Workers Lose Jobs, Labor Force Shrinks February 3, 2021
Thousands of workers continued to exit the southwestern Pennsylvania labor force, and the local unemployment rate ticked upward as the pandemic year of 2020 drew to a close.
The seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose from 6.7 percent in November to 6.8 percent in December 2020, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor Center for Workforce Information & Analysis program data.
During the holiday season, some counties in the region fared better than others. Butler County posted the lowest unemployment rate at 5.9 percent. Fayette County, where 8.6 percent of workers were unemployed, had the highest rate in the Pittsburgh MSA. In Allegheny County, which includes the City of Pittsburgh, 6.7 percent of workers were unemployed in December.
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When DaJuan Davis learned that his application for rent relief was denied, exposing him and his son to another potential eviction, he felt “crushed.”
I felt so dejected. It took a lot of energy from me, said Davis, 45, in a January interview. The sometime commercial driver and convenience store worker, now employed by McDonald’s, sat on his living room couch, while his 13-year-old son attended virtual school in an adjacent bedroom.
He said he’s rented from Monroeville-based Arbors Management for 11 years. He’d weathered eviction filings, which followed a change of employment and gap in pay, in 2019.
His best hope of avoiding another eviction filing, following his July 8 loss of a job, had seemed to be Pennsylvania’s CARES Rent Relief Program. On July 10, he and the property manager filled out forms seeking six months of state help paying the $610-a-month rent for his Penn Hills apartment.
Tayloe, Offit, Minshew, Katz, Snyderman, et. al.: Feeding a Hungry Lie
There is a very, very hungry lie, and the lie needs more food. Dr. Paul Offit is this lie s public chef, but it also gets fed by the Centers for Disease Control, American Academy of Pediatrics, and many other parties who have a vested interest in protecting our current vaccine program. The problem with a lie as big as this one is that it never knows when it has had enough to eat, and it always needs more food.
It s a simple lie, really. And, it s being told with more and more frequency lately, which is really no surprise. Lies like this tend to get fatter and fatter and hungrier and hungrier before they explode, and many, many people need this lie to be true.
Jan. 15, 2021
Kat Grilli started using Flo a popular period- and pregnancy-tracking app a year ago, when she began her IVF journey to get pregnant with her husband, who is transgender. She logged onto the app to track her periods so she would know when to start IVF drugs, she said, adding that she also responded to prompts about her sexual activity, hunger and exercise.
Now nine months into her pregnancy, Grilli, 33, is one of more than a half-dozen women who told The Lily they are permanently deleting the app after the Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday that it filed a complaint against Flo, alleging that it shared millions of users’ data about their menstruation, fertility and pregnancies with the analytics and marketing teams of third-party companies including Google and Facebook all the while, promising users their data would be kept private.