U.S. employers kept adding workers at a healthy pace in July and wage gains picked up, underlining a solid labor market ahead of this week’s Federal Reserve interest-rate cut and President Donald Trump’s threat to ratchet up tariffs on Chinese goods.
Payrolls rose 164,000, almost matching projections, though the two prior months were revised lower, according to a Labor Department report Friday. The jobless rate held at 3.7%, near a half-century low, while average hourly earnings climbed 3.2% from a year earlier, better than forecast.

July was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded, “on a par with, and possibly marginally higher” than the previous warmest month, which was July 2016, according to provisional data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This European climate agency will have a full report for all of July on Monday, but a spokesperson said enough data (through July 29) has already come in to make this declaration.
The monthly global average temperature anomaly was 2.16 degrees (1.2 Celsius) above preindustrial levels, the center reported in its preliminary figures Friday.
On Thursday, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres cited the data at a news conference as an example of why more ambitious action to cut planet-warming greenhouse gases is needed.

A New York Police Department disciplinary official has recommended the firing of the officer videotaped with his arm around the neck of 43-year-old Eric Garner just before he died in 2014, officials said Friday.
The recommendation to fire Daniel Pantaleo, whose actions sparked protests, a federal investigation, and ongoing political debate over police conduct toward minorities, comes a month after Justice Department officials announced the officer would not face criminal charges.
The recommendation follows a weeks-long internal NYPD trial to determine if Pantaleo broke department rules. A lawyer for Pantaleo did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

The United States formally withdrew from a landmark nuclear missile pact with Russia on Friday after determining that Moscow was in violation of the treaty, something the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
Washington signaled it would pull out of the arms control treaty six months ago unless Moscow stuck to the accord. Russia called the move a ploy to exit a pact the United States wanted to leave anyway in order to develop new missiles.
The 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was negotiated by then-US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Sam Blech, 16, and Rivkah Zigman, also 16, both campers on NCSY Hatzalah Rescue, were volunteering as part of their summer program with a United Hatzalah ambulance crew in Tel Aviv. At approximately 7 p.m. on July 16, their ambulance was dispatched to an unresponsive patient in an apartment complex.
NCSY Hatzalah Rescue is a month-long summer program run out of a partnership with the Orthodox Union’s NCSY Summer and United Hatzalah, a volunteer-based emergency medical services organization in Israel. The program includes training teens to serve as Emergency Medical Responders and shifts volunteering with ambulance crews in Israel.

During the first six months of 2019, the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents to date were recorded in the United Kingdom in comparison to the same period in previous years, according to a new report published on Thursday by the Community Security Trust (CST).
The CST recorded 892 anti-Jewish incidents between January and June 2019—a rise of 10 percent from the first six months of 2018—with social-media attacks accounting for 384 of the incidents.
The total number included 710 abusive acts, such as verbal abuse and anti-Semitic graffiti, and 85 incidents classified as “assaults,” an increase of 37 percent of the same type of incidents recorded in the first half of 2018.

Privately-held medical device company CardiacSense developed a watch that can warn of a cardiac arrest before it occurs, the company says.
Founded in 2009 and based in the coastal Israeli town of Caesarea, CardiacSense’s watch-like device tracks factors like arrhythmia, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure in users to identify early signs of stroke or cardiac arrest.
The device uses electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring and photoplethysmography (PPG), an optical technique that detects changes in blood volume, to track the condition of patients and send it directly to their physician in real-time.
Maor Shalom Swisa / CTech
{Matzav.com}

Media rushes to defend Obama after 2020 Democratic candidates attack him during debate.
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The Pentagon has decided to put on hold its decision to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract after President Donald Trump said his administration was examining Amazon.com Inc’s bid following complaints from other tech companies.
The contract, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud, or JEDI, is part of a broad modernization of the Pentagon’s information technology systems.
The decision delays the award of the contract, which the Pentagon had hoped would occur in August. Trump has had a contentious relationship with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, which Trump has accused of unfair coverage.

Like the first set in the second 2020 Democratic presidential debates on Tuesday night in Detroit, where little foreign policy was discussed, Wednesday night’s debate was no different. Only entrepreneur Andrew Yang was questioned about the Iranian threat.
“I would move to de-escalate tensions with Iran because they’re responding to us pulling out of the agreement,” he said, referring to the 2015 nuclear deal, which the Trump administration withdrew from in May 2018, reimposing sanctions lifted under it, along with enacting new financial penalties against the regime.
“We have to re-enter that agreement and renegotiate the timelines because right now the timelines don’t make sense,” said Yang.