Trump reportedly disparaged captured or killed military officers many times – live

The US economy added 1.4 million jobs in August, the Labor Department said on Friday, as unemployment fell below 10% for the first time since the coronavirus forced the nation to halt economic activity.

The Trump campaign seized on the toplines, claiming that Trump has positioned the US to “reopen faster than doomsayers like Biden predicted.”

But the Guardian’s Dominic Rushe reports that there are troubling signs in the numbers.

“August’s figure was also boosted by the temporary hiring of 238,000 people to conduct the 2020 Census,” he writes.

“The racial disparities in unemployment remained. The unemployment rate for Black Americans (13%) was almost double the rate for whites (7.3%). The rate for Latinx Americans was 10.5% and for Asians, 10.7%.”

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s coverage of US political news.

Today we’re watching the fallout from a stunning report in the Atlantic – and later confirmed by the Associated Press and the Washington Post – detailing multiple occasions in which Donald Trump disparaged members of the US military who have been captured or killed as “suckers” and “losers”. The White House vehemently denied the story, calling it “reprehensible lies” while Trump falsely claimed that he “never called” Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam who died in 2018, a “loser.”

The story broke hours before North Carolina, which has one of the largest military populations in the US, began sending out absentee ballots to voters on Friday.

At a rally in the state on Wednesday, Trump suggested voters in North Carolina vote by mail and in person in November’s election, prompting a sharp response from the state’s election chief.

“It is illegal to vote twice in an election,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina state board of elections, said in a statement.

Trump today will greet the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Kosovo for a signing ceremony and a trilateral meeting.

Biden is due to give remarks on “the economic crisis that has been worsened by Trump’s failure to get the virus under control” from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, later this afternoon.