Reporters attended every rally from Kansas to Michigan
In The Wall Street Journal’s The 10-Point newsletter, reporters attended every one of President Trump’s midterm rallies in the preceding week. The itinerary began in Kansas on Monday, included stops in North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Florida and Georgia, and ended in Michigan on Sunday.
Trump was met on stage with cheering crowds and fleeting signs of opposition. The Wall Street Journal said crowds were generally smaller than when he was on the ballot. The outlet characterized his stage behavior as reveling in the attention, touting his agenda, stirring the pot and veering off script.
New York City delays clearing homeless encampments for six days under a policy implemented by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration. The extra time gives outreach workers an opportunity to persuade people to accept services and gives people a chance to secure their belongings. Residents and businesses said the approach allows individuals to, in effect, evade removal: if they relocate across the street on the sixth day, the seven-day clock restarts.
With no movie or streaming adaptations for the hit Sarah J. Maas series “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” full-cast audio versions of the novels play an outsize role. The cast members have become niche celebrities across romantasy, the literary genre blending romance and fantasy. The report warned that screen portrayals can be unexpectedly American in accent for readers who heard the characters differently in their heads, including fans around the world who could not believe how American everyone sounded.
Swift Coat, a maker of antireflective coated glass for satellites, plans to hire two or three workers by the end of the year at its facility in northern Phoenix. All positions will require an engineering degree. The company is part of a broader shift Konrad Putzier reported: U.S. manufacturers increased their head count by 72,000 since December, after years of declining employment. Manufacturers are hiring more white-collar workers in management and business operations, while blue-collar roles increasingly require advanced training as factories become more automated and complex.
Nick Nadeau recently bought a hard drive through Walmart’s app and got a bad feeling about its price. On Nadeau’s phone, Walmart listed the drive for $369. On his wife’s phone, the drive cost $110 less. Sarah Nassauer reported that American shoppers are convinced businesses are deploying technology to charge more, using AI to quickly change prices by assessing their needs or profile. A Walmart spokeswoman said the hard-drive prices varied because of an error that has been corrected, not because the company used personal information to calibrate a product’s price. The report said such denials had failed to stanch the concerns of shoppers and consumer activists.
Laura J. Nelson and Paul Kiernan described California’s proposed one-time tax on the state’s billionaires as a measure conceived to counter looming Medicaid cuts. The Wall Street Journal reported that the proposal exposed deep divisions among Democrats and created unusual alliances among groups working to pass or defeat it. Labor unions were fighting among themselves, worried their own priorities would suffer, while tech elites put down hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat the measure. The proposal’s architect was the subject of allegations of extortion and harassment. Nelson and Kiernan said the messy fight had gripped California for the past year and showed how far from easy it is to enact a long-promoted concept on the left, even in one of the nation’s bluest states.
The 10-Point was curated and edited by Liz Webber and Gary Mitchell in collaboration with Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.