Frank Morris
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The lawsuit claims the Trump administration sidestepped the normal process of changing the H-2A wage rate and that the guest worker pay cuts would freeze Americans out of the farm labor force.
The Trump administration wants to ease an acute farm labor shortage by dropping the wage rates for foreign guest workers under the H-2A visa program.
H-2A visa wage rates are supposed to be set high enough to encourage farmers to hire locally, protecting American workers.
United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero says the cuts would depress wages across agriculture.
The lawsuit claims the Trump administration sidestepped the normal process of changing the H-2A wage rate and that the guest worker pay cuts would freeze Americans out of the foreign labor force.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris.
In the summer of 2023, Marion, Kansas' entire five-member police force and two sheriff's deputies stormed the town's newspaper office and the publisher's home, confronting the publisher's 98-year-old mother, who had a heart attack and died the next day.
The officers seized computers and cell phones, looking for evidence that the paper had improperly obtained confirmation of a local business owner's drunk driving conviction.
The $3 million payment will be split between the publisher, two reporters, and the town's former vice mayor, whose home was also raided.
The agreement does not clear the police chief of criminal charges for allegedly obstructing an investigation of the raids or the city's liability in approving them.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris.
Federal farm subsidies go through the U.S.
It's closed, and now is a bad time for farmers to lose that lifeline.
The prices farmers are getting for the corn, wheat, and soybeans they grow don't come close to covering the cost of producing them.
Tariffs have a lot to do with that, and President Trump has promised farmers a bailout to partially compensate for their trade war losses.
But Pat Westhoff, an economist at the University of Missouri, says that's not happening anytime soon.
Things aren't going to go forward until the government's open again, it appears to me.