America’s employers delivered another outpouring of jobs in March, adding a sizzling 303,000 workers to their payrolls and bolstering hopes that the economy can vanquish inflation without succumbing to a recession in the face of high interest rates.

A 4.8 magnitude earthquake recorded in New Jersey that shook residents in surrounding states and New York City on Friday morning was one of the strongest in state history.

The temblor was reported about 5 miles north of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, at about 10:23 a.m. Friday, according to the United States Geological Survey. The epicenter was about 45 miles from New York City, where residents reported shaking furniture and floors.

“Earthquakes in this region are uncommon but not unexpected. It’s likely people near the epicenter are going to feel aftershocks for this earthquake in the magnitude 2-3 range, and there’s a small chance there can be an earthquake as large or larger, following an earthquake like this,” Paul Earle, a seismologist at the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program told reporters. “In terms of our operations, this is a routine earthquake … Immediately we knew this would be of high interest and important to people who don’t feel earthquakes a lot.”

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NATO marked 75 years of collective defense across Europe and North America, with its top diplomats vowing on Thursday to stay the course in Ukraine as better-armed Russian troops assert control on the battlefield.

The anniversary comes as the now 32-nation alliance weighs a plan to provide more predictable longer-term military support to Ukraine. Plagued by ammunition shortages, Ukraine this week lowered the military conscription age from 27 to 25 in an effort to replenish its depleted ranks and appealed for additional air defenses to counter Russian ballistic missile attacks.

“I didn’t want to spoil the birthday party for NATO, but I felt compelled to deliver a sobering message on behalf of Ukrainians about the state of Russian air attacks on my country, destroying our energy system, our economy, killing civilians,” said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who attended a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council.

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Joe Biden’s administration issued a new rule on Thursday making it harder to fire thousands of federal employees, hoping to head off the risk that if Donald Trump wins back the White House in November he won’t be able to bully and decimate the workforce as he imposes the radical ideologies he’s been pushing on the campaign trail, escalating what he did while in office.

New regulations coming out of the government’s chief human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers – who are more easily dismissed from their jobs.

The move comes in response to so-called “Schedule F”, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2m federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections.

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Thieves in Los Angeles pulled off one of the largest cash heists in city history over the weekend, stealing as much as $30m from a money storage facility on Easter Sunday, authorities said on Wednesday.

The break-in unfolded at an unnamed facility in the Sylmar area of the San Fernando Valley that handles and stores cash from businesses across the region. Burglars were able to enter without immediate detection and breached a safe, said Elaine Morales, a Los Angeles police department commander, to the Los Angeles Times.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Los Angeles police department are investigating the incident.

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The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents denied his effort to have the case dismissed on the contention that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to transform them as personal property and possess them at his Mar-a-Lago club.

The ruling by US district judge Aileen Cannon was significant as it struck one of Trump’s main defenses and suggested the case is headed to trial.

Cannon’s three-page order rejecting Trump’s motion to dismiss rested on the fact that Trump’s argument about the Presidential Records Act did not directly address the applicability of the Espionage Act, which he has been charged with violating, meaning it did not give her a basis to toss the case.

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A group of migrants who were sent to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022 by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, can sue the plane company that transported them, a federal judge has ruled.

In a ruling issued last Friday, the US district judge Allison Burroughs said that the migrants who were shuttled from Texas to the wealthy liberal island in Massachusetts can proceed with their legal claims against Vertol Systems, the plane company which was contracted by Florida to carry out the flights.

The 77-page ruling, which also named DeSantis, Florida’s transportation secretary, Jared Perdue, and other state officials as defendants, said that the Venezuelan migrants and the immigrant rights group Alianza Americas “sufficiently alleged” multiple claims including “civil rights conspiracy” and “civil conspiracy”.

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Joe Biden has called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, telling Benjamin Netanyahu that future US support for Israel will depend on it taking concrete action to protect civilians and aid workers.

As the two leaders held their first phone call since Israeli airstrikes killed seven employees of the international food charity World Central Kitchen (WCK), Biden issued the strongest US rebuke toward Israel since the start of the conflict.

In Thursday’s call, which lasted less than 30 minutes, the US president “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers”, the White House said in a statement.

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