WASHINGTON (AP) — Filings for U.S. jobless aid jumped last week but American workers broadly remain secure in their jobs despite economic uncertainty over global trade.
Jobless benefits applications rose by 14,000 to 240,000 for the week ending May 24, the Labor Department said Thursday. Analysts had forecast 226,000 new applications.
Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as representative of U.S. layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since COVID-19 throttled the economy in the spring of 2020, wiping out millions of jobs.
A sense of relief swept over financial markets early Thursday after a federal court blocked President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law. Wednesday’s decision threw into doubt Trump’s signature economic policy that has rattled global financial markets, frustrated trade partners and raised fears about inflation intensifying and the economy slumping.
The Trump administration quickly filed notice of appeal and the Supreme Court will almost certainly be called upon to decide the issue. It remains unclear whether the White House will respond to the ruling by pausing all of its emergency power tariffs in the interim.
Trump had already paused or dialed down many of his tariff threats, but concerns lingered about a global economic slowdown upending a robust U.S. labor market.
In early May, the Federal Reserve held its benchmark lending rate at 4.3% for the third straight meeting after cutting it three times at the end of last year.
Fed chair Jerome Powell said the potential for both higher unemployment and inflation are elevated, an unusual combination that complicates the central bank’s dual mandate of controlling prices and keeping unemployment low. Powell said that tariffs have dampened consumer and business sentiment.
The government reported Thursday that the U.S. economy shrank at a 0.2% annual pace in the first quarter of 2025, a slight upgrade from its first estimate. Growth was slowed by a surge in imports as companies in the U.S. tried to bring in foreign goods before Trump’s massive tariffs went into effect.
Trump is attempting to reshape the global economy by dramatically increasing import taxes to rejuvenate the U.S. manufacturing sector.
Trump has also tried to drastically downsize the federal government workforce, but many of those cuts are being challenged in the courts and Congress.
Despite showing traces of weakness during the past year, the labor market remains robust, with plentiful jobs and relatively few layoffs.
The government reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 177,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate held at a healthy 4.2%.
Companies that have announced job cuts this year include Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft and Facebook parent company Meta.
Labor reported Thursday that the four-week average of jobless claims, which evens out some of the week-to-week ups and downs during more volatile stretches, ticked down by 250 to 230,750.
The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of May 17 increased by 26,000 to 1.92 million, the most since November of 2021.
FILE - A hiring sign is displayed at a retail store in Chicago on Monday, March 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)
NAIVASHA, Kenya (AP) — When Dickson Ngome first leased his farm at Lake Naivasha in Kenya’s Rift Valley in 2008, it was over 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from shore. The farm was on 1.5 acres (0.6 hectares) of fertile land where he grew vegetables to sell at local markets.
At the time, the lake was receding and people were worried that it might dry up altogether. But since 2011, the shore has crept ever closer. The rains started early this year, in September, and didn't let up for months.
One morning in late October, Ngome and his family woke up to find their home and farm inside the lake. The lake levels had risen overnight and about a foot of water covered everything.
“It seemed as if the lake was far from our homes,” Ngome’s wife, Rose Wafula, told The Associated Press. “And then one night we were shocked to find our houses flooded. The water came from nowhere.”
The couple and their four children have had to leave home and are camping out on the first floor of an abandoned school nearby.
Some 5,000 people were displaced by the rise in Lake Naivasha’s levels this year. Some scientists attribute the higher levels to increased rains caused by climate change, although there may be other factors causing the lake’s steady rise over the past decade.
The lake is a tourism hot spot and surrounded by farms, mostly growing flowers, which have gradually been disappearing into the water as the lake levels rise.
Rising levels have not been isolated to Naivasha: Kenya’s Lake Baringo, Lake Nakuru and Lake Turkana — all in the Rift Valley — have been steadily rising for 15 years.
“The lakes have risen almost beyond the highest level they have ever reached,” said Simon Onywere, who teaches environmental planning at Kenyatta University in Kenya’s capital Nairobi.
A study in the Journal of Hydrology last year found that lake areas in East Africa increased by 71,822 square kilometers (27,730 square miles) between 2011 and 2023. That affects a lot of people: By 2021, more than 75,000 households had been displaced across the Rift Valley, according to a study commissioned that year by the Kenyan Environment Ministry and the United Nations Development Program.
In Baringo, the submerged buildings that made headlines in 2020 and 2021 are still underwater.
“In Lake Baringo, the water rose almost 14 meters,” Onywere said. “Everything went under, completely under. Buildings will never be seen again, like the Block Hotels of Lake Baringo.”
Lake Naivasha has risen steadily too, “engulfing three quarters of some flower farms,” Onywere said.
Horticulture is a major economic sector in Kenya, generating just over a billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2024 and providing 40% of the volume of roses sold in the European Union, according to Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Significant research has gone into the reasons behind the rising lakes phenomenon: A 2021 study on the rise of Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes was coauthored by Kenyan meteorologist Richard Muita, who is now acting assistant director of the Kenya Meteorological Department.
“There are researchers who come up with drivers that are geological, others with reasons like planetary factors,” Muita said. “The Kenya Meteorological Department found that the water level rises are associated with rainfall patterns and temperature changes. When the rains are plentiful, it aligns with the increase in the levels of the Rift Valley lake waters.”
Sedimentation is also a factor. “From the research I have read, there’s a lot of sediment, especially from agricultural related activities, that flows into these lakes,” says Muita.
Naivasha’s official high water mark was demarcated at 1,892.8 meters (6,210 feet) above sea level by the Riparian Association in 1906, and is still used by surveyors today. That means this year’s flooding was still almost a meter (3 feet) below the high mark.
It also means that the community of Kihoto on Lake Naivasha where the Ngomes lived lies on riparian land — land that falls below the high water mark, and can only be owned by the government.
“It’s a mess established by the government … towards the late 1960s,” said Silas Wanjala, general manager of the Lake Naivasha Riparian Association, which was founded some 120 years ago and has been keeping meticulous records of the lake’s water levels since.
Back then, a farmer was given a “temporary agricultural lease” on Kihoto, said Wanjala. When it later flooded and the farmer packed up and left, the farmworkers stayed on the land and later applied for subdivisions, which were approved. In the 60-odd years since, a whole settlement has grown on land that is officially not for lease or sale.
This also isn’t the first time it’s been flooded, said Wanjala. It's just very rare that the water comes up this high. That’s little consolation for the people who have been displaced by this year’s floods and now cannot go home without risking confrontations with hippopotamuses.
To support those people, the county is focusing its efforts on where the need is greatest.
“We are tackling this as an emergency," says Joyce Ncece, chief officer for disaster management in Nakuru County, which oversees Lake Naivasha. “The county government has provided trucks to help families relocate. We have been helping to pay rent for those who lack the finances.”
Scientists like Onywere and Muita are hoping for longer-term solutions. “Could we have predicted this so that we could have done better infrastructure in less risk-prone areas?” Onywere said.
Muita wants to see a more concerted global effort to combat climate change, as well as local, nature-based solutions centered on Indigenous knowledge, such as “conservation agriculture, where there is very limited disturbance of the land,” to reduce sedimentation of the lakes.
But all of this is of little help to Ngome and Wafula, who are still living at the school with their children. As the rest of the world looks forward to the holidays and new year, their future is uncertain. Lake Naivasha’s continuous rise over the past 15 years does not bode well: They have no idea when, or if, their farm will ever be back on dry land.
For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse
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Residential buildings are submerged after Lake Naivasha swelled and flooded homes, in Kihoto Village, in Naivasha, Kenya's Rift Valley region, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)
People use a boat to cross floodwaters as residential buildings remain submerged after Lake Naivasha swelled and inundated homes, displacing people in Kihoto Village, in Naivasha, Kenya's Rift Valley region, on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)
A man salvages his belongings after Lake Naivasha swelled and inundated homes, displacing hundreds in Kihoto Village, in Naivasha, Kenya's Rift Valley region, on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)
Residential buildings are submerged after Lake Naivasha swelled and flooded homes, displacing hundreds in Kihoto Village, in Naivasha, Kenya's Rift Valley region, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)
A man paddles a boat next to flooded buildings after Lake Naivasha swelled and inundated homes, displacing hundreds in Kihoto Village in Naivasha, Kenya's Rift Valley region, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)
