Labor officials announce veterans employment training resources
July 17 (UPI) -- The Department of Labor on Thursday announced a new resource designed to increase employment rates and apprenticeship program participation among millions of disabled veterans.
"Currently, more than 5 million American veterans aged 18 or older have service-connected disabilities," a release from the DOL said. "Each year, roughly 200,000 service members - including approximately 22,000 who have some type of disability - transition to the private sector and many remain unemployed after transition."
The Veterans Accommodations Toolkit includes tips on job recruitment, hiring, training and retaining disabled veterans. The DOL said the service also benefits employers, apprenticeship sponsors and labor force development specialists.
The toolkit was released just prior to National Hire a Veteran Day and the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and supports the Trump administration's goal of developing a million new apprentices in the United States.
The employment rate for veterans with disabilities is 45.5% compared to 79.8%, the DOL said.
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Boston Globe
23 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Iran is holding at least 4 American citizens, rights groups and families say
The detentions are likely to increase the tense political climate between Tehran and Washington after the United States joined Israel's attack on Iran and bombarded and severely damaged three of its nuclear sites in June. Advertisement Nuclear negotiations with Washington have not resumed since the war in June, but Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said this past week in an interview with local news media that he and the U.S. special envoy, Steve Witkoff, have been communicating directly through text messages. President Donald Trump has said that he would not tolerate countries' wrongful detention of Americans and that their release is a top priority for his administration. Witkoff's office did not respond to a question on whether the detention of dual American citizens was brought up in communications with Araghchi. The State Department has said that it is 'closely tracking' reports of Americans being detained in Iran. 'For privacy, safety and operational reasons, we do not get into the details of our internal or diplomatic discussions on reported U.S. detainees,' it said in a statement Monday. 'We call on Iran to immediately release all unjustly detained individuals in Iran.' Advertisement Iran's mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the detentions. Iran's Ministry of Intelligence said in a statement on Monday that it had arrested at least 20 people who were working as spies or operatives for Israel in cities across Iran. The four detained Iranian Americans had all lived in the United States and had traveled to Iran to visit family, according to the rights groups. The families of three of the Americans have asked that their names not be published for fear it could make their situations worse. Two of the four were arrested by security agents in the immediate aftermath of Israel's attacks on Iran in June, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (or HRANA) and Hengaw, independent rights groups based outside Iran. One is a 70-year-old Jewish father and grandfather from New York who has a jewelry business. He is being questioned about a trip to Israel, according to the rights groups and the man's colleagues and friends. The other is a woman from California who was held in the notorious Evin prison. But her whereabouts is now unclear after Israel attacked Evin in June and the prison was evacuated, according to rights groups and Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian British scholar who was imprisoned in Iran for two years and released in 2020. Iran is also holding another Iranian American woman, who was first imprisoned and prevented from leaving the country in December 2024. She is currently out of prison, but her Iranian and American passports were confiscated, according to her U.S.-based lawyer who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information. Advertisement The woman works for a U.S. technology company and runs a charity for underprivileged children in Iran. But after the recent war, the Iranian judiciary elevated her case and charged her with espionage, according to her lawyer -- a serious crime that can carry many years in prison and even the death penalty. At least one other Iranian American citizen, journalist Reza Valizadeh, is imprisoned in Iran. He is a former employee of Radio Farda, the Persian-language news outlet that is part of the State Department-funded Radio Free Europe. Radio Farda has said in a statement that he was arrested in October 2024 while visiting family in Iran. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of 'collaborating with a hostile government.' Two senior Iranian officials who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly confirmed that Iran had recently detained two dual American citizens -- the New York man and the California woman. They said it was part of a wider crackdown focused on finding a network of operatives linked to Israel and United States. The crackdown comes as Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has encouraged Iranians in the diaspora to return to Iran. He said recently that he would speak with the ministries of intelligence and judiciary to facilitate those returns, according to local news reports. 'We have to create a framework so that Iranians living abroad can come to Iran without fear,' Pezeshkian said. But Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group, said recently: 'The Iranian government has a sordid history of cracking down domestically following intelligence failures, and seizing foreign nationals as a cynical form of leverage. And at a time when Tehran and the Trump administration are already at loggerheads over nuclear diplomacy, the arrests could add another significant area of contention.' Advertisement The State Department issued a new warning after the war, telling Americans not to travel to Iran 'under any circumstances.' In a statement in English and Persian, it says that Americans, including Iranian Americans, 'have been wrongfully detained -- taken hostage -- by the Iranian government for months, and years. The threat of detention is even greater today.' The news of the Americans' detentions has rattled the Iranian American community, including several people previously detained in Iran. Many of them are often the first point of contact for families who find themselves navigating the frightening ordeal of having a loved one arrested in Iran. Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American businessperson who was held for eight years in Iran before being released as part of a U.S.-Iran deal in 2023, said that since the war with Israel, the number of Americans detained in Iran has grown. 'Some cases are public; others remain under wraps, often due to poor advice that silence is safer,' he said. 'Securing their release must be a core U.S. priority in any future diplomatic engagement with Tehran,' added Namazi, who is on the board of Hostage Aid Worldwide. In New York's tight-knit Jewish Iranian circles, news of one member's detention spread quickly and brought anxiety. Iran has arrested at least five Jewish Iranians in its postwar crackdown and has summoned 35 more for questioning, according to Skylar Thompson, deputy director of HRANA. Advertisement This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
23 minutes ago
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Nevada is all in on solar power
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The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
TikTok can shape America's next generation and Beijing knows it
If Washington doesn't act urgently, content pushed by TikTok and consumed by young Americans will result in future U.S. leaders unwittingly parroting China's talking points, advocating warped views and, most dangerously, acting in ways that are in Beijing's interests but undermine U.S. national security. There is admittedly no 'smoking gun,' but TikTok represents a highly plausible vector of intelligence collection. ByteDance, TikTok's parent firm, claims it is committed to U.S. national security, but is legally bound to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party. The People's Republic of China almost certainly uses TikTok, at a minimum, as a collection platform to monitor public opinion. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and TikTok agreed in January 2023 to maintain all U.S. data within the U.S., but there are concerning reports of leaks. With 170 million U.S. users, TikTok provides Beijing with real-time, granular insight into American public opinion. That real-time data collection would prove enormously useful, for instance, in assessing U.S. willingness to fight in a hypothetical conflict over Taiwan. But the challenge from TikTok with America's youth is not just collection, but influence. Early evidence suggests this is already underway. A Rutgers study found TikTok suppressed unfavorable accounts of sensitive topics, including Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Uyghur rights and Xinjiang. 'Heavy' users expressed elevated positive attitudes toward China's human rights record and greater interest in traveling to China. Given that the company's black box algorithm thwarts independent verification, we likely have seen only the tip of the iceberg of Beijing's efforts to sway the U.S. public. The algorithm could convulse U.S. domestic politics by sowing discord and highlighting divisions, an outcome that serves Beijing's interest in undermining U.S. cohesion and painting D.C. as an unreliable partner. Indeed, rather than bolstering one candidate or another, TikTok may act as an anti-incumbent tool. In the 2024 election, TikTok contributed to President Biden's low approval ratings, according to one Democratic strategist. In that election, President Trump's support among 18-29-year-olds, which disproportionately comprises TikTok's user base, rose by seven points from 2020. And yet, by April, only three months into office, Trump's support among young people has declined markedly — by up to 27 points. While there are admittedly many variables at play, TikTok can amplify alienation and short-term sentiment swings. Whatever one's politics, it's dangerous for China to retain levers that can subtly shape American public opinion, especially by amplifying dissatisfaction. It's worth noting that as Beijing uses tools to manipulate the U.S. public, especially its youth, it's taking meaningful steps to protect its own young people. Douyin, the version of TikTok used in China and also owned by ByteDance, is required by authorities to enforce a 'youth mode,' limiting users under 14 to app usage for just 40 minutes a day. It also locks them out between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. daily. The contrast is stark: China exports attention-fracturing content while shielding its own youth from it. China's use of TikTok may allow it to influence mass and elite opinion. And in fact, TikTok may be uniquely effective at influencing elite views, by enabling microtargeting. Given TikTok's effectiveness and deniability, as well as Beijing's determination to supplant the United States, Chinese security services are likely tweaking TikTok's algorithms to micro-target key users. Chinese security services can directly shape TikTok's algorithm — rather than merely exploit one built by others — giving it a deniable, end-to-end influence over what users see. Crucially, any elite-focused information operation via TikTok would be even more difficult to detect in the unclassified domain than efforts to shape mass public opinion because of how narrow and precise the targeting would be. For far too long, U.S. leaders on both sides of the aisle have failed to take action against the platform. And the reported decision by President Trump to tell U.S. companies they can ignore the law barring American companies from engaging with TikTok represents a new and immediate danger to U.S. national and economic security. At a minimum, it is imperative to ensure the U.S. is not allowing companies or individuals to engage with TikTok so long as its algorithm is controlled by a Beijing-linked company. But U.S. policymakers need to go even further and consider, for example, more ambitious measures such as national limits on short-video screen time for minors. The status quo is incomprehensible and dangerous: Young Americans are being asked to unwittingly face off against an algorithm that may be a tool of Chinese intelligence services. Allowing this dynamic to persist risks eroding the cognitive, civic and strategic foundations of American leadership. Jonathan Panikoff is a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center and the former director of the Investment Security Group, overseeing the intelligence community's CFIUS efforts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Joseph Webster is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and editor of the independent China-Russia Report.
