By Staff Reporters

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CPI: Here’s a breakdown of how different aisles and departments rose over the past 12 months:

• Cereals and bakery: increase 6%
• Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs: unchanged
• Remaining products (ranging from dairy to beverages): increase 0.3% to 4.8%
• Food in general is up 4.3%
• Food away from home: increase 6.8%
• Used cars and trucks fell 1.2% year-over-year, but new cars and trucks rose 0.3%.  Those may not seem like much, but a new car still costs an average of more than $48,000 — as of May 2023 only three models were available in the U.S. market for $20,000 or less.
• Transportation similarly rose 10.3% over the same period but shelter, which rose 7.3%, “was the largest factor in the monthly increase in the index for all items less food and energy,” according to the August CPI. 

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource

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Not to put a damper on your Sunday morning (the relentless rain is already doing that to the North East USA), but the government still appears headed for a shutdown. Among the immediate impacts: Many federal employees will be furloughed, the IRS will stop picking up your calls, you won’t be able to get married in DC courts, and most national parks—and their social media handles—will go dark.

And even more rain as New York City was hit with its heaviest rain in decades, which flooded roads and subway stations and delayed air travel. Both the mayor and New York’s governor declared states of emergency as images of the waterlogged city filled social media.

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It appears that Mark Zuckerberg’s new “Threads” social media platform is struggling with a massive decline. The social media platform called “Threads” was launched by Facebook (now called Meta). The platform is essentially a clone of Elon Musk’s Twitter, which is now called X. Threads struggling to maintain momentum and gain new users.

Among major social platforms, Threads is reportedly only ahead of Tumblr in the race for user acquisition. Forecasts by Insider Intelligence predict a U.S. user base of 23.7 million for Threads in 2023. The company reportedly anticipated 56.1 million U.S. users. In comparison, X has roughly 528.3 million monthly users.

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