Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's body is back to Tokyo today.

And a stunned Japan heads to the polls tomorrow for parliamentary elections.

RASCOE: We have the latest on Abe's assassination. I'm Ayesha Rascoe.

SIMON: And I'm Scott Simon, and this is UP FIRST from NPR News.

RASCOE: Also, monkeypox infections are rising while testing and vaccinations lag.

SIMON: And that discourages gay men, who are currently the most affected.

JOSEPH OSMUNDSON: We know people who are getting sick, and it's still impossible to take care of one another. The community frustration is very, very high at the moment.

RASCOE: And we dive into the new jobs numbers. Unemployment is near pre-pandemic lows. So stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your weekend.

RASCOE: Mourners have been visiting the scene of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's assassination.

SIMON: He was killed in western Japan yesterday while campaigning for his party, shocking a nation where gun laws are strict, politics are largely peaceful and security at campaign events is low. NPR's Anthony Kuhn joins us from Seoul to update us on this story. Anthony, thanks so much for being with us.

ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Nice to be with you, Scott.

SIMON: How is Japan mourning Mr. Abe's loss?

KUHN: Well, in Nara, the city where he was killed while campaigning, mourners laid flowers and bottles of drinks at a table near the site of his assassination. Abe's body was carried in a motorcade with a hearse and accompanied by his wife, Akie, from Nara back to Abe's home in Tokyo. Abe has a funeral scheduled for Tuesday. That is mostly for family and close friends. There is no word so far on a public memorial service.

Another thing that was different today was that there appeared to be tighter security, more police at campaign events and even a metal detector at Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's campaign stop, and that is something you almost never see in Japan.

SIMON: International reaction has been extraordinary, hasn't it?

KUHN: Yes, and there are some important late additions to what's already come in. One is that China's leader, Xi Jinping, expressed his condolences, saying that Shinzo Abe had worked to improve relations between Beijing and Tokyo. That's important because China was one of Abe's toughest critics, accusing him of trying to revive Japanese militarism. Abe did try later on to improve ties, but they later soured. Another thing is that the leaders of the U.S., India and Australia issued a joint statement praising Abe. And those leaders are members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, which was originally Abe's idea, as is the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, an idea which the U.S. now champions. So the fact that two of the keystones of U.S. policy in Asia were Abe's ideas gives you some idea of his impact on geopolitics in the region.

SIMON: And he filled a huge space on the political stage in Japan. Where does his assassination leave Japanese politics?

KUHN: It leaves a big hole in the middle of them. Abe was the leader of the largest faction in the ruling party. The party and the government are packed with his faction members and his proteges. The defense minister is his brother, for example. The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, served as Abe's foreign minister for five years. So Kishida and all these others had to get his advice. They had to, you know, they had to pay attention to his concerns even as they sought to formulate their own policies. And this has sort of been a story at the very center of the Kishida administration. So now, it sort of - it remains to be seen who's going to fill this vacuum and whether Abe's party is going to unite to pursue his unfinished policy goals, especially amending the country's constitution to give the military a freer hand, or whether it moves in a different direction. And what more have we learned about the man who killed Shinzo Abe?

KUHN: The new details which have come out are that police searched the home in Nara of 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, who is a former sailor in Japan's maritime armed forces, and found more improvised weapons like the double-barreled shotgun apparently used to kill Abe, as well as homemade explosives. And this assassin reportedly told police that his motivations were not political. He claimed his mother had been bankrupted by donating to an unnamed religious organization, and he saw Abe as promoting this group. But we don't know what the group's name is, and the story is hard to verify.

SIMON: NPR's Anthony Kuhn, thanks so much for being with us.

SIMON: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm nearly 800 monkeypox cases in the U.S. as officials try to increase testing capacity and shipments of vaccines to help stop the spread of the virus.

RASCOE: But those efforts aren't meeting the demand. NPR health reporter Pien Huang joins us to round up the latest in monkeypox news. Welcome.

PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Hey, Ayesha.

RASCOE: So let's start with testing. What are some of the holdups here?

HUANG: Well, a new CDC paper that was published yesterday found that in the first six weeks of the monkeypox outbreak here - which, you know, would have been through the end of June - labs tested just 2,000 samples. But the CDC has said that their laboratory response network has been capable of running around 60,000 tests in that time. So some of the problems were on the lab, and the process was slow at first. There were staffing limitations. But some of it was also the fact that it was hard for providers to use this lab network. It took paperwork, permissions from public health authorities. Another challenge identified by the National Council of STD Directors is that many clinics don't actually have the swabs or test tubes needed to even collect samples.

RASCOE: What are authorities doing to address this testing gap?

HUANG: Well, just this week, the CDC announced that LabCorp, a huge commercial laboratory, is now offering monkeypox tests. It's the first of five commercial labs that are expected to come online. And by the end of the month, LabCorp says they'll be capable of running 10,000 tests a week, which would double the existing capacity. Now, this will be a lot easier for doctors. They don't need permission from the public health department to order the test. And now that this is an option, experts say there might be a big jump in case numbers coming up, which will reflect an actually truer picture of what's going on.

RASCOE: The administration has been sending vaccines out to local health jurisdictions. Like, how is that going?

HUANG: Well, there again, demand is high, but supplies are limited. So far, the administration has sent around 40,000 doses to health departments. And they're being offered primarily to the gay and bisexual male community, where the virus appears to be spreading through intimate contact. It's also being offered to health workers and others who may have been exposed. I spoke with Patrick Ashley with the Washington, D.C., health department. They've been offering vaccine appointments online.

PATRICK ASHLEY: We've been able to offer almost a little over 1,000 appointments so far. Each time that we're able to offer appointments, they sell out in a matter of minutes.

HUANG: I visited one of D.C.'s monkeypox vaccination sites this week, and a man named Jeff (ph) there felt relieved to get the shot.

JEFF: Because I didn't really know enough about it, like there wasn't so much I felt I could do to prevent it besides just, like, kind of trying to avoid the most crowded places.

HUANG: Now, nationally, the government is allocating vaccine based on the number of cases. D.C. has around 60 so far, and since the population is small, it actually has the highest monkeypox rate per capita. But by sheer numbers, California and New York have gotten the most vaccines. States like Idaho and Arkansas, which just found their first cases this week, haven't gotten any.

RASCOE: Are more vaccines on the way?

HUANG: Yeah. The government announced that more vaccines are being allocated next week. That'll bring the total available vaccines across the country to 200,000. But advocates have been telling me that's not enough. Joseph Osmundson is a biologist and a queer advocate based in New York City.

OSMUNDSON: Many more people have a friend or know someone who's suffering. They're still having a hard time getting tested. Absolutely no one can access vaccine without winning a sort of online lottery, basically.

HUANG: He says that there's a disconnect between the urgency his community feels and the response from the feds. He says that community anger is rising.

RASCOE: That's NPR health reporter Pien Huang. Thank you so much.

SIMON: You probably noticed at the pump or in line at the grocery store. The U.S. economy has been flashing some warning signs. Inflation is up. Consumer sentiment is down.

RASCOE: But the latest jobs report shows strong hiring despite all this talk about a recession. NPR chief economic correspondent Scott Horsley joins us now to try to make sense of all of these mixed signals. Good morning, Scott.

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Ayesha.

RASCOE: So Friday's report was much stronger than forecasters expected. What does that tell us about where the economy is headed?

HORSLEY: If you looked at the jobs report by itself, you would think this is an economy that's booming. Employers added 372,000 jobs in June. That's solid growth by any measure. In fact, employment at private sector businesses is now higher than it was before the pandemic. So that's really positive.

But other economic measures tell a different story. Consumer spending has softened. The stock market's in a slump. GDP, the broadest measure of economic activity, actually declined in the first three months of the year and maybe in the last three months as well. Jason Furman, who was a top economist in the Obama White House, says this is a really weird disconnect.

JASON FURMAN: Normally, GDP and jobs both go up together, or GDP and jobs both go down together. But right now, you have an unusual situation where GDP might be going down at the same time that jobs are going up.

HORSLEY: Furman offers a variety of possible explanations. It could be workers are less productive right now, maybe because they're working from home or have COVID complications or whatever. So even though more people are working, they may not be generating as much economic activity as you would expect. It could also be that some employers are hiring workers they don't necessarily need right now because they've had trouble hiring in the past and they want to have staff on hand when the economy picks up. And finally, it's possible that one or the other of these measures is just wrong.

RASCOE: Oh, well, that's concerning. So economists like Furman, are they putting more stock in some indicators rather than others? And what are those indicators they're putting more stock in?

HORSLEY: Furman is a little more confident about the jobs numbers. Now, they do get revised over time. For example, the initial job counts for April and May were reduced yesterday. But even after they were marked down, they still showed strong job growth. Furman is a little more skeptical of the GDP numbers. He thinks they may be understating the strength of the economy, at least up until this point.

FURMAN: It seems quite clear that the economy was not in recession in the first half of 2022. I have a certain amount of optimism about the second half of 2022. But there's just so much uncertainty and confusion that one shouldn't overstate one's confidence about anything, at least about the future, right now.

HORSLEY: You know, that line, often attributed to Yogi Berra, that predictions are tough, especially about the future - that is doubly true in this weird pandemic, battle-scarred economy.

RASCOE: Very true. The job report also showed wages going up, but as we know, prices of goods and services are also going up. So how does that affect the outlook?

HORSLEY: Yeah, high inflation is definitely weighing on people's attitudes. It's eating into their spending power. That's one reason consumers are so anxious about the economy. We have seen some slowdown in wage growth since last year. What would be helpful is if inflation also slows so that even smaller pay raises actually stretch further at the gas station and the grocery store. In the meantime, shoppers have been dipping into savings to support their spending. Some are putting more spending on credit cards. You can do that for a while, but not indefinitely.

RASCOE: Very true. NPR's Scott Horsley, thank you so much.

SIMON: And that's UP FIRST for Saturday, July 9, 2022. I'm Scott Simon.

RASCOE: And I'm Ayesha Rascoe. UP FIRST is back tomorrow with the first part of a three-part series taking a look at the foods, languages and people of Afghanistan. Follow us on social media. We're @UpFirst on Twitter.

SIMON: And for more news, interviews, books, music, just turn on your radio every Saturday and Sunday morning for Weekend Edition from NPR News. You can find your NPR station at stations.npr.org.

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