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Investigators combed through wreckage Wednesday for clues to why a business jet crashed on a Texas highway, killing one person on board after its pilots reported mechanical problems while requesting an emergency landing at a nearby airport.

The fiery crash late Tuesday in Laredo near the Mexican border sent bystanders racing from their cars to help police rescue passengers and crew from the burning aircraft. The crash killed Joshua Baer, a leader in Texas’ technology and startup sectors, the president of Baer’s company said.

Video from the frantic scene showed someone trying to smash the cockpit glass with a sledgehammer, while others used makeshift levers as they worked to open the plane’s door. Local officials said a firefighter entered the smoke-filled jet to extract one person still inside after the rest had escaped.

“While the loss of life is deeply regrettable, it is nothing short of a miracle that this tragedy did not become a mass fatality event,” Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño said during a news conference Wednesday.

Two pilots and three teenagers survived the crash and have since been released from the hospital, according to the Laredo Police Department. A dog on board that suffered from smoke inhalation was also expected to survive, said Jose Baeza, an investigator with the police department.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known. The Federal Aviation Administration was investigating along with the National Transportation Safety Board.

Laredo Police Chief Miguel Rodriguez Jr. said investigators working to reconstruct the crash were at the crash site Wednesday.

Crash victim worked to help entrepreneurs launch startups

Baer, 50, was known as a central figure in Austin’s turbocharged evolution as a tech hub. He was the founder and chief executive of Capital Factory, which helps entrepreneurs connect with investors and others to launch their businesses.

“The number of lives Josh impacted in Austin, across Texas, and throughout the technology community is impossible to measure,” Capital Factory President Bryan Chambers said in a post on LinkedIn.

Capital Factory executives did not immediately return phone messages Wednesday from The Associated Press.

Baer lived in Austin with his wife and three children, according to his LinkedIn page. He recently taught a student entrepreneur class at the University of Texas at Austin.

“I help people quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs,” Baer said on his LinkedIn page.

Pilots reported low fuel and power loss, airport director says

The Cessna Citation Latitude twin jet departed Tuesday evening from the Mexican resort city of San José del Cabo and was bound for Austin, Texas, the FAA said in a statement.

The plane was operated by NetJets, a company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway that lets people buy part ownership in private jets. NetJets said in a statement it was cooperating with authorities.

The jet went down at about 10 p.m. Tuesday on the Loop 20 highway, just a few minutes after its pilots radioed the local airport seeking to make an emergency landing. Their call to air traffic controllers “mentioned low fuel and a power outage,” Laredo International Airport Director Gilberto Sanchez said.

“They had mechanical issues and they lost communication with the tower,” Sanchez said Wednesday.

Dashcam video posted on social media showed the aircraft careening down the highway and knocking down a light post before stopping near the airport. The jet also barreled into a car, sending one motorist to a hospital in stable condition, Baeza said.

Five officers treated at a hospital for smoke inhalation have since been released, according to Rodriguez.

Experts wonder if jet lost engine power, had fuel leak

NetJets, started as a private jet charter service in 1964, had never had a fatal crash before Tuesday. Aviation safety experts interviewed Wednesday praised the company’s safety record.

It shouldn’t take investigators long to get a good idea of what caused the crash, in part because both pilots survived, former NTSB investigator Alan Diehl said.

The flight’s final minutes suggest the plane may have lost power to both engines and been attempting to glide into the Laredo airport, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former FAA and NTSB investigator.

“I think they just ran out of altitude and airspeed toward the end there,” Guzzetti said.

Aviation safety expert Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the Transportation Department, wondered if the jet had a fuel leak based on the pilots reporting they were running low. The jet has a range of 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers), roughly three times the distance of their planned flight to Austin.

Ultimately, Schiavo said, a lack of fuel may have prevented more death and destruction.

“Luckily, the plane didn’t explode in a fireball,” she said.

The Texas crash was the third significant aviation accident in as many days. A B-52 bomber crashed Monday during a test flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California and killed all eight people aboard, while on Sunday, 12 people were killed when a plane on a skydiving outing in Missouri crashed.

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Collins reported from Hartford, Connecticut; Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska; and Golden reported from Seattle. AP journalists Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

MIAMI (AP) — All detainees at an immigration detention center in an isolated airstrip in the Florida Everglades, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” have been transferred to other facilities, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said, citing concerns related to the hurricane season.

The South Florida Detention Center has been praised by President Donald Trump. But its conditions have been harshly criticized by l awyers, families and human rights groups, who have persistently denounced the mistreatment of detainees since the center opened 11 months ago, during the Atlantic hurricane season.

DHS said that all detainees at the Florida state-run facility had been transferred but did not specify how many or where they were taken. Nor did it say whether the facility would close permanently or only temporarily.

“For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities,” department spokesperson Lauren Bis said in an emailed statement.

The hurricane season spans six months, from June through November. The detention facility opened on July 3, 2025, one month after the start of that year’s hurricane season, which concluded without any storms making landfall in Florida. It has been operating since then.

Shortly after ICE announcement, the National Hurricane Center reported on Wednesday that the first tropical storm o f the 2026 hurricane season had formed off the Texas coast.

Detainees at the facility have talked about their difficulty accessing lawyers, and have described poor physical conditions, including worms in the food, toilets that don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects everywhere.

Surrounded by alligator-filled swamps in the Florida Everglades, “Alligator Alcatraz” was built by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration in a matter of days, and Trump toured it on July 1, 2025, just two days before it was opened.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management, the main state agency responsible for its operation, did not immediately respond to an information request from The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Since the facility opened, immigration advocates said the tents were never safe or humane to hold people. Federal and state officials, nonetheless, had said that it was prepared to withstand hurricanes.

“Transferring people out of this cruel facility is an important step, but it does not erase the harm that has already been done,” said Amy Godshall, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who filed a lawsuit against the state and the federal government alleging a lack of access to legal representation for detainees. “The state and federal government must permanently close this facility and commit to never detaining people there again.”

DeSantis said in May that South Florida Detention Facility always was meant to be temporary. He said the facility had processed and deported 22,000 detainees since its opening.

Hurricane season is an excuse, activists say

Immigration advocates and lawyers said the hurricane season is an excuse, not the real reason why the detainees have been transferred.

“That’s a nonsense excuse because they opened in the middle of the worst part of hurricane season last year,” said Arianne Betancourt, a community advocate at the non-governmental group The Workers Circle who has spent months connecting dozens of detainees with pro-bono attorneys.

Betancourt and other advocates and attorneys said they noticed an increase in the transfer of detainees to other facilities over the past two weeks, during which time they lost contact with dozens of detainees.

Katie Blankenship, an immigration attorney at Sanctuary of the South, said all 50 clients that she and other attorneys have been providing free advice during the past 20 days have been moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other facilities in South Florida, California, Arizona, Louisiana and Texas.

“They are all gone,” Blankenship said. “They have been moved and disappeared into the system and are unavailable to family or counsel, typically for a period of about a week.”

She noted that she hasn’t received any official notice about the transfers, but instead found out because her clients did not appear at hearings or did not show up at calls. When she tried to find out what had happened to them, she located them using the official detainee search tool and saw that they had been transferred to other facilities, Blankenship said.

Families left to pick up pieces

Renata Bozzetto, deputy director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said that even if the facility is closed, the harm will not end.

“Many of the people detained there will be transferred to other detention facilities, while their families continue to face uncertainty and hardship,’’ Bozzetto said. “When this detention camp closes, many corporations and contractors will have walked away with millions in profits, while immigrant families are left to pick up the pieces.”

BALTIMORE (AP) — Prosecutors have filed a criminal charge against the chief engineer of a cargo ship involved in the deadly 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, accusing him of failing to notify the U.S. Coast Guard of hazardous conditions on the ship.

Karthikeyan Deenadayalan was charged in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Monday with one count of violating the federal Port and Waterways Safety Act. Deenadayalan’s attorneys did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

Prosecutors also filed notice of a “deferred prosecution agreement” with the court, but did not provide details about the terms of that deal. Deferred prosecution agreements are typically used when a defendant has agreed to meet certain conditions — such as providing testimony, or paying restitution — in exchange for the charges against them being dropped.

Prosecutors say in court documents that Deenadayalan was the chief engineer of the container ship when it was in the Port of Baltimore in the days before the deadly bridge collision, and that Deenadayalan willfully failed to notify the U.S. Coast Guard that an improper fuel pump without a backup system was being used to power two of the ship’s generators.

The Dali, bound for Sri Lanka, lost power twice in a four-minute span as it moved to sea from the Port of Baltimore, causing it to crash into the Key Bridge in the early hours of March 26, 2024. Investigators say a loose wire in a switchboard likely caused the first power loss that led to its steering failure.

But after regaining power, the ship found itself in trouble again, prosecutors say, because the fuel pump used on the two generators was not designed to automatically restart after the first blackout. That caused a second blackout to occur, and the vessel crashed into a supporting column of the bridge, killing six construction workers who had been filling potholes on the structure. The toll bridge first opened in 1977 and is traveled by millions of cars every day.

The Singapore-based ship operator and another employee were indicted on criminal charges in May, accused of relying on the improper pump and then lying about it to investigators. Synergy Marine Pte Ltd. and Chennai, India-based Synergy Maritime Pte Ltd. and the ship’s former technical superintendent Radhakrishnan Karthik Nair, 47, are charged with conspiracy, misconduct causing death, failing to immediately inform the U.S. Coast Guard of a hazardous condition, obstructing the National Transportation Safety Board and making false statements.

A trial in the case against the ship’s operator and the technical superintendent has been scheduled for October 2027.

After the indictment, Synergy Marine expressed disappointment and accused the U.S. Justice Department of turning an accident into a crime. Nair’s lawyer, David Gerger, had a similar response, saying in May that his client “thinks about this accident every day, but he certainly did not cause it.”

In April, a $2.25 billion settlement was announced between the state of Maryland, Synergy Marine and Grace Ocean Private Limited, the Singapore-based ship owner. Grace Ocean hasn’t been charged with any crimes related to the collapse.

Earlier this month, a federal judge agreed to postpone a civil trial over the collapse after a flurry of last-minute settlements resolved most of the remaining claims, including deals resolving all pending claims over the deaths of six construction workers.

Virtually all of the unresolved claims are alleging economic losses by businesses and local governments. None of the remaining parties were asking to start the trial as scheduled this week.

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Republican legislative leaders on Wednesday rejected Gov. Brian Kemp’s call to redraw congressional and legislative districts during a special session, citing concerns about moving too quickly after a U.S. Supreme Court decision weakened federal Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters.

The aborted effort to reduce nonwhite voters’ representation contrasts with other Southern states where Republican majorities moved quickly to redraw congressional boundaries ahead of the November midterms, partly in response to President Donald Trump’s pleas to shore up the GOP’s fragile House majority.

Civil rights activists and Democrats, especially Black and other nonwhite lawmakers, celebrated the development and claimed victory after exerting weeks of pressure and gathering hundreds of citizens at the Georgia Capitol on Wednesday ahead of the session.

“Today showed that ordinary people don’t need to wait until November to make their voices heard and protect our democracy,” said U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, the state’s first Black senator who returned to Atlanta from Washington to be at the Capitol. “We can stand up and speak right now.”

Kemp had not asked his fellow Republicans to reopen Georgia districts ahead of November. Instead, he wanted them to redraw congressional boundaries for the 2028 election. But the governor, in the final months of his second term, also called on lawmakers to redraw their own districts — a move that would have made Georgia the first state to apply the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision to its legislature.

State House Speaker Jon Burns sent Kemp a letter hours before Wednesday’s special session was set to begin, informing him that legislators would not consider redistricting at all during the session. He announced the decision publicly shortly after, as demonstrators filled the Capitol with chants of “Black voters matter!”

Kemp said he believes Georgia’s current districts are unconstitutional, and he sees no reason to delay redistricting.

“Legislative districting, however, is the responsibility of the General Assembly, and it is within their discretion to defer the issue until a later date,” Kemp said in a statement.

Burns said lawmakers want to take their time after the Callais decision, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander and laid the groundwork for legislatures to reduce the number of districts where Black and other nonwhite voters hold most sway.

The speaker said it was more important for lawmakers to focus on economic matters rather than “partisan games.” He also cited pending litigation over existing Georgia districts and the need to understand the full ramifications for how race can or cannot be used in redistricting.

Privately, Republicans had expressed concerns that a rushed process that diminished Black and other minority voters’ political power could cause a backlash. And they worried that redrawn districts could unintentionally create more competitive jurisdictions that Democrats could win, especially around Atlanta.

Still, Georgia Republicans did not rule out revisiting redistricting later this year.

Conservative justices gave the green light

Before Callais, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was understood to require maps — for Congress, state legislatures and local legislative bodies — that gave historically marginalized minorities a reasonable chance to select candidates of their choice. Nationally, those so-called “opportunity districts” have disproportionately elected Black and other nonwhite representatives.

About one-third of Georgia’s 180 state representatives are Black. Latino, Asian and other minorities bring the total nonwhite share to about 40% — roughly reflecting the state’s overall population. Georgia’s U.S. House delegation has five districts out of 14 total where the electorate is majority or plurality nonwhite. All elected Black Democrats in 2024.

With the Callais ruling, a conservative majority of justices concluded that jurisdictions drawn with racial makeup in mind violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion declared that apportionment should be “race neutral.”

Alito’s stated reasoning did not hinge on party interests, and federal courts have said partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible. But in Southern states, party loyalty dovetails considerably with race and ethnicity. So the decision has allowed Republicans to redraw maps to boost GOP districts by redistributing nonwhite voters who tend to support Democrats.

Many civil rights activists argue that makes it impossible for Southern legislatures to be genuinely “race neutral” when drawing boundaries.

Democrats and activists opposed the special session

Minority voting rights are especially salient in Georgia, where the Capitol complex includes a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and sits blocks from where the assassinated civil rights icon lived, preached and led the movement that yielded the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Warnock, who is also minister at the Atlanta church where King once preached, invoked the civil rights icon as he led demonstrators who criticized the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Callais that it was discriminatory to draw districts to allow minority voters a chance to elect their preferred representatives.

The senator compared the possibility of scaling back nonwhite representation to the long Jim Crow history of poll taxes and literacy tests. White conservatives in the South once called those policies “race neutral,” too, Warnock noted.

Speaking before Burns’ announcement, Warnock lamented that some white Republicans who might consider redrawing district lines — or already have in other states — also praise King on his federal holiday each year.

“If you want to redraw maps and you have the power to do it, I guess you can do it,” he said. “But keep Dr. King’s name out of your mouth.”

Trump started the fight before the Supreme Court decision

Nationally, a partisan redistricting battle started last year when Trump urged Republican-controlled states to gerrymander their congressional maps. Texas answered the call first.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in Sacramento answered with their own gerrymander that voters later approved. A succession of states followed. The outcome would have been close to even had the Virginia Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives, not struck down new Democratic-drawn maps approved voters. All told, Republicans think they could notch a net gain of 10 seats across the multiple states.

That still may not be enough for the GOP to hold a congressional majority, given Trump’s lagging approval ratings. But it could mitigate Democratic gains and set Republicans up well for 2028 and beyond.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The eight men killed in this week’s fiery crash of a B-52 during a test flight at California’s Edwards Air Force Base included four active duty airmen, a reservist and three civilians who were on a team devoted to keeping the bomber flying for decades to come, military officials said Wednesday.

The airfield where the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress crashed shortly after takeoff on Monday remained closed but other base operations have resumed, according to a base spokesperson. No cause has been determined. Officials said it could take six months to complete the investigation.

The victims were identified as: Col. Gregory Watson, 53; Retired Lt. Col. Miles Middleton, 50; Lt. Col. Gabriel Estrella, 40; Maj. Alexander Davis, 34; Maj. Robert Dee, 40; Maj. Brad Hovey, 35; Jeromy Smith, 32; and Christopher Rischar, 41.

“They were dedicated professionals, beloved family members and irreplaceable teammates,” Col. Thomas Tauer, commander of the 412th Test Wing at Edwards, said in a statement.

Watson, a weapons systems officer, and Middleton, a pilot, were Boeing employees and the company said their loss “is deeply felt across our teams, and our hearts remain with their families, loved ones and those who worked with them.”

Engineer remembered for his passion for flight

Rischar was a flight test engineer with government contractor JT4 who had worked at Edwards for 10 years, said his wife, Rebecca Rischar. She said he loved going to airplane museums and showing their two children, 15 and 14, different types of aircraft and how they functioned.

She recalled how her husband’s father, who also works at the base and had seen the crash, called her to ask if Christopher had been flying.

“I knew he was on that flight,” she said Wednesday. “It was routine, and if the plane went up, he was going up with it.”

Rebecca and Christopher met at a church youth group while attending the same high school in nearby Lancaster and had celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary in April. He had just started helping their teenage daughter learn how to drive.

“Our marriage is not just for this life here on Earth but for eternity, so we are sealed together,” she told The Associated Press.

Bomber was part of a test program

The B-52 that crashed Monday was taking part in a test mission as part of a program aimed at making the 65-year-old bomber fleet operable through at least 2050. The bomber had arrived at Edwards in December after having a modernized radar installed at Boeing’s facility in San Antonio, an Air Force press release said at the time.

The plan was to use the bomber as a testbed throughout 2026 to help military officials decide whether to proceed with the B-52 Radar Modernization Program, the Air Force said.

For almost a decade before the plane served as a testing platform, it was based in Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, where the bomber was the flagship of the 307th Bomb Wing.

Its pilot, Col. Bruce Cox — an alumni of Texas A&M — dubbed the bomber “The Spirit of Aggieland.” An Air Force press release from 2015 said that the bomber was “dedicated to former and future cadets that graduated from Texas A&M; University’s Corps of Cadets Program.”

Cox would go on to take his final flight aboard the bomber in 2017 before retirement, according to the unit’s Facebook page.

The crash came quickly

The aircraft took off shortly before noon on a clear day, heading southwest into the prevailing winds. It flew straight and crashed on the same 15,000-foot (4,572-meter) runway. The compact wreckage indicates the plane dropped sharply.

Aviation safety experts have said their first thoughts about what might have caused the crash were about a malfunction in the flight controls or engines, but it is much too early to know. Investigators will consider several factors, including the age and maintenance of the plane.

Aerial footage showed virtually nothing left of the aircraft that went down at the base in the Mojave Desert about 100 miles (161 km) northeast of Los Angeles.

Lauren Smith told Eyewitness News KBAK-CBS and FOX58 that her husband, Jeromy Smith, was a flight test engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense and died doing what he loved.

“It is such a horrible hurt, and I’m still processing everything that happened,” she said Tuesday.

The B-52, a long-range bomber that entered service in 1955, is designed to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. It has been used in conflicts involving the U.S. military from Vietnam to Iran. .

Edwards is home to the 412th Test Wing, which conducts regular developmental testing of all Air Force aircraft, weapons systems, software and components before purchase by the service as well as throughout their life span. Test missions take place at Edwards daily, officials said.

The base is where Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager reached a speed of Mach 1.05 and broke the sound barrier in 1947.

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Rush reported from Portland, Oregon, and Toropin from Washington, D.C. Associated Press journalist Josh Funk contributed from Omaha, Nebraska.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve kept its key rate unchanged Wednesday yet almost half the central bank’s policymakers said they could support a rate hike later this year.

The unexpectedly aggressive tilt toward higher rates would disappoint President Trump and suggests heightened concerns about persistent inflation among Fed officials.

In an unusually short statement after their two-day meeting, the officials dropped language that had suggested their next move would be to cut the key rate. The brief statement reflects the influence of new chair Kevin Warsh, who was appointed by Trump. Warsh has previously criticized the Fed for commenting too broadly on the economy.

Still, Warsh’s 18 colleagues on the Fed’s rate-setting committee sent a clear message in a set of quarterly projections released Wednesday: Nine signaled they supported higher rates this year, with six of those supporting two or more quarter-point increases.

It’s a sharp change from March, when no policymakers penciled in a hike and the committee as a whole forecast one cut in 2026. The change is an acknowledgement that inflation is at its highest level in three years and many officials have said in recent speeches that if inflation doesn’t decline, higher rates may be necessary in the coming months.

Warsh, in his first news conference as chair, also underscored the Fed’s determination to bring inflation down to the central bank’s 2% target, suggesting he will take a hawkish approach as chair. “Hawks” typically support higher rates to quell inflation, while “doves” often support lower rates to boost hiring.

“We’ve missed (on inflation) for five years and we’re going to fix that,” he said. “When we deliver on our price stability objectives, which we will, the American people will feel as though the hardships that they’ve been living through … are in the rear view mirror.”

Warsh had supported rate cuts last year while under consideration to be Trump’s pick as Fed chair to replace Jerome Powell. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump repeatedly attacked Powell for not cutting rates more deeply.

Warsh did not hint whether he was leaning toward hiking rates, but economists saw his message at the press conference as hawkish.

“The risk that they might need to raise rates has clearly risen given what we got today,” Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, said.

Financial markets agreed. Stock prices fell sharply after the Fed issued its statement and Warsh spoke. Bond yields rose.

Trump, for his part, appeared to accept the Fed’s decision.

“We have a very good guy over there now so I’m guided by what he wants to do,” Trump said in France, where he attended a meeting of leaders from the world’s seven largest economies.

All told, another eight officials signaled they would support keeping the rate unchanged, and one penciled in a cut. Warsh did not submit a forecast for how the Fed might change its key rate.

In another shift, the Fed’s post-meeting statement contained no hints about its next moves, or what economists refer to as “forward guidance.” Previous Fed chairs, starting with Ben Bernanke, saw such guidance as a benefit to the Fed, because it prodded financial markets to move rates either higher or lower, depending on what the Fed preferred.

Warsh told reporters at a press conference that guidance was not “well suited to the current policy conjuncture.” He has previously criticized forward guidance, as well as the quarterly projections, for potentially locking the Fed into a specific rate path.

Warsh also said he is forming five task forces to examine such areas as how the Fed communicates, the sources of data it uses in making policy decisions, and the frameworks it uses to evaluate inflation, all with the goal of making sure the Fed is “clear-eyed and focused on the future.”

Diane Swonk, chief economist at accounting firm KPMG, said the use of the task forces indicates Warsh is not looking to impose changes on the rest of the Fed, but instead is seeking consensus.

“He wants buy in,” she said. “He’s not trying to change it by command.”

If the Iran war is resolved, gas prices will likely continue to decline and inflation may cool in the coming months. But prices of many goods and services — such as clothes, dental care, and child care — were rising before the Iran war, and inflation has been above the Fed’s 2% target for five years, suggesting that there may still be inflationary pressures in the economy.

Warsh also faces a sharply different economic environment than when he appeared to campaign for the job of Fed chair last year. Back then, he was outspoken in favor of lower interest rates, as Trump has demanded. He pointed to the development of AI as a technology that could vastly expand the economy’s ability to produce goods and services cheaply, which would over time bring down inflation.

Even then, many economists were skeptical of his claim. At least in the short run, analysts note that soaring investment in semiconductors and computing equipment is contributing to higher inflation.

Indeed, since the Iran war began Feb. 28, inflation has accelerated to a three-year high of 4.2%, lifted mostly by costlier gas stemming from the Iran war. The Fed typically fights higher inflation by raising its key interest rate to cool spending and growth.

Trump has announced a peace agreement that could bring the three-month conflict to an end, but it’s not clear if peace will hold. And even if oil flows freely out of the Middle East again, it could take months for prices of gas, groceries, and items such as airline fares, to cool.

At the same time, hiring has picked up in recent months, removing a key rationale for cutting rates. In January, the Fed forecast that it would reduce rates twice this year, as part of its quarterly economic projections. A big reason for those potential cuts is that employers were shedding jobs and policymakers worried that the unemployment rate would rise. The central bank typically cuts its key rate to spur economic growth and hiring.

But earlier this month a government report showed that hiring jumped in May, when employers added 172,000 jobs, the third straight month of solid job gains.