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NEW YORK (AP) — Moments after his daughter Olivia was born, Marlon White felt his wife’s hand slacken as she fainted. The baby, born at 29 weeks weighing about 2 pounds, wasn’t making a sound as she was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. Terrified, he waited in the hall while the doctors stabilized his newborn and wife.

The next day, White, a welder, was back at work. Two days later, his wife, Farra Lanzer-White, was also back on the job, setting up a work station at the Denver hospital. For two months, first at one hospital then another, she kept up with emails and meetings as alarm bells went off each time Olivia stopped breathing, as she herself prepared for open-heart surgery for a condition discovered during her difficult pregnancy.

The Fort Collins, Colorado couple made a choice familiar to many parents with newborns in intensive care: Keep working while the baby is in the NICU to save any parental leave they might have for when the baby comes home. They are now part of a growing movement advocating for the adoption of NICU leave in the country’s patchwork of family leave policies, which differ between states, cities and companies.

In January, seven months after Olivia was born, Colorado became the first U.S. state to adopt paid NICU leave, offering up to 12 weeks for parents with newborns in intensive care on top of the 12 weeks of parental leave under the state’s family and medical leave program. A more modest policy will take effect next month in Illinois, guaranteeing between 10 and 20 days of unpaid leave to NICU parents.

While advocates want more states to adopt NICU leave, a major focus now is galvanizing support for a federal bill to add NICU leave to the Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1993 law that entitles eligible workers nationwide to take unpaid leave for family and medical reasons, said Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit that advocates for paid leave and other workplace policies in support of families.

“We think it’s promising in terms of bipartisan support, because as we’ve approached people, it seems that they intuitively understand it,” said Chettiar.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Colorado Democrat who is drafting the federal bill said it would offer up to 12 weeks of NICU leave on top of the 12 weeks of parental leave available under the FMLA.

The U.S. has no federal law mandating paid family or parental leave, an issue that has long divided Democrats and Republicans. While FMLA leaves out many workers who can’t afford to take unpaid leave, Pettersen said the goal is to win bipartisan support for the idea of NICU leave and bring it to the forefront of discussions surrounding parental leave.

The NICU leave bills passed in Colorado and Illinois offer mixed signals about the potential for bipartisanship. Colorado’s paid leave passed mostly along party lines, while the shorter, unpaid leave adopted in Illinois had overwhelming bipartisan support.

Unlike Colorado, Illinois does not already have a paid family leave program in which it could incorporate NICU leave, said Illinois state Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Democrat who introduced the bill and whose twin boys were born at 27 weeks in 2014 and stayed intensive care for three months.

Several Republican lawmakers became co-sponsors, including state Rep. Nicole La Ha, whose daughter spent 45 days in the NICU in 2017 after her water broke at almost 30 weeks.

“Unless you have had this experience, you can’t fully understand why something like this is so meaningful,” said La Ha. “You have an infant who is struggling to eat and breathe. The last thing you want to think about is work but unfortunately you have bills to pay.”

While Colorado’s bill lacked bipartisan support, Colorado State Sen. Jeff Bridges said “it was the quietest opposition you could hear,” with few Republicans or business groups publicly speaking against it. Bridges introduced the bill a year after his son Kit was born two months early and weighing just 2 pounds.

“I wanted to share stories that were so moving that the lobbyists would look like monsters if they opposed it,” Bridges said.

Nearly one out of 10 babies born in the U.S. are admitted to a NICU, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While in the NICU, newborns are still learning to swallow, breath on their own and regulate their body temperature, said Dr. Karen Puopolo, section chief for Newborn Medicine at Pennsylvania Hospital and chair of the Committee on Fetus and Newborns of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Parental presence has a “multitude of advantages both ways,” Puopolo said. Skin-to-skin contact slows down the baby’s heart beat, improves their breathing and helps the mother with milk production.

In recent years, a smattering of companies have adopted dedicated paid NICU leave, including Morgan Stanley, Pinterest and the organic baby formula company Bobbie, while others have extended the length of parental leave or added policies like caregiving leave, which could also help NICU parents.

But mostly, the plight of NICU parents has been a blind spot, said Sahra Cahoon, executive director Love for Lily, a Colorado-based organization that supports NICU families and advocated for Colorado’s new law.

Cahoon launched the organization after her daughter Lily, born at 24 weeks and five days, died after three-and-a-half months in the NICU. Cahoon, who owned a jewelry-making business at the time, said she worked, believing her daughter would survive.

“It’s probably one of my biggest regrets,” Cahoon said, though at the time she felt lucky to be able to work remotely from the hospital and didn’t feel she could afford to give up her income. “We did not know that our story was going to end that way.”

When Rebecca Herrera-Moreno learned about Colorado’s NICU leave law last year, it brought her back to her son’s time in the NICU six years earlier and she decided to leap into advocacy for a similar provision in her home state of California.

When her son Nico was born at 32 weeks in 2020, Herrera-Moreno was already on disability leave, having entered preterm labor weeks earlier. Her husband, Martin Moreno, was entitled to six weeks of paid parental leave under California law at the time, but they decided he would save that time for when Nico could come home, which ended up being three weeks later.

She struggled to enjoy moments with her tiny son while holding him surrounded by machines, monitors and nurses. She would say “I love you” every day before leaving him while guilt swelled inside her that she hadn’t developed that feeling yet. Weeks later at home, she opened to up to her husband, Martin Moreno, who confessed that he had felt the same way.

Moreno, a health director for a labor union, said he was consumed at the time with his job, which suddenly intensified as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country. To this day, his most vivid memory of the period isn’t with his son in the NICU, but of a video he helped produce to show workers how to properly wash their hands.

When he came home, he felt unprepared to care for Nico, who had to be fed on his side to prevent choking. He had been oblivious to his wife’s emotional turmoil.

“I wish I would have had more preparation with the medical staff to really feel like I had everything set. And that’s speaking to the medical piece of it — not even addressing being absent for Becky during so much of this,” Moreno said.

Nearly 800 people have applied for neonatal care leave since Colorado’s policy took effect in January, according to Tracy Marshall, director of Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance Division.

Among the first were Chris and Stevie Madden, whose son was born almost eight weeks early on Jan. 11.

Stevie Madden, a mental health professional who had been rushed to the hospital after her blood pressure spiked and she began bleeding, said she panicked about how to handle the crisis and work when she realized she had planned to start her maternity leave much later.

A nurse at the hospital, however, told Chris Madden about the new NICU leave, which they both applied for.

Madden, an oil field mechanic, said he wouldn’t have been able to keep him mind on his risky job while his son was fighting for his life. He said he learned how to handle his baby’s delicate skin — press gently, don’t rub — and gained the confidence he needed when Roczen stopped breathing once after returning home and had to be rushed the hospital.

He told every parent he met at hospital about NICU leave.

“It was life changing not to have to think about money and stress and just be present with your baby,” Madden said.

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The Associated Press’ women in the workforce coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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WAIALUA, Hawaii (AP) — The reddish-brown mud that smothered Bok Kongphan’s Hawaii farm has hardened in the tropical sun. Irrigation tubes lie in a tangle where his lemongrass, cucumber and okra once flourished.

His niece, Jeni Balanay, lost her crops too — a mustardy green called choy sum, bitter melon, tomato. The leaves of her recently planted banana, coconut and mango have gone yellow, the trees unlikely to survive.

Across Oahu’s North Shore, an area famed for its big-wave surfing, the small farms that help supply the island’s food are struggling after back-to-back storms in March brought the state’s worst flooding in two decades. Officials are pleading with farmers not to give up, stressing that local agriculture is crucial for the isolated archipelago.

“In some cases entire farms have been wiped out,” said Brian Miyamoto, executive director of the Hawaii Farm Bureau. “These are farmers who were just days or weeks away from harvesting and now they have to start over.”

According to data collected by farming advocates, more than 600 of Hawaii’s 6,500 farms reported nearly $40 million in damage, including to crops, livestock and machinery. But Miyamoto said the farm bureau estimates that the full extent of the destruction is much broader — $50 million at close to 2,000 farms.

For most of the late 19th and 20th centuries, plantation-style agriculture dominated Hawaii, as companies like Dole and conglomerates founded by missionary descendants grew immense fields of sugarcane or pineapple for export. The operations drew large numbers of immigrants, primarily from Asia and Portugal.

But that large-scale monoculture faded by the 1990s amid international competition, and officials began to promote smaller farms — some, like Kongphan’s, just a few acres — with a wider array of crops that could be sold to local grocery stores or at farmers markets.

Worldwide shipping disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance of having a local food supply in Hawaii, and the state in recent years has offered additional support to the farms. That includes money for infrastructure, a farm-to-school program and loans for those who have been denied credit from banks.

But they still face challenges. Unlike many of their counterparts on the mainland, Hawaii farms are often too small and diversified to be able to afford or qualify for crop insurance.

Many of the farmers are immigrants who were barely eking out a living even before the storms, Miyamoto noted.

The majority of Hawaii’s farms report less than $10,000 in annual sales, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The flooding, along with high winds and power outages, killed or stressed livestock and destroyed equipment, vehicles and infrastructure.

Without insurance, Kongphan, an immigrant from Thailand, has been trying to obtain government aid and figure out how to level earth moved by the floodwaters. His niece has been helping him and other Thai farmers navigate the process. Available help includes federal disaster relief, one-time $1,500 emergency grants and long-term loans from the state, and a charitable fund that raised about $850,000 in the weeks after the floods. Many farmers also have online fundraising pages.

In an interview interpreted by Balanay, Kongphan called the floods “very devastating,” but said he will continue working the 5-acre (2-hectare) plot he’s leased for five years, growing vegetables he sells at farmers markets, a swap meet, and at shops and stalls in Honolulu’s Chinatown.

Kongphan pointed to a faint, thigh-high line on a plywood wall showing where the water reached inside his home, which he built from a shipping container. Inside, there’s now a donated tent, but he usually sleeps outside.

Flies swarmed as he carried a dirt-caked generator he hopes to salvage. Nearby sat a Toyota Yaris, covered inside and out in the same dried sludge.

Balanay, who learned farming from her mom after the family immigrated to Hawaii, isn’t sure she wants to keep at it. She recalled the torrent rising to her waist in seconds and wiping out her crops in the middle of the night.

“Will it happen again?” she asked. “When you look at the land and it’s all destroyed, you want to give up.”

The flooding is the latest crisis for Hawaii’s farmers, on top of wildfires, pests and volcanic tephra — ash and debris ejected by an erupting Big Island volcano, said the state’s top agriculture official, Sharon Hurd.

“These are the farms that we really need to get started again,” Hurd said. “We cannot have them give up.”

Officials have been conducting tests to assure farmers that their soil is safe and providing them with seeds and plant starts, she said.

Some farmers have been unable to make it to farmers markets, a key source of their income. Many who do have less to offer, Miyamoto said.

Farmer Kula Uliʻi said her family has been bringing roughly one-quarter of their usual output. Instead of 200 pounds (90.7 kilograms) of tomatoes at weekend farmers markets, they might sell 60 pounds (27.2 kilograms).

They lost starts that were due to be planted this month and face months of limited harvest, she said. She’s unsure about the status of her farm’s contracts with grocery stores, given that it can’t meet demand.

Even the taro, which thrives in water, is lost, she said, after it was submerged in the contaminants carried by the floods.

“It’s all gone,” Uliʻi said. “We can’t use any of it.”

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Associated Press writer Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed.

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SEOUL, May 17 (Reuters) – South Korea will pursue all options, including emergency arbitration, to avoid a labour strike at the country’s biggest employer Samsung Electronics and to minimise any damage if one does occur, its prime minister said on Sunday.

The world’s largest memory chip maker and its South Korean labour union will resume pay talks on Monday with a government mediator, in a move that could ease concerns over a potentially disruptive strike at the tech giant that accounts for nearly a quarter of the country’s exports. 

“Just one day of suspension at Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor factory is expected to incur direct losses of as much as 1 trillion won ($667.68 million),” Prime Minister Kim Min-seok said after an emergency meeting with ministers on Sunday. 

“What is more concerning is that a temporary pause on semiconductor manufacturing lines leads to months of inactivity,” Kim said, adding there were worries about economic damage ballooning to as much as 100 trillion won if materials had to be disposed of due to a strike.

An emergency arbitration order, which can be invoked by the labour minister if the country deems a dispute is likely to harm the economy or daily life, immediately prohibits industrial action for 30 days while the National Labor Relations Commission conducts mediation and arbitration.

It has rarely been invoked and would represent an extraordinary step for a union-friendly administration.

The union said on Sunday it would not give in to pressure on arbitration and would not agree to a pay deal should the company offer a less favorable proposal.

Samsung accounts for 22.8% of South Korea’s exports and 26% of the domestic stock market, employing more than 120,000 people and working with 1,700 suppliers, Kim said. 

($1 = 1,497.7300 won)

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin, Heejin Kim and Jihoon Lee; Editing by William Mallard and Jamie Freed)

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By Suzanne McGee

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island, May 17 (Reuters) – Investors are warning that lofty U.S. stock markets have not yet priced in the risk of rocketing inflation and are vulnerable to a sharp spike in bond yields.

Equity markets have been propelled by robust first-quarter earnings and expectations of boosts from artificial intelligence, overshadowing the risk of high energy prices and the lack of a conclusion to the war with Iran.

But a spike in bond market yields over the past week – which took the 30-year Treasury bond above 5% and benchmark 10-year bonds above 4.5% – could change the picture for investors. That caused stock market caution on Friday.

Paul Karger, co-founder and managing partner of TwinFocus, who manages money for ultra-high net worth families, said his clients are bombarding him with questions every time he meets with them about how to make sense of the apparent market paradox.

“Breakfast, lunch and dinner: the question is always about how to make sense of the fact that this is such a divided outlook,” with earnings telling a positive story but oil prices and inflation emerging as a negative for companies, Karger said.

Karger has what he calls a “barbell” approach to assets he manages: accumulating big overweight positions in cash, gold and other commodities, while maintaining positions in the market-leading mega-cap growth stocks.

After an initial swoon following the start of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran in late February, U.S. stock indexes have mounted a sharp rebound. The benchmark S&P 500 was last up more than 17% since its low for the year in late March, giving it a year-to-date gain of over 8% – even with Friday’s pullback of nearly 1%.

Rising benchmark yields tend to put pressure on equity valuations, as companies and consumers will face higher borrowing costs. This can also weigh on economic growth and corporate profits, while possibly making bond returns more competitive with stocks.

That may especially be the case now with the stock market at elevated levels. The benchmark S&P 500 as of Thursday was trading at 21.3 times earnings estimates for the next 12 months, according to LSEG Datastream. That is well above the index’s long-term average forward P/E ratio of 16, although it is below the 23.5 level it reached in October, as the strengthening U.S. earnings outlook has helped to keep valuations somewhat in check.

“I do think there is a real fear that inflation is kind of embedded in the economy going forward,” said Peter Tuz, president, Chase Investment Counsel, in Charlottesville, Virginia. “You don’t see any signs of it going down right now, and that is a real fear, and it will drive the market down if it continues.”

Jack Ablin, chief market strategist at Cresset Capital, said if there is a delay of even a few months in reopening the Strait of Hormuz to both oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers as well as other commercial shipping, the result could be “a brand new inflation regime for which investors just aren’t prepared.”

EARNINGS ROSY

The reason equity markets remain robust, portfolio managers say, is earnings. U.S. publicly traded corporations are delivering first-quarter profits that are significantly above expectations and on track to be some 28% higher than a year ago, the largest jump seen since late 2021.

“We’re seeing the impact of the AI spending boom and (a related) increase in productivity,” said Jeremiah Buckley, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson, which could extend into 2027, he added.

The latest wave of artificial-intelligence market enthusiasm has buoyed stocks including semiconductors. Massive capital spending on data centers and other AI-related infrastructure boosted chip demand. Still, lofty valuations in AI-related sectors are also causing some to forecast a pullback.

Also underpinning equity markets is fear of being left on the sidelines.

“Traders don’t want to turn bearish if there is a possibility — as many think — that the Strait of Hormuz situation could be cleared up in just a few weeks’ time,” said Tim Murray, capital markets strategist at T. Rowe Price.

RISKS SKEWED

However, investors are becoming increasingly aware of the risks – and the potential shock to equities. The surge in the price of crude oil, still trading above $100 as uncertainty swirls around the temporary ceasefire between Iran and the United States, has propelled inflation fears. Producer prices saw their largest gain in four years in April.

“Markets aren’t braced for an ‘extreme’ scenario in the Iran war” of a prolonged Hormuz shutdown, John Higgins, chief economic adviser, financial markets at consultancy Capital Economics, warned his clients in a report published on Thursday. While Treasury markets are pricing in the inflation risk, equity markets are not doing the same with the prospect that a prolonged shutdown may take a toll on the growth that has supported profits.

The geopolitical crisis in the Persian Gulf and the inflation it may be causing has the potential for long-term damage.

“The Iran crisis has the potential to reshape the trajectory of the markets” for the rest of the year, said Matthew Gertken, chief geopolitical strategist at BCA, a market analysis firm.

(Reporting by Suzanne McGee in Providence, Rhode Island; additional reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch and Lewis Krauskopf; editing by Megan Davies and Nick Zieminski)

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In the past week, many Americans remained focused on the economy, inflation and how those forces could impact their lives. Trips to the grocery store or gas station are more painful than they were last year, and that is impacting the decisions of both households and businesses.

Here’s a snapshot of prominent economic data and news that occurred over the past week and what it potentially means for you.

U.S. consumer prices climbed sharply again last month as the 10-week war with Iran pushed energy prices higher.

The Labor Department’s consumer price index rose 3.8% from April 2025, according to data released Tuesday. On a month-to-month basis, April prices rose 0.6% from March as gasoline prices rose 5.4% during the month; the month-over-month gain was down from a 0.9% increase from February to March.

Labor Department figures showed that gasoline prices are up more than 28% compared to a year ago. AAA says the average gallon of gasoline costs motorists more than $4.50 a gallon, about 44% more than it cost last year at this time.

U.S. wholesale inflation came in hot last month. Producer prices rose 6% from a year earlier, the most since December 2022, as the 10-week Iran war pushed up energy prices and put pressure on companies to pass along higher costs to consumers.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it hits consumers — shot up 1.4% in April, the biggest monthly gain since March 2022.

Energy prices climbed 7.8% from March to April and 22.7% from a year earlier. Gasoline soared 15.6% from March and diesel, the dominant fuel used in shopping, jumped 12.6%.

Excluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called core producer prices were up 1% from March and 5.2% from April 2025.

All the numbers were much higher than economists had forecast.

The number of Americans filing for jobless aid rose last week but remains historically low despite the economic uncertainty caused by the war in Iran.

U.S. applications for unemployment benefits for the the week ending May 9 rose by 12,000 to 211,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s slightly more than the 207,000 new applications analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet had forecast.

Weekly filings for unemployment benefits are considered a proxy for U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.

Despite relatively few layoffs, the labor market appears to be stuck in what economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” state. That has kept the unemployment rate low at 4.3%, but left many of those out of work struggling to find new employment.

Shoppers pulled back on spending in April as higher gas prices fueled by the Iran war meant less money left over for some nonessentials like clothing and furniture.

Retail sales rose a respectable 0.5% in April, but that was slower than the 1.6% growth seen in March, according to Commerce Department data released Thursday. March marked the largest one-month increase in retail spending in more than three years, largely because gas prices rose so rapidly.

Excluding gasoline, retail sales in April were up 0.3%. That’s less than half the 0.7% pace from the previous month, excluding gas station sales.

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes were essentially flat in April, another lackluster showing for the housing market during what’s traditionally its busiest time of the year.

Existing home sales edged up 0.2% last month from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Monday. Sales were unchanged compared to April last year.

The latest sales figure fell short of the roughly 4.12 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet.

Sales have been hovering close to a 4 million annual pace now going back to 2023, far short of the historic norm that is closer to 5.2 million.

The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate edged lower this week, its first drop after rising the previous two weeks.

The benchmark 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate fell to 6.36% from 6.37% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.81%.

Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also eased this week. That average rate fell to 5.71% from 5.72% last week. A year ago, it was at 5.92%, Freddie Mac said.

The U.S. stock market was falling from its records Friday and joining a worldwide stock market drop as higher oil prices sent a shiver through the bond market. Stocks that had been caught up in the euphoria around artificial-intelligence technology that rose sharply for most of the week, led the decline Friday.

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Recent comments by U.S. President Donald Trump that arms sales to Taiwan are a “very good negotiating chip” in the United States’ dealings with China are heightening anxieties on the island democracy that Beijing claims as its own.

Trump made the comment in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier that aired right after the U.S. president wrapped up a high-stakes visit to China on Friday.

China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province, to be retaken by force if necessary. The U.S., like all countries that have formal ties with Beijing, doesn’t recognize Taiwan as a country but has been the island’s strongest backer and arms supplier.

Trump is now suggesting that is open to negotiation.

Asked if he would approve a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan that has been held up for months, Trump said that’s up to China.

“I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said. “It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly. It’s a lot of weapons.”

The U.S. is bound by its own laws to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself and sees all threats to the island as a matter of grave concern.

By conditioning U.S. arms sales to Taiwan on his negotiations with China, Trump may play into one the island’s “nightmare scenarios,” said William Yang, a Northeast Asia senior analyst for International Crisis Group: that Taiwan, instead of being at the negotiating table, is on the menu.

Although Trump didn’t say specifically what he would want from China in return for denying Taiwan the weapons, he has been pressing Beijing to buy more American goods and to help put pressure on Iran.

Trump and the U.S. Congress already approved in December a separate $11 billion arms sales package to Taiwan. Beijing reacted furiously by staging live fire drills around the island.

China has framed Taiwan as “the most important issue in China-U.S. relations” during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent summit with Trump. The visit is to be followed next week by a trip by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Beijing.

In one of his strongest statements to date, Xi on Thursday warned Trump of “clashes and even conflicts” if the issue of Taiwan is not handled properly.

Taiwan’s presidential office on Saturday sought to smooth over the tensions by highlighting “that the consistent U.S. policy and position toward Taiwan remain unchanged.”

“The Republic of China is a sovereign, independent, democratic country; this is self-evident, and Beijing’s claims are therefore without merit,” said Presidential Office Spokesperson Karen Kuo, referring to Taiwan’s official name. She added that the island remains grateful to Trump for his support and stressed that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are stipulated by law.

Another statement that raised concerns on the island was Trump’s call for Taiwan’s microchip sector — the world’s largest and most advanced — to pick up and move to the U.S.

“I’d like to see everybody making chips over in Taiwan come into America,” Trump told Fox News, describing such a move as “the greatest thing you can do.”

Trump has long pressed Taiwanese chipmakers, which produce more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, which are used for artificial intelligence, smartphones and military equipment, to base some of their production in the U.S.

Taiwan’s leading chipmaker, TSMC, has committed an investment of $165 billion in a mega-campus in Arizona. The island’s government, in a sweeping trade agreement with the U.S. earlier this year, pledged $250 billion in investment in the U.S. microchip sector, which included TSMC’s previous commitment.

Trump also reiterated older accusations that Taiwan “stole” its chipmaking sector from the U.S. decades ago.

While Trump during his summit with Xi did not alter U.S. policy wording on Taiwan — which many observers had feared he would — he did seem to adopt some of the Chinese president’s own narrative about the island’s government.

Beijing has branded Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te as a “Taiwan independence diehard,” and warned that he would bring war and destruction to the island.

Trump and other top U.S. officials don’t usually communicate with Taiwanese leaders but have shown support in the past for example by allowing former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to transit on U.S. soil en route to visiting Latin American countries. Lai, who is about to reach his presidency’s two-year mark, has yet to set foot on the U.S. mainland, and some observers have interpreted that as a rollback of support by the Trump administration.

In his interview with Fox News, Trump stressed that he didn’t want to see a change of status quo between Taiwan and Beijing. “But they have somebody there now that wants to go independent,” he said, likely referring to Lai.

“They’re going independent because they want to get into a war and they figure they have the United States behind them.” He added that he is not looking to fight a war thousands of miles away.

Trump’s worrying statements about Taiwan may be another instance of “his transactional rhetoric being turned up to the max,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a fellow with the Atlantic Council. “What matters more is the substance, which Taiwan is holding its collective breath for.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump returned from the spectacle of a Chinese state visit to a less than welcoming U.S. economy — with the military band and garden tour in Beijing giving way to pressure over how to fix America’s escalating inflation rate.

Consumer inflation in the United States increased to 3.8% annually in April, higher than what he inherited as the Iran war and the Republican president’s own tariffs have pushed up prices. Inflation is now outpacing wage gains and effectively making workers poorer. The Cleveland Federal Reserve estimates that annual inflation could reach 4.2% in May as the war has kept oil and gasoline prices high.

Trump’s time with Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears unlikely to help the U.S. economy much, despite Trump’s claims of coming trade deals. The trip occurred as many people are voting in primaries leading into the November general election while having to absorb the rising costs of gasoline, groceries, utility bills, jewelry, women’s clothing, airplane tickets and delivery services. Democrats see the moment as a political opportunity.

“He’s returning to a dumpster fire,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank focused on economic issues. “The president will not have the faith and confidence of the American people — the economy is their top issue and the president is saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”

The president’s trip to Beijing and his recent comments that indicated a tone-deafness to voters’ concerns about rising prices have suggested his focus is not on the American public and have undermined Republicans who had intended to campaign on last year’s tax cuts as helping families.

Trump described the trip as a victory, saying on social media that Xi “congratulated me on so many tremendous successes,” as the U.S. president has praised their relationship.

Trump told reporters that Boeing would be selling 200 aircraft — and maybe even 750 “if they do a good job” — to the Chinese. He said American farmers would be “very happy” because China would be “buying billions of dollars of soybeans.”

“We had an amazing time,” Trump said as he flew home on Air Force One, and told Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview that gasoline prices were just some “short-term pain” and would “drop like a rock” once the war ends.

Trump departed from the White House for China by saying the negotiations over the Iran war depended on stopping Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.

That remark prompted blowback because it suggested to some that Trump cared more about challenging Iran than fighting inflation at home. Trump defended his words, telling Fox News: “That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again.”

The White House has since stressed that Trump is focused on inflation.

Asked later about the president’s words, Vice President JD Vance said there had been a “misrepresentation” of the remarks. White House spokesman Kush Desai said the “administration remains laser-focused on delivering growth and affordability on the homefront” while indicating actions would be taken on grocery prices.

But as Trump appeared alongside Xi, new reports back home showed inflation rising for businesses and interest rates climbing on U.S. government debt.

His comments that Boeing would sell 200 jets to China caused the company’s stock price to fall because investors had expected a larger number. There was little concrete information offered about any trade agreements reached during the summit, including Chinese purchases of U.S. exports such as liquefied natural gas and beef.

“Foreign policy wins can matter politically, but only if voters feel stability and affordability in their daily lives,” said Brittany Martinez, a former Republican congressional aide who is the executive director of Principles First, a center-right advocacy group focused on democracy issues.

“Midterms are almost always a referendum on cost of living and public frustration, and Republicans are not immune from the same inflation and affordability pressures that hurt Democrats in recent cycles,” she added.

Democratic lawmakers are seizing on Trump’s comments before his trip as proof of his indifference to lowering costs. There is potential staying power of his remarks as Americans head into Memorial Day weekend facing rising prices for the hamburgers and hot dogs to be grilled.

“What Americans do not see is any sympathy, any support, or any plan from Trump and congressional Republicans to lower costs – in fact, they see the opposite,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday.

Vance faulted the Biden administration for the inflation problem even though the inflation rate is now higher than it was when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with a specific mandate to fix it.

“The inflation number last month was not great,” Vance said Wednesday, but he then stressed, “We’re not seeing anything like what we saw under the Biden administration.”

Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 under Biden, a Democrat. By the time Trump took the oath of office, it was a far more modest 3%.

The data tells a different story as higher inflation is spreading into the cost of servicing the national debt.

Over the past week, the interest rate charged on 10-year U.S. government debt jumped from 4.36% to 4.6%, an increase that implies higher costs for auto loans and mortgages.

“My fear is that the layers of supply shocks that are affecting the U.S. economy will only further feed into inflationary pressures,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.

Daco noted that last year’s tariff increases were now translating into higher clothing prices. With the Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s ability to impose tariffs by declaring an economic emergency, his administration is preparing a new set of import taxes for this summer.

Daco stressed that there have been a series of supply shocks. First, tariffs cut into the supply of imports. In addition, Trump’s immigration crackdown cut into the supply of foreign-born workers. Now, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off the vital waterway used to ship 20% of global oil supplies.

“We’re seeing an erosion of growth,” Daco said.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The Long Island Rail Road, North America’s largest commuter rail system, was shut down Saturday after unionized workers went on strike for the first time in three decades.

The railroad, which serves New York City and its eastern suburbs, ceased operations just after midnight after five unions representing about half its workforce walked off the job.

The unions and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the public agency that runs the railroad, have been negotiating for months on a new contract, with talks stalled over the question of workers’ salaries and healthcare premiums. President Donald Trump’s administration tried to broker a deal, but the unions were legally allowed to strike starting at 12:01 a.m.

Kevin Sexton, national vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said no new negotiations have been scheduled.

“We’re far apart at this point,” Sexton said early Saturday. “We are truly sorry that we are in this situation.”

MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said the agency “gave the union everything they said they wanted in terms of pay” and that to him it was apparent the unions always intended to walk out.

The walkout, the first for the LIRR since a two-day strike in 1994, promises to cause headaches for sports fans planning to see the Yankees and Mets battle this weekend or to watch the Knicks’ playoff run at Madison Square Garden, which is located directly above the railroad’s Penn Station hub in Manhattan.

The station was devoid of its usual weekend bustle in the afternoon. Only a few dozen people were seen traversing the main concourse, many dragging rolling luggage from departing or arriving Amtrak trains, which are not affected by the strike.

Departure boards normally showing upcoming trains by destination instead listed ghost trains marked “No Passengers.” A few signs affixed to customer service windows explained that the railroad was shut down because of a strike.

Access to platforms was blocked off with bicycle-rack style barricades and roll-down gates as MTA police officers stood sentry, directing people to alternative transportation.

If the stoppage continues into the workweek, the roughly 250,000 people who ride the system each weekday will be forced to find other routes to the city from its Long Island suburbs. For many that likely means navigating the region’s notoriously congested roads.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, blamed the Trump administration for cutting mediation short and pushing the negotiations toward a strike. Trump, a Republican, responded on his Truth Social platform, saying he had nothing to do with the strike and “never even heard about it until this morning.”

“No, Kathy, it’s your fault, and now looking over the facts, you should not have allowed this to happen,” Trump said, renewing his endorsement of Long Island politician Bruce Blakeman, who is challenging Hochul’s reelection bid. “If you can’t solve it, let me know, and I’ll show you how to properly get things done.”

Hochul urged Long Islanders to work from home if possible. The MTA has said it would provide limited shuttle buses to New York City subway stations, but that contingency plan was not envisioned to handle all the riders the system normally carries on a workday.

And while remote work options greatly expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people still need to show up in person, said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, a commuter advocacy group.

“You work in construction, you work in the healthcare industry, you work at a school or you’re about to graduate from school, that’s not always possible,” she said. “People need to get where they need to go.”

Dave Sumner, a locomotive engineer of 32 years, said he anticipates that Trump or Congress will step in before the strike goes on much longer.

“We’re pretty vital to this area,” he said.

The MTA has said the unions’ initial demands to raise salaries would have led to fare increases and impacted contract negotiations with other unionized workers.

The unions, which represent locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen and other train workers, have said more substantial raises were warranted to help workers keep up with inflation and rising living costs.

Duane O’Connor, who picketed in the morning at Penn Station, said that while he regrets the impact on commuters, workers are simply asking for fair pay.

“I feel terrible. Terrible. This is going to hurt. This is going to hurt the island, this is going to hurt the city. … All we are asking for is fair wages,” he said.

“We’re pretty much three years without a contract,” said Karl Bischoff, a locomotive engineer with LIRR for 29 years. “If they did their contracts for their construction stuff like that, this place would be in worse condition.”

If the unions get the pay increases they are looking for, “it will come at the expense of our riders who will see next year’s 4% fare increase doubled to 8%,” Gerard Bringmann, chair of the rider advocacy group LIRR Commuter Council, said in a statement. “Like the union workers, we too are burdened by the increase in the cost of living here on Long Island.”

With Hochul running for reelection, the pressure might be on the MTA to strike a deal to end the shutdown, said William Dwyer, a labor relations expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where commuter rail workers staged a three-day strike last year.

“She’s up for reelection, and Long Island is a critical vote for her,” Dwyer said. “So if there’s a significant fare hike, that does not bode well for her on Election Day.”

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Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo

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TULA, Mexico (AP) — When bombs fell from the sky and bullets ricocheted off her concrete floors, 74-year-old María Cabrera and her family fled into the night-cloaked mountains of central Mexico with only the clothes on their backs.

A week later, Cabrera picks through the charred scraps of her life, salvaging pots, woven cloths and a small wooden cross. She knows that it’s the last time she’ll return to her home of 60 years.

“Oh God, why have you abandoned me,” she said through heartbroken sobs, wandering past burned ashes of what was once her mattress in a small room with a collapsed roof and a melted refrigerator just through the door. “How are we going to rebuild? We don’t have money, we don’t have anything.”

She joined a growing number of people displaced in conflict-torn regions of Mexico forced to flee their homes. Experts have described the phenomenon as an invisible crisis with long-term humanitarian consequences — there are few official figures on the number of displaced people, who have almost no resources to turn to once violence forces them to leave.

Cabrera fled her small town Friday after years of mounting cartel violence in Tula. This town of around 200 native Náhuatl people is among many in the central state of Guerrero ravaged by decades of fracturing rival criminal groups warring for territorial control.

Last week, a group known as Los Ardillos attacked her town and a handful of others with drone-fired explosives, opened fire on local community police forces, killed livestock and burned homes like Cabrera’s to an undistinguishable crisp.

Cabrera carefully handed bags of belongings to soldiers escorting a small group of families returning home to gather their things. She prayed as armed men in camouflage loaded her possessions into the back of a truck. As she wandered through her garden for the last time, she begged forgiveness from the dogs and chickens she was forced to leave behind.

“We don’t want to abandon them,” she said. “But we suffered through everything. We can’t live here anymore.”

A local human rights group, Indigenous and People’s Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata, or CIPOG-EZ, estimated that at least 800 people, including children and the elderly, were forcibly displaced along with Cabrera, and three community police officers — groups often formed to protect themselves in the wake of state absence — fighting back against the mafia were killed.

The official numbers are far lower: Mexico’s government said Tuesday that only 120 people were forced to flee and confirmed no deaths. One community leader sleeping at the basketball court on Friday told a local government official that in their town alone they estimated around 280 people had been forced to flee.

Some families ran into the mountains, not looking back. Hundreds sought shelter under a local basketball court, hoping that it might be safe to eventually return home. Others — some wounded by gunfire — boarded cars, buses and trucks, scattering to different regions of Mexico.

Videos published on social media this week show groups of crying women and children pleading for help.

The images pushed the government to deploy 1,200 military and police officers to the region. Officials say they have provided aid to those displaced, largely contained the violence, established a “safe corridor” for humanitarian aid to enter and paved the way toward defusing the region’s convoluted conflict.

“What we do not want is a confrontation that would affect the civilian population. Above all, we must preserve people’s lives,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said at a news conference last week.

Critics say that it was the latest example of government inaction and efforts to downplay the depth of the displacement crisis in Mexico. Unlike Colombia, Mexico doesn’t have a comprehensive registry of displaced people. Government figures are often cited as being insufficient by entities like the U.N. refugee agency, human rights groups and researchers documenting the crisis.

A 2025 government National Survey of Victimization and Public Security Perception estimated that nearly 250,000 households were forced to flee their homes in 2024 alone to protect themselves from crime.

Between 2024 and 2025, the Ibero-American University documented at least 44,695 people who had fled their homes to other parts of Mexico. Many more migrate to the U.S.

In a May report, the university noted that forced displacements are on the rise in Mexico at a time when Sheinbaum’s government has sought to highlight security gains — like sharp dips in homicides — in an effort to offset threats by the Trump administration to take military action on Mexican cartels.

“There’s no more life in these communities,” said Prisco Rodríguez, a local representative for CIPOG-EZ. “The government says people have already returned to their houses, but there’s no one here. People don’t say where they’re going out of fear … and the majority never appear.”

Cabrera and her husband, 75-year-old Alejandro Venancio Bruno, were scrambling to figure out where they would go. Cabrera said that her children plead with her to come live with them in Mexico City, around 350 kilometers (220 miles) from their home, or the state of Queretaro, and rebuild their lives elsewhere.

But Venancio said that he’s spent his life working his land, and without money, a home or his most valuable possessions — his goats — any other life outside of Tula seems unfathomable.

“It’s like starting from zero,” he said.

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May 16 (Reuters) – Tesla raised the prices of its Model Y cars in the United States on Saturday, according to its website.

The company increased the price of its Model Y premium all-wheel drive and Model Y premium rear-wheel drive by $1,000 to $49,990 and $45,990 respectively.

The company also raised the price of its Model Y Performance all-wheel drive to $57,990 in the United States, up $500 from earlier, the website showed.

In August last year, the company raised the price of its most-expensive Cybertruck pickup truck model by $15,000 in the United States despite softer-than-expected sales and recalls.

Tesla did not provide a reason for the price increase.

The last time the company increased the price of Model Y cars was two years in 2024 ago when it raised the prices of all Model Y cars by $1,000.

(Reporting by Angela Christy in Bengaluru; Editing by Louise Heavens)

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