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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve kept its key rate unchanged Wednesday at about 3.9% despite stubbornly high inflation, as Chairman Kevin Warsh suggested its policies are already showing signs of having an impact.
“Inflation remains elevated,” the Fed said in a statement released after its two-day policy meeting. Holding off on an increase will allow “the accumulation of more information” that will help determine what policy the Fed should pursue “to ensure a timely return of inflation” to the central bank’s 2% inflation target, the statement said.
The Fed raised its benchmark rate last month for the first time in three years, defying President Donald Trump’s demands for rate cuts, in an effort to get inflation back to its 2% target in a “timelier” manner. The Fed is tasked by Congress to combat inflation, and it does so by lifting rates to slow borrowing and spending and cool price increases.
Wall Street investors and many economists continue to expect a quarter-point rate hike at the central bank’s next meeting Dec. 8-9.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard & Poor’s 500 index and Nasdaq index all dropped after the Fed announcement but regained much of their losses by closing bell.
The Fed’s decision comes just six days before a midterm election that has focused heavily on concerns around the cost of living and affordability. Consumers have generally soured on an economy weighed down by more expensive gas, groceries, and clothing, among other items. Warsh denied the election played a part in the Fed’s staying pat.
“Politics played no role in the decision,” he said at a news conference after the announcement. “I just spent two days with my colleagues upstairs. I didn’t hear an utterance about politics.”
Warsh faces plenty of challenges in getting inflation back to target. Some of the forces pushing up prices — specifically the rapid buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure and higher energy prices — may not be easily tamed by higher interest rates.
Still, Warsh said the “overwhelming consensus” among Fed officials is that what they’ve done “is starting to work some,” noting that credit conditions “tightened for some businesses and households.”
He said specifically that as large tech firms ramp up their borrowing to build data centers, higher rates will have a greater ability to cool that investment.
“Do interest rates matter?” Warsh asked. “I believe they do, and I don’t think they’re divorced from the rest of the economy.”
Two Fed officials dissented from Wednesday’s decision, with Fed governor Lisa Cook and Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Beth Hammack voting in favor of hiking rates by a quarter point. This is Cook’s first dissent since she was appointed to the board by President Joe Biden in 2022.
Cook has been targeted by the Trump administration, which tried to fire her last year, though the Supreme Court in June ruled she could keep her job while litigation played out. No president has fired a Fed governor before, a sign of the Fed’s longstanding independence from day-to-day politics. Trump renewed his attempt to remove Cook last month by setting up a committee to look into allegations Cook committed mortgage fraud, which she has denied.
Trump has also slammed the Fed for raising its key rate last month, though he largely blamed the central bank’s rate-setting committee, rather than Warsh, whom he appointed.
Parts of the economy are already being hit by higher rates, which were lifted by market forces, even before the Fed hiked last month. The average 30-year mortgage rate reached a three-year high of 7.4% earlier this month, though it has since slipped a bit. Higher mortgage rates have made buying a home unaffordable for 5 million more Americans since the beginning of the year, according to Oxford Economics, a consulting firm. Over time, Fed rate hikes can make mortgages, auto loans and credit card borrowing more expensive, adding to Americans’ sense that things like homes and cars are getting pricier.
Inflation picked up in September, when consumer prices rose 3.7% compared with a year earlier. The increase was much bigger than the 2.4% rate in February, just before the Iran war.
And on a monthly basis, the consumer price index — the most widely followed inflation gauge — rose 0.3% in both August and September. At that pace over a full year, inflation would rise much more quickly than the Fed’s 2% target.
A separate inflation measure more closely followed by the Fed, the personal consumption expenditures price index, comes out Thursday and is forecast to have jumped 3.6% in September from a year earlier, up from 3.4% in August. Core prices, which exclude the food and energy categories, are forecast to have risen 3.1%, up from 3% the previous month.
The Fed’s policy meeting is part of a busy week for central banks around the world. The Bank of Canada will also meet Wednesday and is forecast to lift its key rate a quarter point, to 2.5%. Policymakers at the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan are both scheduled to meet Thursday and are expected to keep their key rates unchanged.
For Warsh and the Fed, another key consideration is that the U.S. economy is growing at a healthy pace and unemployment remains low, at 4.2%, even if hiring is also sluggish. The government will report Thursday on growth for the July-September quarter, which is expected to reach 3%, according to a forecast by data provider FactSet. That would be up from 2.2% in the April-June quarter.
Many economists argue that solid growth is evidence that interest rates aren’t particularly high and the economy could withstand higher rates to combat inflation.
The post Federal Reserve holds interest rates steady despite elevated inflation appeared first on MS NOW.
Effort to loosen rules on unproven peptide drugs, favored by RFK Jr, faced fierce pushback from agency scientists
A plan to give people in the United States easier access to unproven peptide drugs favored by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was opposed by most Food and Drug Administration scientific staff members, who had limited input in drafting the policy, according to six people familiar with its development.
The document posted online on Wednesday by Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) covers a handful of injectable peptides promoted within the wellness industry for building muscle, healing injuries and boosting energy.
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© Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
© Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
© Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers and coined the rallying cry “Sí, se puede!” died of cancer Wednesday at her California home. She was 96. Her decades of organizing inspired generations of activists and public servants.
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
LONDON (AP) — Russell Brand acknowledged in a London court on Wednesday that he had been obsessed with sex as a younger man, but denied multiple charges of rape and sexual assault, saying the claims have had a “devastating” impact on his life.
The British actor-comedian entered Southwark Crown Court alongside his wife, Laura Gallacher, to testify in his own defense, telling reporters that “today is the day for truth and justice.”
Brand, 51, stood in the witness box and took the oath, then gave his full name: Russell Edward Brand. He answered “no” to each charge as his lawyer, Ian Winter, asked whether he was guilty of three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted indecent assault.
Brand denied forcing any of the six alleged victims to do anything against their will.
“Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary, and indeed in many ways more important than sex itself,” Brand said.
Brand said the allegations had had a “devastating” impact, with friends and colleagues abandoning him. He said no one with relevant evidence had been willing to testify in court on his behalf.
“My entire life has been consumed by these events, these allegations, these accusations,” he said, adding later that dealing with the “traumatic” allegations had come “at the expense of my marriage, my children and health.”
Brand said he was even barred from staying with his baby son in hospital after anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him in a newspaper and a TV documentary in 2023.
“The reason given by Great Ormond Street Hospital when my son was receiving open-heart surgery and subsequent treatment was due to the material published,” he said.
Over the past two weeks of the trial, prosecutors set out their case, and the jury heard from six women who accuse Brand of sexual misconduct between 1999 and 2009.
Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones told jurors that Brand was “ruthless, he was calculating, he was manipulative. And, the prosecution say, he was a sexual predator.”
Known for risqué stand-up routines and battles with drugs and alcohol, Brand rose to prominence in the early 2000s, hosting television programs and his own BBC radio show. He appeared in Hollywood films including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek” and was briefly married to pop star Katy Perry.
In recent years, he has moved away from mainstream media, relocated to Florida, and built a large online following with videos mixing wellness, conspiracy theories, and discussions of his religious devotion.
The allegations cover a decade when Brand went from rising stand-up comedian to major celebrity in the U.K.
The first victim alleges that Brand raped her in a hotel room during the Labour Party’s annual conference in the seaside town of Bournemouth in 1999. Another woman alleges that in 2001 Brand tried to drag her into the men’s bathroom at the London office of music channel MTV, where she worked.
A third woman alleges that Brand orally raped her in 2004 in the toilet of a London bar, and a fourth says Brand kissed and groped her at a London radio station in 2004 or 2005.
Another complainant says Brand anally raped her at his home after she met him at one of his shows in 2009, while the sixth says the comedian demanded a massage and pressed his face into her groin during the recording of an advertisement in 2009.
Prosecutors say the women don’t know one another and separately went to police after the TV documentary was broadcast in 2023. The Associated Press doesn’t name victims of alleged sexual violence, and British law protects their identities from the media for life.
Under cross-examination by Karmy-Jones, Brand acknowledged he had dedicated a lot of his earlier life to “beyond reckless philandering.”
“As I became more successful and famous I was very comfortable allowing that to facilitate sexual access, which I agree with you was wrong,” he said.
He said “yes” when asked if he had been obsessed with sex when he was younger, but “no” when the prosecutor asked: “Do you accept that you were desperate for it and sometimes couldn’t function without it?”
As he completed a day on the stand, Brand was asked again whether he had committed the crimes he is accused of.
“Not guilty is my plea in every single case,” he said.
The post At rape trial, Russell Brand says he was obsessed with sex but insists encounters were consensual appeared first on MS NOW.
URDA, Spain (AP) — One high-speed Spanish train slammed into another that had stopped on the tracks Wednesday, killing at least 68 people and shredding carriages in the country’s second deadly rail collision this year.
The regional government for Castilla La Mancha confirmed the death toll and said another 58 people needed medical treatment in hospital. It said 397 passengers were in the moving train and 147 passengers in the stopped train.
Rescue workers continued to search for survivors and bodies.
Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente said that the crash was caused by what he called the “inexplicable” order from a central command center for Spain’s trains after a security system had failed. He said the train engineers were not to blame.
The accident comes with memories still fresh of another crash between high-speed trains in southern Spain in January involving trains from the same two companies.
Spain’s rail system operator ADIF said the crash occurred in the province of Toledo, involving two high-speed trains heading in the same direction from the capital Madrid to Seville in southwestern Spain.
One train, run by the state-owned RENFE company, ran into the tail of the other train owned by private company IRYO that had stopped, knocking two of its cars off the track in a rural area between two villages.
Rail service was suspended between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia.
Until this year, there had been no fatal crash on Spain’s dedicated high-speed lines since the network opened in 1992.
Puente said that at 8:30 a.m. local time the security system on a stretch of 39 miles stopped working due to a computer malfunction, causing all trains on that stretch to stop. But the central command told the RENFE train to start running again without any speed restrictions, and it collided with the stopped IRYO train at 8:53 a.m.
Puente said that the train should never have been told to start moving again since there was still a “stop signal” active that line. And if it had, it should have been told to go at reduced speed.
Puente said they were working to determine how fast the train was going, but it could have been 124 mph for that stretch of the track.
“I am not attributing responsibility to anyone, I am just stating the facts,” Puente said.
The crash, which occurred in a flat stretch surrounded by olive fields in between the towns of Urda and Los Yébenes, left one car torn into bits of metal and other material, scattering debris down a gravel slope.
Spanish Health Minister Mónica García said that emergency workers were focusing on rescuing survivors and bodies from the two most damaged train cars. She said that the injured are being sent to hospitals in the area.
“It was a high-speed impact, so we are expecting this to be a tragedy,” García said.
Passenger Ignacio Relaño was traveling on the RENFE train. He told state broadcaster TVE that the train had stopped momentarily on the line before it started again and then crashed into the IRYO.
“We all felt the train abruptly slowing down and then the impact,” he said. “The car leaned to one side like it was about to tip over. I hit my nose, everything went flying, luggage, cellphones. Everything shook.”
Another passenger recounted to Cadena Ser radio how she felt the train slam on the brakes and was thrown forward in her seat, breaking the small table in front of her. She said she saw body parts and trapped people covered in blood.
IRYO, an Italian-owned company, said in a statement that it has “activated its security protocols and is closely working with authorities.”
The mayor of the nearby town of Urda, Manuel Galán, said civil protection authorities had asked his officials to prepare a sports pavilion to receive injured passengers.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez canceled his agenda to focus on the crash. He wrote on X that he was “dismayed by the serious train accident in Toledo.”
“Emergency services are working on site to attend to the affected passengers,” wrote Sánchez, who faces a national election next month. “All my thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
Spain’s King Felipe VI visited the crash site. He and Queen Letizia said in a short statement on X that they were following news of the accident.
“We are deeply saddened and concerned by the train accident in Urda (Toledo),” the royal couple said. “We share in the grief of the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives, and we send our heartfelt support to the injured and all those affected.”
Spain’s soccer federation postponed all 24 Copa del Rey games scheduled on Wednesday.
The wreckage of Wednesday’s crash reminded many of the aftermath of another train collision in January, when 46 people died in southern Spain when a IRYO train jumped the track and hit an oncoming RENFE train. That sent the first two cars of the impacted train plummeting down a 13-foot slope.
That crash was the deadliest in Spain since a 2013 crash that killed 80 people.
The post At least 68 dead in central Spain after high-speed train crash appeared first on MS NOW.
Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers union to improve working conditions in the nation's fruit and vegetable fields and coined the phrase "Sí, se puede!" that became a widespread rallying cry.
(Image credit: Court Mast)
Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers union to improve working conditions in the nation's fruit and vegetable fields and coined the phrase "Sí, se puede!" that became a widespread rallying cry.
(Image credit: Court Mast)
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