By TERESA CEROJANO and MATT OTT, Associated Press

Wall Street was on track to open with solid gains Thursday on the strength of some blowout quarterly reports from the AI-obsessed technology sector.

Futures for the technology-heavy Nasdaq climbed 1.2% before the opening bell, while S&P 500 futures rose 0.9%. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average lagged its counterparts but was still up 0.2%.

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Facebook parent company Meta jumped 11.6% overnight after the social media giant crushed Wall Street’s sales and profit targets even as the company continues to pour billions of dollars into artificial intelligence.

Helped by higher advertising and a growing user base on its social media platforms, Meta earned $18.34 billion in the quarter, a 36% increase over the same quarter a year ago. Revenue jumped 22%.

Also posting stellar results was Microsoft, whose shares climbed 8.4% overnight after it also posted better results than analysts were expecting. Microsoft said that annual revenue for its Azure cloud computing platform has surpassed $75 billion, up 34% from a year earlier. Azure is a centerpiece of Microsoft’s efforts to shift its focus to artificial intelligence. Until Wednesday, the company hadn’t disclosed how much money it makes.

Microsoft’s fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $34.3 billion was up 24% over last year.

Early Thursday, CVS Health topped Wall Street expectations for the second quarter and hiked its full-year forecast again, as the health care giant rallies under new management after a forgettable 2024 that saw the sector hammered by rising costs.

CVS, whose shares rose 7.5% before markets opened, said all three of its business segments saw revenue growth of 10% or more.

Amazon and Apple report quarterly results after the markets close Thursday.

Also Thursday, the U.S. releases new data on inflation and layoffs. On Friday, the Labor Department releases its July jobs report.

Stocks were pressured by rising Treasury yields after the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted that a rate-cut in September is not a sure thing. The Fed has left its rate alone for the past five meetings as inflation remains stubbornly above the central bank’s 2% target.

The odds of a rate cut in September, according to futures pricing, fell from nearly 60% before the meeting to just 45% after the press conference, the equivalent of a coin flip, according to CME Fedwatch.

President Donald Trump has clamored for a rate cut, which would likely give the job market and overall economy a boost, but it could also risk fueling inflation when Trump’s tariffs may be set to raise prices for U.S. consumers. The Fed’s double mandate is to seek maximum employment, while keeping inflation in check.

Elsewhere, in Europe at midday, Germany’s DAX ticked down 0.1%, while Britain’s FTSE 100 added 0.4%. In Paris, the CAC 40 was 0.3% higher.

In Asian trading, Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 1.1% to 41,069.82 after the Bank of Japan kept interest rates steady at 0.5% and raised its inflation projections.

In Seoul, the Kospi edged down 0.3% to 3,245.44 after South Korea reached a 15% tariff deal with the U.S., with no levies on American goods like cars, trucks and farm products. The deal also includes South Korea’s purchase of $100 billion in U.S. gas and oil and $350 billion worth of investments in the U.S.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell 1.5% to 24,803.18, while the Shanghai Composite Index slid 1.2% to 3,573.21. Australia’s S&P ASX 200 shed 0.2% to 8,742.80. India’s BSE Sensex rose 0.2% to 81,642.81. Taiwan’s TAIEX added 0.3% to 23,542.52.

China’s manufacturing activity was weaker than expected in July, with data on Thursday showing the official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index PMI slowed to 49.3, down from 49.7.

In energy trading, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 46 cents to $69.54 per barrel, while Brent crude, the international standard, shed 53 cents to $71.96 per barrel.

The U.S. dollar rose to 149.90 Japanese yen from 149.51 yen. The euro rose to $1.1445 from $1.1404.

LEMOORE, Calif. (AP) — A pilot was safe after an F-35C fighter jet crashed near a central California naval installation on Wednesday, officials said.

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Authorities received a report that a military jet had crashed and was engulfed in flames around 6:40 p.m., the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office said in a social media post. Responding deputies, firefighters, California Highway Patrol officers and EMS personnel found the wreckage in a cotton field just north of Lemoore Naval Air Station. The pilot, who had ejected, was found with a parachute in a nearby field, the sheriff’s office said. He was flown to a hospital for evaluation and was expected to be OK.

Firefighters used a bulldozer to cut a path to the jet so fire engines could get close enough to extinguish the fire, the sheriff’s office said.

Naval Air Station Lemoore confirmed that the F-35C attached to the VFA-125 Rough Raiders went down near the installation. The pilot was safe after successfully ejecting and no other personnel were affected, the installation said in a statement posted on social media.

By PAUL WISEMAN, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has been getting his way on trade, strong-arming the European Union, Japan and other partners to accept once unthinkably high taxes on their exports to the United States.

But his radical overhaul of American trade policy, in which he’s bypassed Congress to slam big tariffs on most of the world’s economies, has not gone unchallenged. He’s facing at least seven lawsuits charging that he’s overstepped his authority. The plaintiffs want his biggest, boldest tariffs thrown out.

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And they won Round One.

In May, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized federal court in New York, ruled that Trump exceeded his powers when he declared a national emergency to plaster taxes — tariffs — on imports from almost every country in the world. In reaching its decision, the court combined two challenges — one by five businesses and one by 12 U.S. states — into a single case.

Now it goes on to Round Two.

On Thursday, the 11 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, which typically specializes in patent law, are scheduled to hear oral arguments from the Trump administration and from the states and businesses that want his sweeping import taxes struck down.

That court earlier allowed the federal government to continue collecting Trump’s tariffs as the case works its way through the judicial system.

The issues are so weighty — involving the president’s power to bypass Congress and impose taxes with huge economic consequences in the United States and abroad — that the case is widely expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, regardless of what the appeals court decides.

Trump is an unabashed fan of tariffs. He sees the import taxes as an all-purpose economic tool that can bring manufacturing back to the United States, protect American industries, raise revenue to pay for the massive tax cuts in his “One Big Beautiful Bill,’’ pressure countries into bending to his will, even end wars.

The U.S. Constitution gives the power to impose taxes — including tariffs — to Congress. But lawmakers have gradually relinquished power over trade policy to the White House. And Trump has made the most of the power vacuum, raising the average U.S. tariff to more than 18%, highest since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University.

At issue in the pending court case is Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose sweeping tariffs without seeking congressional approval or conducting investigations first. Instead, he asserted the authority to declare a national emergency that justified his import taxes.

In February, he cited the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across the U.S. border to slap tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico. Then on April 2 — “Liberation Day,’’ Trump called it — he invoked IEEPA to announce “reciprocal’’ tariffs of up to 50% on countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and a 10% “baseline’’ tariff on almost everybody else. The emergency he cited was America’s long-running trade deficit.

Trump later suspended the reciprocal tariffs, but they remain a threat: They could be imposed again Friday on countries that do not pre-empt them by reaching trade agreements with the United States or that receive letters from Trump setting their tariff rates himself.

FILE – President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House, on April 2, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

The plaintiffs argue that the emergency power laws does not authorize the use of tariffs. They also note that the trade deficit hardly meets the definition of an “unusual and extraordinary’’ threat that would justify declaring an emergency under the law. The United States, after all, has run trade deficits — in which it buys more from foreign countries than it sells them — for 49 straight years and in good times and bad.

The Trump administration argues that courts approved President Richard Nixon’s emergency use of tariffs in a 1971 economic crisis. The Nixon administration successfully cited its authority under the 1917 Trading With Enemy Act, which preceded and supplied some of the legal language used in IEEPA.

In May, the trade court rejected the argument, ruling that Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the President’’ under the emergency powers law.

“The president doesn’t get to use open-ended grants of authority to do what he wants,’’ said Reilly Stephens, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian legal group that is representing businesses suing the Trump administration over the tariffs.

In the case of the drug trafficking and immigration tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico, the trade court ruled that the levies did not meet IEEPA’s requirement that they “deal with’’ the problem they were supposed to address.

The court challenge does not cover other Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos that the president imposed after Commerce Department investigations concluded that those imports were threats to U.S. national security.

Nor does it include tariffs that Trump imposed on China in his first term — and President Joe Biden kept — after a government investigation concluded that the Chinese used unfair practices to give their own technology firms an edge over rivals from the United States and other Western countries.

A Delta Air Lines flight from Salt Lake City to Amsterdam was hit by serious turbulence, injuring passengers and forcing the flight to divert to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the airline said.

The flight landed around 7:45 p.m. Wednesday. The airport fire department and paramedics met the flight and 25 passengers were taken to hospitals for evaluation and treatment, the airline said.

Serious injuries from in-flight turbulence are rare, but scientists say they may be becoming more common as climate change alters the jet stream.

A man was killed when a Singapore Airlines flight hit severe turbulence in May 2024, the first person to die from turbulence on a major airline in several decades.