By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — A key inflation gauge moved higher in May in the latest sign that prices remain stubbornly elevated while Americans also cut back on their spending last month.

Prices rose 2.3% in May compared with a year ago, up from just 2.1% in April, the Commerce Department said Friday. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 2.7% from a year earlier, an increase from 2.6% the previous month. Both figures are modestly above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. The Fed tracks core inflation because it typically provides a better guide to where inflation is headed.

At the same time, Americans cut back on spending for the first time since January, as overall spending fell 0.1%. Incomes dropped a sharp 0.4%. Both figures were distorted by one-time changes: Spending on cars plunged, pulling down overall spending, because Americans had moved more quickly to buy vehicles in the spring to get ahead of tariffs.

And incomes dropped after a one-time adjustment to Social Security benefits had boosted payments in March and April. Social Security payments were raised for some retirees who had worked for state and local governments.

Still, the data suggests that growth is cooling as Americans rein in spending, in part because President Donald Trump’s tariffs have raised the cost of some goods, such as appliances, tools, and audio equipment. Consumer sentiment has also fallen sharply this year in the wake of the sometimes-chaotic rollout of the duties. And while the unemployment rate remains low hiring has been weak, leaving those without jobs struggling to find new work.

Consumer spending rose just 0.5% in the first three months of this year and has been sluggish in the first two months of the second quarter.

“Because consumers are not in a strong enough shape to handle those (higher prices), they are spending less on recreation, travel, hotels, that type of thing,” said Luke Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust.

Spending on airfares, restaurant meals, and hotels all fell last month, Friday’s report showed.

At the same time, the figures suggest that President Donald Trump’s broad-based tariffs are still having only a modest effect on overall prices. The increasing costs of some goods have been partly offset by falling prices for new cars, airline fares, and apartment rentals, among other items.

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On a monthly basis, in fact, inflation was mostly tame. Prices rose just 0.1% in May from April, according to the Commerce Department, the same as the previous month. Core prices climbed 0.2% in May, more than economists expected and above last month’s 0.1%. Gas prices fell 2.6% just from April to May.

Economists point to several reasons for why Trump’s tariffs have yet to accelerate inflation, as many analysts expected. Like American consumers, companies imported billions of dollars of goods in the spring before the duties took full affect, and many items currently on store shelves were imported without paying higher levies.

There are early indications that that is beginning to change.

Nike announced this week that it expects U.S. tariffs will cost the company $1 billion this year. It will institute “surgical” price increases in the fall. It’s not the first retailer to warn of price hikes when students are heading back to school.

Walmart said last month that that its customers will start to see higher prices this month and next as back-to-school shopping goes into high gear.

Also, much of what the U.S. imports is made up of raw materials and parts that are used to make goods in the U.S. It can take time for those higher input costs to show up in consumer prices. Economists at JPMorgan have argued that many companies are absorbing the cost of the tariffs, for now. Doing so can reduce their profit margins, which could weigh on hiring.

Cooling inflation has put more of a spotlight on the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome Powell. The Fed ramped up its short-term interest rate in 2022 and 2023 to slow the economy and combat inflation, which jumped to a four-decade high nearly three years ago. With price increases now nearly back to the Fed’s target, some economists — and some Fed officials — say that the central bank could reduce its rate back to a level that doesn’t slow or stimulate growth.

Trump has also repeatedly attached the Fed for not cutting rates, calling Powell a “numskull” and a “fool.”

But Powell said in congressional testimony earlier this week that the Fed wants to see how inflation and the economy evolve before it cuts rates. Most other Fed policymakers have expressed a similar view.

By DAVID RISING

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran’s top diplomat said the possibility of new negotiations with the United States on his country’s nuclear program has been “complicated” by the American attack on three of the sites, which he conceded caused “serious damage.”

The U.S. was one of the parties to the 2015 nuclear deal in which Iran agreed to limits on its uranium enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief and other benefits.

That deal unraveled after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out unilaterally during his first term. Trump has suggested he is interested in new talks with Iran and said the two sides would meet next week.

In an interview on Iranian state television broadcast late Thursday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi left open the possibility that his country would again enter talks on its nuclear program, but suggested it would not be anytime soon.

“No agreement has been made for resuming the negotiations,” he said. “No time has been set, no promise has been made, and we haven’t even talked about restarting the talks.”

The American decision to intervene militarily “made it more complicated and more difficult” for talks on Iran’s nuclear program, Araghchi said.

In Friday prayers, many imams stressed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s message from the day before that the war had been a victory for Iran.

Cleric Hamzeh Khalili, who also is the deputy chief justice of Iran, vowed during a prayer service in Tehran that the courts would prosecute people accused of spying for Israel “in a special way.”

During the war with Israel, Iran hanged several people who it already had in custody on espionage charges, sparking fears from activists that it could conduct a wave of executions after the conflict ended. Authorities reportedly have detained dozens in various cities on the charge of cooperation with Israel.

Israel attacked Iran on June 13, targeting its nuclear sites, defense systems, high-ranking military officials and atomic scientists in relentless attacks.

In 12 days of strikes, Israel said it killed some 30 Iranian commanders and 11 nuclear scientists, while hitting eight nuclear-related facilities and more than 720 military infrastructure sites. More than 1,000 people were killed, including at least 417 civilians, according to the Washington-based Human Rights Activists group.

Iran fired more than 550 ballistic missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted but those that got through caused damage in many areas and killed 28 people.

Israeli military spokesperson Brig. Gen Effie Defrin said Friday that in some areas it had exceeded its operational goals, but needed to remain vigilant.

“We are under no illusion, the enemy has not changed its intentions,” he said.

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Experts and officials are still assessing what remains of Iran’s nuclear program

The U.S. stepped in on Sunday to hit Iran’s three most important strikes with a wave of cruise missiles and bunker-buster bombs dropped by B-2 bombers, designed to penetrate deep into the ground to damage the heavily-fortified targets. Iran, in retaliation, fired missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar on Monday but caused no known casualties.

Trump said the American attacks “completely and fully obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, though Khamenei on Thursday accused the U.S. president of exaggerating the damage, saying the strikes did not “achieve anything significant.”

There has been speculation that Iran moved much of its highly-enriched uranium before the strikes, something that it told the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that it planned to do.

Even if that turns out to be true, IAEA Director Rafael Grossi told Radio France International that the damage done to the Fordo site, which was built into a mountain, “is very, very, very considerable.”

Among other things, he said, centrifuges are “quite precise machines” and it’s “not possible” that the concussion from multiple 30,000-pound bombs would not have caused “important physical damage.”

“These centrifuges are no longer operational,” he said.

Araghchi himself acknowledged “the level of damage is high, and it’s serious damage.”

He added that Iran had not yet decided whether to allow in IAEA inspectors to assess the damage, but they would be kept out “for the time being.”

Julia Frankel in Jerusalem contributed to this story.

One of the first and most promising uses scientists envision for the rapidly evolving technology of quantum computing is a new approach to drug development. A quantum computer could, in theory, eliminate much of the trial and error involved in the process to help researchers more quickly zero in on ways to treat aggressive cancers, prevent dementia, kill deadly viruses or even slow aging by sifting through the trillions of molecules that might potentially be synthesized to create pharmaceuticals.

As proof of the technology’s potential, a group of researchers published a paper in Nature Biotechnology earlier this year showing how they could use a small-scale quantum computer designed by IBM and AI to identify a potential cancer drug.

While several dozen quantum computers are working in labs worldwide, they’re not yet advanced enough or big enough to beat existing supercomputers except for certain special test problems. Still, there have been some surprising leaps in progress.

“We’re not making the claim that it’s faster, cheaper, better or anything … we’re showing it’s possible,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, a co-author of the paper and founder of Insilico Medicine. He compares these early uses with the first airplane flights — essential for demonstrating a new mode of transportation once deemed impossible.

Until recently, quantum computers were severely limited by their tendency to make errors. They use units of information storage called qubits, and stringing them together only compounds the error rate. Last year, the startup Quantinuum and later Google announced they’d found a way to resolve the problem so that adding more qubits decreased the error rate by building in a kind of redundancy.

While ordinary computers store information in bits, which can take the values 0 or 1, a qubit can take on both values simultaneously, enabling quantum computers to process data in fundamentally different and often more powerful ways.

Quantum computing harnesses the famously strange behavior of quantum physics, where atoms, light and subatomic particles exist in states of uncertainty until observed — even their position can resemble a smeared-out wave rather than a single point in space.

Qubits can be created in various ways — from electrons moving through supercooled materials to atoms suspended in place by lasers. Most current systems connect only a handful of qubits, but Google set a milestone last December by implementing error correction in a system of 105. If this approach can be scaled to thousands of them, scientists believe it could revolutionize how we tackle real-world complexity — enabling breakthroughs in medicine, energy storage, high-efficiency solar panels, next-generation space suits, and innovations we haven’t yet imagined.

It’s exciting how quickly the field is advancing, said Brian DeMarco, a physicist who studies quantum computing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

In DeMarco’s lab, researchers make qubits from the spin of single atoms. He said these atoms can be isolated from their environment so well that their quantum behavior dominates, enabling them to be used as qubits for quantum computing.

The scientists involved in the cancer drug research used a system with just 16 qubits to find a new molecule capable of binding to a protein called KRAS. The protein has proved hard to target with existing drugs.

Christoph Gorgulla, a biologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, said the researchers eventually hope to be able to specify an action for a drug to carry out and then use quantum computers to search for the right molecules for the job. He said the number of drugs that could potentially be developed through this process could be described as 10, followed by about 60 zeros.

It’s not so much that the quantum computer is fast, he said, but it speaks the language of matter, so it takes fewer steps to get to the same place. “On this atomic level, it’s really quantum mechanics that governs what is happening … how the atoms move, how they interact, and how strongly,” said Gorgulla, one of the study’s co-authors.

DeMarco agreed. “The reason that protons and neutrons and electrons can arrange themselves into atoms is because of quantum physics,” he said. He said the rules of chemistry are sometimes enough, but often, they fall short. Quantum physics offers a master formula — the Schrödinger equation — for predicting how matter behaves. The problem is that it’s unusable for the complex molecules that make up our bodies; solving it with conventional computers would take millions of years.

Scientists are reluctant to predict precisely when quantum computers will be capable of speeding the discovery of drugs, chemicals and new materials, but many envision it happening within a decade. Last month, DARPA launched its “Quantum Benchmarking Initiative,” aiming to chart a path toward an industrially viable quantum computer by 2033.

More research is needed to continue progressing in the field and for the US to maintain its place in the race. This spring, several of the industry’s leaders appeared before Congress to advocate for continued government support.

Michael Kratsios, President Donald Trump’s science adviser, has championed quantum computing and AI. However, there are concerns that the administration’s budget cuts — especially in research — will set efforts back. The drastic cuts have already led some scientists to work elsewhere. The Nature Biotechnology paper’s lead author, physicist Alán Aspuru-Guzik, left Harvard for the University of Toronto following Trump’s first election in 2016, citing concerns about the country’s political climate.

Uncertainty is part of the nature of science — we can’t always predict where a pursuit will lead or how long it will take to produce practical results. One thing we can predict is that giving up guarantees we’ll fall behind.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.

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Caroline Lowe was working at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis in 1995 when Jodi Huisentruit, a Mason City, Iowa, TV news anchor, disappeared.

The news rocked the WCCO newsroom, Lowe said.

Former WCCO-TV reporter Caroline Lowe is traveling to Mason City for an event to mark the 30th anniversary of Jodi Huisentruit’s disappearance. She plans to bring a stone with the word “Hope” engraved on it, a gift from Patty Wetterling. (Courtesy of Caroline Lowe)

“She was a Minnesota gal. She was one of our own,” said Lowe, who now works as an independent journalist in northern California. “She was going to work one morning to do what we do, and until we know otherwise, I consider her somebody who was snatched on her way to do her job. This person stopped her from doing her job, stopped her from living a life, but we’re not going to stop looking for them and seeking answers. It’s, like, how do we walk away from that?”

Lowe has spent decades working to solve the cold-case mystery. She and other members of FindJodi.com will gather with friends and family members of Huisentruit at 11 a.m. Friday outside KIMT-TV in Mason City to mark the 30th anniversary of Huisentruit’s disappearance.

“It’s time,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for 28 years now. One of my grandkids asked me a couple of years ago, he was about 7 or 8, and he said, ‘How long are you going to do this? When are you going to stop?’ His sister jumped in and said, ‘Never. She can’t.’

“You know, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I hope it’s not going to be forever.’”

30 seconds, 30 years

Huisentruit overslept on the morning of June 27, 1995.

When Amy Kuns, an assistant producer at KIMT-TV, called to check on her, the 27-year-old native of Long Prairie, Minn., said she had just gotten up and would be at the station in time for her 6 a.m. broadcast.

It was the last anyone heard from her.

Authorities believe someone grabbed Huisentruit shortly after 4 a.m. as she went to her red Mazda Miata in the parking lot of the Key Apartments in Mason City. Neighbors said they heard a scream about that time, and a passerby reported that he saw a white van in the parking lot.

Police found Huisentruit’s red high heels, blow dryer, hair spray and earrings strewn across the lot. Her bent car key lay on the ground near the Miata, and police believe she was unlocking her car door when she was attacked from behind.

An unidentified partial palm print was found on her car, but there were no other substantial clues.

“She was 12 steps from her apartment building,” Lowe said Thursday as she drove to Mason City. “She was basically just outside the front door. We walked it. From the time she left her apartment on the second floor, walked down the steps, and went to her car, it was 30 seconds. And now it’s been 30 years.”

Thousands of tips

Mason City police have received thousands of tips over the years, and they continue to come in, especially around this time of year, said Police Chief Jeff Brinkley.

“I think that at different points, people reach out for different reasons,” he said. “In most cases it’s, ‘Hey, I think this is nothing, but I want you to have it.’ Particularly for people in the community, they feel like it’s their chance to do their part to help — just in case it’s something that we can use.”

Special Agent Ryan Herman, of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, was assigned to the Huisentruit case in the fall of 2021. He said he generally gets half a dozen to two dozen tips a week, but he’s already fielded 279 tips this spring.

“It’s a cliché, but we do hope we get closure for the family,” he said. “I hope we find out where she is or what happened to her. Answering those questions for the family is important.”

Herman grew up in southern Minnesota and was 11 when Huisentruit disappeared; his grandparents, who lived in Albert Lea, used to watch her on the morning news.

“I remember when it happened,” he said. “Personally, I do think it will be solved. There’s still an interest in the case. I don’t know that we’ll get the result that we want, but I do think it’ll be solved at some point. I think there’s an answer for every case.”

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Herman credits Lowe for helping keep the case in the public spotlight.

“I have more phone-call conversations with Caroline than I do my own mother,” he said. “She sends me stuff throughout the week, and then she’ll touch base with me, ‘Hey, did you get this? What do you think about this?’ She’s kind of a bulldog. She doesn’t let up.”

Lowe graduated with a bachelor’s degree in law enforcement from Metropolitan State University in St. Paul and earned a master’s degree in police leadership from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. She has a private-investigator license in California, spent eight summers as a patrol officer at the Minnesota State Fair and graduated in 2010 from the FBI Citizens’ Academy in Minneapolis. She also attended the Petaluma, Calif., Police Department’s Citizens’ Academy.

‘Incredibly grateful’

Lowe’s experience in law enforcement and the media has been invaluable, according to Huisentruit’s family members.

“I’ve said to Caroline so many times, and I will continue to say it, ‘We’re never going to be able to say “Thank you” enough, but we’re going to try,’” said Huisentruit’s niece, who asked not to be named. “We’re just incredibly grateful.”

The FindJodi.com team has released an updated flyer and created a new billboard to mark 30 years since Jodi Huisentruit’s disappearance. (Courtesy of FindJodi.com)

Lowe helped the niece, who lives in St. Paul, launch the separate “Jodi’s Hope” Facebook page in December. This page is described as a “dedicated space to hear directly from Jodi’s family” and is meant to “clarify erroneous information that has been presented regarding Jodi and/or the case.”

Lowe “has just been a great source of information, a great sounding board,” the niece said. “Just somebody that I can turn to to say, ‘What do you think of this? Or how does this look?’ She’s just great about keeping me in the loop about things, and she just has such a great heart.”

The niece, who grew up in Sauk Centre, said it was she who answered the phone when the Mason City Police Department called to report that her Aunt Jodi, who was her godmother, was missing.

The news was hard to comprehend, she said.

“I knew kids went missing. I knew because of the Jacob Wetterling case that happened in our area,” she said, referring to the 11-year-old boy who was abducted on Oct. 22, 1989, by a masked gunman along a rural road in St. Joseph, not far from his home. “I knew about that situation, but I just couldn’t comprehend that an adult would go missing, and so in my head, I didn’t think it was that serious. I just thought, you know, she got a flat tire and can’t get in touch with somebody.”

“Later that day, when we met up with my grandma, I saw the look on her face, and then I just saw how everybody’s demeanor and face changed, and I knew it was a lot more serious than I was imagining,” she said.

Her grandmother, Imogene Huisentruit, died in December 2024 at age 91.

Jodi Huisentruit was her idol, the niece said. “She was always positive, always upbeat, full of energy,” she said. “She was somebody that I really wanted to be like. She had a great influence in who I’ve become … in who I am as a person, how I treat people.”

The niece said she holds on to hope that the case will be solved.

“Hope is probably the only thing that I’ve got at this point, so I’m always going to hope that it will be solved,” she said. “But, you know, logically, I recognize we’re now at 30 years, and that every year that goes by, it gets harder and harder for that possibility to happen. But I’m still going to hang on to hope that it will.”

‘Holding onto hope’

In conjunction with the upcoming 30th anniversary, FindJodi team member Brian Wise produced a 30-second video, called “30 seconds,” to underscore how fast Huisentruit disappeared, Lowe said. The only sound in the brief video is of a clock ticking for 30 seconds.

The video has been posted on the FindJodi Facebook page and YouTube channel. The group also branched out and posted the video on TikTok, she said.

A new billboard also has been erected near the Mason City Airport. It reads: “30 years. It’s time.”

“This is the third iteration of the billboard,” Lowe said. “We don’t want to become wallpaper. We want Jodi to be present in Mason City. We want people in Mason City to see her until she’s found, so our goal is to just keep putting her up at different places around town.”

Many of the people Lowe has worked with on the Huisentruit case are gone. Retired Woodbury police Cmdr. Jay Alberio died in November 2024; former TV news director Gary Peterson, who co-founded the FindJodi site with news anchor Josh Benson, died in April 2023.

“It’s so sobering,” Lowe said. “So many witnesses have passed away. Memories have faded. That’s one of the biggest challenges. Memories fade, and there’s not a lot of evidence. I mean, this is as tough of a case – it’s tougher than Jacob (Wetterling)’s because at least with Jacob, we had eyewitnesses, right? We don’t have any of that in this case, so it’s tough.”

In 2015, police arrested Danny Heinrich, 53, of Annandale, who later confessed to kidnapping, molesting and murdering the boy.

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Lowe said she keeps a photo of Huisentruit on her desk next to a photo of Jacob.

Among the items she took to Mason City this week was a stone with the word “Hope” on it – a gift from Patty Wetterling, Jacob’s mother.

“Patty gave me that a number of years ago, before Jacob was found,” she said. “So I’m holding on to that. I’m holding onto hope.”

Jodi Huisentruit gathering

An event to mark the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit will begin at 11 a.m. Friday outside KIMT-TV, the Mason City, Iowa, TV station where she worked.

The event will be livestreamed on the FindJodi Facebook page and video will be posted on FindJodi’s YouTube channel.