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LAREDO (AP) — Six people were found dead inside a cargo train boxcar at a Union Pacific rail yard near the Mexico border in Laredo, Texas, police said.

The people were found Sunday as workers were inspecting one of the cars, said Jose Baeza, a spokesperson for the Laredo Police Department. They did not appear to be alive, he said.

Police and fire crews arrived at the scene shortly afterward. They confirmed that there were six people dead, five men and one woman, Baeza told reporters. They were not named.

Baeza said autopsies would be done. He did not immediately respond to a text requesting information Monday.

The cargo car’s travel history was not known.

“Union Pacific is saddened by this incident and is working closely with law enforcement to investigate,” the rail company said in a statement.

Laredo is a busy land port of entry for trade on the U.S.-Mexico border and a common nexus for the illegal movement of people, although authorities have not said whether the six deaths were related to a smuggling operation.

Last year, two smugglers were sentenced to life in prison for what remains the nation’s deadliest human smuggling attempt across the U.S.-Mexico border. They were convicted in connection with the deaths of 53 migrants found in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer in Texas in 2022.

WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. markets hovered near all-time highs Monday and oil rose more than 2% after President Donald Trump appeared to dismiss Iran’s response to a U.S. peace plan.

Futures for the S&P 500 were essentially unchanged, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked down 0.1%. Nasdaq futures rose 0.1%.

With corporate earnings season winding down this week, rising energy prices and new U.S. inflation data will dominate the stage, along with a high-stakes summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Oil prices jumped early Monday after Trump wrote in a social media post that Iran’s response on Sunday to the U.S.’s latest proposal was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”

Brent crude, the international standard, gained $2.71 to $104 per barrel. It was roughly $70 per barrel before the war began in late February. Benchmark U.S. crude was $2.55 higher at $98 a barrel.

With the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for global oil and gas transport, still largely closed and as the U.S. is continuing its sea blockade of Iranian ports, analysts believe oil prices are likely to remain higher for longer.

The Iran war will certainly be an important piece of the agenda during the Trump-Xi summit. China has close economic links with Iran and the U.S. has been pressing Beijing to leverage its influence to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“There remains a glimmer of hope that talks between Trump and Xi later this week could yield positive results on Iran,” ING commodities analysts Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey wrote Monday.

“The hope is that China can use its influence over Iran to push it closer towards a peace deal,” they said. “Clearly, this is easier said than done.” The oil market is still very much “heavily headline-driven,” the pair added.

In the U.S. on Monday, April numbers for U.S. existing home sales will be released. Later this week, the U.S. will release data on consumer and wholesale inflation as well as the latest retail sales figures.

At midday in Europe, Britain’s FTSE 100 was unchanged, while Germany’s DAX fell 0.2% and France’s CAC 40 lost 1.1%.

In Asia, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.5% to 62,417.88 after briefly reaching another record high in intraday trading at above 63,300. Technology-focused investment holding company SoftBank Group, one of Japan’s largest stocks, fell more than 6%.

South Korea’s Kospi gained 4.3% to 7,822.24. It also hit an all-time intraday high, led by gains from tech-related stocks including Samsung Electronics and memory chip maker SK Hynix.

Technology-related stocks and growing artificial intelligence-related interest have supported markets in Japan and South Korea despite the Iran war, with the Nikkei 225 and Kospi rising more than 10% and 30%, respectively, over the past month.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng edged up less than 0.1% to 26,406.84. The Shanghai Composite index climbed 1.1% to 4,225.02, following official data Monday that showed China’s factory gate prices rose 2.8% in April from a year ago, the highest since 2022, as well as better-than-expected export figures released over the weekend.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.5%. Taiwan’s Taiex traded 0.5% higher, and India’s Sensex fell 1.7%.

NEW YORK (AP) – A new poll finds that younger Americans are more pessimistic than older ones about the state of the job market. This is a sudden reversal from just three years ago, when older Americans were more pessimistic. In the United States until 2023 and in many countries globally, young people tend to be more optimistic about the job market than older people. Gallup found that, typically, around the world, younger people are more likely by 10 percentage points than older ones to report their local job market is good. In the United States, younger people are 21 percentage points less likely to do so than older ones.

For years, younger Americans have been more optimistic about the job market than older Americans, even through the depths of the Great Recession. But in an abrupt shift, a new poll released Monday finds young people’s confidence has plummeted over the past two years — while their elders remain more upbeat.

The gap between young and older Americans’ views of the job market now is greater than in any other country among the 141 surveyed, according to the Gallup World Poll. In the United States, 43% of those aged 15-34 believe it’s “a good time” to find a job in the area where they live, well below the 64% of those aged 55 and over who say the same.

Around the world, it’s the opposite. Globally, the median share of younger people who say it’s “a good time” to find work in their local job market is 48%, compared with 38% among older people.

The findings reveal a generational rift in Americans’ views of economic opportunity, with young people feeling increasingly downtrodden about job prospects, while older people still largely think it’s a good time to find work. The schism is likely to continue fueling generational divides in politics, where younger voters have focused on economic issues such as housing costs and have registered less faith in institutions.

“It’s an incredibly new phenomenon,” Benedict Vigers of Gallup said of young Americans’ pessimism. He added that last year was the first time in Gallup’s decades of polling that young Americans were more pessimistic about the job market than their peers in other developed countries. “Has this happened in most other advanced economies? The answer is a resounding no.”

Younger and older Americans differ on how easy it is to find a new job

Young people, with fewer physical limitations and family responsibilities — along with an ability to adapt more quickly than older counterparts — normally are more optimistic about their ability to land work.

But the new Gallup analysis finds the U.S. is one of only five countries where younger people are at least 10 points more pessimistic about the availability of work than older ones, joining China, Hong Kong, Norway, Serbia and the United Arab Emirates.

Among the 141 countries surveyed, younger Americans ranked 87th in job market expectations. Even that is striking, Vigers said, because young Americans have long stood out globally for their optimism about job opportunities. Other countries, such as New Zealand and Canada, had lower levels of optimism among the youngest group, but there was no significant generational divide.

The divergence between younger and older Americans happened suddenly. Every U.S. age group registered a drop in confidence in the job market after 2023 — following a post-COVID rebound in 2021 and 2022 — but those 34 and younger saw the largest decline in recent years. The share of younger Americans saying it was “a good time” to find a job plunged by 27 percentage points from 2023 to 2025. That’s comparable to the rate of decline for young people during the 2008 global financial crisis, which also saw a drastic drop in confidence for older Americans. But that hasn’t happened in the last few years. In fact, older Americans’ views have barely dropped.

Older Americans also have a sunnier view of the economic landscape more generally, according to recent AP-NORC polling. About 8 in 10 adults under 35 describe the U.S. economy as very or somewhat poor, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in April. Only about 6 in 10 adults 55 and older say the same, although a majority still see the U.S. economy negatively.

John Della Volpe, a pollster who regularly surveys U.S. youth for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, said young people are frequently frustrated at how prior generations don’t understand their current economic challenges.

“It’s just another thing that drains their mental health — ‘my parents don’t understand that their pathway at this stage in life that I’m in was so much easier,’” Della Volpe said.

Job market optimism among younger adults approaches Great Recession levels

Younger Americans’ job market views now register close to the level they did in 2010, when the country was still deep in the Great Recession. This is not the first Gallup poll to find striking levels of pessimism among young Americans — they also register notably high levels of anxiety about pocketbook issues compared with people their age in other countries.

A separate Gallup survey on perceived U.S. job prospects found pessimism emerging at the end of 2024 and continuing into 2025. That coincides with the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term and the rise of artificial intelligence, which many fear will transform the labor market and eliminate many entry-level jobs.

The new poll finds the most frustrated groups of young people are those who haven’t secured a first job yet, college graduates and young women. But the heightened pessimism spreads across all subgroups of younger Americans, including men and those who haven’t attended college.

“Whoever they are, they are more pessimistic than they were three years ago,” Vigers said of young Americans.

The older Americans who have a less dire view of the job market are themselves more likely to be retired and not looking for work. They’re also more likely to own their own homes, a longtime building block of American prosperity that has increasingly seemed out of reach to younger people.

Day-to-day financial concerns were a key issue in the 2024 election, particularly for younger voters, and Trump improved on his previous performance among this group as he ran on a platform of economic prosperity, fighting inflation and affordability. But like other groups that were important parts of Trump’s 2024 coalition, some younger Americans have soured on the president as inflation continues, recent AP-NORC polling finds.

About 8 in 10 adults under 35 disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy and the cost of living, the recent AP-NORC poll found, compared with about 6 in 10 older adults.

The Texas Tribune – Federal officials opened a civil rights investigation into the state-controlled Houston ISD over its plans to relocate students with disabilities, separating them from classmates.

Some students with disabilities will be required to move campuses next school year where they will learn in a “contained” setting, Houston ISD Deputy Superintendent Kristen Hole announced earlier this week. It is part of an effort to centralize special education services, so programs spread across several campuses could be consolidated into one site. The majority of special education students will not be affected.

Hole said the changes will mean better instruction for children with disabilities with more small-group settings for individualized attention.

However, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is examining whether the move runs directly counter to the federal law that says students with disabilities should learn alongside classmates who do not have disabilities as much as possible.

“Schools cannot exclude students with disabilities simply because of their disability status. Placement decisions must be made individually, based on each student’s needs, rather than by blanket policies that segregate students by disability category,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey wrote in a statement. “The allegations described here are alarming.”

Houston ISD did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the investigation. The district’s website notes that student services will still closely follow individualized education plans, or IEPs, which is a written plan of each students’ needs.

Federal officials cited concerns from Houston families that their children will lose out on a chance to improve their social skills in general education classrooms. Parents also worry that longer transportation times to these alternative campuses will be challenging for children with medical and behavioral needs.

Houston ISD previously has struggled to provide supports to the more than 20,000 students who qualify for special education services. In 2020, special investigators with the Texas Education Agency found HISD in “systemic and widespread” noncompliance with special education law.

About a decade ago, federal officials found Texas failed to properly educate many students with disabilities.The state had quietly capped the percentage of students that schools could identify as in need of special education services.

Houston ISD has been under state control since June 2023 due to chronic poor academic performance. For the district to regain local control, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath has said, in addition to improving academic outcomes, HISD must get its special education programs in compliance with state and federal law.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The Texas Tribune – Nearly six months after being indicted on federal fraud charges, Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar is now facing an attempt to remove him from office.

Former Laredo City Council member Alfonso “Poncho” Casso filed the petition to remove Cuellar in Webb County district court last week, citing the federal indictment and other misconduct allegations. Casso’s filing, which was first reported by The Laredo Morning Times, asked the court to suspend the five-term South Texas sheriff from office pending a trial that seeks to permanently remove him from the post.

Cuellar denied all allegations outlined in the petition and “demands strict proof,” according to a response filed in court on Friday. He already pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, which were unsealed in January.

Casso’s petition largely relies on the five-count indictment, which accuses Cuellar and two other people of misappropriating funds from the Webb County sheriff’s office during the COVID-19 pandemic.

They allegedly opened a private disinfecting business in April 2020 that operated “almost entirely with county employees and supplies,” including to complete a $500,000 contract cleaning schools in Laredo, according to the indictment. Cuellar then received around $175,000 and used it to purchase property in the area, according to federal prosecutors.

Rick Rodriguez, Cuellar’s former deputy who was involved in the business, already pleaded guilty. If convicted, the sheriff could face up to 10 years in federal prison for conspiracy and theft of federal funds charges, and another 10 years for money laundering charges.

Beyond the indictment, Casso’s petition also alleges mismanagement of the county jail as well as violations of the Texas WhistleBlower Act, the Texas Elections Code and procurement laws.

“He has been compromised and has no credibility managing the Webb County Sheriff’s Office or County Jail,” his filing said.

The sheriff is the brother of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, the Laredo Democrat who was indicted in May 2024 on bribery, money laundering and conspiracy charges related to his relationship with an Azerbaijan-run oil-and-gas company and a Mexican bank. President Donald Trump pardoned the representative in December before criticizing him of disloyalty for deciding to run again as a Democrat for his 12th term.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The Texas Tribune – As Texas struggles to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population, a state fund had $1.28 billion available this year to support projects that could deliver water even in a severe drought. 

Unfortunately, 23 worthy projects requested a total of $4.2 billion, prompting the state to deny 13 of them — the first time the SWIFT fund had to say no to an applicant in its 11-year history.

It was lamentable timing for a state plagued by a brutal drought and aging water infrastructure.

“We have more demand than we actually have the capacity to fulfill this year,” said Marvin Cole-Chaney, director of program administration and reporting for the Texas Water Development Board, which administers SWIFT, the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas.

One of the denied projects is a desalination plant with the potential to create 100 million gallons of drinking water a day along the Coastal Bend in South Texas — an area including Corpus Christi, which is in the grips of a devastating drought.

The denial surprised John Byrum, executive director of the Nueces River Authority, which proposed building the plant as a critical source of water for Coastal Bend cities. 

Under the scoring system used to set priorities for SWIFT, the river authority’s plant ranked 11th. The top 10 proposals will next submit more-detailed applications for the money. 

“We really thought our project would rate higher,” Byrum said. “We were disappointed.” 

The river authority requested $140 million to fuel plans to build a seawater desalination plant in Harbor Island, which sits within the cities of Aransas Pass and Port Aransas. A desalination plant filters salt and other minerals out of seawater to make it drinkable.

The proposed project, which received federal permitting in September and is projected to cost $3.2 billion, would distribute water to cities, water districts and businesses across South Texas, including Corpus Christi, which is nearing a water crisis. The coastal city is one of the biggest water suppliers in the region and may be just months away from a water crisis as its main reservoirs have shriveled to below 8% capacity. 

Corpus Christi paid $2.7 million to the river authority to reserve an option to buy 50 million gallons of water a day once the Harbor Island desalination plant is running.

City leaders are bracing for a Level 1 water emergency, the point when the water supply is projected to be 180 days from falling short of demand, which could be triggered as soon as September. Commissioners in Nueces County, which includes Corpus Christi, voted unanimously last week to declare a county-wide water emergency, restricting residents’ outdoor watering. 

SWIFT offers low-interest loans with extended and flexible repayment plans. The water development board said the denied projects may be eligible for other funding options, such as the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, but Byrum believes the SWIFT fund should place a higher priority on an area’s need for water.

The water development board considers several factors when prioritizing projects, ranking them on a scoring sheet with a maximum score of 86. Projects can earn the most points by serving large populations, with readiness and water conservation among other factors also taken into account. 

A project’s “emergency need” carries little weight, earning a maximum five points.

None of the 10 highest-ranked projects earned any points for “emergency need,” a designation restricted to public water systems where supply is expected to fall short of demand within 180 days, federal money was sought or received to deal with the emergency, or the need for water will occur a decade sooner than anticipated by state planners.

The Harbor Island plant, despite targeting an area that critically needs water, earned no emergency need points and lost potential points because it is in rural Nueces County with a relatively low population. Its score of 62 was just one point behind the 10th-place project. 

This year’s 10 highest-rated SWIFT projects span the state, including the Riverbend Water Resources District — the top-rated project on the SWIFT scorecard. Riverbend is seeking $2.98 million to assess and expand water infrastructure to meet Texarkana’s growing population.

The North Texas Municipal Water District is asking for nearly $419 million for a pipeline and treatment plant in Leonard, a town in Fannin County. The water district is also receiving around $611 million to design a new raw water pump station. 

Money is also being directed to South Texas, where the Hidalgo County Drainage District made a pitch for $120 million for its proposed Santa Cruz Reservoir. 

Byrum said the Nueces River Authority is going to apply for the water board’s other funding programs, as well as seek private funding, in hopes of getting the Harbor Island desalination plant built. 

SWIFT was created by the Texas Legislature and approved by voters in 2013, allowing the one-time transfer of $2 billion from the state’s rainy day fund. Revenue bonds over the next 50 years, starting in 2015, will finance around $27 billion in water supply projects through SWIFT. 

To date, the water development board has committed about $17.2 billion in SWIFT money to 76 projects. The agency estimates the funding saved entities almost $2.1 billion over the life of the debt compared to market rates.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.