内容摘要：Lutnick stuck to that national security framing, but White House trade adviser Peter Navarro focused more on the import taxes being leverage in the bigger economic puzzle.

Lutnick stuck to that national security framing, but White House trade adviser Peter Navarro focused more on the import taxes being leverage in the bigger economic puzzle.

The Catholic Benefits Association serves more than 9,000 Catholic employers and has about 164,000 employees enrolled in member health plans, according to its website.HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A man says he was tortured for weeks in a New York townhouse. Another in Paris was held for ransom and his finger cut off. A couple in Connecticut were carjacked, beaten and thrown into a van.

All, authorities allege, were victims tied to cryptocurrency-related crimes that have spilled out from behind computer screens and into the real world as the largely unregulated currency surges in value.While crypto thefts are not new, the use of physical violence is a far more recent trend, said John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas in Austin who tracks financial crimes.“I think this kind of physical violence is a natural manifestation of the emboldened nature of crypto activities,” he said. “Things that might clearly be outside of social norms in other spaces — like robbing a bank — are somehow just part of the game here.”

In the New York case, two American crypto investors — John Woeltz and William Duplessie —on kidnapping and assault charges in recent days after a 28-year-old Italian man told police they tortured him for weeks to get his Bitcoin password. Attorneys for both men declined to comment.

While the allegations are still emerging, they come just weeks after 13 people were indicted on federal charges in Washington, D.C., accused of combining computer hacking and money laundering with old-fashioned impersonation and burglary to steal more than $260 million from victims’ cryptocurrency accounts.

Some are accused of hacking websites and servers to steal cryptocurrency databases and identify targets, but others are alleged to have broken into victims’ homes to steal their “hardware wallets” — devices that provide access to their crypto accounts.Yet on Thursday Walmart

in response to the tariffs and will do so even more in June and July just as families gear up the back-to-school season. The company counts 90% of the U.S. population as customers and price hikes at the nation’s largest retailer may start to sink in with Americans who have already been buffeted by post-pandemic inflation.The survey found consumers are increasingly worried about rising inflation. Over the next 12 months, consumers expect inflation to jump to 7.3%, the highest since 1981 and up from an expectation of 6.5% last month. Over the next five years, they foresee inflation reaching 4.6%, the highest since 1991, up from 4.4% last month.

Those expectations typically run higher than actual inflation, which, the lowest level in more than four years. Still, economists and the Federal Reserve closely watch inflation expectations, because they can become self-fulfilling. If people are worried inflation will accelerate, they may take steps, such as demanding higher pay, that can push up prices.