Vahid Salemi/AP

🎧 NPR’s Arezou Rezvani tells Up First that she spent a few hours at the Haji Omeran border crossing interviewing people who were leaving Iran and entering Iraq. During that time, she says that one of the most striking things she noticed was how terrified people were to speak. Rezvani spoke with a woman in her 60s from a border city in Iran who asked not to be named for fear of government reprisal, even outside of the country. The woman avoided talking about the war, but did tell Rezvani that she wished the airstrikes on her city had killed her, expressing how her life had become unbearable. Iran has been under an intense internet blackout for the last couple of weeks, making it hard to contact people inside the country. Iranians who have managed to get online report seeing increased checkpoints in their cities and towns, where security forces are checking phones for apps used to bypass the blackout.
➡️ Yesterday, Joe Kent, the head of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, became the first senior official from the Trump administration to resign due to the conflict with Iran. Kent is an Army veteran who completed 11 combat deployments in the Middle East and elsewhere. In his resignation letter, he said he could not "in good conscience" support the war, that Israel pushed the U.S. into the conflict with a pressure campaign to "deceive" Trump and that Iran "posed no imminent threat to our nation."

🎧 The labor market initially seemed to stabilize, but that changed when the February jobs report showed a loss of 92,000 jobs. Normally, this might prompt the Fed to lower interest rates to boost the economy, but stubbornly high inflation complicates that decision, especially with the energy shock triggered by the war in Iran, NPR’s Scott Horsley says. Today's Fed vote on interest rates may not be unanimous, just like previous meetings. At the last meeting, two of the twelve policymakers pushed to lower rates by a quarter point, citing concerns over the weakening job market rather than rising prices. Today's vote will reveal whether the Fed's risk balance has shifted in light of the disappointing February jobs report and the recent surge in gas prices.