China likes to condemn the United States for extending its arm too far outside of its borders to make demands on non-American companies. But when it sought to hit back at the U.S. interests this month, Beijing did exactly the same.In expanding export rules on rare earths, Beijing for the first time announced it will require foreign firms to obtain approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even tiny amounts of China-originated rare earth materials or produced with Chinese technology.That means a South Korean smartphone maker must ask for Beijing’s permission to sell the devices to Australia if the phones contain China-originated rare earth materials, said Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. “This rule gives China control over basically the entire global economy in the technology supply chain,” he said.For anyone familiar with U.S. trade practice, China is simply borrowing a decades-long U.S. policy: the foreign direct product rule. It extends the reach of U.S. law to foreign-made products, and it has been used regularly to restrict China’s access to certain U.S. technologies made outside of the United States, even when they are in the hands of foreign companies.It is the latest example of Beijing turning to U.S. precedents for tools it needs to stare down Washington in what appears to be an extended trade war between the world’s two largest economies.“China is learning from the best,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “Beijing is copying Washington’s playbook because it saw firsthand how effectively U.S. export controls could constrain its own economic development and political choices.”He added: “Game recognizes game.”
The idea goes back to at least 2018
It was in 2018, when President Donald Trump launched a trade war with China, that Beijing felt the urgency to adopt a set of laws and policies that it could readily deploy when new trade conflicts arise. And it looked to Washington for ideas.Its Unreliable Entity List, established in 2020 by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, resembles the U.S. Commerce Department’s “entity list” that restricts certain foreign companies from doing businesses with the U.S.In 2021, Beijing adopted the anti-foreign sanction law, allowing agencies such as the Chinese Foreign Ministry to deny visas and freeze the assets of unwelcome individuals and businesses similar to what the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Treasury can do.Calling it a toolkit against foreign sanctions, intervention and long-arm jurisdiction, the state-run news agency China News in a 2021 news report cited an ancient Chinese teaching, saying Beijing would be “hitting back with the enemy’s methods.”The law “has combed through relevant foreign legislation and taken into consideration the international law and the basic principles of international relations,” said the Chinese scholar Li Qingming as quoted in the news report. He also said it could deter the other side from escalating.Other formal measures Beijing has adopted in the past several years include expanded export controls and foreign investment review tools.Jeremy Daum, a senior research scholar in law and senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said Beijing often draws from foreign models in developing its laws in non-trade, non foreign-related areas. As China seeks capabilities to retaliate in kind in trade and sanctions, the tools are often “very parallel” to those of the U.S., he said.Both governments also have adopted a “holistic view of national security,” which expands the concept to justify restrictions on each other, Daum said.
Things accelerated this year
When Trump launched his trade war with China shortly after he returned to the White House earlier this year, Beijing readily deployed its new tools in addition to raising tariffs to match those imposed by the U.S. president.In February, in response to Trump’s first 10% tariff on China over allegations that Beijing failed to curb the flow of chemicals used to make fentanyl, the Chinese Commerce Ministry put PVH Group, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger and the biotechnology company Illumina, on the unreliable entity list.That barred them from engaging in China-related import or export activities and from making new investments in the country. Beijing also announced export controls on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium, which are elements critical to the production of modern high-tech products.In March, when Trump imposed the second 10%, fentanyl-related tariff, Beijing placed 10 more U.S. firms on its unreliable entity list and added 15 U.S. companies to its export control list, including aerospace and defense companies like General Dynamics Land Systems and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, among others, asserting that they “endanger China’s national security and interests.”Then came the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, when Beijing not only matched Trump’s sky-high tariff of 125% but also blacklisted more U.S. companies and announced export controls on more rare earth minerals. That led to a pause in the shipment of magnets needed in manufacturing a wide range of products such as smartphones, electric vehicles, jet planes and missiles.While the new tools have allowed China to stare down the United States, Daum said they are not without risks.“The dangers in such a facially balanced and fair approach are, one, what one side sees as reciprocity the other might interpret as escalation,” he said. And second, “in a race to the bottom, nobody wins.”
Didi Tang, Associated Press
China’s economy expanded at the slowest annual pace in a year in July-September, growing 4.8%, weighed down by trade tensions with the United States and slack domestic demand.The July-September data was the weakest pace of growth since the third quarter of 2024, and compares with a 5.2% pace of growth in the previous quarter, the government said in a report Monday.In January-September, the world’s second largest economy grew at a 5.2% annual pace. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s higher tariffs on imports from China, its exports have remained relatively strong as companies expanded sales to other world markets.China’s exports to the United States fell 27% in September from the year before, even though growth in its global exports hit a six-month high, climbing 8.3%.Exports of electric vehicles doubled in September from a year earlier, while domestic passenger car sales climbed 11.2% year-on-year in last month, down from a 15% rise in August, according to data released last week.Tensions between Beijing and Washington remain elevated, and it’s unclear if Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will go ahead with a proposed meeting during a regional summit at the end of this month.Xi and other ruling Communist Party members are convening one of China’s most important political meetings for the year on Monday, where they will map out economic and social policy goals for the country for the next five years.The economy slowed in the last quarter as the authorities moved to curb fierce price wars in sectors such as the auto industry due to excess capacity.China is also facing challenges including a prolonged property sector downturn which has been affecting consumption and demand.Data released Monday showed China’s residential property sales fell 7.6% by value in the January-September period from a year earlier. Industrial output rose 6.5% year-on-year last month, the fastest pace since June, but retail sales growth slowed to 3% from the year before.Ratings agency S&P estimates nationwide new home sales will fall by 8% in 2025 from the year before and by 6% to 7% in 2026.The World Bank expects China’s economy to grow at a 4.8% annual rate this year. The government’s official growth target is around 5%.Chinese shares rose Monday, with the Hang Seng in Hong Kong climbing 2.3% and the Shanghai Composite index up 0.5%.A National Bureau of Statistics spokesman said China has a “solid foundation” to achieve its full-year growth target, but cited external complications including trade friction with the U.S. and other trading partners and protectionist policies in many countries as reasons for the slowdown.China’s stronger economic growth in the first half of this year gives it “some buffer” to achieve the growth target, said Lynn Song, chief economist for Greater China at ING Bank.However, spending during China’s eight-day Golden Week national holiday in October was “mildly disappointing,” reflecting sluggish consumer confidence and demand, Morningstar analysts said in a note this month.Investments in factories, equipment and other “fixed assets” fell 0.5% in the last quarter, underscoring weakness in domestic demand. It also was reflected in prices, which have continued to fall both at the consumer and the wholesale level.There’s room for the government to do more, Song said.“(We) are looking to see if there will be further measures to support consumption and the property market, as the impact from previous policies begins to weaken,” Song said.Economists are also expecting a rate cut by China’s central bank by the end of the year, which could encourage more spending and investment.China’s economy is also likely to further slow in 2026, said Jacqueline Rong, chief China economist at BNP Paribas, as property investment in the country “looks (to) continue falling” and the AI boom, which helped lift China’s economy and fueled a stock market rally, is expected to moderate.
Chan Ho-Him, AP Business Writer
President Donald Trump said Sunday that the United States could purchase Argentinian beef in an attempt to bring down prices for American consumers.“We would buy some beef from Argentina,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One during a flight from Florida to Washington. “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down.”Trump promised earlier this week to address the issue as part of his efforts to keep inflation in check.U.S. beef prices have been stubbornly high for a variety of reasons, including drought and reduced imports from Mexico due to a flesh-eating pest in cattle herds there.Trump has been working to help Argentina bolster its collapsing currency with a $20 billion credit swap line and additional financing from sovereign funds and the private sector ahead of midterm elections for his close ally, President Javier Milei.
Christopher Megerian, Associated Press
A popular frozen food producer has recalled nearly 92,000 pounds of breakfast burrito and breakfast wrap products that contain eggs due to a risk of contamination with Listeria monocytogenes.
The ready-to-eat burritos and wraps were recalled after the producer, M.C.I. Foods, discovered a positive Listeria result while doing routine testing on scrambled eggs from external suppliers, according to a recall notice posted by the U.S. Department of Agricultures Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
The recall impacts multiple brands supplied by M.C.I. Foods, including some that contain branding from the popular Minions animated franchise.
The California-based company reported its findings to the FSIS, which published the notice on Saturday, October 18.
Fortunately, no illnesses have been linked to the consumption of the affected products to date. Heres what you need to know:
Which products are being recalled?
The individually packaged and bulk-packed frozen breakfast burritos and wraps were produced between September 17 and October 14, 2025.
Affected products have establishment numbers EST. 1162A or P-5890A inside the USDA mark of inspection. These products were shipped to food service institutions nationwide, including schools.
The FSIS notice notes that the Los Cabos, El Más Fino, and Midamar brand products are included in the USDAs National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs.
Below are the specific product details for impacted products.
El Mas Fino: Egg, Ham, and Cheese Breakfast Burrito
El Mas Fino: Egg, Sausage, and Cheese Breakfast Burrito
Los Cabos: Sausage, Egg & 3 Cheese Breakfast Burrito
Los Cabos: Egg, Cheese, Potato & Cooked Sausage Crumbles (Made with Turkey) Breakfast Wrap
Los Cabos: Egg, Cheese & Cooked Sausage Crumbles (Made with Turkey) Breakfast Wrap
Los Cabos: Cheese, Cooked Sausage Crumbles (Made with Turkey) & Egg Breakfast Wrap
Midamar: Egg, Cheese & Beef with Sausage Seasoning Breakfast Wrap
You can find a full list of product and lot codes on the FSIS website. Note that some of the products have Minions branding on the packaging. You can also find images of the product labels on the FSIS website.
What if I have this product?
Foods service institutions are instructed to throw away the recalled products. The FSIS is concerned that the recalled products may still be in refrigerators or freezers at these institutions, the notice states.
Institutions are being urged to avoid serving the affected products. Recalled products should be thrown out.
Where was this product sold?
The recall notice doesnt include a list of locations where the products were distributed. However, it notes that they were shipped to food service institutions nationwide, including schools.
Fast Company has reached out to M.C.I. Foods for a list of distribution locations. We will update this story if we receive a response.
If you have questions about the recall, you can contact M.C.I. Foods at 888-345-5364.
What is Listeria?
Listeria infection is an illness caused by bacteria that can spread through contaminated food.
According to the Mayo Clinic, healthy people rarely become seriously ill from Listeria infection.
But the disease can be fatal for unborn babies, newborns, and those with weakened immune systems. Pregnant women, adults 65 and older, and people with weakened immune systems are more at risk for infection.
U.K. banks and government tech systems going down. University students in Australia struggling to complete their coursework. Homes across Europe losing access to their Ring doorbells.
While you were sleeping, large parts of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based internet went offline around the world.
According to the AWS outage monitor, the problem stemmed from a misconfiguration of Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within the company’s cloud infrastructure. The problem was remedied within three hours of being encounteredby people unable to log onto Roblox or search the web with Perplexity.
But the outage highlights just how much the web’s day-to-day functionality relies on the the existence of too few companies. AWS controls around a third of the market; Microsoft, through its Azure cloud service, and Google hold around another third. They are some of a handful of companies that dominate the marketand do so because of their ordinary success and smooth running of cloud infrastructure services.
That success, some argue, has translated to overly concentrated control by a small number of companies of key bits of the webs infrastructure, which was always meant to be distributed and with many points of failure. The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one serviceAWSwithout planning for redundancy, says Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surreys department of computer science.
It means that in the rare event of an outage from those key infrastructure providers, we see catastrophic consequences across different sectors, from gaming to government.
Once again, we are experiencing how the concentration in the computing industry, in this case in cloud computing, can crash major parts of our internet, all at once, says Corinne Cath-Speth, an expert on cloud computing and head of digital at human rights organization ARTICLE 19. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.
Even those that do have multiple eggs in multiple metaphorical baskets were affected. Signal, the secure messaging app which rents cloud infrastructure from AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure, faced outages because of AWSs issues. Amazon did not immediately respond to Fast Companys request for comment.
That urgency needs to go to the top of governments, nevermind businesses, reckons Amandine LePape, chief operating officer and cofounder of Element, which provides secure communications to governments. Centralized systems may offer convenience and scale, but they also create single points of failure, she says. True resilience comes from decentralisation and self-hosting.
That needs to be considered for the futuresimilar outages of AWS have occurred in 2020, 2021, and 2023because its likely to happen again.
Governments and other organizations must rethink their infrastructure strategies now, says LePape, or risk being next in line when the cloud goes dark, especially when it comes to their communications.
French luxury goods company Kering said Sunday it is selling its beauty division to L’Oreal for 4 billion euros ($4.66 billion).Under the agreement, Clichy, France-based L’Oreal will acquire the House of Creed high-end fragrance company as well as licenses to create beauty and fragrance products for Kering brands like Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga.The companies said they will establish a strategic committee to ensure coordination between Kering brands and L’Oréal. Kering and L’Oréal said they are also exploring joint business opportunities in the wellness and longevity market, combining L’Oreal’s innovation with Kering’s deep understanding of luxury clients.The deal has some precedence. L’Oreal acquired the beauty license for Kering’s Yves Saint Laurent brand in 2008.Luca de Meo, CEO of Paris-based Kering, said the deal combines L’Oreal’s expertise with Kering’s luxury reach.“Joining forces with the global leader in beauty, we will accelerate the development of fragrance and cosmetics for our major houses, allowing them to achieve scale in this category and unlock their immense long-term potential, as did Yves Saint Laurent Beauté under L’Oréal’s stewardship,” de Meo said in a statement.Nicolas Hieronimus, the CEO of L’Oreal Groupe, said Creed is one of the fastest growing players in the niche fragrance market, while Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga are “exceptional couture brands with enormous potential for growth.”The all-cash deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026. L’Oréal will also pay royalties to Kering for the use of its licensed brands.
Dee-Ann Durbin, AP Business Writer
On a recent weekday in Aspen, Colorado, Stu Landesberg stood with a group of firefighters on a mountainside and watched a drone take off and fly toward a simulated fire. The drone detected the hotspota pile of ice, since wildfire risk was too high that day for real flamesand then aimed and blasted it with fire suppressant.
The test flight was one of thousands that Landesbergs startup, Seneca, has run while operating in stealth mode over the last several months. The company officially launched today, announcing that it has raised $60 million. It aims to reshape wildfire responseand help protect wildfire-prone communities in a way that hasnt been possible until now.
[Photo: courtesy Seneca]
“Once I started learning about this problem, I became obsessed with it”
For Landesberg, the startup represents an unexpected pivot. Since 2012, he’d led Grove, the consumer products company known for cutting plastic waste in packaging. But in late 2023, the company brought in a new CEO, former Amazon executive Jeff Yurcisin, to help it grow. Landesberg became chairman of the board, and started to think about what he wanted to take on next.
I looked around at the problems that were enormousplanetary scale, he says. That list included wildfires, a challenge that he was intimately familiar with as a Californian. As fires have dramatically increased in recent years, he lost fire insurance on his own house. His father-in-laws house also went through a fire.
The wildfire crisis keeps growing. Fires are now burning eight times more land in the West each year than they did in the mid-1980s. In 2020 alone, 4.3 million acres burned in California, an area larger than the entire state of Connecticut and most of Rhode Island. Insurers are hiking rates in the state or pulling out of some areas completely; a state-run last-resort insurance plan is struggling.
If you lose your fire insurance, you can’t get a mortgage, Landesberg says. And if you can’t get a mortgage, what is going to happen to the American West? If we want to continue living in the American West, we absolutely have to figure out a way to live there without our communities being at risk of burning down.
Its not just California. Texas experienced its largest fire in state history last year, covering a million acres. In the Great Plains, fires are happening more often than in the past, and covering more area. Places that previously werent as likely to burn, like Quebec and other parts of Canada, are increasingly catching fire. Last fall, as parts of the East Coast saw record drought, fires spread across New Jersey and Massachusetts. Globally, nearly a billion acres burned last year. Climate change will keep making the problem worse.
Once I started learning about this problem, I became obsessed with it, Landesberg says. More than 100 million Americans are living at risk of fire, he explains: Its one of those things that until you really study it, you don’t quite realize just how big the problem is. . . . It costs the U.S. economy something like a trillion dollars a year.
[Photo: courtesy Seneca]
A new type of fire response
In early 2024, Landesberg dove into research. He rode along with firefighters, studied fire science, and began conversations with potential partners. He also looked at other tech under development. The world of fire tech is quickly growing: after Silicon Valley choked on smoke from the deadly Camp Fire in Paradise, California in 2018, and the sky in San Francisco turned orange from smoke in 2020, several other founders also began exploring how technology could help.
Some of those solutions are in use now. Pano AI, which uses cameras and AI to detect smoke and alert firefighters, now has hundreds of cameras monitoring more than 50 million acres around the world. (In one example of its use, when lightning struck a remote mountain in Colorado last year, the system was the only source to report the fire. It gave firefighters coordinates in minutes, and helicopters and ground crews were able to stop the blaze.) BurnBot, another startup, helps safely burn dry vegetation to create fire breaks.
Landesberg saw an opportunity for new tech to help with another part of the challengehow to help firefighters quickly respond when a fire begins. If you talk to many of the chiefs on the front lines in the most high-risk communities, they will tell you that its all about catching the fire when its small, he says.
In hard to reach areas like a steep California canyon, helicopters are often the fastest way to reach a fire. But because theyre very expensive, their numbers are limited. When conditions are at their worst and many fires are happening simultaneously, a helicopter might not be available. High winds and poor visibility at night can also stop helicopters from flying. In some cases, when trucks can’t reach a fire, fire crews have to hike to remote areas on foot.
By the fall of 2024, Landesberg and his founding partners had decided to build drones that could autonomously navigate to fires and suppress them. (Some other startups are working on related solutions, like Dryad, which also makes technology to detect firs.) They started building prototypes. By early 2025, they were testing the drones with fire agencies.
[Photo: courtesy Seneca]
How the technology works
The drones are designed to fly in strike teams of five aircraft, each carrying 100 pounds of fire suppressant. Fire agencies and utilities could station them in remote areas, so they’re ready to fly autonomously as soon as a fire is detected. The swarm of drones can spray a line of firefighting foam that’s around three feet wide and 1,280 feet longenough to stop or meaningfully slow a fire. Then they can fly back to their base, reload, and return.
One selling point of the drones is that they can fly closer to a fire than a helicopter or plane could, and target an exact position on the ground. “You kind of get one shot with a helicopter, whereas with drones, you can lay patterns and lines and just do that more precisely,” says Bill Clerico, founder of Convective Capital, a wildfire-focused VC firm that co-led the startup’s fundraising round.
Drones are at the right stage in development for this type of application. “We’re at this interesting inflection point in drone technology where the batteries are getting much better, the motors are getting much better, they’re getting lighter, they can carry much more,” Clerico says.
They’re also far less expensive than the helicopters that are currently used. The company hasn’t shared exact costs, but Landesberg says that a group of five drones will be in the high hundreds of thousands or low seven figures; operating a helicopter is also extremely expensive, whereas drones run at a marginal cost.
“It’s totally clear that aerial suppression needs to be part of the solution and part of the future,” Landesberg says. “It’s also totally clear that the cost of today’s aerial suppression apparatus is incredibly highso high that it means you can’t get enough of them. Our intention is to build something that can be low enough cost that you can station them remotely and dedicate them to fast response in a high-risk area.”
In conditions where a fire moves very quicklylike a hot, windy day after months of droughtreaching a fire even minutes earlier could help stop the spread. Drones could also be used to support fire crews during controlled burns. The company’s goal is audacious: to eliminate the risk of wildfire across 500 million acres in the U.S. and other countries by 2035. When I ask if that’s even possible in a world made so much more flammable by climate change, Landesberg says that it simply has to be done.
“I think it has to be solved,” he says. “I think there’s two options: either we give up or we believe that we can do it. There is no middle ground.” Later, he adds that he believes society is at an inflection point where it can build the technology to create a resilient future. “I’m optimistic, perpetually, because I don’t think there’s any other way to be,” he says. “It’s not that I think the problem is going to get easier. I just think we have to acknowledge it’s going to get harder and we have to work.”
[Photo: courtesy Seneca]
Getting in the air
As Seneca’s team worked on the design of the drones, they worked closely with fire agencies to vet the approach. “One of the really wonderful things about having been a consumer founder first is that I think Seneca has incredible ‘listen to your customer’ DNA,” Landesberg says. The team also includes former firefighters.
After test flights with agencies in different states, they kept iterating. The foam pump, for example, was initially designed at an angle based on typical California fires. But after meeting with fire departments Montana and Wyoming, where fires from lightning strikes are more common, they realized that the nozzle needed to also be able to point downward at the base of a fire. Now it can adjust as needed.
The drones have gone through extensive testing, including hundreds of missions on live fires, and now the company plans to test final edge cases before shipping the product next year. It “needs to be perfectly hardened before we hand it off to an operator that we fully expect to be using this in mission critical environments,” says Landesberg.
Fire agencies are often slow to adopt new technology, but have been enthusiastic so far. “There’s a joke in the fire service that it’s 300 years of tradition unimpeded by progress,” says Clerico. “It’s a very traditional culture. That said, I think in wildland firefighting there’s a broad acknowledgment that the current tools we have are not working and we need to try new things. The crisis has reached a breaking point and people are willing to try new stuff. So it feels like the right time to build this company.”
Because of the immense economic damage from wildfireshomes are losing value, insurance companies have lost hundreds of billions, the utility company PG&E went through bankruptcy, governments spend billions fighting firesthere’s also huge demand for solutions that could work.
“This is a big betthat these technologies will work well and be deployed at scale,” says Clerico. “There’s certainly risk in that. But if it works, it could be an absolutely enormous company. These Seneca stations could be at every utility substation and every fire station in the West.”
Americans are growing increasingly concerned about their ability to find a good job under President Donald Trump, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds, in what is a potential warning sign for Republicans as a promised economic boom has given way to hiring freezes and elevated inflation.High prices for groceries, housing and health care persist as a fear for many households, while rising electricity bills and the cost of gas at the pump are also sources of anxiety, according to the survey.Some 47% of U.S. adults are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a good job if they wanted to, an increase from 37% when the question was last asked in October 2023.Electricity bills are a “major” source of stress for 36% of U.S. adults at a time when the expected build-out of data centers for artificial intelligence could further tax the power grid. Just more than one-half said the cost of groceries are a “major” source of financial stress, about 4 in 10 said the cost of housing and health care were a serious strain and about one-third said they were feeling high stress about gasoline prices.The survey suggests an ongoing vulnerability for Trump, who returned to the White House in January with claims he could quickly tame the inflation that surged after the pandemic during Democratic President Joe Biden’s term. Instead, Trump’s popularity on the economy has remained low amid a mix of tariffs, federal worker layoffs and partisan sniping that has culminated in a government shutdown.Linda Weavil, 76, voted for Trump last year because he “seems like a smart businessman.” But she said in an interview that the Republican’s tariffs have worsened inflation, citing the chocolate-covered pecans sold for her church group fundraiser that now cost more.“I think he’s doing a great job on a lot of things, but I’m afraid our coffee and chocolate prices have gone up because of tariffs,” the retiree from Greensboro, North Carolina, said. “That’s a kick in the back of the American people.”
Voters changed presidents, but they’re not feeling better about Trump’s economy
The poll found that 36% of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a figure that has held steady this year after he imposed tariffs that caused broad economic uncertainty. Among Republicans, 71% feel positive about his economic leadership. Yet that approval within Trump’s own party is relatively low in ways that could be problematic for Republicans in next month’s races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and perhaps even in the 2026 midterm elections.At roughly the same point in Biden’s term, in October 2021, an AP-NORC poll found that 41% of U.S. adults approved of how he was handling the economy, including about 73% of Democrats. That overall number was a little higher than Trump’s, primarily because of independents 29% approved of how Biden was handling the economy, compared with the 18% who currently support Trump’s approach.The job market was meaningfully stronger in terms of hiring during Biden’s presidency as the United States was recovering from pandemic-related lockdowns. But hiring has slowed sharply under Trump with monthly job gains averaging less than 27,000 after the April tariff announcements.People see that difference.Four years ago, 36% of those in the survey were “extremely” or “very” confident in their ability to get a good job, but that has fallen to 21% now.Biden’s approval on the economy steadily deteriorated through the middle of 2022 when inflation hit a four-decade high, creating an opening for Trump’s political comeback.
Electricity costs are an emerging worry
In some ways, Trump has made the inflation problems harder by choosing to cancel funding for renewable energy projects and imposing tariffs on the equipment needed for factories and power plants. Those added costs are coming before the anticipated construction of data centers for AI that could further push up prices without more construction.Even though 36% see electricity as a major concern, there are some who have yet to feel a serious financial squeeze. In the survey, 40% identified electricity costs as a “minor” stress, while 23% said their utility bills are “not a source” of stress.Kevin Halsey, 58, of Normal, Illinois, said his monthly electricity bills used to be $90 during the summer because he had solar panels, but have since jumped to $300. Halsey, who works in telecommunications, voted Democratic in last year’s presidential election and described the economy right now as “crap.”“I’ve got to be pessimistic,” he said. “I don’t see this as getting better.”At a fundamental level, Trump finds himself in the same economic dilemma that bedeviled Biden. There are signs the economy remains relatively solid with a low unemployment rate, stock market gains and decent economic growth, yet the public continues to be skeptical about the economy’s health.Some 68% of U.S. adults describe the U.S. economy these days as “poor,” while 32% say it’s “good.” That’s largely consistent with assessments of the economy over the past year.In addition, 59%, say their family finances are “holding steady.” But only 12% say they’re “getting ahead,” and 28% say they are “falling behind.”
People see plenty of expenses but few opportunities
The sense of economic precarity is coming from many different directions, with indications that many think middle-class stability is falling out of reach.The vast majority of U.S. adults feel at least “minor” stress about the cost of groceries, health care, housing, the amount they pay in taxes, what they are paid at work and the cost of gas for their cars.In the survey, 47%, say they are “not very” or “not at all” confident they could pay an unexpected medical expense while 52% have low confidence they will have enough saved for their retirement. Also, 63%, are “not very” or “not at all” confident they could buy a new home if they wanted to.Young adults are much less confident about their ability to buy a house, though confidence is not especially high across the board. About 8 in 10 U.S. adults under age 30 say they are “not very confident” or “not at all confident” they would be able to buy a house, compared with about 6 in 10 adults 60 and older.For 54% of U.S. adults, the cost of groceries is a “major source” of stress in their life ight now.Unique Hopkins, 36, of Youngstown, Ohio, said she is now working two jobs after her teenage daughter had a baby, leaving Hopkins with a sense that she can barely tread water as part of the “working poor.” She voted for Trump in 2016, only to switch to Democrats after she felt his ego kept him from uniting the country and solving problems.“It’s his way or no way,” she said. “Nobody is going to unite with Trump if it’s all about you, you, you.”
The AP-NORC poll of 1,289 adults was conducted Oct. 9-13, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
This story has been corrected to reflect that the name of the NORC Center is NORC Center for Public Research, not Public Affairs.
Josh Boak and Linley Sanders, Associated Press
One of the stocks with the highest surges in premarket trading this morning is Beyond Meat, Inc. (Nasdaq: BYND). As of the time of this writing, shares in BYND are up a staggering 67% before the opening bell.
But whats driving this surge? Heres what you need to know.
Beyond Meats recent struggles
Todays premarket stock price jump follows a significant rally on Friday for Beyond Meat, the California-based producer of plant-based meat alternatives, whose shares closed up more than 24% to end the trading week at 64 cents per share, according to data from Yahoo Finance.
The stock price surge, which is now in its second trading day, may come as a surprise to many, considering that Beyond Meat is experiencing significant financial woes as of late.
As noted by Bloomberg, the company has seen a decline in interest in its plant-based products in recent years, with consumers being put off by high prices, the taste of the product, and its excessive processing.
Weakening demand for meat alternatives in the U.S. helped lead to a 19.6% decline in sales in Beyond Meats most recent quarter, Q2 2025. Beyond Meat reported $75 million in revenues during that quarter.
Earlier this year, Beyond Meat had attempted a brand pivot in hopes of returning to its former glory, as Fast Company reported.
More recently, however, the company announced that its creditors had agreed to a debt swap, in which the company will issue 316 million new sharesthereby diluting the value of its current shares.
This event contributed to a significant fall in the stock. As of Fridays closing price, BYND shares were down more than 82% for the year.
Beyond Meat shares surge in premarket trading
So why are BYND shares surging this morning?
Yahoo Finance points out that Fridays and todays share price surge is not due to any fundamental financial shifts in the company.
Instead, it is the result of a sudden spike in trading volume amid a classic short squeeze, where a heavily shorted stock experiences a sharp rise, forcing bearish investors to buy back shares to limit losses. As investors are forced into buying back the stock, its price rises.
Some retail traders on Reddit have been pumping up the stock, even though analyst ratings have largely turned negative. In the past, Beyond Meat has been cited as being among the so-called meme stocks that online traders rally behind, a list that has included Krispy Kreme, GoPro, and others this year.
Even with todays premarket stock price surge, BYND shares have performed poorly in 2025. In February, they were trading above $4.40 per share at one point. And even that 2025 share price high is dismal when you consider the company’s stock price going back further.
In 2019, shortly after Beyond Meat went public, its shares were trading north of $230 at one point. The stocks price has dropped massively since its IPO debut, leading to a decline of more than 98% as of Fridays close.
Earlier this month, it entered penny stock territory, hitting a low of around 50 cents a share.
The week is not off to a great start for much of the internet.
In the early hours of the morning Pacific time, internet users around the world began experiencing issues with accessing various apps, websites, and platforms. Shortly after, a culprit emerged: Amazon Web Services (AWS)or, more specifically, an outage at Amazons cloud computing platform.
Heres what you need to know about the AWS outage and what websites are affected.
Whats happened?
At around midnight Pacific time, internet users around the globe began experiencing issues accessing high-trafficked parts of the internet.
Websites like Reddit, services like Lyft, and even apps from restaurant chains like McDonalds seemed to be down or working intermittently.
The source of the problem was shortly found: AWS, Amazons cloud computing platform that hundreds of thousands of websites and services rely on, including Reddit, Netflix, Pinterest, Spotify, and more.
At 12:11 a.m. PDT, the AWS Health Dashboard posted its first notification about the problem, stating that the platform was investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.
By 12:51 a.m. PDT, AWS confirmed increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region, and by 1:26 a.m. PDT, AWS said it could confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region.
But though the problem seemed to be affecting only the endpoint located in one region of the United States, any website, app, or service that ran data through that endpoint could be affected by its outageno matter where in the world the end-user was located.
And that was bad news for users around the globe who were attempting to access some of the globes most highly trafficked sites and apps.
What websites went down?
Users around the world have reported troubles accessing dozens of websites, apps, and services, according to data compiled by DownDetector.
As of this writing, the DownDetector home page is showing that multiple websites and services that rely on AWS are being reported as down, including:
Amazon
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Prime Video
Apple Music
AT&T
Chime
Delta Air Lines
Epic Games Store
Fortnite
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Lyft
Max
McDonalds app
Reddit
Ring
Robinhood
Roblox
Roku
Playstation Network
Signal
Snapchat
Spectrum
Starbucks
Steam
Ubisoft Connect
Venmo
Xbox Network
Xfinity by Comcast
Zoom
This list above is not exhaustive. Users of many other websites, apps, and services have also reported additional outages, including on Coinbase and United Airlines. Its also worth noting that some report being able to access select sites and services, while others report no luck while attempting access.
What caused the AWS outage?
Amazon has not yet mentioned whether a specific cause has been identified. A spokesperson for AWS referred Fast Company to its status page, which is still being updated with new developments.
How long will the outage last?
Its unknown how long the AWS outage will last or for how long your favorite site or service will be down.
The last update on the AWS Health Dashboard, posted at 3:35 a.m. PDT and stated that the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, adding most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.
However, the same notice warned that Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.
In other words, if you still cant access your favorite site or platform, its best to try again in a little bit.
This story is developing . . .
