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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
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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.”
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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
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