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Trade Wars
Halloween Spending to Reach Record $13.1 Billion
Halloween spending is expected to reach a record $13.1 billion this year, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual consumer survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics. The figure is up from $11.6 billion last year and exceeds the previous $12.2 billion record set in 2023. Most Halloween shoppers (79%) anticipate prices will be higher this year specifically because of tariffs. Despite these reservations, nearly three-quarters of consumers (73%) plan to celebrate the holiday, in line with last year’s 72%.
Candy continues to be the most popular purchase, with total spending expected to reach $3.9 billion. Across other categories, 71% plan to purchase costumes and spending is expected to reach $4.3 billion. Another 78% plan to purchase decorations, up from 75% last year, and will spend an estimated $4.2 billion in total. And 38% plan to purchase greeting cards, an increase from 2024’s 33%, with total spending estimated at $0.7 billion.
Read more at Material Handling & Logistics
Space Force Approaches Industry For Space Situational Awareness, Battle Management, And Cyber Security
U.S. Space Force battle-management experts are reaching out to industry for new ways to control space to protect U.S. and allied forces from enemy space and cyber attacks. Officials of the U.S. Space Systems Command in El Segundo, Calif., issued a broad agency announcement (FA8819-24-R-B003) on Tuesday asking industry for space and cyber technologies to counter emerging space threats. Space Force will explore pathfinders to test assumptions, validate answers, and potentially field ad-hoc solutions. The intent is to gain a better understanding of requirements for improved space situational awareness and cyber security, while addressing the need for integrated space and cyber solutions.
This project has five areas of interest: resiliency technologies and techniques that increase survivability of space systems; Improvements to space domain awareness that enhance the knowledge of space objects, status, activities, threats, and environment to enable courses of action; using space for defensive and offensive counter-space to protect friendly space-related capabilities from attack; efficiencies that promote space battle management command control and communications (BMC3); and methods for advancing exercises, tests, and training environment.
Read more at Military Aerospace Electronics
Pfizer Boosts Obesity Drug Prospects With $7.3 Billion Deal To Buy Metsera
Pfizer said it would acquire weight loss biotech Metsera in a deal valued at up to $7.3 billion, including future payments, as it scrambles to win a slice in the booming obesity drug market. The move comes after a string of setbacks for Pfizer on the obesity front, including a decision to scrap its own lead obesity pill in April due to safety concerns. Metsera, founded in 2022, brings a pipeline of both oral and injectable treatments with different targets that the company had picked up through its own licensing and acquisition deals.
The move comes after a string of setbacks for Pfizer in the obseity space. The pharmaceutical giant struggled to develop its own lead obesity drug candidate, danuglipron, before deciding to scrap it entirely in April due to safety concerns. Pfizer also discontinued a different once-daily pill in June 2023 due to elevated liver enzymes in patients who received it. The opportunity could be huge. Some analysts expect the weight loss drug space could be worth roughly $100 billion by the 2030s, with room for new rivals to compete with popular injections from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk
Read more at CNBC
RTX Raytheon Gets $1.7B For LTAMDS Production
The U.S. Army has awarded RTX Corp. a $1.7 billion contract for the low-rate initial production of the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense System (LTAMDS), marking a significant step in advanced missile defense. LTAMDS, also known as GhostEye, will replace the Patriot missile radar, providing 360-degree detection and tracking with twice the power and enhanced efficiency using Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology.
LTAMDS can track, classify, and engage multiple threats from any direction, offering long-range detection and large-sector sensing to improve battlefield defense. The LTAMDS primary array is roughly the same size as the Patriot radar array, but provides more than twice Patriot's performance. While it is designed for the U.S. Army's Integrated Air and Missile Defense system, LTAMDS also will be able to preserve previous Patriot investments.
Read more at Military Aerospace Electronics
Top 10 OSHA Violations of 2025
Every year, OSHA releases their findings of the top 10 most frequently cited violations, and for the third year in a year, it’s the exact same violations on the list. While the rankings within the Top 10 shifted slightly over the past year, the same group of violations that made the 2024 list, and the 2023 list, appear again on the 2025 list. The number one violation, as it has been for many years, is again Fall Protection—General Requirements.
“While progress has been made, the consistency in citation rankings year after year signals that yesterday’s hazards are still today’s vulnerabilities,” pointed out Lorraine Martin, CEO of the National Safety Council. Martin’s remarks were made at the 2025 NSC Safety Congress & Expo in Denver, Colo. “Employers, safety professionals and communities must intensify efforts through robust training, regular hazard assessments and leadership accountability to protect workers and save lives.”
Read more at EHS Today
GE and UAW Reach Deal, End Strike
GE Aerospace and its United Auto Workers union employees at two plants in the Cincinnati region, at Evendale, Ohio, and Erlanger, Ken., have reached a new five-year labor agreement to end a three-week strike. The new contract is backdated several days to September 15, and runs through September 15, 2030. As described by the UAW the agreement includes 3-5% wage increases through 2029 and nearly $3,500 per employee in cash payments, to offset rising healthcare costs. It also provides “minimum workforce” guarantees, as a hedge against job cuts, and additional personal time allowances and vacation time, the UAW reported.
GE Aerospace operates more than 40 locations in the U.S., and more than 80 worldwide. The company manufactures turbofan, turbojet, turboprop, and turbofan engines installed in commercial, military, and business aircraft; industrial gas engines, and marine engines. It also produces a wide variety of component parts for those engines. The Evendale plant manufactures commercial, military, and business jet engine components, including ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) for high-temperature engine components.
Read more at American Machinist
Nvidia to Invest Up to $100 Billion in OpenAI
Nvidia and OpenAI, two U.S. giants powering America’s race for AI superintelligence, announced an expansive partnership Monday, including plans for a massive data center buildout and a $100 billion investment by the chip maker into the startup. The deal announced Monday will allow OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for its artificial intelligence data centers to train and run its next generation of models. That amount of electricity is roughly comparable to what is produced by more than four Hoover Dams or the power consumed by eight million homes.
The partnership is significant because of the scope and size of the investment in running AI models in the hope of creating superintelligence. The partnership is a bet on continued model improvements, essentially that investments of hundreds of billions of dollars from investors, companies, governments and Wall Street financiers will create AI models capable of profoundly transforming economies and society. It envisions a future economy reliant on far more computing power than is available today.
Read more at CNBC
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