Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney raised the prospect of reviving the contentious Keystone XL pipeline project with U.S. President Donald Trump during his White House visit this week, a government official familiar with the matter said Wednesday.
A Canadian company pulled the plug on it four years ago after the Canadian government failed to persuade then-President Joe Biden to reverse his cancellation of its permit on the day he took office. It was to transport crude from the oil sand fields of western Canada to Steele City, Nebraska.
Trump previously revived the long-delayed project during his first term after it had stalled under the Obama administration. It would have moved up to 830,000 barrels (35 million gallons) of crude daily, connecting in Nebraska to other pipelines that feed oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The Canadian government official said Trump was receptive to the idea when it was talked about during their White House meeting Wednesday. The official said Carney linked energy cooperation to Canadas steel and aluminum sectors, which are subject to 50% U.S. tariffs. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Carney mentioned building major projects and unleashing Canadian energy” in a live video call with business leaders in Toronto on Wednesday.
Biden canceled Keystone XL’s border crossing permit in 2021 over longstanding concerns that burning oil sands crude could make climate change worse and harder to reverse.
A spokesperson for South Bow Corp., the oil pipeline operator that owns the existing Keystone pipeline system, said they are not privy to the ongoing discussions between the Canadian and U.S. governments.
South Bow is supportive of efforts to find solutions that increase the transportation of Canadian crude oil. We will continue to explore opportunities that leverage our existing corridor with our customers and others in the industry, the spokesperson said in an email.
Carney is under pressure from the oil-rich province of Alberta to get a pipeline built.
Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said building a new pipeline to increase oil shipments to the U.S. Gulf Coast would be the cheapest, fastest, and least complicated route for a major oil pipeline.
Strategically, this would increase, not decrease our dependance on the US export market. But it would be a brilliant judo move to find common ground with the Trump Administration, and help him to realize that the US benefits from and needs its privileged relationship to Canada, and access to our resources, Kenney posted on social media.
Played smartly, Canadas cooperation could be strong leverage to push for reductions in Trump tariffs, he added.
Carney mentioned Wednesday in the call that tariffs on Canada’s aluminum exports are not wise, noting the country provides 60% of the aluminum the U.S. needs.
For the U.S. to produce that much aluminum, it would need the equivalent of the energy of 10 Hoover Dams, Carney said. Is making aluminum really the first best use of that power at a time when youve got the AI revolution, and youre reassuring manufacturing that you want to keep peoples electricity costs down at home.
Carney also reiterated that Canadas relationship with the U.S., which led to increasing integration over many years, has changed.
Our relationship will never again be what it was,” Carney said. We understand America first.
Rob Gillies, Associated Press
iPhone users have a new tool to combat the scourge of nuisance phone calls: a virtual gatekeeper that can screen incoming calls from unknown numbers.It’s among the bevy of new features that Apple rolled out with last month’s release of iOS 26. The screening feature has been getting attention because of the ever-increasing amount of robocalls and spam calls that leave many phone users feeling harassed.Here’s a run-through of the new function:
How to activate call screening
First, you’ll need to update your iPhone’s operating system to iOS 26, which is available to the iPhone 11 and newer models.To switch call screening on, go into SettingsAppsPhone. Scroll down and you’ll find a new option: Screen Unknown Callers.You’ll be presented with three choices. The Never option lets any unknown call ring through, while Silence sends all unidentified numbers directly to voicemail. What you want to tap is the middle option: Ask Reason for Calling.If the option isn’t there, try restarting your phone.I still couldn’t find it after updating to iOS 26, but, after some online sleuthing, I checked my region and language settings because I saw some online commenters reporting they had to match. It turns out my region was still set to Hong Kong, where I lived years ago. I switched it to the United Kingdom, which seemed to do the trick and gave me the updated menu.
How it works
Call screening introduces a layer between you and new callers.When someone who’s not in your contacts list dials your number, a Siri-style voice will ask them to give their name and the purpose of their call.At the same time, you’ll get a notification that the call is being screened. When the caller responds, the answers will be transcribed and the conversation will pop up in speech bubbles.
You can then answer the call.
Don’t want to answer? Send a reply by tapping one of the pre-written messages, such as “I’ll call you later” or “Send more information,” which the AI voice will read out to the caller.Or you can type out your own message for the computer-generated voice to read out.If you don’t respond right away, the phone will continue to ring while you decide what to do.
Teething troubles
In theory, call screening is a handy third way between the nuclear option of silencing all unknown callers including legitimate ones or letting them all through.But it doesn’t always work perfectly, according to Associated Press colleagues and anecdotal reports from social media users.One AP colleague said she was impressed with how seamlessly it worked. Another said it’s handy for screening out cold callers who found his number from marketing databases.“However, it’s not great when delivery drivers try to call me and then just hang up,” he added.Some internet users have similar complaints, complaining that important calls that they were expecting from their auto mechanic or plumber didn’t make it through. Perhaps the callers assumed it was an answering machine and didn’t seem to realize they had to stay on the line and interact with it.I encountered a different issue the first time it kicked in for me, when an unknown caller whether mistakenly or not threw me off by giving my name instead of theirs. So I answered because I assumed it was someone I knew, forgetting that I could tap out a reply asking them again for their name.The caller turned out to be someone who had obtained my name and number and was trying to get me to do a survey. I had to make my excuses and hang up.If you don’t like call screening, you can turn it off at any time.
As for Android
Apple is catching up with Google, which introduced a similar automatic call screening feature years ago for Pixel users in the United States.Last month, the company announced the feature is rolling out to users in three more countries: Australia, Canada and Ireland.If it’s not already on, go to your Phone app’s Settings and look for Call Screen.Google’s version is even more automated. When someone you don’t know calls, the phone will ask who it is and why they’re calling. It will hang up if it determines that it’s a junk call, but let calls it deems to be legit ring through.Google warns that not all spam calls and robocalls can be detected, nor will it always fully understand and transcribe what a caller says.Samsung, too, lets users of its Galaxy Android phones screen calls by using its AI assistant Bixby’s text call function, which works in a similar way.
Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip.
Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer
Americas advertising market has transformed so dramatically over the last decade that almost two-thirds of it is now in the hands of just five tech companies.
This week, MoffettNathanson released a report called “U.S. Advertising: Are We Near the AI Tipping Point?” which highlights, among other things, how generative AI is disrupting TV advertising as interest in traditional media continues to shift away.
The report suggests that the effects of AI have been prominent among some of the largest Big Tech companies, which have taken up incremental market share through improved targeting, engagement, and performant creative.
For instance, the findings point to how five major online companiesMeta Platforms, Amazon, Microsoft, Google owner Alphabet, and ByteDance-owned TikTokhave grown their share of the total U.S. ad market over the past 10 years.
According to the research, the five companies cumulatively made up 22% of the market nearly a decade ago.
However, MoffettNathanson predicts that those companies will make up 65% of the market this yearup 400 basis pointsor $260 billion dollars. The rest of the market is projected to decline by $7 billion to $143 billion.
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MoffettNathanson expects the total U.S. ad growth forecast for 2025 to be slightly above previous estimates at 6.3%, with growth continuing to be fueled by digital channels instead of traditional media.
The data also predicts that cable TV advertising will decline by 8%, while broadcast advertising revenue will decline by 9%, and total TV advertising revenue will drop by 9%.
Because of this, linear TV is expected to lose $4 billion of ad spending this year, with advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) taking back about $2 billion. Meanwhile, spendingwhich includes retailwill continue to flourish, adding nearly $32 billion to the U.S. ad market.
Kill your television, keep your phone?
Overall, the report and its findings speak to a growing trend that many in the industry have suspected for years now: linear TV is slowly dying, while avenues such as online video platforms like YouTube, and more affordable options like ad-supported streaming, are continuing to grow and expand especially among young consumers.
During the 2025-26 TV upfront season, the time when TV networks and streaming services preview their content and programming to advertisers to secure revenue, there was a major push for popular influencers and creators like MrBeast to lure advertising dollars away from traditional TV.
Other social- and mobile-friendly programming, like microdramas, have been gaining traction.
Spanish-language giant TelevisaUnivisions streaming platform ViX debuted microdramas during its TV upfront presentation, which resulted in successful streaming commitments for the company, and the format has also been gaining traction with competitors. Telemundo launched its own microdramas earlier this month.
For the first time in nearly half a century, the city of Detroit has a major new addition to its skyline. Hudson’s is a $1.4 billion ground-up downtown development of two buildings covering more than 1.5 million square feet, including residential, office, hotel, retail and event space.
It’s a large-scale argument that for all of the city’s troublesfrom its precipitous population decline to its high poverty levels to its rock bottom 2013 municipal bankruptcythe city has brighter days ahead.
This assertion comes from Bedrock, the real estate arm of billionaire Dan Gilbert, who has almost single handedly breathed life into the city’s downtown core through a decade and a half of strategic building renovations, adaptations, and historic restorations that have brought both jobs and residents back. Today there are nearly 6,000 residents in the core of downtown Detroit, up from about 4,400 in early 2019. The Hudson’s project is by far the most sizable of these efforts.
The project’s 49-story hotel and condo tower, now the second tallest building in the city, features a stepped form and bright lighting along its five glassy rectangular sections. At its base is a pedestrianized mid-block alley that Bedrock is turning into a public civic space. And next door is a stout 12-story mixed use building with ground floor retail, an events and exhibitions center, a top floor restaurant, and seven floors of office space. As a sign of the project’s early success and impact downtown, local auto giant General Motors signed on to turn four of the office floors into its new global headquarters.
The project was designed by the architecture firm SHoP Architects. It’s been in the works since October 2013, just months after Detroit declared the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, but it is built on the site of another deep scar on the city.
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
A hole in the heart of the city
The project is named after J.L. Hudson’s, the famed hometown department store that grew to become a touchstone space for generations of Detroiters. Once the second largest department store in the world, Hudson’s filled an entire city block along Woodward Avenue, the city’s central spine, and rose 25 stories tall. It was known as much for hosting the city’s Thanksgiving parade as for selling school clothes and wedding dresses.
“As a kid growing up here, Hudson’s was magic,” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan tells Fast Company. “You went down there at Christmas. You went and saw Santa Claus on the 11th floor. Everybody in southeastern Michigan has such powerful memories of it.”
The Hudson’s building (large structure on the left), ca. 1998. [Photo: Vergara, Camilo J./United States Library of Congress]
But after more than 100 years in business, the store’s fates followed those of the city’s and it closed in 1983. It was imploded in 1998 on live television. Newscasters covering the event from several blocks away were, like the rest of the city’s downtown, coated with the dust of Hudson’s former glory.
“It left a literal and figurative hole in the heart of the city,” says Jared Fleisher, president of Bedrock. “For Dan, the Hudson’s Detroit was both a symbolic and a substantive exercise. Symbolic in the sense of honoring that history and recreating something that would have the same kind of significance in the cultural and historical fabric of the city, but then substantive to actually drive economic progress in the city.”
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
Four years of design
Designing aproject to meet those goals took time. Bill Sharples, one of the founding principals of SHoP Architects, says his firm spent about three months developing an initial design concept and getting a model in front of Gilbert, back in early 2014. “About a month later we heard, well, the model got broken,” Sharples says. “He wasn’t excited about it. And from there, that’s where it got interesting.”
The project shape-shifted. Several times. There was a swooping and metallic version of the podium that got leaked to the press in 2015, then a more carved up approach, and gradually more rectilinear takes. There were four different versions of the tower part of the project, with each poking out from a big, bulky base building spreading across the entire site.
Sharples says his design team began to think about the project not as one big behemoth, but as a project trying to appease two wildly different scales. “We started to think about how does this building impact the skyline and how does this impact the urban fabric of Woodward,” he says. “That’s when we split it into two separate buildings.” The design gelled in the spring of 2017, and the project broke ground later that year.
After nearly eight years of constructionand one global pandemicthe two buildings are now substantially complete. The 12-story offices-and-more block building will have its first office tenants move in later this year and its retail and events spaces are already operating. The tower’s exterior is complete, and the interior is now being built out to house an Edition hotel on the lower part of the tower and Edition-branded condos on the top. Both are expected to open in 2027. The public alley space between the buildings will officially open in October.
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
A love letter to Detroit architecture
Walking along the front side of the Hudson’s office building earlier this month, Bedrock vice president of architecture and design James Witherspoon points to some of the facade treatments on the block building that, Bedrock hopes, will make it blend into its surroundings while also reminding people of the original Hudson’s building. “It was important that it was a building that felt of Detroit, and not something that just landed here,” Witherspoon says.
The building includes visual references to the department store’s terra cotta facade, but also to other significant buildings in the area, including the interiors of the Guardian Building, a national historic landmark, and the modernist office tower One Woodward, designed by Minoru Yamasaki. Walking into the block building, where workers are still putting finishing touches on the main lobby and the offices, some of these references can be seen obliquely through the windows and others pop out throughout the interior.
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
Inside the event space, past a small reception area and coat check, are three escalators framed by a black and gold tunnel meant to evoke the historic main stairs into the Hudson’s department store. They lead to what’s been dubbed the Department, two floors of flexible meeting and exhibition venue with room for up to 2,000 people. The main floor covers 33,000 square feet that can host conventions or be subdivided down for smaller events like weddings.
One corner features a covered outdoor patio that overlooks the new civic space running between this building and the tower part of the project, and nearly the entire frontage overlooking Woodward Avenue has a narrow terrace offering views up and down the corridor (and, not accidentally, front row seats for the Thanksgiving parade that still takes place on the street every year).
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
The floor above has another 19,000 square feet of meeting and event space, broken down into nine rooms sized for groups of up to 150 people. Each has a cleverly connected access point to a service space where an event’s drinks or food service can be brought directly from the back-of-house kitchen area.
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
The rest of the 12-story building is office space. Filling nearly the entire block, it is a deep building, which the architects addressed by creating a large central atrium inside topped by a massive oval skylight. On the fifth floor, this pours light into a large amenity space, with communal seating, a cafe, planters with mature trees. It’s also where tenants access the building’s other amenities, including a gym, a lounge, and an indoor pickleball court. This space also doubles as an event area, hosting all-hands meetings, for example. Oval-ish walkways wrap around the atrium on each floor leading to the top of the building, which will soon house a restaurant.
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
Moving past stacks of building materials and workers installing seats and planters on the amenity floor of the office section of the block building, Witherspoon notes that the project was already well underway when the pandemic changed the calculus around how much office space makes sense in a city. Because it has a relatively modest amount of office spaceseven floors, not 70Bedrock didn’t make any significant changes to the overall program. But the company did refocus on the amenity spaces that would serve office tenants, and lure big companies. “We imagined it to be a headquarters,” Witherspoon says.
[Photo: courtesy Bedrock]
GM’s new HQ
Others did, too. In April 2024, General Motors announced it would be moving its global headquarters into the Hudson’s office building, taking the top four office floors. There are already plans for GM to use part of the lower section of the building to create displays of its newest vehicles. Maybe not coincidentally, an oversized car elevator was designed into the project from its earliest days.
“There was always the idea that if you’re building an events space in Detroit, you’d better be able to accommodate cars,” says Witherspoon, smiling.
GM’s move is a resounding endorsement for Bedrock’s vision for this project, but it’s also a death knell for GM’s current headquarters, the beleaguered Renaissance Center office and hotel complex. Located a few not very easily accessible blocks away, the Renaissance Center was originally built in the 1970s by the Ford Motor Company and is now owned by General Motors, which has seen tenancy in its six towers evaporate in the years since the onset of the pandemic.
By abandoning its own building and joining what commercial real estate experts call a flight to quality, GM has essentially numbered the days for the Renaissance Center. It’s now working with Bedrock on a plan to partially demolish the complex.
Sharples says the Hudson’s project was designed to offer a new model, and a new center of gravity for the city. “[The Renaissance Center] was built as a fortress. You come in, do your business, and leave Detroit,” he says. “Here we were working with something that was completely the opposite. It was about reinvigorating the city center.”
That goal may not translate to an easy return on Bedrock’s $1.4 billion investment, nor on the $60 million tax abatement the city approved for the project in 2022.
Whether it’s a slow success or an expensive loss leader for Bedrock’s development aims remains to be seen. Witherspoon says that one of Gilbert’s guiding principles for the company is to be “for more than profit,” and the Hudson’s project fits that mold. “For Dan, a lot of the work Bedrock has done for the last 15 years is acting as a catalyst for economic activity in this part of town that had stalled out,” he says. “He’s been the biggest cheerleader, the biggest optimist for the opportunity here, and this building is representative of that.”
Duggan, who was first elected the city’s mayor in November 2013 when the project was just getting started, sees more of a spiritual impact for a city that’s had more than its share of heartbreak. “To see Dan bring it back the way he’s done it, to bring General Motors headquarters there, to see the second tallest building in Michigan going up on that site . . . it means a lot to me,” he says. “It means a lot to every longtime Detroiter.”
Novo Nordisk said on Thursday it would buy U.S.-based Akero Therapeutics for up to $5.2 billion to add its promising experimental liver disease drug, in the first major deal by the Danish drugmaker’s new CEO to boost growth.
The deal underscores new Novo Nordisk CEO Mike Doustdar’s efforts to revive sales growth and fend off intense competition from U.S. rival Eli Lilly. Doustdar, who took over the reins in July, last month also announced the company would cut 9,000 jobs.
Akero is testing its drug, efruxifermin, in a late-stage trial of patients with severe liver scarring, or cirrhosis, due to a type of fatty liver disease known as metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH).
Efruxifermin could be a potential breakthrough in treatment of fatty liver disease and become a “cornerstone” treatment either on its own or in combination with Wegovy, Doustdar said in a statement on Thursday.
Under the deal, Novo would pay Akero shareholders $54 per share upfront in cash, which represents a premium of about 16.2% to Akero’s last close of $46.49 on Wednesday.
The Danish drugmaker will also pay an additional $6 per share to Akero’s shareholders if efruxifermin secures a full U.S. approval for the condition by June 30, 2031, the companies said.
Shares of Akero jumped more than 19% in premarket trading, while Novo’s Denmark-listed shares were down nearly 2%.
Some Novo investors have recently told Reuters that they want to see the company invest heavily in research and development to build out its future drug pipeline and revive investor confidence with a growth story. Some have also said they would prefer the company diversify beyond weight loss and diabetes.
Doustdar has said the company will focus on developing the next generation of highly effective obesity and diabetes drugs that can also treat related cardiometabolic conditions such as MASH, rather than expand into other disease areas.
Anna Ringstrom, Mariam Sunny and Maggie Fick, Reuters
Most members of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting committee supported further reductions to its key interest rate this year, according to minutes from last month’s meeting released Wednesday.A majority of Fed officials felt that the risk unemployment would rise had worsened since their previous meeting in July, while the risk of rising inflation “had either diminished or not increased,” the minutes said. As a result, the central bank decided at its Sept. 16-17 meeting to reduce its key rate by a quarter-point to about 4.1%, its first cut this year.Rate cuts by the Fed can gradually lower borrowing costs for things like mortgages, auto loans, and business loans, encouraging more spending and hiring.Still, the minutes underscored the deep division on the 19-person committee between those who feel that the Fed’s short-term rate is too high and weighing on the economy, and those who point to persistent inflation that remains above the central bank’s 2% target as evidence that the Fed needs to be cautious about reducing rates.Only one official formally dissented from the quarter-point cut: Stephen Miran, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and was approved by the Senate just hours before the meeting began. He supported a larger, half-point cut instead.But the minutes noted that “a few” policymakers said they could have supported keeping rates unchanged, or said that “there was merit” in such a step.The differences help explain Chair Jerome Powell’s statements during the news conference that followed the meeting: “There are no risk-free paths now. It’s not incredibly obvious what to do.”Miran said in remarks Tuesday that he thinks inflation will steadily decline back toward the Fed’s 2% target, despite Trump’s tariffs, and as a result he doesn’t think the Fed’s rate needs to be nearly as high as it is. Rental costs are steadily declining and will bring down inflation, he said, while tariff revenue will reduce the government’s budget deficit and reduce longer-term interest rates, which gives the Fed more room to cut.Yet many other Fed officials remain concerned about stubbornly high inflation, the minutes showed. Jeffrey Schmid, president of the Federal Reserve’s Kansas City branch, said in a speech Monday that “inflation is too high” and argued that the Fed should keep rates high enough to cool demand and prevent inflation from worsening.And Austan Goolsbee, president of the Fed’s Chicago branch, said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press that he supported a cautious approach toward more cuts, and wanted to see evidence that inflation would cool further.“I am a little uneasy with front loading rate cuts, presuming that those upticks in inflation will just go away,” he said.The minutes provide insight into how the Fed’s policymakers were thinking last month about inflation, interest rates, and hiring. Since then, however, the federal government shutdown has cut off the flow of economic data that the Fed relies on to inform its decisions. The September jobs report wasn’t issued as scheduled last Friday, and if the shutdown continues, it could also delay the release of the inflation report set for next Wednesday.
Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
For its first brand refresh in 13 years, Domino’s updated its color palette, packaging, and font to look more engaging. When it came to making new tagline, though, the Michigan-based pizza chain is trying something unique: they just added more Ms to their wordmark. Mmm.
Domino’s announced a rebrand Wednesday that includes brighter reds and blues and a new font called Domino’s Sans that was designed to “be thicker and doughier” and proves that using sans serifs doesn’t have to be bland. Team members will get new branded gear to wear in the kitchen and out delivering orders, and there’s a reimagined suite of new pizza boxes, including one black-and-metallic-gold box designed for premium menu items, like Domino’s Handmade Pans, to better upsell pricier pizzas.
[Image: Domino’s]
It’s a brand refresh optimized for craveability, like recent rebrands for Burger King and Papa Johns that used squishy type and color palettes chosen to convey freshness and ingredients. This is graphic design meant to look delicious and make you hungry.
For its new taglinewhich Domino’s is calling it its “cravemark”they tapped Shaboozey, who draws out the “m” sound when saying “dominos” in campaign ads (like “dommmino’s,” get it?). On screen, the musician’s jingle is visually reinforced with an animation that adds the extra Ms to the Domino’s wordmark before the letters snap into the Domino’s domino logo.
“Rather than launching a more traditional tagline, we’re baking craveability right into our name and every aspect of our brand as a reminder of this relentless focus,” Domino’s executive vice president Kate Trumbull said in a statement. “You literally can’t say ‘Domino’s’ without saying ‘mmm.'”
The cravemark is a wordmark, tagline, and jingle all rolled up into one, and judging by who the company got to sing it, Domino’s has big ambitions for its new brand asset. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” tied the record for the longest-running No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 chart history last November, and he was the only artist to be featured on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter twice. In a statement, he called pizza “that one food that brings everyone together” across generations and cultures. Domino’s is aiming for an asset with wide appeal and recognition.
Domino’s is the leading U.S. pizza chain by revenue, bringing in $4.78 billion annually, ahead of Papa John’s, Yum! Brands-owned Pizza Hut, and Little Caesars. Same as its competitors, though, Domino’s has also seen its year-over-year same-store sales plummet since the pandemic as fewer people seek out delivery options. Like Peloton or Zoom, delivery pizza brands are pandemic darlings that are readjusting to new norms. Pizza has been hit especially hard by inflation, with median restaurant meal prices rising 12% for pizza, more than any other food category, according to data from Datassential.
[Image: Domino’s]
Other pizza chains have responded to shifting quick-service restaurant trends with redesigns of their own, like Papa Johns, which introduced a food-inspired brand refresh last year, and Pizza Hut, which is experimenting with its own new store concepts and premium menu items at home and a new, fun, retro logo abroad. Trumbull, the Domino’s executive, denies that their brand refresh is due to the company struggling, but it does have something to do with repositioning the brand.
“Over the past decade, we became known as a technology company that happens to sell pizza,” she said. The pizza chain remembered for its pizza tracker and website would like to start being remembered for “making and delivering the most delicious products and experience,” as Trumbull put it. Though the brand refresh will show up in digital advertising and on Domino’s app and website, the impetus behind it is human.
With no end in sight to the political impasse in Washington that has shut down the government, the U.S. IPO market is expected to experience a significant slowdown just as it was beginning to show signs of life again.
Some companies are nevertheless forging ahead with their listings.
Phoenix Education Partners, parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix, which announced its IPO plans one day before the shutdown began, said on Wednesday that it has priced its shares at $32. That’s the midpoint of its earlier targeted range of between $31 and $33 a share.
The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the “PXED” ticker symbol. Selling shareholders will offer roughly 4.3 million shares of its common stock, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, BMO Capital Markets, and Jefferies serving as lead book runners.
At its offering price, Phoenix Education has a valuation of roughly $1.14 billion, Bloomberg reported.
“An attractive and growing sub-segment”
University of Phoenix is almost 50 years old and has been accredited since 1978, according to a company prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The school is geared toward online adult education, with most of its students already in the workforce and seeking to advance their careers in some way.
“Adult learners represent an attractive and growing sub-segment of the higher education market,” Phoenix Education writes in its prospectus. “However, they face unique challenges that are not addressed by traditional programs designed for 18- to 22-year-olds, including the time constraints and responsibilities of work, community and caring for dependents.”
The school says it had an average total enrollment of 82,700 degree-seeking students as of the first nine months of this fiscal year. Roughly 70% of its students are seeking bachelor’s degrees, with business and IT being its most popular areas of study, followed by healthcare and behavioral and social sciences.
Is University of Phoenix profitable?
Unlike some of the high-profile tech startups that have gone public this year, University of Phoenix is already profitable.
Last year, it generated net income of $115 million on revenue of $950 million, according to its SEC filings, up from net income of $52 million on revenue of $801 million in 2022.
What else is there to know?
Phoenix Education is backed by Apollo Global Management and investment firm Vistria Group, with the former being a majority shareholder. The company is expected to list its shares today (October 9, 2025) at some point after the opening bell.
The IRS will furlough nearly half of its workforce on Wednesday as part of the ongoing government shutdown, according to an updated contingency plan posted to its website. Most IRS operations are closed, the agency said in a separate letter to its workers.The news comes after President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to fund federal operations, and the government shutdown has entered its second week, with no discernible endgame in sight.The agency’s initial Lapsed Appropriations Contingency Plan, which provided for the first five business days of operations, stated that the department would remain open using Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act funds.Now, only 39,870 employees, or 53.6%, will remain working as the shutdown continues. It is unclear which workers will remain on the job.Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement that taxpayers should expect increased wait times, backlogs and delays implementing tax law changes as the shutdown continues.“Taxpayers around the country will now have a much harder time getting the assistance they need, just as they get ready to file their extension returns due next week,” she said. “Every day these employees are locked out of work is another day of frustration for taxpayers and a growing backlog of work that sits and waits for the shutdown to end.”She urged the Trump administration and Congress to “reach an agreement that reopens government and restores the services that Americans need and deserve.”The notice to workers states that furloughed workers and those who remain on the job will receive back pay once the shutdown ends. This is notable since the Republican administration on Tuesday warned of no guaranteed back pay for federal workers affected by a government shutdown.Last week, Trump said roughly 750,000 federal workers nationwide were expected to be furloughed across agencies, with some potentially fired by his administration.Representatives from the IRS, the Treasury and the White House did not comment on the furlough plans.Earlier this year the IRS embarked on mass layoffs, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, affecting tens of thousands of workers. At the end of 2024, the agency employed roughly 100,000 workers and currently that hovers around 75,000.
Fatima Hussein, Associated Press
Creativity has always been governed by timenot just how long it takes to bring an idea to life, but how long a creator can stay in flow. Every designer knows the frustration of an idea hanging in digital limbo. But those pauses, once accepted as inevitable, are now starting to vanish.
Figma, the cloud-based interface design tool, and Google Cloud, the computing and storage platform, have announced the integration of Googles Gemini 2.5 Flash directly into Figmas design platform. The collaboration aims to let designers generate visuals and make edits almost instantly, eliminating the lag between an idea and its execution.
For users, that means faster collaboration, smoother iteration, and a more natural creative flow.The economic significance of latency in AI is far greater than just speedits about changing the commercial viability and product experience for every application built on a generative model, says Matt Renner, president of global revenue at Google Cloud. Lower latency, in turn, decreases computational and financial expenses, allowing the AI tools to become more scalable and efficient for high-volume tasks, he added. Gemini 2.5 Flash (also known as Nano Banana”) rose to prominence for its ability to merge multiple images, keep characters consistent across edits, and generate a wide range of styles, from lifelike portraits to classic art, in mere seconds.
Google claims that in early integrations of Gemini 2.5 Flash, Figma users saw a 50% reduction in latency for the platforms Make Image feature, unlocking faster image generation capabilities for its users.In Figma, every second AI can return to the user, whether its time saved renaming layers, editing images or even generating multiple images at the same time, frees them up to focus on the kind of higher-level problem solving and deep iteration thats at the root of all great design, says Abhishek Mathur, vice president of platform engineering at Figma. The partnership signals a deeper strategic shift for Google Cloud. Rather than competing for user attention, the company aims to embed its AI models, including Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.0, and Imagen 4, directly into third-party creative ecosystems like Figma to make Gemini an unseen accelerant that enhances existing tools instead of forcing users to switch platforms.Our focus is on helping users go from idea to production, and we see AI as core to how this workflow will evolve moving forward, Mathur adds.
Googles ecosystem strategy to scale Gemini
Over the past year, Google has woven Gemini into a broad range of partner products, from workspace tools to data analytics suites, positioning the speed and security of its AI models and ease of integration as its defining edge. Salesforce has integrated Gemini into its Agentforce platform to power AI agents across Google Cloud and Salesforce environments. Oracle now supports Gemini models on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enabling enterprises to build multimodal AI agents that can process text, images, motion, and audio data. Googles underlying bet is simple: If AI feels secure and frictionless, widespread adoption will feel inevitable.Released in June, Gemini 2.5 Flash is known for generating high-quality visuals quickly and affordably (one-third the price of Gemini Pro). The model can deliver its first reply in under half a second, making it ideal for fast-moving creative apps, chatbots, or customer support systems. Moreover, the latest Gemini 2.5 Flash updates have improved its accuracy in following instructions, made responses more concise, and boosted speed by up to 40%, making it one of the fastest, most efficient AI models available.Experts caution, however, that faster performance alone may not be enough for Figma to win over creative professionals.Drops in latency will certainly encourage tool usage and support the kind of cross-discipline collaboration Figma has been building toward for years, says AJ Joplin, senior analyst at Forrester, who focuses on experience design, design organizations, and design leadership. But taste still matters. The efficiencies gained from generative tools can quickly disappear if teams dont pair that time saved with the ability to critically assess what the AI produces.
The AI design race is heating up
The Google-Figma partnership comes amid an escalating AI-design race. Adobe has integrated AI models from Google Cloud, OpenAI, and others like fal.ai, Ideogram, Luma, Pika, and Runway to power its Firefly platform and Sensei AI features, including generative fill, AI video editing, 3D design, and smart stock tools. And Canva has become an AI-first platform.Announced at OpenAIs Developer Day on Oct. 6, Canva is now a pilot partner for ChatGPT app integration, allowing users to create and edit designs directly within ChatGPT. The move aims to bring visual design tools to the chatbots 800 million weekly users.If Gemini 2.5 Flash delivers on its promise, the future of design wont just be more intelligent; it will feel instantaneous. And in the new economy of creativity, that sense of speed may prove to be the ultimate edge.
