TheChek News Flow

Illness has sickened over 480 people in the state since late January

A second child who was diagnosed with measles has died in Texas, marking another death in a growing measles outbreak that has so far sickened hundreds of people, hospitalized dozens and spread to nearby states.

The school-age child was being treated for measles-related complications at UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, a spokesman for the health system said in a written statement to The Wall Street Journal. The child, who died within the past few days, wasn’t vaccinated and didn’t have any known underlying health conditions, according to the spokesman, Aaron Davis.

“This unfortunate event underscores the importance of vaccination,” Davis said.

Another child in Texas died in February, marking the first measles-related death in the U.S. in a decade. Officials in New Mexico are also investigating the death of an unvaccinated Lea County resident who tested positive for measles.

More than 480 people have been sickened with measles in Texas since the outbreak began in late January, a growing tally as local public-health officials urge residents to vaccinate themselves and their children.

At least 54 people in New Mexico have tested positive for measles. The state’s health department said it believes the cases are related to the Texas outbreak. Oklahoma reported 10 cases linked to the outbreak. And Kansas health-department officials said there is a possible link between about two dozen measles cases there and the Texas outbreak.

The denim brand said it directly produces and distributes $200 million worth of goods that would be subject to higher U.S. tariffs.

Guess Inc. is evolving, through the tariff storm and more.

The denim brand’s fourth quarter came in stronger than analysts forecast and the company laid out a series of initiatives to reorient operations — from shuttering 20 North American stores to looking for a partner to take on its business in China.

Fourth-quarter revenues increased 5 percent to $932 million while adjusted earnings per share fell 26.4 percent to $1.48, but were still better than the $1.37 analysts forecast, according to FactSet.

But there’s plenty more change and potential change on the horizon.

Guess said a special committee of its board has retained investment bank Solomon Partners and law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher as it evaluated a buyout offer from brand management company WHP Global.

Last month, WHP offered to pay $13 a share to investors other than cofounders Paul and Maurice Marciano and chief executive officer Carlos Alberini. That sets up a scenario where WHP would own the intellectual property while the Marcianos and Alberini take on the operating portion of the company, a source told WWD.

But no matter who owns the business, Guess is going to have to figure out how to operate in a world with higher duties.

Guess forecast sales would rise 3.9 percent to 6.2 percent this year, but that projection didn’t account for any impact from President Donald Trump’s towering “Liberation Day” tariffs set to reorder the global sourcing landscape.

On a call with analysts, Alberini painted a picture of a company that is well-balanced and ready to push ahead.

“We operate a very diversified business model geographically,” Alberini told analysts on the call. “Roughly 75 percent of our business is conducted outside of the U.S. and therefore, not subject to increased tariffs.

“With respect to the remaining 25 percent, our estimate of the cost of the products that we directly produce and distribute in the U.S. is roughly $200 million,” he said. “About one-third of this total relates to Rag & Bone, which attracts a more affluent customer, which gives us greater flexibility and pricing power. The remaining two-thirds of that relates to the gift business in the U.S., where we have a substantial outlet business.

“Based on the nature of the products that we carry in our outlet assortment, we feel there are significant opportunities to counter source these products in markets, especially in Latin America, where the tariffs announced tend to be more moderate,” he said.

Guess would ultimately feel the pinch no matter who is making the goods and bringing them in as any price increase will ripple up to the company one way or another.

In addition to changing up where it makes products, Guess is looking to change where it directly sells goods.

Alberini said the company’s business in Greater China would lose about $20 million this year.

“In spite of how challenging this market has been for us over the years, we continue to believe that there is an opportunity for the Guess brand in Greater China as our brand awareness is high, and the market is very large and compelling,” he said. “We plan to turn this business over to a third party to run it. We have already met several potential candidates for consideration. We expect for this transition to be completed before the end of this year, which should contribute to a significant improvement in our profitability in fiscal year 2027 and beyond.”

- "The prime minister and president also shared their concerns about the global economic and security impact, particularly in Southeast Asia."

- French Pres Macron: "A trade war is in no one’s interest. We must stand united and resolute to protect our citizens and our businesses"

Well, look at that: We’ve broken ChatGPT.

A full week after OpenAI debuted an improved version of the bot with better image-making abilities, the tool has experienced a gigantic surge in demand and has at times been totally unavailable to use. (Sigh. I still haven’t gotten the darn thing to finish generating mocked-up images to inspire my slow-moving bedroom renovation. Sam—a little help, please!)

Now, if I could draw our attention away from all the Ghibli memes, another startup has also debuted a shiny new AI, and it points to the direction competition in the industry is heading in.

That spiffy AI belongs to Runway, a New York–based startup focused on generative video AI. It released a new version of its video-editing tool that makes it easier to construct longer, more sophisticated clips. A few days later, Runway formally announced what was a poorly kept secret: It had secured a gigantic new chunk of funding from General Atlantic and other investors, reportedly valuing it at $3 billion. And it publicly highlighted a new part of its operations that we spotlighted in a recent Big Read on Runway: The startup will begin financing filmmakers, hoping to deepen connections it has made in Hollywood.

Runway’s AI is rather obviously a significant step forward from what it offered before, and it seems pretty inevitable that OpenAI will shift to concentrating on videos in earnest given Runway’s very public advancements. (In December, OpenAI released its first version of its video-editing tool, Sora.) Runway hopes to capture a different market than OpenAI’s. It wants its tools used by professionals, while OpenAI targets a more general mass market. When Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela described the strategy in an interview for our earlier Big Read, I found myself nodding along: Yeah, they want to be the Adobe of AI—got it.

It seems like he’d have real room to maneuver away from OpenAI and establish his own territorial claim. Yet as this week has proven again, no AI company has proven to be better at capturing everyone’s attention than OpenAI, and I suspect it’s just a matter of time before OpenAI sets out to really squash the competition in video. (I wonder if concerns about that explain why Runway didn’t get the $4 billion valuation it initially wanted from its latest fundraising.) We’ll know that moment has fully arrived when Sora breaks down in public, too.—Abram Brown

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to host a hackathon next week focused on the creation of a “mega API” that will provide access to taxpayer data, according to Wired.

Wired says the hackathon is being organized by two DOGE staffers at the Internal Revenue Service — Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, who’s also CEO at healthtech startup Levels. Corcos has reportedly been telling others at DOGE that his goal is to build “one new API to rule them all.”

This would make it easy for cloud providers to access IRS data including taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment information, which could all be exported to external systems. According to Wired, a third-party party vendor would manage parts of the project, with Palantir “consistently” brought up as a candidate.

“It’s basically an open door controlled by Musk for all Americans’ most sensitive information with none of the rules that normally secure that data,” an anonymous IRS worker reportedly told Wired.

The health-conscious elite are flocking to high-end clinics in the hopes of getting ahead of the aging process

For up to six figures a year, longevity clinics promise to buy their patrons longer, healthier lives. For now, they’re conferring something maybe just as valuable: status.

Plenty of people are deciding the hefty fees are worth it. High-end medical clinics aimed at optimizing their clients’ health for years to come are proliferating, as demand for their often-experimental treatments grows. A few hundred such clinics now operate in the U.S., longevity doctors and market researchers estimate. Most of them are in affluent areas in California, New York and Florida, according to research and media company Longevity.Technology.

Longevity clinics can charge hundreds to thousands of dollars for à la carte services such as biological age-testing, preventive body scans or plasma exchange and, at the highest end, $100,000 or more for annual memberships. At $250,000 a year, for instance, Extension Health in downtown New York now offers top-paying clients a “Superhuman” package by invitation only.

Robin Leigh, a chef-turned-restaurateur who alternates between London, New York and Miami, used to belong to the private social club Soho House. Now, he says, he would rather do hyperbaric oxygen therapy than mingle with influencers over Martinis. He estimates he spends $120,000 a year on longevity-related care in those cities for treatments such as red-light therapy and stem-cell injections for his knee pain.

“My main priority in life is to look and feel as good as I possibly can,” says Leigh, who takes more than 30 supplements a day and sees a concierge longevity doctor on top of his clinic visits. He says he recently got peptide injections at a London clinic for a price on par with a table for six at the upscale restaurant Cipriani.

“But they will last and make me look so healthy,” he says.

Many doctors and scientists caution that some clinics’ treatments lack robust scientific evidence and could even carry certain health risks. Supplements, a big part of many longevity regimens, aren’t regulated at the level that prescription drugs are, for instance.

“That’s the huge struggle in the field,” says Mazzarine Dotou, an operations lead at the National University of Singapore’s Academy for Healthy Longevity. “We don’t know when you’re taking a supplement if they really have any effect on you.”

Yet the clinics’ nontraditional approaches are often the draw for those obsessed with fighting aging and with the means to get personalized medical care, say clients, consultants and clinic operators.

“Being healthy inside and out is actually the ultimate status symbol,” says Julia Klim, who advises high-end gym club operator Equinox on longevity efforts. The company launched a $3,000-a-month longevity program last year that includes sleep, nutrition and exercise coaching and tests of metrics such as V02 max, a measure of aerobic capacity.

At Extension Health, services include peptide therapy, medical imaging and experimental procedures such as plasma exchange, which involves removing a patient’s blood, separating its components and replacing the plasma with a mixture of saline and albumin.

The clinic’s lower-level annual membership costs $10,000 and includes quarterly doctor’s visits, preventive body scans and comprehensive blood work.

For those who get the “Superhuman” package, “we are your everything,” says founder Dr. Jonathann Kuo. Many of the clinic’s clients, he adds, are chief executives, company founders and celebrities.

One Superhuman-tier client, a man in his early 50s, says he invested in the membership in the hopes of adding more healthy years to his life. His regimen at Extension includes plasma exchange and peptide injections. He has also traveled outside the U.S. for experimental stem-cell and gene-therapy treatments, he says.

Corey Malczewski and his wife, Kate, belong to Miora, a clinic that opened in 2023 in Minneapolis. The roughly $6,000 a year that they pay includes blood work and meetings with providers every few months. Both also started taking a compounded GLP-1—the class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs known by names such as Ozempic. His first appointment, which involved drawing 12 vials of blood, was a birthday gift from a friend.

“What do you get a man who’s 50 years of age who has everything?” Malczewski said.

As the number of clinics grow, some practitioners are seeking to develop standards for longevity care. The Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, a professional group of longevity specialists, is working to establish evidence-based guidelines and standards for the clinics, as well as training for healthcare professionals. The group consulted with the Abu Dhabi Department of Health, which last year became the first government agency to set regulatory standards for longevity clinics.

The standards include definitions for concepts such as “biological age,” a measure of how fast or slow a person is aging physically, and “healthspan,” how long a person lives in good health. Physicians are required to have formally trained in healthy longevity medicine or have experience in related fields.

In Minneapolis, Malczewski says his longevity clinic membership is already paying off. He credits the GLP-1 regimen with helping him reverse his prediabetes. After five months of monitoring his blood sugar levels with a continuous glucose monitor, his average blood sugar level dropped and he lost weight.

When he catches up with friends these days, the conversations are less about family and finances than they used to be. Now, they often talk about exercise regimens and testosterone boosters and compare blood pressure readings.

“We kind of cheer each other on,” Malczewski says.

In Vietnam, Factories That Boomed in Trump’s First Term Brace for 46% Tariffs

Hanoi and other cities have grown into bustling centers of commerce, but manufacturers worry about losing their biggest customer

HANOI—For Ha Pham, who runs a network of garment factories employing 500 Vietnamese workers, America has been good for business.

The U.S. accounts for most of her sales, and President Trump’s first-term tariffs on China nudged businesses to shift more production out of China and to factories such as hers. That boosted her revenue by as much as 20% annually.

So when Trump ordered a 46% tariff on Vietnamese goods, to go into effect on Wednesday, it sent her on a crash mission to find new customers in Europe and elsewhere. “The tariff itself is absurd,” said Pham, whose factories work on goods that end up at Levi’s, Target and other U.S. brands. “Americans would not benefit at all.”

Trump’s plan threatens to upend one of modern history’s great comeback stories: the rehabilitation of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship after the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago this month.

The U.S., little more than a footnote in Vietnam’s trade early this century, has become the country’s biggest customer, importing $137 billion in Vietnamese goods last year, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam—the basis for Trump’s tariff rate—is third only to China and Mexico.

That has helped turn Hanoi into a bustling center of global commerce. There are McDonald’s and Starbucks across the street from each other. Business bigwigs glide down modern roads in electric sport-utility vehicles, passing by digital billboards flashing ads for beer.

There are a few clues this isn’t an American city. One is the swarm of mopeds, often balancing potted plants or live chickens, puttering through red lights. Another: streets and alleys lined with the hammer-and-sickle flag of the ruling Communist Party.

It isn’t just American money that is welcome in Vietnam. Americans themselves are too. “Beloved and welcome pretty much everywhere,” said Ted Osius, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam who has worked in the country since the 1990s.

The hole-in-the-wall noodle shop where the late TV star Anthony Bourdain dined with President Barack Obama in 2016 commemorates the occasion by displaying the table and chairs they used behind glass, like a museum exhibit. After the trip, the Circle K convenience stores that dot Vietnamese cities began selling magnets showing Obama giving a thumbs-up to the grilled-pork dish he ate, called bun cha.

For American tourists in Vietnam, the biggest risk is making eye contact with Vietnamese teens at tourist locations like the Saigon Central Post Office. They might lose 10 minutes of time to students eager for a free lesson.

“It’s partly curiosity, partly a chance to practice English,” said David McCaskey, a University of California, Riverside student working on an environmental history Ph.D. in Vietnam.

After U.S.-China tensions flared in the first Trump administration and Trump imposed his first round of tariffs on Chinese goods, suppliers for companies like Nike and Apple doubled down on Vietnam to avoid the tariffs. Foreign businesses found Vietnamese officials to be pro-business and eager to give manufacturing projects a boost. And with Hanoi wary of China getting too powerful, Vietnam’s geopolitical stance aligned with Washington’s.

Labor is cheaper in Vietnam than in China and, since the two countries are neighbors, it is easy to truck in needed Chinese parts. Vietnam’s youthful population of about 100 million means it has more workers ready to toil at factories than most other nations—although even then, it can be hard to find enough with the right skills.

Now, Vietnam’s ballooning trade surplus with the U.S. has put it in the sights of people like Trump.

Since it opened in 2019, Christina Chen’s factory in northern Vietnam has been churning out tables and chairs—nearly all of them destined for America. She said that since Trump announced the tariffs, she has spent so much time negotiating with clients over their orders that she has developed a sore throat.

“This is something we cannot defeat even with the best product and best price,” said Chen, a Taiwanese executive whose business makes furniture from local acacia wood. Without a reprieve, she said, “everybody knows the volume is going to crash.”

After the tariffs were announced, Michel Bertsch, a Belgian national who runs a business in Vietnam making baby cribs and high chairs, met other Europeans at a reception for the Belgian royal family, who were in Vietnam on a state visit. Even the royal splendor couldn’t lighten the atmosphere.

“The mood was very worried, shocked,” Bertsch said. “Nobody expected the tariffs to be this high.”

He said he expected Americans would have to pay more for his products and demand would fall.

Factory owners say they will struggle to find other takers for their products, in part because Chinese competitors will be trying to cut deals with the same European buyers.

Vietnam’s leaders tried to put themselves in position to negotiate over the tariffs even before they were announced. When a delegation of about 60 American businesses including representatives of Amazon, Coca-Cola and Ford Motor visited the country last month, they got a rare meeting with Vietnam’s top leader, Communist Party General Secretary To Lam.

“He had some very clear messages that he wanted to convey about Vietnam’s desire to work with the private sector,” especially U.S. businesses, said Osius, the former ambassador, who led the delegation.

Vietnam also said recently that it approved a trial for Starlink, the satellite internet provider of Elon Musk, Trump’s adviser. Hanoi cut its tariffs on U.S. goods, including on cars and natural gas, and pledged to buy more American planes and agricultural products.

The moves appeared to have an initial effect. Two days after announcing the tariffs, Trump said that he had a “very productive” phone call with Lam on Friday to strike a deal.

Now, Vietnam is on tenterhooks awaiting word of progress. The nation’s deputy prime minister is flying to the U.S. on Sunday, and businesspeople are speculating what further promises Hanoi could offer Trump.

Interviewed this weekend, Hanoi-based ceramic exporters who sell decorative vases and other goods to U.S. companies including Walmart said they were confident that the 46% rate would be negotiated down. “Things will fall in place soon,” said one exporter, Thanh-Tam Pham.

At a bustling industrial park near Hanoi’s airport, Do Thi Loan had just finished her sewing shift at Vit Garment, where she earns about $310 a month. After buying a bag of oranges and guavas, she said worries about tariffs hadn’t yet hit her factory floor.

The lower labor costs are among the reasons why Pham, the garment executive, finds the American tariffs and Trump’s plans to revitalize U.S. manufacturing absurd. “If you want to switch production to America like 100%, the price would be over the top,” Pham said.