By STAN CHOE, Associated Press Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market is holding steadier on Monday following two weeks of sharp swings, but it’s churning underneath the surface ahead of big-time reports coming later in the week.

The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged and remained only a bit below its all-time high set late last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was also basically flat, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% higher.

Alphabet was the strongest force pushing upward on the market. It rose 5.2% in the first chance for traders to buy its stock since Berkshire Hathaway said it built a $4.34 billion ownership stake in Google’s parent company. Berkshire Hathaway, run by famed investor Warren Buffett, is notorious for trying to buy only stocks that look like good values while avoiding anything that looks too expensive.

Such discipline has become a much hotter topic on Wall Street recently. Critics have been warning that the U.S. stock market could be primed for a drop because of how high prices have shot since April, leaving them looking too expensive. Critics point in particular to stocks swept up in the AI mania, which have been surging at spectacular speeds for years.

The company at the center of the frenzy, Nvidia, fell another 1.3% Monday, following swings of at least 1.8% in eight of the last 10 days. It’s nevertheless still up nearly 40% for the year so far after it doubled in price in four of the last five years.

That has Wall Street’s spotlight on Wednesday, when Nvidia will report how much profit it made during the summer. AI stocks have surged as much as they have because of expectations that they’ll produce huge growth in profits. If they fail to meet analysts’ expectations, that would undercut one of the big assumptions that’s driven the U.S. stock market to records.

Such high expectations extend beyond tech stocks, even if they are toughest for AI darlings.

Aramark fell 6% after the company, which offers food and facilities management for schools, national parks and convention centers, reported a profit for the latest quarter that fell short of analysts’ expectations. It also said it expects an underlying measure of profit to grow between 20% and 25% this upcoming year. While relatively strong, that was less than what analysts had been forecasting.

Another source of potential disappointment for Wall Street is what the Federal Reserve does with interest rates. The expectation had been that the Fed would keep cutting interest rates in hopes of shoring up the slowing job market. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give the economy and prices for investments a boost.

But questions are rising about whether a third cut for the year will actually come after the Fed’s next meeting in December, something that traders had earlier seen as very likely. The downside of lower interest rates is that they can make inflation worse, and inflation has stubbornly remained above the Fed’s 2% target.

Fed officials have pointed to the U.S. government’s shutdown, which delayed the release of updates on the job market and other signals about the economy. With less information and less certainty about how things are going, some Fed officials have suggested it may be better just to wait in December to get more clarity.

Now that the shutdown is over, the government is preparing to release September’s delayed jobs report on Thursday. That could create further swings for the market. Too strong a job market would likely stay the Fed’s hand on rate cuts, while too weak figures would raise worries about the economy.

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was at 4.14%, where it was late Friday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across much of Europe and Asia.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1% after the government reported that the Japanese economy contracted at a 1.8% annual pace in the July-September quarter.

South Korea’s Kospi was an outlier and jumped 1.9% as tech-related stocks there did well.

AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

Your daily look at what happened across the East Metro high school sports scene last night (or, on Mondays, over the weekend).

Girls hockey season is off and running. Here are key results from Saturday’s games:

Girls hockey

Mounds View/Irondale 7, Park 4: Mounds View/Irondale is a perfect 4-0 thanks to an offense that’s averaging 5.5 goals per game. Mia Simones and Sarah Johnson each netted hat tricks in Saturday’s win.

Johnson has a whopping 10 goals and seven assists already this season.

Mounds View/Irondale travels to Forest Lake on Tuesday.

South St. Paul 3, Rock Ridge 1: After a couple narrow defeats at the hands of Hastings and Simley to open the season, the Packers nabbed their first win of the season as Isabella Stinsa, Kira Erb and Sidney Thompson all scored, while Kjirsten Kline stopped 21 shots.

Stinsa now has three goals on the season.

Stillwater 1, Forest Lake 0: Brynne Laska scored the game’s lone goal to improve the Ponies to 1-0-1 on the season.

Stillwater out-shot the Rangers 39-15, but Kiera Peek was excellent in net for Forest Lake, stopping 38 shots. Haley Solnitzky recorded a shutout for the Ponies.

Eagan 4, Shakopee 1: The Wildcats are 2-0 on the season after a pair of dominant victories over Hastings and Shakopee.

Kaitlyn Barry and Reagan Robbins each scored twice on Saturday. The Wildcats have surrendered only 26 shots on goal combined through two games.

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By GRAHAM LEE BREWER, Associated Press

NEW TOWN, N.D. (AP) — On a recent chilly fall morning, Ruth De La Cruz walked through the Four Sisters Garden, looking for Hidatsa squash. To college students in her food sovereignty program, the crop might be an assignment. But to her, it is the literal fruit of her ancestors’ labor.

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“There’s some of the squash, yay,” De La Cruz exclaimed as she finds the small, pumpkinlike gourds catching the morning sun.

The garden is named for the Hidatsa practice of growing squash, corn, sunflower and beans — the four sisters — together, De La Cruz said. The program is part of the Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, operated by the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation.

It is one of more than three dozen tribal colleges and universities across the country that the Trump administration proposed cutting funding to earlier this year. Tribal citizens are among communities navigating the impacts of massive cuts in federal spending and the effects of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

A funding increase for tribal colleges and universities announced before the shutdown was welcome news, but college leaders remain uneasy about the government’s financial commitments. Those federal dollars are part of some of the country’s oldest legal obligations, and tribal college and university (TCU) presidents and Native education advocates worry they could be further eroded, threatening the passage of Indigenous knowledge to new generations.

“This is not just a haven for access to higher education, but also a place where you get that level of culturally, tribally specific education,” De La Cruz said.

US committed to Native education

When the U.S. took the land and resources of tribal nations to build the country, it promised through treaties, laws and other acts of Congress that it would uphold the health, education, and security of Indigenous peoples. Those fiduciary commitments are known today as trust responsibilities.

“We prepaid for all of this,” said Twyla Baker, the college’s president.

Twyla Baker, president of the Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, poses for a portrait at the school Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025, in New Town, N.D. (AP Photo/John Locher)

The U.S. may have intentionally and violently disrupted the passage of Indigenous knowledge and lifeways, Baker said, but their ancestors forced the government to promise to protect them for future generations. Those legal and moral obligations must be honored, she said.

“They carried our languages under their tongues. They carried them close to their heart. They carried these knowledge systems with them and protected them to bring them forward to us. So I feel as if I have a responsibility to do the same,” Baker said.

Today, the education pillar of the trust responsibilities takes many forms, like the hundreds of elementary schools on reservations funded by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education and the funding that pays for Native history and language classes taught at TCUs.

That funding was set to be reduced by as much as 90% in President Donald Trump’s federal budget proposal. But in September the U.S. Department of Education announced TCUs would receive an increase of over 100%. While the decision was welcomed by many, those new federal dollars came at the cost of other institutions where many Native students attend, like Hispanic-serving institutions.

The education of Native students outside of TCUs are also part of those trust and treaty rights, said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which advocates for TCUs.

An uncertain funding outlook

Rose said that the increase in Department of Education funding coincides with decreases in several areas of the federal government that provide vital grants to TCUs, like the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Students take a test during a class at Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025, in New Town, N.D. (AP Photo/John Locher)

In 1994, Congress passed a bill designating tribal colleges as land grant institutions, which opened them up to new sources of federal funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But unlike other land grant universities like Cornell, Purdue and Clemson that are still sustained by the profits of unceded tribal lands, TCUs don’t share in those billions of dollars. Instead they rely on grants from the federal agencies that support land grant universities.

However, that too has become more difficult, Rose said. Tribal liaisons at some of those federal departments who ensure they are complying with their trust responsibilities have been laid off or furloughed, she said, and many of those positions remain unfilled.

“We’re still under a great deal of stress,” Rose said. “I don’t want people to think because we got this increase in funds that all is OK, because it’s still precarious.”

That kind of uncertainty makes it hard to budget, said Leander McDonald, president of the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota. That, mixed with the current push to cut the federal workforce, leaves him and other TCU presidents second-guessing decisions to create education programs and hire staff.

“How long is the storm going to last?” McDonald said. “That’s the part that I think is unknown for us.”

Presidents like McDonald and Baker spend a lot of their time on the road, traveling to Washington, D.C., to make the case for both the value that TCUs add and the government’s responsibility to uphold them. An American Indian Higher Education Consortium report released in September found that in 2023 TCUs generated $3.8 billion in added income to the national economy in the forms of increased student and business revenue and social savings related to health, justice and income assistance.

Schools help preserve traditions

On top of the opportunities higher education provides, for TCU students there is an added incentive. The U.S. government systematically tried to erase their cultures, and many students and faculty believe part of the government’s fiduciary responsibility to tribal nations today includes providing opportunities to sustain the traditions that it threatened.

Learning directly from elders who pass down that knowledge is a key part of the Native American Studies program at Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College. Students like Zaysha Grinnell, a citizen of the MHA Nation enrolled in the program, learn their languages and take classes on tribal sovereignty and traditional burial rites.

“You can’t get that anywhere else,” she said. “That experience, that knowledge, all of the knowledge that the ones teaching here carry.”

Many of the communities where those traditions were taught were broken up, the languages spoken in them were intentionally targeted, and the lands where they thrived were taken, said Mike Barthelemy, head of the college’s Native American Studies program.

“You can look around us in any direction for hundreds of miles, and those are ceded territories,” he said. “There’s not a single Indigenous nation that got really, truly compensated for what they gave. And so I think that trust responsibility, it lingers.”

By TOM MURPHY, Associated Press Health Writer

Novo Nordisk is chopping prices again for its popular obesity treatment Wegovy, but doctors say the expense will remain challenging for patients without insurance.

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The drugmaker said Monday that it has started selling higher doses of the injectable treatment for $349 a month to patients paying the full bill. That’s down from $499 and in line with terms of a drug pricing agreement outlined earlier this month by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Novo also has started a temporary offer of $199 a month for the first two months of low doses of Wegovy and the drug’s counterpart for diabetes, Ozempic. The new pricing will be available at pharmacies nationwide through home delivery and from some telemedicine providers.

Rival Eli Lilly also plans price breaks for its weight-loss drug Zepbound once it gets a new, multi-dose pen on the market.

Obesity treatments like Zepbound and Wegovy have soared in popularity in recent years. Known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, the drugs work by targeting hormones in the gut and brain that affect appetite and feelings of fullness.

In clinical trials, they helped people shed 15% to 22% of their body weight — up to 50 pounds or more in many cases. But affordability has been a persistent challenge for patients.

A recent poll by the nonprofit KFF found that about half of the people who take the treatments say it was hard to afford them.

Previous research has shown that people have difficulty paying for a medication when the cost rises above $100 per month for a prescription or refill, said Stacie Dusetzina, a Vanderbilt University Medical Center professor and prescription drug pricing expert.

She said new prices like those outlined by Novo are “not going to really move the needle for a person who doesn’t have a pretty reasonable amount of disposable income.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.