By WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS

NEW YORK (AP) — Tariffs and years of teetering mall traffic have roiled much of the toy industry. But Build-A-Bear investors are continuing to reap sizeable gains.

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Shares of Build-A-Bear Workshop are up more than 60% since the start of 2025, trading at just under $72 apiece as of Tuesday afternoon. That compares to just 13% for the S&P 500 since the start of the year, and marks dramatic growth from five years ago, when the St. Louis-based retailer’s stock sat under $3.

The toy industry overall has been “reasonably soft” in recent years, notes Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData — but certain categories, including craft-oriented products, have done very well following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that’s key to Build-A-Bear’s core business model: welcoming consumers into their brick-and-mortar stores to make their own plush animals.

That may also set Build-A-Bear apart from the malls its stores are often inside, many of which have struggled to see overall traffic rebound over the years.

“The mall may not be a destination, but Build-A-Bear often is — because it’s often a planned trip,” Saunders said. “It’s a store within a mall that many consumers make a beeline for.”

Build-A-Bear is still not isn’t entirely immune to macroeconomic pressures, but the company’s profit has soared to record after record in recent quarters. Last month, the retailer reported what it said were the best results for a second quarter and first half of a fiscal year in the history of the Build-A-Bear, which opened its first store in 1997. Company executives pointed to strong store performance and other expansion efforts.

In the first half of its 2025 fiscal year, the company’s revenues hit $252.6 million and its pre-tax income climbed to $34.9 million — up 11.5% and 31.5%, respectively, year-over-year.

The company also raised its financial outlook for the full year, despite anticipated costs of President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on goods coming into the U.S. from around the world and other headwinds.

“Tariffs are a real cost that we are facing,” Voin Todorovic, chief financial officer at Build-A-Bear, said in the company’s Aug. 28 earnings call — pointing to current U.S. import tax rates of 30% on China and 20% on Vietnam, where the retailer sources much of its products. Some of that has already trickled down to the cost of Build-A-Bear’s merchandise in North America, but Todorovic noted that such levies would impact the company “even more in the second half of the year.”

Still, he and other executives pointed to preparations Build-A-Bear had made to lessen the blow, including previous inventory increases. The company also maintained that consumer-facing price impacts would be limited.

While the retailer offers some ready-made toys and toy clothing, “what Build-A-Bear generally buys is materials,” Saunders noted. This can “hedge against tariffs much more effectively,” he explained, as they reduce labor costs and potentially allow for more flexibility on sourcing.

Still, Saunders notes that everyone is going to be affected by tariffs and Build-A-Bear isn’t an exception. He adds that consumers will probably “eat that extra cost because they’re paying for the entertainment value.”

Barring any significant changes, Todorovic said in August’s earnings call that tariffs are anticipated to cost Build-A-Bear under $11 million for the 2025 fiscal year. But despite that and other costs, he noted that the company is still on track to approach or slightly beat last year’s earnings.

The company’s latest guidance expects its pre-tax income to reach between $62 million to $70 million for the full 2025 fiscal year, compared to just over $67 million reported in 2024.

By TRAVIS LOLLER

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Bobby Cain, who helped integrate one of the first high schools in the South in 1956 as one of the so-called Clinton 12, died Monday in Nashville at the age of 85, according to his nephew J. Kelvin Cain.

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Bobby Cain was a senior when he entered the formerly all-white Clinton High School in Tennessee on a court order. He had previously attended a Black high school about 20 miles away in Knoxville and was not happy about leaving his friends to spend his senior year at a new school in a hostile environment.

“He had no interest in doing it because, you know, he’d gotten to rise up through the ranks at Austin High School as the senior and was finally big fish in the pond. And to have to go to this all-white high school — it was tough,” said Adam Velk, executive director of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center, which promotes the legacy of the Clinton 12. Velk added that the 16-year-old had to do it “with the entire world watching him.”

This was a couple of years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v Board of Education that separating public school children on the basis of race was unconstitutional and a year before Little Rock Central High School was desegregated by force. Unlike the Little Rock Nine, the Clinton 12 students were not hand-picked and trained for the job of desegregation. They just happed to live within the Anderson County school district at the time, Velk said.

Although the court-ordered desegregation in Clinton was accepted by state and local authorities, many in the local white community were against it. They were soon joined by Ku Klux Klan members and other segregationists from outside the community in a series of protests that led to the National Guard being called in to restore order.

Cain managed to stick out the year, becoming the first Black student in Tennessee to graduate from an integrated state-run school. What should have been a triumphant moment was marred by violence. After receiving his diploma, Cain was jumped and beaten up by a group of white students. In the end, only one other member of the Clinton 12 made it to graduation. Gail Ann Epps graduated the following year, according to the Tennessee State Museum.

Cain had a lot of anger around his experience at the school and didn’t talk about it for many years.

Bobby Cain poses poses for a photo in the Civil Rights Room of the Nashville, Tenn., Public Library in October 2017. (Robin Conover/The Tennessee Magazine via AP)

“He didn’t want to remember it,” his nephew said.

He received a scholarship to attend Tennessee State University in Nashville, where he met his wife. After graduation, he worked for the Tennessee Department of Human Services and was a member of the U.S. Army Reserve. He never joined in the sit-in protests of the era, quipping to The Tennessee Magazine in a 2017 interview that it was because “you had to agree to be nonviolent.”

Cain told the magazine that he had no white friends at Clinton High School.

“You have to realize that if any white students had gone out of their way to be nice to us, they would have been jumped on,” he said.

He also had to stop playing sports because “the coaches at Clinton told me that none of the other high schools would play against us if I was on the field at the game.”

Velk calls Cain a reluctant hero.

“This is a normal, everyday human being who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances and acted above those circumstances,” Velk said. “This is a person who dealt with this tremendous difficulty and rose to the occasion.”

Cain is survived by a daughter, Yvette Cain-Frank, and grandson Tobias Cain-Frank.

By MEGAN JANETSKY

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The Trump administration Tuesday designated the Barrio 18 gang as a foreign terrorist organization, joining other Latin American criminal groups receiving the designation in recent months.

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Barrio 18, largely based in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, originated in the United States as a street gang in Los Angeles created by young Salvadoran immigrants as a way to protect themselves. When many of their members were deported from the U.S. to El Salvador, the gang expanded and gained power across Central America, where it continues to terrorize communities.

In recent years, the gang has been dealt a powerful blow by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who has waged war on the country’s gangs, imprisoning more than 1% of El Salvador’s population for alleged gang ties with little evidence or access to due process. That has sharply dropped crime rates in El Salvador, but also fueled accusations of mass human rights abuses by the government.

In a statement on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the designation “further demonstrates the Trump administration’s unwavering commitment to dismantling cartels and gangs and ensuring the safety of the American people.”

Bukele has long referred to members of the gang as “terrorists” and even built a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center. It was that same lockup where 200 Venezuelan deportees were held earlier this year as part of an agreement with Trump.

On Tuesday, Trump thanked Bukele, an ally, on the stage of the United Nations General Assembly “for the successful and professional job they have done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country.”

Bukele’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear what the designation would mean for law enforcement in the region. The Trump administration has ruffled feathers in Latin America as it has drastically expanded military actions by firing on boats in the Caribbean that it alleges were carrying drugs to the U.S. A number of people have been killed in those strikes.

Barrio 18 joins its rival, the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and a number of Mexican cartels, including the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, in holding the foreign terrorist organization designation.

The designation has long been applied to groups that are more political in nature. While the Latin American groups have sown terror in the populations they lord over, they also are largely not political in nature and instead focus their efforts on raking in money through drug trafficking, extortion and other illegal activities.

Jason Gale, Bloomberg News

President Donald Trump’s call for pregnant women to avoid Tylenol is drawing sharp criticism from researchers who say the advice ignores decades of evidence and could endanger mothers and babies.

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At a White House event Monday, Trump linked acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, to autism and encouraged women to tough out fevers. The remarks, made alongside health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime critic of mainstream medicine — rattled doctors and drugmakers.

Mady Hornig, a New York physician-scientist who has studied pregnancy-related risk factors for autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for 25 years, said the White House’s message misrepresents the science around acetaminophen, which is also known as paracetamol in Europe and elsewhere.

“It seemed like they had indicated that there was evidence that prolonging a fever is a good thing,” Hornig, a visiting scientist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health, said in an interview. “It’s astonishing misinformation.”

Trump and Kennedy have both sought to challenge health guidance and practices, sometimes relying on cherry-picked evidence. The U.S. leader also has a record of promoting unfounded medical theories.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called the latest advice on acetaminophen “irresponsible,” while the American Academy of Pediatrics also said misrepresenting science does a “disservice” to autistic people. The U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said there’s no evidence that paracetamol causes autism and said it remains safe during pregnancy.

Genetic risk

Hornig’s research, based on the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study of over 100,000 families, found that moderate or high fevers in pregnancy were linked to elevated autism risk, especially in the second trimester.

“We found that there was about a 40% increased risk of autism without acetaminophen,” she said. “That went down substantially with the use of acetaminophen.”

She stressed that fever itself, not a single drug, is a key factor.

“It’s clear that unmitigated fever, particularly where it is of a moderate level or higher, is something that has an impact on offspring to increase risk of autism,” she said. “To allow women to have even a modest fever during pregnancy, which in and of itself can potentially cause damage and is associated in many studies with risk, is very worrisome.”

In preliminary, unpublished work, Hornig’s team also saw hints that acetaminophen taken for pain may carry different risks. “There seems to be some pattern that suggested that for pain, it may not be the drug to use,” she added, though she cautioned the findings need more study.

A small number of women reported using ibuprofen for fever during pregnancy. None of their children developed autism, though Hornig stressed the numbers were too small to draw conclusions.

The findings underscore what scientists have long said: autism doesn’t have a single cause. Genetics, timing and environment all interact, Hornig said, citing factors such as parental age gaps, exposure to wildfire smoke and heavy metals, seasonal immune shifts and infections that trigger fever.

“The idea that it’s going to be a singular cause is really kind of foolhardy, and it doesn’t go along with the things that we know,” she said.

Hornig also urged more precision in research. Common genetic differences in enzymes that help break down acetaminophen may influence how safely a pregnant woman can metabolize the drug. Some labs are testing newborns’ meconium for toxic byproducts of acetaminophen metabolism — a potential biomarker that could guide safer choices in the future.

“Our future generations deserve a personalized approach that looks at genetic risk, environmental exposures, and safer alternatives,” she said.

For now, she said, context matters. Acetaminophen remains widely recommended because aspirin carries a risk of Reye’s syndrome and ibuprofen isn’t considered safe later in pregnancy. But Hornig warned that discouraging treatment altogether — especially with respiratory viruses like flu and Covid-19 still circulating — could leave women vulnerable.

Vaccination before and during pregnancy, when indicated, remains one of the best safeguards against infections that trigger fever, she added.

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