By MICHELLE CHAPMAN, AP Business Writer

Labubu, the plush toy from China’s Pop Mart is a social media darling, but the toothy little monsters are far from an overnight success. Having appeared a decade ago, Labubus may have finally cemented their place in the collectible toy market for years to come.

The Labubu, by artist and illustrator Kasing Lung, first appeared with pointed ears and pointy teeth, in three picture books inspired by Nordic mythology in 2015.

In 2019 Lung struck a deal with Pop Mart, a company that caters to toy connoisseurs and influencers, to sell Labubu figurines. But it wasn’t until Pop Mart started selling Labubu plush toys on key rings in 2023 that the toothy monsters suddenly seemed to be everywhere, including in the hands of Rihanna, Kim Kardashian and NBA star Dillon Brooks. K-pop singer Lisa of Blackpink began posting images of hers for her more than 100 million followers on Instagram and on TikTok, where Labubu pandemonium has broken out.

There are 1.4 million #Labubu TikTok posts and counting, videos of fans unboxing them, showing styles inspired by them, and of course, Labubu cosplay.

Fans have latched on to Labubu’s mashup of play and fashion, making them accessories on handbags, backpacks and belts, or hanging them from car mirrors.

“The character has evolved into a collectible and style symbol, resonating with fans who connect with its quirky aesthetic and unique backstory,” Emily Brough, Popmart’s head of IP licensing in the Americas, said.

Labubu has been a bonanza for Pop Mart. Its revenue more than doubled in 2024 to 13.04 billion yuan ($1.81 billion), thanks in part to its elvish monster. Revenue from Pop Mart’s plush toys soared more than 1,200% in 2024, nearly 22% of its overall revenue, according to the company’s annual report.

Aside from their ability to pique the interest of toy aficionados and fashionistas, Labubu latched on to the blind box phenomenon, where the purchaser doesn’t know exactly which version of the plush toy they’ll get.

And Pop Mart made sure there is a Labubu for everyone, regardless of income. Most are priced in a wide rage between $20 and $300, with certain collaborations or limited editions priced higher, according to Brough.

Unlike many toys, Labubu devotees include a large number of adults. Buyers ages 18 and over drove a year-over-year increase of more than $800 million in the U.S. toy market in 2024, according to market research firm Circana. Adult shoppers, mostly female, bought the toys for themselves. In 2025’s first quarter, toy sales for those ages 18 and over rose 12% from the prior-year period. At $1.8 billion, adults also accounted for the highest spending among all age groups in the quarter.

Like many retailers, Pop Mart is actively monitoring negotiations between the U.S. and just about every one of its trading partners as prices may be impacted. The situation with China is at the forefront, with President Donald Trump saying on Friday that the country “violated” an agreement with the United States on trade talks.

Right now Pop Mart, whose products are manufactured across Asia, says that it is continuously scaling production and expanding distribution across its online shop, retail stores and blind box vending machines to meet increasing demand.

Short supply has led to long lines at stores and at least one physical fight at a shopping center in the United Kingdom. Pop Mart said in an Instagram post late last month that it was temporarily suspending all in-store and blind box machine sales in the U.K. Peter Shipman, head of Europe, said in a Facebook post that the company is currently working on a new method to distribute toys to stores.

Resellers have become problematic and many Labubu fans are still willing to pay exorbitant price markups.

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Kena Flynn was at The Grove shopping center in Los Angeles recently when she stumbled upon some Labubus being sold at a kiosk. Flynn said in a TikTok on Sunday that the prices were “really bad,” but her boyfriend bought two anyway.

“At a certain point, you can’t buy them,” Flynn said in her video. “I just want a Labubu and I cannot buy one from Pop Mart, so here we are.”

Looking to keep up with the overwhelming demand, Pop Mart says it’s on track for 50 more retail locations in the U.S. by the end of the year. That’ll give shoppers more chances to hunt for Labubus, as Pop Mart says it’s planning multiple new Labubu releases tied to seasonal moments and holidays throughout the rest of the year.

By FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan would cut deficits by $2.8 trillion over a 10-year period while shrinking the economy, raising the inflation rate and reducing the purchasing power of households overall, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office.

The numbers were revealed in a letter sent to Democratic congressional leadership outlining how the Trump administration’s plan to impose wide-ranging tariffs on countries around the world will affect American households.

Baked into the CBO analysis is a prediction that households would ultimately buy less from the countries hit with added tariffs. The budget office estimates that the tariffs would increase the average annual rate of inflation by 0.4 percentage points in 2025 and 2026.

The budget office’s model also assumes that the tariffs, announced through executive action between January and May, will be in place permanently.

Since the analysis was conducted, a federal court struck down sweeping tariffs that Trump invoked under an emergency-powers law. An appeals court allowed the Trump administration to continue collecting the tariffs while the case goes through appeals.

Largely confirming what other economic models have predicted, the CBO’s estimations show that the tradeoff for a $2.8 trillion deficit reduction over 10 years would be an overall reduction in household wealth. In addition, the tariffs would shrink the economy, or reduce the rate of the gross domestic product by 0.06 percentage points per year.

The Penn-Wharton Budget Model’s April report predicted that the Republican president’s tariffs would reduce long-run GDP by about 6% and wages by 5%.

A major caveat of the CBO’s estimates is written into the report — its estimates are “subject to significant uncertainty, in part because the Administration could change how the tariff policies are administered.”

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Trump has often announced changes and pauses to his tariff plans on his social media platform.

In April, he posted that he was backing off his tariffs on most nations for 90 days and jacking up the tax rate on Chinese imports to 125%.

Last week, he announced plans to hike the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to a punishing 50%, a move that’s set to hammer businesses and likely push up prices for consumers even further. The 50% tariffs went into effect Wednesday.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast Tuesday that the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, will slow growth to just 1.5% in 2026.

A representative from the White House did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment

Associated Press writer Paul Wiseman in Washington contributed to this report.

By Jackie Fortiér, Kaiser Health News

You’re pregnant, healthy and hearing mixed messages: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is not a scientist or doctor, says you don’t need the COVID vaccine, but experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection still put you in a high-risk group of people who ought to receive boosters. The science is on the side of the shots.

Pregnant women who contracted COVID-19 were more likely to become severely ill and to be hospitalized than non-pregnant women of the same age and demographics, especially early in the COVID pandemic.

A meta-analysis of 435 studies found that pregnant and recently pregnant women who were infected with the virus that causes COVID were more likely to end up in intensive care units, be on invasive ventilation, and die than women who weren’t pregnant but had a similar health profile. This was before COVID vaccines were available.

Neil Silverman, a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology and the director of the Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said he still sees more bad outcomes in pregnant patients who have COVID. The risk of severe COVID fluctuated as new variants arose and vaccinations became available, Silverman said, but the threat is still meaningful. “No matter what the politics say, the science is the science, and we know that, objectively, pregnant patients are at substantially increased risk of having complications,” Silverman said.

A request for comment regarding the scientific literature that supports COVID vaccination for pregnant women sent to HHS’ public affairs office elicited an unsigned email unrelated to the question. The office did not respond when asked for an on-the-record comment.

Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before joining the Trump administration, announced May 27 that COVID vaccines would be removed from the CDC’s immunization schedule for healthy pregnant women and healthy children. His announcement, made in a video posted on the social media platform X, blindsided CDC officials and circumvented the agency’s established, scientific processes for adding and removing shots from its recommended schedules, The Washington Post reported.

There’s still much unknown about how COVID affects a pregnant person. The physiological relationship between COVID infections and mothers and fetuses at different stages of a pregnancy is complex, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

The increased risk to pregnant patients comes in part because pregnancy changes the immune system, Rasmussen said.

“There is natural immune suppression so that the mother’s body doesn’t attack the developing fetus,” Rasmussen said. “While the mother does still have a functioning immune system, it’s not functioning at full capacity.”

Pregnant patients are more likely to get sick and have a harder time fighting off any infection as a result.

In addition to changing how the immune system works, being pregnant also makes women five times as likely to have blood clots. That risk is increased if they contract COVID, said Sallie Permar, chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The virus that causes COVID can affect the vascular endothelium — specialized cells that line blood vessels and help with blood flow, Rasmussen said. In a healthy person, the endothelium helps prevent blood clots by producing chemicals that tweak the vascular system to keep it running. In a person infected with the COVID virus, the balance is thrown off and the production of those molecules is disrupted, which research shows can lead to blood clots or other blood disorders.

Permar said that those clots can be especially dangerous to both pregnant women and fetuses. Inflammation and blood clots in the placenta could be connected to an increased risk of stillbirth, especially from certain COVID variants, according to studies published in major medical journals as well as by the CDC.

When the placenta is inflamed, it’s harder for blood carrying oxygen and nutrients to get to the developing baby, said Mary Prahl, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine.

“If anything is interrupting those functions — inflammation or clotting or differences in how the blood is flowing — that’s really going to affect how the placenta is working and being able to allow the fetus to grow and develop appropriately,” she said.

It makes sense that we see the effects of COVID in the placenta, Silverman said. “The placenta is nothing more than a hyper-specialized collection of blood vessels, so it is like a magnetic target for the virus.”

Blood vessels in the placenta are smaller and may clot more easily than in the mother’s circulatory system, he said.

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Permar said recent data suggests that pregnant women sick with COVID still have a higher risk of pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia, preterm birth, and miscarriage, even with existing immunity from previous infection or vaccination. COVID, she said, can still land women in the hospital with pregnancy complications.

Prahl said the connection between stillbirth and COVID may be changing given the immunity many people have developed from vaccination or prior infection. It’s an area in which she’d like to see more research.

There’s already strong evidence that both mRNA-based and non-mRNA COVID vaccines are safe for pregnant women.

Prahl co-authored a small, early study that found no adverse outcomes and showed antibody protection persisted for both the mother and the baby after birth. “What we learned very quickly is that pregnant individuals want answers and many of them want to be involved in research,” she said. Later studies, including one published in the journal Nature Medicine showing that getting a booster in pregnancy cut newborn hospitalizations in the first four months of life, backed up her team’s findings.

Prahl expects more evidence will be available soon to support the benefits of mothers receiving a COVID booster during pregnancy.

“I can say, kind of behind the scenes, I’m seeing a lot of this preliminary data,” she said.

She blames the delay in part on the Biden administration’s scaling back of federal efforts to track COVID. “A lot of the surveillance of these data were pulled back,” she said. The Trump administration is further cutting money used to track COVID.

But because the vaccines give a pregnant woman’s immune system a boost by increasing neutralizing antibodies, virologist Rasmussen is confident that getting one while pregnant makes it less likely a pregnant woman will end up in the hospital if she gets COVID.

“It will protect the pregnant person from more severe disease,” she said.

Getting a COVID vaccine while pregnant also helps protect newborns after birth. Pregnant women who get vaccinated pass that protection to their young babies, who can’t get their own shots until they are at least 6 months old.

According to data released by the CDC in 2024, nearly 90% of babies who had to be hospitalized with COVID had mothers who didn’t get the vaccine while they were pregnant.

As recently as April 2024, research showed that babies too young to be vaccinated had the highest COVID hospitalization rate of any age group except people 75 and older.

The Trump administration’s decision to remove the COVID vaccine from the list of shots it recommends for pregnant women means insurance companies might no longer cover it. Pregnant women who want to get it anyway may have to pay hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket.

“I don’t want to be that doctor who just says, ‘Well, it’s really important. You have to vaccinate yourself and your kids no matter what, even if you have to pay for it out-of-pocket,’ because everyone has their own priorities and budgetary concerns, especially in the current economic climate,” Silverman said. “I can’t tell a family that the vaccine is more important than feeding their kids.”

But he and his colleagues will keep advising pregnant women to try to get the shots anyway.

“Newborns will be completely naive to COVID exposure,” he said. “Vaccinating pregnant women to protect their newborns is still a valid reason to continue this effort.”

©2025 Kaiser Health News. Visit khn.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Lauren Schwahn, NerdWallet

House Republicans passed President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” on May 22.

This meaty budget reconciliation bill includes a provision to increase the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction limit. If the changes make it through the Senate, certain taxpayers could see big tax breaks.

What is the SALT cap?

The SALT deduction is a tax break that allows people who itemize to deduct certain taxes from their federal taxable income. Eligible deductions include property taxes and a choice of state and local sales taxes or state and local income taxes.

The SALT deduction is currently capped at $10,000 ($5,000 for those married filing separately) and is set to expire at the end of 2025.

What might change?

The House bill would raise the SALT cap to $40,000 ($20,000 for those married filing separately), four times higher than the current limit. The cap and income thresholds would increase by 1% annually through 2033. Taxpayers with a modified adjusted gross income over $500,000, would have a reduced deduction, but it would not go lower than $10,000.

But the details could change as the bill moves through the Senate.

Who might benefit?

High-earners making less than $500,000, especially those living in higher-tax states such as California and New York, are positioned to get the biggest breaks.

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These taxpayers are generally paying higher state income and property taxes, and could claim larger deductions under the proposed changes. The cap increase could lower these federal tax bills by thousands of dollars.

People who don’t pay state income taxes, don’t itemize and don’t own homes likely wouldn’t benefit from the changes, says Miklos Ringbauer, a certified public accountant in Los Angeles.

Should I do anything now?

Hold off on changing your tax strategy until the bill’s future is certain.

“This is not a law yet, so you can’t fully plan for it,” Ringbauer says. In the meantime, you can explore how the proposed changes might impact you.

Stay informed

Track the bill’s progress. Taxpayers can also call their senators and express their concerns with the bill or what they like about it, Ringbauer says, which could help shape the final version.

Compare deduction options

Calculate whether itemizing your deductions would be greater than taking the standard deduction. (The standard deduction for 2025 is $15,000 for single filers, $22,500 for heads of household and $30,000 for taxpayers who are married filing jointly.)

If you’re considering itemizing, explore ways to maximize your deductions, such as prepaying property taxes or increasing charitable donations.

Get help running the numbers

Ringbauer suggests plugging your numbers into tax software programs and online tax calculators, or working with a tax professional. Professionals can help you make the most tax advantageous choices, he says.

“We have resources and software now that can run different scenarios for our clients.”

Lauren Schwahn writes for NerdWallet. Email: lschwahn@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @lauren_schwahn.

The article Tax Deductions Might Go Up. Would You Benefit? originally appeared on NerdWallet.