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Atlanta rapper Juney Knotzz received six years in prison for a mail theft check fraud scheme. Learn how check washing works and how to protect yourself.

A district court judge blocked the new rule last week after a whistleblower warned it could “derail” the midterm elections.

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Why we love this deal

Summer is on the way out, but fall will be here soon. And if you love spending time outdoors, it likely has you in the mood to refresh your yard for the cooler weather, whether it’s reviving patchy grass with a lawn mix or envisioning a new spot to lounge on crisp fall days. To achieve the latter, a new patio set can help create a lounge-worthy outdoor space that you’ll be able to enjoy all year long.

If you’re looking for a patio set under $100, Walmart has plenty of options to choose from. Our latest outdoor find is the Krofem 3-Piece Wicker Patio Set. Right now, this all-weather set is on sale for only $54, which is 33% off its original $80 price tag. Even at full price, the three-piece patio set is a steal. All the more reason to add it to your cart while it’s available at an even more affordable price.

Krofem 3-Piece Wicker Patio Set, $54 (was $80) at Walmart

Courtesy of Walmart

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Why do shoppers love it?

This three-piece patio set can make an outdoor space feel more like home. It can create a small seating area in a compact space, or cozy up a corner on a large deck with its two armchairs and a side table. Each piece has a powder-coated steel frame that’s wrapped in wicker rattan, complete with UV treatment and an all-weather design that can hold up in the spring and summer — rain or shine. While it’s a good practice to use a furniture cover during inclement weather, this budget-friendly patio set can keep up with the seasons. 

Each chair measures 22.7 inches long by 23.8 inches wide by 30.9 inches high, with a seat height of 16.5 inches. The chairs feature contoured backrests to support good posture, and they’re paired with comfortable seat cushions. The cushions themselves are thick and have removable waterproof covers that are easy to clean. 

The side table measures 16.1 inches long by 16.1 inches wide by 15.6 inches high. It has a stylish and durable tempered glass top that’s secured with suction bases to prevent it from sliding around. The tabletop is also easy to clean with a quick wipe with a damp cloth.

Related: Amazon’s pair of reclining patio chairs with detachable side tables is now $70

Pros and cons

Pros 

Compact size: The three-piece set is perfect for small outdoor spaces, including small decks or apartment balconies.

All-weather design: Its powder-coated frame wrapped in wicker rattan is resistant to warping and made for the outdoors. The cushion covers are also removable and waterproof.

Easy assembly: Reviewers say it’s easy to put together, and it comes with a tool.

Cons

Limited colors: The set was available in only three colors.

Stationary: Plenty of shoppers love a stationary patio set, but we’ve seen a lot of readers take to rocking chair designs lately. If you’re into the relaxing feel of an outdoor rocking chair, this set might not be the one for you.

According to Walmart shoppers, this patio set was very easy to assemble, which isn’t always the case with furniture. One shopper also said it provides a lot of comfort for the price, while another reviewer loved it so much that they plan on ordering more.

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If you’ve been waiting for an outdoor deal that will help you cozy up your outdoor space and save you money, the Krofem 3-Piece Wicker Patio Set is an excellent choice. On sale for just $54 at Walmart, you’ll get a stylish and durable set at an affordable price.

Adobe is handing over control to a new CEO after the current CEO spent 18 years in the role, as artificial intelligence is set to disrupt the software company that powers Photoshop and Creative Cloud.

Adobe (ADBE) is undergoing one of its largest leadership overhauls ever at a particularly challenging time for investors.

Anil Chakravarthy will become president and CEO of software giant Adobe, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who has been at the helm for more than 18 years. Chakravarthy will take over on Dec. 1, and Narayen will move to the role of executive chair.

But Wall Street’s response hinted at the scale of the task confronting Adobe’s new boss.

Adobe shares fell nearly 7% on Sept. 4, after the leadership announcement and David Wadhwani’s departure. Wadhwani ran Adobe’s creativity and productivity business and was a potential CEO candidate.

After falling more than 21% in 2025, the stock had fallen 18% in 2026 before Friday Sept 4.

But the greater issue is that generative AI is coming for the industry that Adobe has controlled for decades, and investors are waiting for proof that Adobe can transform its own AI technologies into enough growth to secure its business.

Adobe’s leadership shakeup comes at a critical moment

Chakravarthy joined Adobe in 2020 after serving as CEO of Informatica. He oversaw Adobe’s Digital Experience business first, then ran international field operations and finally led its Customer Experience Orchestration business.

That background might be a key hint as to where Adobe is headed.

Adobe says it’s using agentic AI more in its corporate solutions to tailor interactions enterprises have with their consumers.

Narayen described Chakravarthy as a “transformational leader” with profound knowledge of Adobe’s business.

But the succession also heralds another big shift.

Wadhwani, who has overseen Adobe’s creative and productivity division for almost five years, said he was stepping down after Chakravarthy’s appointment. Wadhwani was said to be a possible contender for the CEO role.

Related: Citi resets Adobe stock price target

So Adobe is not just replacing the CEO. The corporation is also facing what may be the largest technical challenge to its creative-software brand since cloud computing emerged.

Now investors have to decide whether Chakravarthy can take that disruption and reshape it once again.

Adobe makes dramatic leadership change as AI rivals close inNurPhoto / Getty Images

Wall Street sees a major AI threat to Adobe

Adobe’s main challenge is that it lacks artificial intelligence.

The business has been working hard to grow Firefly and add generative AI capabilities to products like Photoshop and its larger creative suite.

The question is whether AI is changing the economics of creative software quicker than Adobe can commercialize those goods.

Morgan Stanley downgraded Adobe to Underweight from Equalweight in July and slashed its price target to $240 from $365. The firm cited several simultaneous transitions, including Adobe’s freemium strategy, leadership changes, and increased AI investment.

More fundamentally, Morgan Stanley questioned the vulnerability of Creative Cloud’s recurring income to being replaced by generative AI.

This is the heart of Adobe’s problem.

AI technologies are democratizing the ability to create complex images and video that previously required specific technical skills, which took time and practice to master. Adobe is also competing with firms like Canva and Figma, and newer generative AI platforms are transforming the way people create digital material.

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Other experts are less gloomy.

Barclays recently raised its Adobe price target to $295 from $250 while maintaining an Equalweight rating, while RBC Capital increased its target to $315 from $285 and maintained an Outperform rating.

The fight reveals exactly how challenging it has become for Wall Street to value Adobe.

Adobe’s new CEO inherits an AI problem worth billions

The shift in leadership at Adobe comes only days before another big test.

Adobe’s fiscal third-quarter earnings release is due Sept. 10, providing investors their first big chance since the CEO announcement to gauge Adobe’s financial performance and its AI strategy. The leadership announcement itself came as Adobe confirmed the date for results.

Adobe isn’t going into that report empty-handed.

Reuters reported that the business upgraded its annual profit prediction in June due to rising demand for its AI-powered goods.

But investors want more than that.

They want proof that standard artificial intelligence can protect—and ultimately accelerate, the steady income stream Adobe has created with products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Creative Cloud.

The nomination of Chakravarthy is significant beyond an executive shift.

Narayen helped turn Adobe from a packaged software company into a cloud subscription juggernaut. So now Chakravarthy inherits a new transformation: the challenge of showing Adobe can still be vital when generative AI makes it much simpler to create professional-looking content.

The decline in the stock implies investors aren’t convinced yet.

And after two years of significant share-price loss, Adobe’s new CEO doesn’t have the luxury of looking at AI as just another product cycle.

He’s taking over a debate over whether one of software’s best brands can stay just as valuable in an AI-first society.

Related: Adobe’s latest AI acquisition just breezed through Washington

The Pennsylvania senator responded to some of the allegations detailed in a Wall Street Journal report last week in new comments to CNN.

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Few retail chains that filled malls in the 1980s and 1990s still exist today.

Teenage me could have shopped at Chess King for shiny shirts, Gadzooks for baggy pants, or gone a little classier and purchased some dressier clothes at Structure. All of those chains were fairly, if not very, popular for a minute, and none of them exist now.

Tory Burch Chief Client Officer Francesca Danzi told Forbes that it’s a major challenge for a brand to remain relevant across decades.

“Enhancing retail experience is key and goes beyond adding omnichannel capabilities that boost convenience. We are witnessing the rise of experiential retail that is reshaping the store of the future,” she said.

Danzi does not see the so-called retail apocalypse as a crisis where stores are closing, but as an opportunity to right-size store portfolios.

“Actually, what I see is the continuous integration and convergence of physical stores, e-commerce websites and digital content/marketing platforms. Relevancy and personalization are key,” she added.

It’s a changing market that makes the ongoing survival of Gap Inc. impressive. The Gap, the company’s flagship brand, was a hip mall chain in the 1980s that maintained that status through the 1990s.

Now, the company has completed its process of closing 350 stores, but the company still faces a difficult cost equation.

The Gap delivers mixed results

“In the second quarter, while the company exceeded our profit expectations, we delivered a net sales decline of 2% with mixed performance on the top line across the portfolio. While not the revenue outcome we wanted, continued operational and financial rigor contributed to gross margin strength,” Gap CEO Richard Dickson said during the chain’s second-quarter earnings call.

The Gap brand was the clear standout.

“The Gap brand delivered another exceptional quarter with comparable sales increasing 10%, and Banana Republic continued to build momentum, posting its fifth consecutive quarter of positive comps. Athleta’s top line remained pressured, though we saw encouraging improvements in inventory productivity,” he added.

Old Navy, which was the company’s strength in the 2000s and 2010s when the chain’s namesake brand struggled lagged, has been dragging the company down.

“At Old Navy, as we previewed on last quarter’s call, seasonal categories continued to weigh on performance. While we took actions to address this as the quarter progressed, we also experienced a slowdown in traffic, which led to a modest miss versus our expectations,” the CEO shared.

Gap needs to cut costs

In a process that began in 2020, Gap Inc. closed 220 Gap and 130 Banana Republic stores.

At the time, the company made it clear that it was mostly exiting mall stores in favor of cheaper strip malls, open-air city centers, and outlet malls.

“We’ve been overly reliant on low-productivity, high-rent stores,” former Gap CEO Mark Breitbard told Boston 25 News. “We’ve used the past six months to address the real estate issues and accelerate our shift to a true omni-model.”

The long-term goal was to reduce ROD, rent, occupancy, and depreciation, which are fixed or semi-fixed costs associated with store operations.

That strategy worked, according to CFO Katrina O’Connell, but more work remains to be done,

“We have previewed that ROD deleverages this year. It is a new dynamic for us. I think it represents 2 things. First of all, we’ve largely concluded closing our underperforming stores. The pace of the closures that we were doing when we were closing 350 stores had provided meaningful benefit to ROD,” she said.

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Now, the retailer has moved to opening stores, and that has created a negative when it comes to expenses.

“And now we’re modestly opening stores. So that does impact the ROD line as the closures abate, and we end up with not that ROD favorability,” she added.

The new stores, she noted, “does help us on the sales line,” but it leaves the company in a position where it needs to cut costs without the lever of being able to close high-cost, low-profit stores.

Gap has been growing, but its Old Navy brand has struggled.Shutterstock

Gap reported mixed results

Gap Inc. saw its sales drop, but increased its profitability in the second quarter and returned $262 million of cash to shareholders in the form of share repurchases anddividends during the quarter.

Some financial highlights included:

Net sales of $3.7 billion were down 2% compared to last year. Comparable sales were down 1%.

Store sales decreased 3% compared to last year.

The company ended the quarter with nearly 3,500 store locations in about 35 countries, of which 2,471 were company-operated.

Online sales decreased 1% compared to last year and represented 35% of totalnet sales.

Adjusted net income was $190 million and adjusted diluted earnings per share were $0.52, excluding the net IEEPA tariff recovery and related interest income.

The Gap brand itself was the clear leader for the company.

“Second quarter net sales of $844 million were up 9% compared to last year. Comparable sales were up 10%, with the brand’s focus on big ideas and culturally relevant storytelling continuing to drive strong performance in destination categories including denim, fleece, and kids and baby,” the company shared.

Experts and analysts have mixed opinions on Gap

GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders acknowledged that Dickson has shifted the culture at the company.

“I stand by that view, mostly because I think it’s important to give due recognition to positive changes – especially in an area where a retailer has traditionally struggled. However, as I also mentioned, this is only one piece in the jigsaw puzzle of change that needs to occur for Gap to get back on track,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

He was critical, however, of the company’s merchandise after a visit to a local store.

“In menswear, the assortment is still incredibly bland. There is very little, if any, newness. None of the products are innovative. Few have those little twists or styling embellishments that make them ‘must-have’ items. Everything is just very flat,” he added.

Saunders made that assessment after visiting a Gap store previously, and his comments offer a useful counterpoint to the brand’s much stronger Q2 results.

Some analysts, however, remained concerned about the problems at Old Navy.

Jefferies analyst Corey Tarlowe downgraded Gap (GAP) to Hold from Buy with a price target of $23, down from $29, TipRanks reported.

“The firm is ‘increasingly concerned’ about softer trends at Old Navy, with its data pointing to higher promotions. Gap’s Q2 offers the easiest comparison of the year, yet trends have lagged, and the comps get tougher in the second half of the year, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Jefferies downgraded the shares to reflect its weakening survey metrics for Gap,” the website reported.

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Every product launch is an argument about what something can do.

That is the entire genre. A company builds a thing, then spends a launch day listing the tasks it handles faster, cheaper, or better than whatever came before. Carmakers list horsepower. Chipmakers list transistors. Artificial intelligence labs list benchmark scores, and for roughly three years those scores have moved in one direction, which is up.

The competitive logic got simple enough that investors stopped interrogating it. More capability means more paying customers, more enterprise contracts, and more justification for the hundreds of billions in data center spending now underwriting the AI trade. Nobody in that chain had much reason to advertise restraint.

That pattern has held through every model release since ChatGPT arrived, including the ones that shipped with safety documentation attached. The documentation described risks. The product still went out whole.

So it registers when a launch inverts the format. On Thursday, Sept. 3, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra and spent a meaningful share of the announcement explaining which capabilities the model would refuse to use.

What OpenAI actually held back inside Astra

Astra is the first model the company has classified at the Critical cybersecurity threshold under its own Preparedness Framework, a designation that triggers deployment restrictions the rest of the industry has never had to apply.

The version reaching most customers refuses advanced offensive security work, including requests to write proof-of-concept exploits. In the application programming interface, a flagged task stops outright instead of pausing for approval. Enterprise administrators have to switch Astra on themselves, because workspace access is off by default.

Related: Apple’s accusations are making things uncomfortable for OpenAI

Astra’s ability to find and develop zero-day exploits “creates a need for stronger safeguards,” OpenAI said in its launch post.

The numbers behind that sentence are worth sitting with:

Astra scored a perfect 100% on ExploitBench without production safeguards, up from 78.5% for predecessor GPT-5.6 Sol, according to OpenAI.

The model found and used two previously unknown vulnerabilities during an internal test built from flaws disclosed in the three months before launch, according to OpenAI.

It solved 88.0% of software reverse-engineering tasks on a single attempt, against 55.9% for Sol, according to OpenAI.

Developers pay $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, reported CSO Online.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman framed the release in bigger terms. “Welcome to the AGI era,” he told reporters, Forbes reported.

Why the Critical label is a disclosure and not a capability jump

The instinct here is to treat Astra as newly dangerous. When I read the launch post against OpenAI’s own August disclosures, that reading fell apart.

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OpenAI paused internal work on Astra in early August after the model showed sharp gains in agentic coding and cybersecurity, a decision covered here when the company split its Daybreak program into two access tiers. The capability existed then. What arrived on Sept. 3 was the measurement.

“The testing changed. The model did not,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, CSO Online reported.

That inverts the obvious enterprise response, Gogia argued. Astra is now the only frontier model whose offensive cyber ceiling has been measured against a published threshold and disclosed. Every unlabeled model already sitting behind corporate credentials has never been tested that way, and will not be until its vendor decides to test it.

Those models are not safer. They are unmeasured. My analysis of the comparison table OpenAI published alongside the launch found rival models scoring within striking distance on the same exploit benchmarks, without any equivalent public threshold attached to them.

That is the part worth carrying into a portfolio decision. The market has spent this year pricing AI cyber risk off incidents, which arrive at random and fade in a week. Astra prices it off a published measurement, which does not fade and which competitors will eventually have to answer.

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on Sept. 3, classifying it as Critical cybersecurity and restricting most users’ access.CFOTO / Getty Images

What the Astra lockdown signals for cybersecurity stocks

For investors, the disclosure lands on a trade that has been working all year.

Enterprise security budgets have been repricing since spring, and the catalyst has consistently been AI capability rather than any single breach. CrowdStrike (CRWD) and Palo Alto Networks (PANW) both hit record highs on Aug. 10 following the Black Hat conference, where AI security demand dominated the agenda.

“AI agents have fundamentally changed the threat landscape,” BTIG analysts wrote to clients after that conference, CNBC reported.

Astra hardens that thesis rather than complicating it. A vendor voluntarily disabling its own model’s best offensive capability is telling security buyers, in the plainest language available, that the attacker side of the equation just got cheaper. Chief information officers do not need a briefing note to translate that into a budget line.

The distribution layer benefits too. Astra ships through Microsoft (MSFT) Azure and Amazon (AMZN) Bedrock, which means the two largest cloud vendors are now selling a model whose capability ceiling is a public compliance fact rather than a marketing claim.

The read-across is not uniform, and that matters for position sizing. Endpoint and identity vendors sit closest to the agentic attack surface Astra widens. Firewall-heavy revenue mixes sit further from it. Palo Alto shares had already roughly doubled year to date before this disclosure, which leaves less room for a headline to do the work a quarter usually has to do.

The gap between OpenAI monitoring Astra and enterprises auditing it

The uncomfortable finding sits further down the launch post, where OpenAI acknowledged that Astra’s written reasoning is harder to monitor than its predecessor’s.

The company attributes the decline to Astra solving problems in fewer written steps. The practical effect is the same either way. A model that behaves better, while revealing less about why, is a model that outruns the audit tooling built around it.

Gogia made the sharper version of that point to CSO Online, noting that OpenAI’s ability to monitor Astra does not give an enterprise the ability to audit it. The telemetry stays with the vendor.

There is a cost on the other side as well. Users outside OpenAI’s vetted access programs may hit slowdowns, pauses, or outright blocks, sometimes in the middle of work unrelated to security, according to MarkTechPost, which cited OpenAI’s Mia Glaese.

OpenAI has said it will loosen those restrictions for vetted defenders through Daybreak in the coming weeks. That is the number worth tracking, and it is not a benchmark score. It is the ratio of how much capability gets unlocked to how many organizations clear the vetting.

If that ratio stays narrow, Astra becomes a compliance product with a genuine moat, and the cybersecurity names selling defense against everything below the frontier keep their run. If it widens quickly, the restraint on display Sept. 3 may turn out to have been a launch-week posture, and the safety disclosure investors are currently reading as a moat starts reading as a pause.

Related: OpenAI just disclosed something genuinely alarming

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