Back-to-school is Target's biggest shopping moment outside of the holidays.
Business Insider went behind the scenes with Target's stores chief to see how it's tackling the rush.
"This is the 16th state in three weeks of visits," Adrienne Costanzo told us.
If the holiday shopping season is a retailer's final exam each year, back-to-school is the midterms. For Target, this year's test is a big one.
Success depends on getting the basics right: exciting merchandise, fully stocked stores, and competitive pricing. Those are all areas where Target has stumbled in recent years.

#target #costanzo

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump announced Sunday that his new White House counsel will be Will Scharf, the staff secretary who as the Trump-appointed head of the National Capital Planning Commission helped secure approval for the $400 million ballroom project.
Trump said that, beginning Sept. 1, Scharf will be replacing David Warrington, who will be leaving the administration to join the private sector. Trump noted that Scharf previously served as a federal prosecutor and represented him in a number of cases, including at the Supreme Court.
"Will is Tough, Strong, and Smart! He also loves our Country, and respects the Law," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Will Scharf will do a great job as White House Counsel!"
The shakeup in the White House counsel's office comes at a critical juncture — just months ahead of the midterm elections, where Trump's Republican Party will be fighting to hold on to control of Congress. Democrats have vowed to pursue investigations into Trump and his administration if they are successful in November.
The White House counsel's job is to advise on legal and policy questions related to the presidency. The office is the primary White House contact for the Justice Department, and it handles presidential pardons, works on judicial appointments and reviews legislation. The office also helps investigate and manage congressional investigations into the administration and lawsuits against the president when he is sued in his official capacity.

#washington

(NewsNation) — A year after pleading guilty to the murders of four University of Idaho students, Bryan Kohberger is challenging his conviction.
According to a handwritten post-conviction petition, the criminology student claims he was "convinced to falsely confess" to the crimes. He claims he was swayed into the plea deal that landed him life in prison through "coercion, disinformation, false promises, and the withholding of exculpatory discovery."
While Kohberger claims he had ineffective counsel who "misrepresented" what life in prison would be like, NewsNation contributor Ashleigh Banfield told Hena Doba on Monday she believes Kohberger's just bored.
"Life in prison is really awful," she said. "And when you're his age, you're facing about 70 years of this last one year that he's had. He didn't like his last year. He's been in solitary. It's boring. He's tired of it."
Clue points to one sender of Nancy Guthrie notes, profiler says

#claims #prison #like

A Connecticut police officer repeatedly ordered a man to drop a baseball bat before opening fire as the suspect continued bludgeoning a motionless man in the head, newly released body camera footage shows.
The footage, released this week by the Connecticut Office of Inspector General, captures the July 19 encounter in Meriden that left two men dead, including 38-year-old Robert Lee Jenkins III, who investigators said was shot by a responding officer while carrying out the attack.
According to the inspector general's preliminary report, Meriden Officer Anthony Offiaeli arrived at a home on Sagamore Road shortly after 10 a.m. and found Jenkins "bludgeoning" a man lying motionless on the front lawn with a baseball bat.
Video Shows Undercover Cops Shooting Man Threatening Shoppers With Fake Gun In 'Justified' Defense: Officials
"Put the f---ing bat down!" the officer shouted repeatedly while pointing his firearm at Jenkins, body camera footage shows.

#jenkins #footage #meriden

Daisy Kelly's business was inspired by a personal problem - for years she'd been pulling out her eyelashes.
She hid her habit with lash extensions, but when beauty salons closed during Covid Daisy decided to create a serum to help her eyelashes grow back.
She started Glow For It from her mother's kitchen table in 2020 while she was a student and now her business generates £6m a year in sales.
More than 40% of Daisy's sales come from TikTok Shop UK and increasingly from live streams.
"I think live shopping gives people that connection and interaction that we're all craving...We actually generated over £100,000 revenue in one 12 hour TikTok live," says Daisy, now 27.

Hazardous smoke from Canada's wildfires is spreading across the Northeast and Midwest, triggering air quality alerts, health warnings and concerns that conditions could worsen in the days ahead.
Some of the country's worst air conditions were reported Wednesday, July 15, in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, while New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on social media that smoke and haze from Canadian wildfires were creating unhealthy air conditions across the state.
New York City is already feeling the impact ahead of Sunday's World Cup final in neighboring New Jersey, with wildfire smoke pushing air quality into unhealthy territory. Officials urged residents to reduce strenuous outdoor activity and take extra breaks outside as forecasters warned smoky conditions could persist through the end of the week.
Here's what to know.

JOHANNESBURG, July 9 (Reuters) - Groups of anti-immigration South Africans seized foreigners from their homes in Johannesburg on Thursday and handed them to police in a hardening of protests that have ‌sown fear in communities and strained ties with some countries.
In Johannesburg's Alexandra township, a Reuters ‌reporter saw protesters breaking down doors and entering houses where they believed undocumented immigrants were hiding.
They escorted the people to police vans where they were taken away, including a woman and a small child from Malawi. Another man who was apprehended by the marchers told Reuters he was in the country legally.
"I am a ZEP holder," said the Zimbabwean national, Total Mhlanga, referring to the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit which allows tens of thousands of nationals to live ‌and work in South Africa.
In Soweto, ⁠anti-immigrant protesters marched through town wielding sticks and flags, with plans to go search for undocumented immigrants. Several of the flyers for Thursday's protests advertised a "peaceful march" followed ⁠by "door to door". Another march took place in Durban on the east coast.

SEOUL, July 10 (Reuters) - North Korea has decided on measures to strengthen its ‌nuclear forces "quantitatively and qualitatively" as leader ‌Kim Jong Un called for modernising its military, state media KCNA reported on Friday.
The measures and Kim's remarks came during an enlarged meeting of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Military ‌Commission on Thursday, ⁠KCNA said.
Kim said North Korea's security and "true peace" could only be ⁠guaranteed by building a powerful military capable of controlling all threats, according to the report.
The meeting set plans to renew the technical infrastructure ‌of combat systems, expand and strengthen nuclear forces, and standardise, specialise and modernise military bases, KCNA said.
It also discussed expanding the role of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North ‌Korea's military intelligence agency, to improve its reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering capabilities, the report added.

The main suspect in a bomb attack that wounded a Ukrainian tycoon on Monday in Monaco is a Ukrainian woman who disguised herself as a man, local authorities say.
Named as 39-year-old Anastasiia Berezovska in an Interpol Red Notice, she last resided in Germany and has a tattoo, possibly of a snake, running down her right arm from her shoulder to elbow.
After the attack, the suspect fled to neighboring France, then drove to Italy in a German-registered car that had been rented for the operation, prosecutors added.
The sophistication of the bomb used indicates that more than one perpetrator was involved, prosecutors said, adding that two men were arrested in Monaco before being released due to lack of evidence.
The main suspect has been the subject of a manhunt ever since a bomb exploded four days ago in the entranceway of one of Monaco's fanciest apartment buildings, targeting Ukrainian-born businessman Vadym Yermolaiev, according to CNN's French affiliate BFMTV.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former CIA Director John Brennan sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, demanding a court order that would require officials to preserve records from investigations that he says are targeting him for "phantom criminal conduct."
Brennan said in the lawsuit that the records would be essential for him to mount a defense on vindictive prosecution grounds in the event of a future indictment brought by the administration. Such a defense, his lawyers said, would be supported by the more than 100 verbal or written statements that President Donald Trump has made since 2017 lambasting Brennan and by the Republican president's directives to his Department of Justice to initiate cases "without regard to factual or legal justification."
"To fully consider those motions, the reviewing judge would need to scrutinize the motivations of the Justice Department officials who directed, oversaw, or undertook those actions to determine whether they violated Director Brennan's rights, and specifically whether they were motivated by a desire to vindictively prosecute him as an act of retribution," Brennan's lawyers wrote in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington.

Despite wanting to keep her gigantic philanthropy quiet, MacKenzie Scott's giving keeps making a splash.
Of the $19.2 billion worth of megagifts made by donors in 2025, Scott's giving represented one-third, according to data provided to Fortune from Giving USA and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had her banner philanthropic year in 2025, when she donated about $7 billion, which brought her **** ulative giving to $26.2 billion in just five years across thousands of organizations focused on housing, DEI, disaster recovery, and many more causes.
Other 2025 megadonors included Michael Bloomberg ($4.3 billion), Bill Gates ($3.7 billion), Warren Buffett ($1.34 billion), and Susan and Michael Dell (nearly $1 billion). These megadonors are part of the larger philanthropic engine in the U.S., which totaled a whopping $617.2 billion in 2025, according to a report published by Giving USA and IU's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy released Tuesday. This included philanthropic donations from individuals, bequests, foundations, and corporations to U.S. charities. The total is a 5.7% jump from the previous year.
"It was a positive year for charitable giving, with virtually all categories of recipient organizations achieving solid or better growth at the aggregate level," Gabe Cooper, vice chair of Giving USA Foundation and founder and CEO of Virtuous, said in a statement. Some of the organization types that received the most funding include religion, human services, education, health, international affairs, and arts and culture.
Despite Scott's extreme generosity in 2025, the Chronicle of Philanthropy didn't recognize her on its list of the top 50 donors this year. That's due mostly to Scott's quiet nature of giving. She is notoriously under-the-radar with her donations, never personally seeking press coverage for her gifts and rarely offering insights into the donations.

BEIJING, June 18 (Reuters) - China officially appointed its fifth-ranked leader Cai Qi as head of the Communist Party's central ‌ideology school, cementing his position as one of President ‌Xi Jinping's closest and most trusted confidants.
Cai became part of the party's seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, China's pinnacle of political power overseen by Xi, in 2022. Cai is also director of the party's General Office, making him Xi's de facto chief of staff.
China's two most recent leaders, ‌Xi and Hu Jintao, ⁠had both served as head of the elite Central Party School before ascending to the top leadership ⁠position.
By taking the helm of the top party school, Cai, 70, unites the party's organisational, doctrinal and administrative apparatus under a single Standing Committee member — a rare concentration of power.
Cai replaced Chen Xi, 72, as ‌the new president of the National Academy of Governance, the human resources ministry announced on Thursday.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by police who were responding to a shoplifting call this week has ignited simmering tensions between police and Black residents in the small town of Senatobia, Mississippi.
The death of Kohen Wiley is the latest in a series of troubling encounters with police that have outraged community members in recent years. It has led to protests and calls for greater police accountability in the town of 8,000, with some civil rights activists pointing to Kohen's death as another example of a Black life lost over something of nominal value — in this case, allegedly stolen diapers.
"We are treating items on a shelf as more valuable than a child," Bernice King, the daughter of civil right icon Martin Luther King, Jr., said in a statement posted to Instagram on Wednesday. "That is not just bad policing; it is a moral collapse."
There are still many unanswered questions about the shooting and what led up to it.
Senatobia police responded to the shoplifting call at a local Walmart on Sunday, where they found two women and a child leaving the store, getting into a car and driving away. According to a statement released by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation: "Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one. An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene."

This week's racially motivated violence in Northern Ireland has drawn attention to the region's changing demographics.
The overall level of international migration to NI is below the peaks reached in the late 2000s but where people are coming from has shifted dramatically since Brexit.
Many fewer people are coming from the EU with most new arrivals now from South Asia and an increasing number from Africa.
Official data on people registering for a medical card, to access a local GP, helps illustrates the magnitude of the change
In 2018 Poland accounted for just over 1,000 registrations compared to about 650 from India.

Most homeowners know they'll eventually need to replace at least some of the major components of their home. Roofs wear out over time, especially in areas with severe weather, and water heaters fail. HVAC systems don't last forever, either, nor do large appliances or flooring. But while many of those expenses can be anticipated at least a few years in advance, it's often difficult to know exactly when a central air conditioning system will need to be replaced — or how much that replacement will cost.
That cost question is becoming an increasingly important one as homeowners hold onto their properties longer and look for ways to manage their ongoing maintenance expenses. A central AC system is one of the most expensive household systems to repair or replace, after all, yet many homeowners don't begin researching costs until performance starts to decline or a contractor recommends a replacement. That's when many discover that the price of a new system can vary significantly.
Factors like the size of the home, the efficiency of the unit and the complexity of the installation can all influence the final bill, after all. So, before moving forward with a purchase, it's important to understand both the average costs and what specific factors drive the price of a central air conditioning unit.
Learn how ARS can help you keep your central AC costs down now.
What is the average cost of a central air conditioning unit?

An innocent woman was killed when gunmen fired 70 to 80 bullets into a car at a Louisiana gas station, apparently believing that their target was in the car, according to police.
Hammond police said the gunmen's alleged target had been in the car before the shooting, but not at the time of the shooting.
Before the gunfire erupted early Thursday, the suspects were stalking a car at a farm, Hammond Police Chief Edwin Bergeron Jr. said at a news conference.
Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann likes to read about serial killers in jail: Sheriff
"At some point [the alleged target] was in the vehicle, and then exited the vehicle to ride with someone else," Bergeron said.