Federal health officials confirmed Thursday that shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in five U.S. states is the source of a widespread outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a parasitic intestinal illness that has now sickened thousands of people across more than 30 states since the outbreak was first identified in early May.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning late Thursday advising consumers not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce from Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. According to the CDC’s most recent tally, the outbreak has sickened at least 1,644 people across 34 states, including at least 94 hospitalizations, though officials cautioned that federal numbers lag behind what individual state health departments have reported. Michigan alone reported more than 5,000 confirmed cases as of Friday, including 102 hospitalizations, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, a figure far exceeding the CDC’s national count and underscoring how significantly reporting delays have affected the visibility of the outbreak’s true scale.

A Food and Drug Administration trace-back investigation identified a single supplier behind the contaminated lettuce. While the federal government’s initial public warnings did not name the company, Taylor Fresh Foods, based in Salinas, California, confirmed that FDA testing had traced the contamination to a specific independent farm affiliated with the company in central Mexico. In a statement posted to social media on July 17, Taylor Farms de Mexico said it was voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and had informed the FDA that it would initiate a formal recall. The company emphasized that none of its branded salads or salad kits sold in grocery stores nationwide are connected to the outbreak, noting that those retail products do not contain iceberg lettuce in the first place.

Taco Bell confirmed Friday that it had completed the removal of the affected product from its restaurants nationwide. “As of July 17, Taco Bell has completed removal of affected Taylor Farms lettuce from our restaurants,” the company said in a statement. “Based on ongoing conversations with public health officials, and out of an abundance of caution, Taco Bell worked swiftly to voluntarily remove the product from restaurants and the affected ingredient has been removed from our supply chain nationwide. We took this action to ensure our guests can enjoy their Taco Bell favorites safely. We believe public health is a shared responsibility among restaurants, their suppliers, and authorities, and we are proud to have consistently acted quickly and proactively to protect our guests.”

The CDC has said it is also investigating additional cyclosporiasis illnesses and outbreak clusters nationally that are unrelated to the Taco Bell lettuce findings, meaning not every reported case tied to the broader national surge in cyclospora infections is necessarily connected to this specific source.

Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a microscopic parasite transmitted through contaminated food or water. According to the CDC, symptoms typically begin about one week after exposure, though onset can range anywhere from as soon as two days to as long as two weeks or more after consuming contaminated food. Common symptoms include watery diarrhea, loss of appetite and weight loss, with the illness sometimes persisting for weeks if left untreated. Officials noted the infection is treatable with antibiotics once properly diagnosed, though there is no routine testing for cyclospora, meaning healthcare providers typically only test for it when an outbreak has already raised awareness among clinicians. No deaths have been reported in connection with the current outbreak.

Health officials have emphasized that thorough washing alone cannot reliably remove Cyclospora from produce, since the parasite is resistant to typical rinsing methods. The CDC recommends cooking produce to an internal temperature of at least 158 degrees Fahrenheit, or 70 degrees Celsius, as the most reliable method for killing the parasite when contamination is a concern.

The outbreak has had measurable financial consequences for companies connected to the fresh produce and fast-food supply chain. Shares of Yum Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, fell nearly 7% over the five trading days following the outbreak’s public disclosure. Other companies that sell fresh lettuce also saw their stock prices affected by the broader health scare, even without direct ties to the confirmed outbreak source. Salad chain Sweetgreen saw its shares plunge nearly 13% over the course of the week, while fast-casual chain Cava fell more than 3%. Both companies saw a partial rebound Friday, with Sweetgreen shares rising more than 17% and Cava climbing about 2%, a reaction analysts attributed to apparent relief among investors once the CDC’s investigation confirmed that neither company’s ingredients were identified as a source of the outbreak. Analysts have generally said any near-term sales or stock price impact facing Taco Bell and similarly affected companies is likely to be limited in scope and duration, particularly once headlines about the outbreak begin to fade.

This is not the first time Taylor Farms has been connected to a significant foodborne illness investigation involving a major fast-food chain. Last year, an E. coli outbreak was traced to onions supplied to several restaurants from a Taylor Farms facility in Colorado, a situation that briefly forced McDonald’s to stop using onions on its Quarter Pounder sandwiches at some locations while the investigation unfolded. On its website, Taylor Farms describes itself as the leading global producer of salads and healthy fresh foods, operating production facilities across the United States, Canada, Mexico and Western Europe, and industry analysts have noted that a small number of large, vertically integrated companies like Taylor Farms dominate the U.S. bagged lettuce and salad supply chain, meaning contamination at a single facility or farm can quickly ripple across numerous restaurant chains and retail products nationwide.

The FDA said it continues working with Taylor Farms to determine whether lettuce from the implicated Mexican farm was distributed to any additional locations or retailers beyond the five states currently named in the CDC’s consumer warning. Federal and state health officials said the investigation remains active, and additional updates are expected as testing and case reporting continue in the coming weeks. Consumers who believe they may have symptoms consistent with cyclosporiasis are encouraged to consult a healthcare provider and report their illness to their local health department to assist ongoing surveillance efforts tied to the outbreak.

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Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 this week, unveiling what the company describes as the largest open-source AI model ever made publicly available, with benchmark performance the company says rivals some of the most advanced systems built by American labs including Anthropic and OpenAI.

The model, released Thursday, contains 2.8 trillion total parameters, making it roughly 75% larger than DeepSeek’s V4 Pro, previously one of the largest Chinese open-weight models at approximately 1.6 trillion parameters, and far outpacing Zhipu AI’s GLM 5 series at 744 billion parameters. Kimi K3 is also roughly 2.8 times the size of Moonshot’s previous flagship model, K2.6, released in April. Full model weights are scheduled to be released publicly on July 27, timed to coincide with the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference currently underway in Shanghai.

According to Moonshot, K3 performed “competitively” against Anthropic’s Fable 5, currently among the most capable publicly available AI models, and “substantially outperformed” Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 as well as OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol and GPT 5.5 on the company’s officially released benchmarks, where K3 consistently ranked among the top three models tested. One independent benchmark from Arena.AI reportedly ranked K3 as the best-performing model currently available, ahead of offerings from both Anthropic and OpenAI, though Moonshot’s own reporting placed K3 slightly behind Fable 5 on overall performance.

In a press release announcing the model, Moonshot described K3 as its most powerful open-source coding model to date. “K3 stands as Moonshot AI’s most powerful open-source coding model to date,” the company wrote, adding that the model can “sustain long engineering sessions, navigate massive repositories, and orchestrate terminal tools” while “operating with minimal human oversight.”

The model introduces two architectural innovations developed internally at Moonshot: Kimi Delta Attention, a hybrid linear attention mechanism designed to reduce memory usage and improve processing speed, and Attention Residuals, which the company describes as a drop-in replacement for traditional residual connections that delivers more consistent performance gains as models scale in size. Both techniques had previously been published as open research by Moonshot’s team on GitHub. K3 also supports a 1-million-token context window, positioning it for long-horizon coding tasks and autonomous agent workloads, along with native visual understanding capabilities and an always-on reasoning mode the company calls “thinking mode.” Moonshot said the model uses 21% fewer output tokens than its predecessor on equivalent tasks, and the model’s API is compatible with the OpenAI SDK, lowering the technical barrier for developers already building on OpenAI or Anthropic’s existing toolchains.

Pricing for K3’s API access is set at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, the highest pricing structure of any major Chinese AI lab, though still roughly half the per-task cost of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and dramatically cheaper than Fable 5, which reportedly costs $50 for an equivalent volume of output tokens. Independent testers have noted that K3’s reasoning mode consumes a substantial number of tokens even on relatively simple tasks, with one test generating 13,241 reasoning tokens for a basic SVG image-generation request, costing roughly 25 cents per query.

Moonshot’s Kimi chatbot has become one of the most widely used consumer AI products in China, and the company’s annualized recurring revenue exceeded $200 million as of April, driven by a combination of paid subscriptions and API usage. The company’s investor base includes several major names in Chinese technology, including Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, HongShan (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund and 5Y Capital, with total funding raised across four rounds standing at approximately $3.77 billion. Bloomberg reported in June that Moonshot was seeking a new funding round valuing the company at roughly $30 billion, an almost eightfold increase from its $4 billion valuation in late 2024.

Beyond its use inside China, Moonshot’s models have already gained traction among Silicon Valley developers. Cursor, the AI-assisted coding startup, has used earlier versions of Kimi to help power its Composer 2 coding agent. DoorDash chief technology officer Andy Fang said in an early July social media post that the company delegates “lower-level work to Kimi K2.6.” Thinking Machines also used Kimi K2.5 to help generate early post-training data for its Inkling model, released July 15.

The release of K3 coincided with, and appeared to intensify, a broader selloff already underway in global chip and technology stocks. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company shares fell 7% Friday despite the company reporting a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit, while SoftBank, often viewed by investors as a proxy for OpenAI given its investment stake, fell 9%. Z.ai, a Chinese AI startup that has released a competing model to Kimi, plunged nearly 30% in Hong Kong trading. In the U.S., the Nasdaq 100 fell roughly 1% as of 2 p.m. Eastern time Friday, Nvidia shares dropped 1.2%, briefly ceding its position as the world’s most valuable company to Apple, and Meta shares fell more than 2.4%.

Technology analyst Patrick Moorhead pushed back on characterizing the market reaction as strictly performance-driven, attributing much of the response instead to broader political tensions surrounding Chinese AI development. In an email to CNBC, Moorhead said, “There’s a big debate in Washington DC about whether the U.S. should use Chinese open source models and if U.S. companies should enable the Chinese to use their models,” adding, “The latter is ironic as the Chinese seem to be doing fine with their models.”

K3’s release marks a notable comeback for Moonshot, whose market position had eroded significantly over the prior 18 months following the meteoric rise of rival Chinese lab DeepSeek, whose earlier open-source model releases similarly rattled global markets and intensified competitive pressure across the AI industry. With full model weights set to be published July 27 and Moonshot pursuing a substantially higher valuation in ongoing funding talks, the release is expected to keep pressure on both Chinese and American AI labs as the global race to develop increasingly capable, cost-efficient open-weight models continues to accelerate.

The NatWest Growth Tracker Business Activity Index pegs the region as one of the best performers in the UK

A survey that tracks the health of the region’s private sector companies has remained in growth despite a fallback in activity in June.

The NatWest North East Growth Tracker Business Activity Index, which measures month-on-month changes in the region’s manufacturing and service sectors, declined to 50.8 in June, having stood at 53.8 in May. Scores above 50 denote a growing economy.

The North East outperformed the UK as a whole, however, where activity fell in June. Among the 12 monitored UK regions and nations, only London and the South East recorded better trends for activity.

Within the survey, business confidence strengthened in the North East in June, with optimism regarding output over the coming year rising to a three-month high. Cost pressures receded, according to businesses responding to the survey, while the rate of input price inflation eased to its lowest since February.

But there were concerns at job losses, which came at the steepest levels since November last year and were sharper than the UK average.

Malcolm Buchanan, chair of the NatWest North regional board, said: “The North East saw growth momentum falter as the first half of 2026 drew to a close, according to the latest NatWest Growth Tracker. New business placed with private sector firms increased for the seventh month running, but the rate of growth slowed to a fractional pace that was the weakest over this period and contributed to a much slower rise in overall business activity.

“Nonetheless, the region remained one of only three monitored UK areas to record growth in June, alongside London and the South East. This relative resilience helped support confidence among private sector firms, with optimism about the year ahead rising to a three-month high.

“Companies also reported a further easing in cost pressures at the end of the second quarter. The rate of input cost inflation fell to its lowest since February, though it remained high by historical standards. Firms continued to raise their own charges at a marked, albeit softer, pace as they sought to protect margins from elevated cost burdens.

“At the same time, businesses moved to protect cashflow by controlling expenditure elsewhere. Employment fell at the sharpest pace since November last year, underlining the pressure firms continue to face even as demand remains in positive territory.”

The release of the growth tracker has come ahead of some key economic data showing the state of the regional economy. Unemployment and labour market data will be published next Tuesday, including regional data, followed by national inflation data the next day.

Get ahead of the market by subscribing to Seeking Alpha’s Wall Street Week Ahead, a preview of key events scheduled for the coming week. The newsletter keeps you informed of the biggest stories set to make headlines, including upcoming IPOs, investor days, earnings reports, and conference presentations.

Wall Street opened in deep red on Friday as a global semiconductor selloff intensified on concerns over elevated AI spending and stretched valuations. Technology stocks remained under pressure as semiconductor shares across global markets traded lower. Meanwhile, tensions in the Middle East remained elevated as concerns over a fresh crude oil supply crunch persisted.

The economic calendar is relatively lighter next week with earnings in full swing. The only major data scheduled are initial jobless claims on Thursday and S&P Global PMI data for July on Friday.

Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), Tesla (TSLA), and Intel (INTC) are among the major firms reporting their results next week. _______________________________________________________________

Earnings spotlight: Monday: Domino’s Pizza (DPZ), AMC Entertainment (AMC). See the full earnings calendar.

Earnings spotlight: Tuesday: Novartis (NVSEF), 3M (MMM), Halliburton (HAL). See the full earnings calendar.

Earnings spotlight: Wednesday: Alphabet, Tesla, Philip Morris (PM). See the full earnings calendar.

Earnings spotlight: Thursday: Intel. See the full earnings calendar.

Earnings spotlight: Friday: American Express (AXP). See the full earnings calendar.

Volatility watch: Sandisk (SNDK) and Western Digital (WDC) have seen options volatility increase over the last week. The most overbought stocks per their 14-day relative strength index include Crinetics Pharma (CRNX), AstroNova (ALOT), and CareDx (CDNA). The most oversold stocks per their 14-day Relative Strength Index include Standard Lithium (SLI) and Rithm Property Trust (RPT).

Dividend watch: Companies that have an ex-dividend date coming next week include Caterpillar (CAT), Colgate-Palmolive (CL), Dell Technologies (DELL), and Pfizer (PFE).

IPO watch: No IPOs are expected to price and

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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha’s Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.