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Spice and flavorings company McCormick announced on Tuesday that it’s combining with Unilever’s foods division, which includes household names like Hellmann’s and Knorr.

The combined company will maintain McCormick’s name and leadership. But upon closing, Unilever and its shareholders are expected to own 65% of the food company’s outstanding equity, amounting $29.1 billion. Unilever would also get $15.7 billion in cash. Meanwhile, McCormick shareholders will own 35.0%.

Unilever and McCormick confirmed they were in talks about a deal earlier this month, with Unilever attempting to streamline its business and focus on beauty and personal care products.

McCormick and its red-capped array of spices is a $15 billion company and the stable of brands it’s adding from Unilever are worth billions more. The companies said on Tuesday that McCormick and Unilever would have a combined revenue of $20 billion for the 2025 fiscal year.

The transaction is expected to close by mid-2027, the companies said Tuesday, pending both shareholder and regulatory approval. The deal excludes Unilever’s food business in India, Nepal and Portugal.

McCormick CEO Brendan Foley said in a prepared statement that the deal “accelerates McCormick’s strategy and reinforces our continued focus on flavor.” He added that McCormick has “long admired Unilever’s foods business, which has a “portfolio that complements our existing business, capabilities and long-term vision.”

Unilever, which is based in London, was founded nearly a century ago when Dutch margarine maker Margarine Unie merged with British soap maker Lever Brothers. The conglomerate now makes dozens of different brands, including Dove soap, Vaseline, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Liquid I.V. hydration, Axe body spray and Pepsodent toothpaste.

In 2024, Unilever announced it was spinning off its ice cream business, which included the Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum and Breyers brands. That business became the Magnum Ice Cream Co., which is based in Amsterdam. Last year, Unilever sold The Vegetarian Butcher, a plant-based meat brand, and Graze, a healthy snacking brand.

McCormick, based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, has been expanding its portfolio to take advantage of consumers’ growing interest in global flavors and sauces. The 137-year-old company bought Reckitt Benckiser’s food division — including the French’s mustard and Frank’s RedHot sauce brands — in 2017. In 2020, it bought Cholula, a Mexican hot sauce brand.

Shares of both companies rose slightly before the opening bell Tuesday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When a business sends money internationally, the process can be slow and expensive. This is the gap that Latitude aims to fill by helping firms make fast and affordable international payments by using stablecoin rails while abstracting away the complexity. 

On Tuesday, Latitude announced that it raised $8 million in a round led by NEA with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase, Paxos, and Solana Foundation, among others. Cyril Mathew, the startup’s CEO, did not disclose the company’s valuation in an interview with Fortune.

“We really want to make global payments simple for everybody and enable small businesses to reach everyone in the world,” said Vivek Morzaria, who started Latitude along with co-founders Brian Wrightson, and Mathew.  

Latitude’s main product is what it calls Global Payouts, which allows U.S. businesses to make payments to individuals in over 50 countries. When an American firm sends U.S. dollars through Latitude, the startup’s network converts that money into stablecoins and then converts them back into the local currency of the destination. One of Latitude’s clients is Zencastr, a content creator company that has podcasters around the world. Through Latitude’s network, this company can pay its content creators in India and in other countries. 

The startup’s second product serves more crypto-native apps or platforms that want to offer stablecoin access to international users.  For example, if a prediction market company wants to expand internationally to, say Mexico or the Philippines, its users could convert local currency into stablecoins through Latitude’s infrastructure. 

The three co-founders have worked at companies like Uber, Coinbase, Meta, and Stripe. They say that this experience in crypto, tech, and payments has taught them the importance of moving money efficiently around the world. 

Latitude is currently in a beta launch, where it generates revenue through transaction fees. The company has 11 employees. 

Mathew says that Latitude’s competition is traditional banks who facilitate foreign exchange transactions through legacy rails like Swift. The startup says that it has newer, more efficient rails than these institutions. 

Small businesses are “paying too much and getting too little” from the incumbent system, Morzaria says.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The stock market ripped Monday morning after the White House signaled it may no longer be America’s job to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The S&P 500 rose more than 1.5%, while the Nasdaq climbed nearly 2%.

Overnight, a Wall Street Journal report indicated that President Trump would be ready to walk away from the war in Iran; by the morning, Trump all but confirmed the reporting, telling allies on social media that they should “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.” 

“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Meanwhile, the average price of gas in the U.S. crossed $4 a gallon Tuesday, up more than a dollar from $2.98 on February 27, the day before the war began. It’s the first time gas prices have crossed the $4 threshold since 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered an energy crisis. At the same time, Trump’s approval rating is tanking, with Nate Silver putting it at -16.7, a record low for his second term and worse even that Joe Biden’s -11.7 at the same point in his presidency.

Throughout the war, the White House has catered its messaging to the stock market, which is desperately trying to hold onto its years-long rally, even as consumer costs climb. And while Americans face pain at the pump, Southeast Asia is confronting fuel shortages that are forcing people to work from home or even wear short sleeves to conserve air conditioning.

As Trump continues to optimize for the American market, he reinforces a type of “America-first” trade, where those who are invested win while other nations absorb the cost. Recently, Gulf allies have implored Trump to continue the war until the Iranian regime is fully crippled, and they are unable to fund their proxies or continue to hold the Strait as a point of leverage. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon echoed this view during an interview with Brian Kilmeade on Fox News on Tuesday morning, saying that “it’s much more important that this be successfully completed than what the market does.”

“We should all hope that these bad people, that we win this thing and clean up the straits and that Iran is no longer a threat to everybody,” Dimon said.

However, the White House, on multiple fronts, has tried to tamp down expectations for the Strait of Hormuz. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Monday that reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not one of the “core objectives” Trump has set for the military campaign, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reinforced the message Tuesday morning at a very friendly presser at the Pentagon, listing the destruction of Iran’s missiles, drones, and navy as the mission’s goal, but not Hormuz.

“This Strait of Hormuz issue is not just a United States of America problem,” Hegseth said.

Leavitt added Tuesday that once the war is over, gas prices “will plummet back to the multi-year lows American drivers enjoyed before these short-term disruptions.”

The stock market appeared to read Trump’s post as deescalation: if the U.S. pulls out, it removes the worst-case scenario of a prolonged ground campaign that sends oil even higher. But walking away doesn’t solve the underlying problem; the price of oil also climbed Tuesday as West Texas Intermediate now sits at $103 at the time of writing, nearly double where it started this year. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned this week that oil could hit $150 and cause a global recession if Iran remains a threat to Hormuz after the war ends.

The damage to the real economy is already compounding. Ultimately, even as the U.S. leverages its strategic reserves, oil is a global commodity, and as commodities researcher Rory Johnston likes to say, “a barrel of oil lost anywhere is a barrel of oil lost everywhere.” Oxford Economics cut its global industrial growth forecast to 2.5% this year, warning that energy-intensive sectors like transport, utilities, and petrochemicals face severe cost spikes and production declines. Their senior economist Nico Palesch warned in a note Tuesday morning of the potential for “supply chain disruptions on par with what was seen in the Covid-19 pandemic” if the strait’s closure isn’t resolved. 

The United Nations Development Programme also warned Tuesday that the war could push up to 4 million people in the Middle East into poverty, with the region facing GDP losses of $120 billion to $194 billion. More than 3,000 people have been killed across the Middle East since the war began: 1,900 in Iran, 1,200 in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, and 13 U.S. service members.

Meanwhile, on the other side of its mouth, the administration keeps ramping up its threats on Iran. Trump shared a video on Truth Social Monday night showing a massive ammunition depot in Isfahan being hit by American bombers, an attack Hegseth confirmed involved 2,000-pound bunker busters to destroy missiles. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs added that the U.S. has begun flying B-52 bombers over Iran, aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

On the ground, thousands of special operations forces—Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Marines—are in the region. Hegseth said strikes will intensify if no deal is reached with Iran soon, while Trump himself has threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants, oil wells, and Kharg Island—and “possibly all desalination plants,” which millions of people across the Middle East depend on for drinking water. Human Rights Watch has said bombing them would constitute a war crime. Asked about it, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said only that the military would run any such target through its “normal procedures.”

Meanwhile, Iran has little incentive to negotiate. Daily ship traffic through the strait has fallen roughly 90% to 95% since the war began. Iran’s parliament has approved a plan to formalize tolls on vessels passing through, codifying its control over the chokepoint, which it has already reaped the benefits of: Iran is earning far more per barrel than before the war. With those sorts of incentives to keep it closed, Tehran might not be in the negotiating mood.

No other country has stepped up to take charge of opening up the Strait. Trump railed against allies on Truth Social, particularly France, which he said has been “VERY UNHELPFUL” as they blocked Israeli planes carrying fuel from flying over their airspace. “THE USA WILL REMEMBER!!”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A U.S. government panel was due to convene Tuesday for the first time since 1992 to consider exempting oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act due to unspecified national security concerns, a move critics say could doom a rare whale species and harm other marine life.

Nicknamed the “God Squad” by groups who say it can decide a species’ fate, the Endangered Species Committee comprises several Trump administration officials and is chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

Republican President Donald Trump has made increased fossil fuel production a central focus of his second term. He wants to open new areas of the Gulf off the Florida coast to drilling, and has proposed sweeping rollbacks of environmental regulations disliked by industry.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth notified Burgum on March 13 that an Endangered Species Act exemption for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf was “necessary for reasons of national security,” according to a court filing from the administration.

Government officials have not disclosed the rationale for the request, which came amid global oil shocks and soaring energy prices brought on by the Iran war. Experts say the administration must specify the military need that would endanger a species to make a case for the national security exemption.

The Gulf of Mexico is one of the nation’s top oil-producing regions. It accounts for more than 10% of crude pumped annually in the U.S., plus a small share of domestic natural gas production.

But the Gulf also has been the scene of environmental disasters such as BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010 that killed 11 workers and spilled 134 million gallons (500 million liters) of oil. A spill in the Gulf earlier this month spread 373 miles (600 kilometers), contaminating at least six species and polluting seven protected natural reserves.

The Trump administration in mid-March approved BP’s new $5 billion ultra-deepwater drilling project in the Gulf.

Environmental groups sought unsuccessfully to block Tuesday’s meeting. They claimed an exemption would doom the rare Rice’s whale to extinction. Only about 50 remain in the Gulf.

A judge who struck down the environmentalists’ request suggested it was premature since officials had not yet acted on the proposed exemption.

A 2025 National Marine Fisheries Service analysis determined the Gulf oil and gas program was likely to harm several species of whales, sea turtles and Gulf sturgeon that face potential harm from ship strikes, oil spills and other impacts.

The Endangered Species Committee was established in 1978 as a way to exempt projects from the Endangered Species Act, which makes it illegal to harm or kill species on a protected list, if no alternative would provide the same economic benefits in a region or if it was in the nation’s best interest.

The panel has convened just three times in its 53-year history and issued only two exemptions. The first was in 1979 to allow construction on a dam on the Platte River in Wyoming, home to the whooping crane. It last met in 1992, allowing logging in northern spotted owl habitats in Oregon. That exemption request was later withdrawn.

Its latest meeting follows a federal judge’s ruling on Monday that struck down attempts during Trump’s first term to weaken rules for endangered species.

The panel’s members include the secretaries of agriculture, interior and the Army, the chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the administrators of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Associated Press left email and telephone messages with Interior and Defense Department officials requesting comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line.

Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys.

The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments.

“What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?” said Phelps.

She wanted students to understand what writing, thinking and classrooms were like before everything turned digital. So, she found a few dozen old manual typewriters, in thrift shops and online marketplaces, and created what her syllabus simply calls an “analog” assignment.

It might be premature to say that typewriters are making a comeback beyond Cornell’s campus. But the revival is part of a national trend toward old-school testing methods like in-class pen-and-paper exams and oral tests to prevent AI use for assignments on laptops.

Typewriters bring ‘old days’ taste of doing one thing at a time

Students arrived for class on a recent analog day to find typewriters at the desks, some with German and some QWERTY keyboards.

“I was so confused. I had no idea what was happening. I’d seen typewriters in movies, but they don’t tell you how a typewriter works,” said Catherine Mong, 19, a freshman in Phelps’ Intro to German class. “I didn’t know there was a whole science to using a typewriter.”

Like a rotary phone, the manual typewriter appears simple but is not intuitive to the smartphone generation. Phelps demonstrated how to feed the paper manually, striking the keys with force but not so hard the letters would smudge. She explained that the dinging bell signifies the end of a line and the need to manually return the carriage to start the next line. (“Oh,” said one student, “that’s why it’s called ‘return.’”)

“Everything slows down. It’s like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time. And there was joy in doing it,” said Phelps, who brings in her two children, aged 7 and 9, to serve as “tech support” and ensure no one has their phones out.

Students welcomed having fewer distractions

The assignment carries lessons beyond simply how to use a typewriter, which is the whole point.

“It dawned on me that the difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you,” said computer science major Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore, whose class had to write a critique of a German movie they’d watched.

In the absence of screens, there are no notifications to distract you as you write, and without every answer readily available at his fingertips, he asked his classmates for help, which Phelps heartily encouraged.

“While writing the essay, I had to talk a lot more, socialize a lot more, which I guess was normal back then,” Lertdamrongwong said, referring to the typewriter era. “But it’s drastically different from how we interact within the classroom in modern times. People are always on a laptop, always on the phone.”

Without a delete key and the ability to correct every mistake, he paused to think more intentionally about his writing.

“This might sound bad, but I was forced to actually think about the problem on my own instead of delegating to AI or Google search,” he said.

Manual machines were a workout for pinky fingers

Most students found their pinkies weren’t strong enough to touch-type, so they typed more slowly, pecking at the keyboard with their index fingers.

Mong, the freshman, faced an added challenge with a recently broken wrist, requiring her to use just one hand. The self-described perfectionist was initially frustrated with how messy her page looked with odd spacing between certain letters and misspellings. (Phelps told students to backspace and type ‘X’s over errors.)

“This thing I handed in had pencil marks all over it and definitely did not look clean or finished. But it’s part of the process of learning that you’re going to make mistakes,” said Mong, who found the assignment of typing a poem “fun and challenging.”

She embraced the odd spacing and played with the visual boundaries of the page to indent and fragment lines in the style of poet E.E. Cummings. It took several sheets of paper and many mistakes, all of which Mong saved.

“I’m probably going to hang them on my wall,” Mong said. I’m kind of fascinated by typewriters. I told all my friends, I did a German test on a typewriter!”

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

I was 48 years old when I left my job and enrolled in the Entrepreneurial Studies program at Stanford.

Most people at that stage of their careers are trying to reduce risk, not introduce it. They have steady income. They have dependents. In tech, the unspoken assumption is that if you were going to take a big swing, you should have done it already. I decided to swing anyway.

For most of my career, I watched Silicon Valley celebrate a particular kind of ambition: the kind that belongs to the young. We applaud founders who drop out of school, and prodigies building in dorm rooms. Those stories are real and extraordinary. But beneath them is a quiet counter-narrative: the idea that reinvention later in life is unusual, and that seasoned operators who know an industry’s flaws intimately and set out to fix them are somehow the exception.

When I speak with seasoned executives considering school or startups, the hesitation is rarely about ability or potential. It’s about perception. Risk after 40 is more often dismissed as a “midlife crisis” than embraced as a calculated choice. That’s not just unfair—it’s economically shortsighted.

What Two Decades in the Industry Taught Me

Before Stanford, I spent decades in enterprise storage. Early in my career, I joined a small company and was sent to help expand the business across Asia Pacific. I had to sit across from customers in markets like Japan and speak as the company’s storage expert—except I wasn’t, not at the beginning. I had to learn fast. I had to admit what I did not know. There were plenty of moments where I was right at the edge of my capability.

Over time, those uncomfortable moments compound. One day you wake up and realize you actually do understand the system. You know why certain architectures fail—you have seen enough cycles to recognize patterns. By my late forties, I had that pattern recognition on autopilot. What I no longer had was the spark that discomfort once fueled.

A friend who had gone through the Sloan Fellowship at Stanford suggested I apply. His advice was simple: put yourself back in an environment where you are not the expert, and be deliberate about what comes next.

I applied. I was accepted. I was the oldest person in the program.

Shortly after the program began, I received a call from an engineer I had worked with years earlier. He had developed a new approach to cloud file access that challenged deeply held assumptions about how storage systems needed to work. He showed me a prototype that defied what conventional wisdom said was possible.

At 28, I probably would have rushed in. At 48, experience pushed me to slow down and test it from every angle before moving forward. We spent months pressure-testing the idea before fully committing. After graduation, we started pitching investors and were rejected 33 times. That’s not easy, but I had watched enough cycles to know that investor consensus and customer reality are not always aligned. We kept on.

The conviction to persist did not come from blind optimism. It came from having watched this problem surface repeatedly over two decades. I had seen the clunky workarounds. I had sat through the budget conversations. I knew this pain was structural, not temporary. Eventually, we found an investor who saw it the same way.

Today, LucidLink serves thousands of companies—including Paramount, Adobe, Shopify, and Spotify—and has grown into a global business last valued in 2023 at $390 million. We won an Emmy last year for transforming the way entertainment gets made.

I do not tell this story to suggest that starting a company at 48 guarantees success. It does not. I tell it because that company would not exist if I had accepted the commonly held idea that my window had closed.

Why This Is a Business Problem, Not a Cultural One

As AI reshapes white-collar work, more professionals will reach inflection points. Some will be displaced. Others will realize that the roles they mastered are evolving faster than expected. Economic pressures are simultaneously pushing many to extend their working lives. Later-stage reinvention will become more common, not less. The question is whether the tech ecosystem treats that reinvention as an asset or a liability.

Age bias is usually framed as a cultural problem. It is also a business problem. We lose out when experience is dismissed. When later-stage operators are subtly discouraged from building, we narrow the range of problems being addressed. In industries like infrastructure, healthcare, media, and enterprise software, depth matters. Pattern recognition matters. Having lived through downturns matters.

This is not an argument against young founders. Many transformative companies were built by people in their twenties. It is an argument against assuming that innovation belongs to a single demographic. Ambition doesn’t expire. Experience, combined with a willingness to be uncomfortable again can be a competitive advantage.

If we want the next generation of companies to solve harder, more systemic problems, we should normalize career reinvention at every stage. Not because it feels inclusive, but because it makes economic sense.

Some of the most important companies of the next decade will be built by people who have already had one or two careers. The real risk is not that they try and fail. It’s that they decide, before they even begin, that they’ve already missed their moment.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Michael White got a call a few weeks ago from someone in Italy who was offering to provide any insight he could about how the Florida Panthers do business.

The caller was Bill Zito, the Panthers’ hockey operations president.

And that’s when White knew he’d fit in as the team’s business operations president.

The Panthers officially announced White, who has spent a 25-year career working in the technology and guest experience worlds, as their new business chief on Tuesday. He will oversee “all business aspects,” the team said, of its four facilities — Amerant Bank Arena, Baptist Health IcePlex, Panthers IceDen and War Memorial Auditorium.

White said the idea to work alongside Zito, the architect of the team that won Stanley Cup titles in 2024 and 2025, was a major factor. Zito called him last month from Italy, where he was part of the leadership for the U.S. men’s hockey team that won gold at the Milan Cortina Olympics. They’ve been off and running ever since.

“We clicked automatically. Our first meeting was supposed to be 30 minutes, went an hour and a half and we probably could have talked another two hours,” White said. “And we just stayed in touch throughout the process. I would say that we’re off to a really great start together and he was one of the primary reasons I came over here. He’s one of one, a legend, but also somebody that you want to partner with.”

White came to the Panthers after most recently serving as Chief Product Officer at Amazon’s autonomous vehicle company, Zoox — helping to develop an autonomous robotaxi. Zambonis still require drivers when they touch up the ice at hockey rinks, but the Panthers said White’s ability to launch strategies in many ways helped set him apart.

“After a diligent and comprehensive search, we are confident that Michael is the right fit to lead our organization into continued success,” said Michael Viola, part of the Panthers’ ownership family. “He brings to our club a proven record in consumer experience, partnership growth and product development for some of the world’s most successful companies and invaluable capabilities of organizational leadership and visionary innovation.”

It won’t take long for White to tackle one key issue for the Panthers’ future. The team has until the fall of 2028 to propose development plans to Broward County officials for property that surrounds Amerant Bank Arena, where the team plays games.

White has also worked for The Walt Disney Company in several senior leadership roles, even playing a role in the execution of the restart of the 2019-20 NBA season that was played in a bubble on the Disney campus near Orlando, Florida, after the COVID-19 pandemic essentially stopped the world in its tracks.

He introduced himself to the majority of the Panthers’ employees on Monday.

“The organization is world-class,” White said. “My previous job was great. Then I met the Violas and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is fantastic. Unbelievable ownership.’ Obviously, the winning that the team has done, and Bill’s done, the culture … it just permeates through. I just met 300 of the front-office folks and everyone literally introduced themselves and you could just feel the culture. For me, it’s a little bit of a listening journey to start and then we’ll see what we can do next. It’s a fantastic foundation and we’ll look for areas where we can amplify that.”

White is replacing Matthew Caldwell, who stepped down as Florida’s business head in August to become CEO of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

One of the world’s rarest whales lives in only one place: the Gulf of Mexico, where the Trump administration wants to expand oil and gas drilling that scientists fear could push the giant mammal to extinction.

Endangered Rice’s whales live their entire lives in the gulf, where they’re vulnerable to vessel strikes, noise pollution, oil spills and climate change -– all of which could increase with more drilling, scientists said. Other animals, including threatened manatees and endangered sea turtles, also could be put at risk, experts said.

As the Iran war pushes energy prices sharply higher, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invoked national security in seeking an exemption from endangered species laws, which make it illegal to harm or kill species on a protected list.

The Interior Department on Tuesday will consider the request at a meeting of the seldom-used Endangered Species Committee — nicknamed the “God Squad” because it can approve federal projects even they could cause extinction. The department did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

What is known about the Rice’s whale?

It’s the only whale species that lives year-round in the Gulf of Mexico, where there are fewer than 100 — and possibly fewer than 50 — left, scientists said.

Recognized as a distinct species in 2021, the Rice’s whale is usually found in a narrow area in the northeastern part of the Gulf, in waters 100 to 400 meters deep.

They’re fairly picky eaters, diving to the gulf floor for fatty fish — mainly silver-rag driftfish — during the day and then resting close to the surface at night, meaning that they are “quite living on the edge,” said Jeremy Kiszka, a biological sciences professor at Florida International University.

That’s because they undertake strenuous dives for a specific kind of food that also might be affected by more drilling and other changes in the gulf, and they’re vulnerable to vessel strikes at night, Kiszka said.

How else could oil and gas drilling put them at risk?

Noise could disrupt the whales’ foraging behavior, while increased global warming — tied to the burning of fossil fuels, including oil and gas — could change where their prey fish live, Kiszka said. The whales also are susceptible to pollution, with a significant portion of an already-small population believed to have been killed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

“What we see today is just a species … that is unlucky in many ways: small home, specialized diet and living in a place that is not easy in the first place,” because of human impacts, Kiszka said.

Many climate change impacts are “baked in,” meaning they will persist even if fossil fuels were eliminated today, said Letise LaFeir, chief of conservation and stewardship at the New England Aquarium.

But the Trump administration proposal “is just compounding the immediate risks locally and the longer term risks,” LaFeir said.

What about other species?

Although a government filing specifically mentions Rice’s whales, other threatened and endangered animals also could be harmed by oil spills or other dangers, scientists said.

“The ocean is connected, so when there is this kind of action somewhere else, it does have implications across the waters,” LaFeir said.

For example, hundreds of sea turtles — including endangered Kemp’s Ridley and loggerheads — are rescued and rehabilitated every year before they are released into the Atlantic Ocean and swim for their nesting grounds in the gulf, she said.

Michael Jasny, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s marine mammal protection project, said consequences could be far-reaching.

“It’s … sea turtles, it’s manatees, it’s whooping cranes, it’s various seabirds, it’s Rice’s whales, it’s sperm whales, it is endangered corals,” he said. “It is every endangered or threatened species in the Gulf of Mexico.”

What is the ‘God Squad?’

It was established in 1978 as a way to exempt projects from Endangered Species Act protections if a cost-benefit analysis concluded it was the only way to achieve net economic benefits in the national or regional interest.

The seven-member committee is led by the secretary of the Interior, with five other federal officials and with affected states getting one shared vote. Five votes are required for an exemption.

The committee has only issued exemptions twice. The first was for construction of a dam on a section of the Platte River considered critical habitat for whooping cranes, though a negotiated settlement won significant protections that led to overall ecosystem improvements. The second was for logging in northern spotted owl habitat, but the request was withdrawn after environmental groups sued, arguing that the committee’s decision was political and violated legal procedures.

Jasny fears the Trump administration wants to eliminate rigorous scrutiny of future exemptions and “turn this … into a thing that could be invoked at any time, almost for any purpose.”

If it can be done for drilling in the Gulf, he said, “why not California? Why not Alaska?”

“If you can declare an emergency to just kill sea turtles and manatees and whales in the Gulf, you know no species is safe.”

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Democrats’ hopes of reclaiming the U.S. Senate are colliding with a fight within their own party.

In Maine, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has thrown his weight behind Gov. Janet Mills in a crucial race, but some of his Senate colleagues are backing insurgent candidate Graham Platner in a rebuke of his strategic vision. A similar dynamic is playing out in other battlegrounds, including Michigan and Minnesota, where progressives senators are endorsing non-establishment candidates.

At stake is more than any single race. Democrats are fighting over whether the party’s traditional playbook still works in a country that elected Donald Trump for a second time — and whether leaders like Schumer should remain in charge.

“Clearly there’s a disagreement of strategy here,” said New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, who has endorsed Platner.

He added that “the business-as-usual calculation for what is going to be successful in a given election cycle does not necessarily, in my view, meet the moment.”

The divide reflects a Democratic base frustrated after the last presidential election, when President Joe Biden ran for a second term despite widespread concerns about his age. He dropped out and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump.

Nan Whaley, a Democratic strategist in Ohio who ran for governor four years ago, said the debate is no longer about progressive or moderate.

“It’s really about, who do you trust? Establishment or not establishment,” she said. “And frankly, the establishment hasn’t given us a lot to trust these past few years.”

‘A rebuke of Schumer’

In Maine, Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, have backed Mills, a 78-year-old moderate in her second term.

Platner, a veteran and oyster farmer, quickly won the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., just days after launching his campaign. His bid has since gained momentum despite scrutiny over past controversial comments and a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol.

In recent weeks, Heinrich, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have endorsed Platner as he builds support on Capitol Hill. Heinrich and Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse held a fundraiser for him, too.

Gallego, a first-term senator who won a battleground race in 2024, downplayed the endorsements as a broader critique of party leadership.

“Senate leadership didn’t back me at the beginning. So I didn’t take that as a critique,” Gallego said.

Michigan also has a contentious primary, with three high-profile candidates. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow has said she would not support Schumer as the caucus leader if Democrats regain the majority, and she’s been endorsed by four senators.

Abdul El-Sayed, running further to the left, has been endorsed by Sanders and has also run on an anti-establishment platform.

U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens has aligned with establishment figures, working with a former DSCC executive director and securing support from two senators.

Democratic strategist Lis Smith said the endorsements in races like Maine and Michigan are “as much as a rebuke of Schumer as it is an endorsement of these candidates.”

“It’s pretty uncommon for sitting senators to endorse against the Senate leader,” Smith said. “Senators are reading the tea leaves and are getting feedback from the grassroots that they are dissatisfied with Schumer’s performance as leader.”

In Minnesota, an open-seat race has similarly emerged as a test of the party’s direction. Rep. Angie Craig is seen as the centrist candidate in the primary, with endorsements from House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, the more progressive candidate, has been backed by Sanders, Warren and others, including Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who is vacating the seat.

“She understands that right now what we need are fierce fighters, people who are willing to stand up to the status quo,” Smith said in her endorsement.

‘The election may impact’ Schumer’s time as leader

Some tensions trace to March 2025, when Schumer voted with Republicans to end a government shutdown, drawing backlash from Democrats who argued he did not push hard enough against Trump’s agenda.

Later that year, Democrats held firm in a record-long shutdown fight, helping regain some ground with activists and progressives. But divisions resurfaced when a group of moderates ultimately sided with Republicans, fueling renewed frustration with party leadership even as Schumer opposed the move.

Since he became Senate leader in 2017, Schumer’s record in elections has been mixed. He led Democrats back to the majority in 2020 and expanded it in 2022 but lost ground in both 2018 and 2024.

“Leader Schumer’s North Star is taking back the Senate and is pursuing a path to do just that,” said Allison Biasotti, a spokesperson for Schumer.

He’s recruited high-profile candidates this year in tough Senate races, such as Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina. Maeve Coyle, communications director for the DSCC, said Schumer “created a path to win a Democratic Senate majority this cycle” with the recruitment.

“Senate Democrats overperformed in the last four election cycles and in 2026, we will win seats and flip the majority,” she added.

David Axelrod, who served as a top strategist for President Barack Obama, said that being Senate leader is never easy, and that Schumer “has been under fire for some time, particularly from progressives in the party.”

Schumer’s time as leader, Axelrod added, is likely directly linked to the outcome of the 2026 midterms.

“There’s questions as to whether he’ll run in 2028. There’s even questions as to whether he might be challenged as leader,” he said. “I think the results of this election may impact that.”

For now, Schumer’s caucus is tentatively standing behind him. None have explicitly called for him to step aside. But discontent has lingered, with some openly questioning whether the party needs a new direction.

“How people did politics in the 1990s is going to feel different than in the 2020s,” said Heinrich.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For decades, the image of the software developer has been one of a solitary architect hunched over a glowing integrated development environment (IDE) and terminal, translating complex business logic into thousands of lines of syntax. Success was often measured by a developer’s ability to act as a living dictionary of commands and a precise debugger of semicolons. But we are entering a new era. The introduction of agentic tools and AI-assisted “vibe coding” is fundamentally transforming the developer workflow. We are witnessing the rise of the “Supervisor Class” — a shift where the developer’s primary value is no longer the manual production of code, but the high-level orchestration of autonomous agents.

The Rise of the Supervisor Class

The developer’s role is moving to a higher plane. Previously, a workflow involved understanding a business need, drafting high-level and low-level designs, and then typing out every single line of code. Today, the last two steps are largely handled by agents. A developer now prompts a system with goals and requirements, allowing the agent to complete the task.

In this new reality, the terminal is becoming a more powerful tool than traditional UI builders because it acts as the central hub for overseeing autonomous loops. The developer no longer just writes; they review, refine, and direct. The core value proposition has shifted from the rote memorization of syntax to the application of high-level judgment.

The Death of Syntax and the Birth of Agent Skills

In this reimagined workflow, remembering 50 or 60 specific terminal commands is no longer a bottleneck. While fundamental knowledge of what these commands do remains necessary, the need to memorize granular syntax is fading. In its place, the industry is adopting agent skills — modular, natural-language instructions that teach an agent how to bridge its own knowledge gaps.

Agent skills solve one of the most persistent frustrations in early AI coding: the “forgetting” problem. Standard prompts are transient, and large language models (LLMs) suffer from limited context windows; once a conversation gets too long, the model loses its edge. Agent skills act as a modular, indexed framework — much like the chapters of a book — allowing an agent to pull in only the specific knowledge it needs for a task. This allows developers to build a persistent “second brain” within their project repositories, ensuring that if an agent learns a best practice or a project-specific architectural rule once, it retains it going forward.

Vibe Coding with Guardrails

The shift toward vibe coding has its skeptics. Without structure, vibe coding can lead to low-quality AI output, the so-called “slop,” producing code that looks right but fails to meet production security or performance standards. The new architecture of collaboration requires reimagining the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) with built-in guardrails. Enterprises are now embedding linters, security scanners, and deterministic workflows directly into the agentic loop.

The need for a structured foundation is why the myth that SaaS platforms are irrelevant is at odds with enterprise reality. When developers vibe code an entire architecture from scratch, they inadvertently create a massive hidden tax: a sprawling surface area of raw code that they must then maintain, secure, and operate. The resulting management overhead — spending elite engineering time correcting outputs and paying the high token costs of ungrounded prompts — eventually outweighs the initial speed of creation.

Agentic SaaS platforms provide the necessary metadata and secure infrastructure that allow agents to execute tasks — from billing support to promotional queries — with the accuracy required for production. Agent skills are still valuable. When deployed within a platform where the security and scalability foundations are already established, agent skills become a massive accelerator for developers to rapidly build high-value capabilities on top of the platform.

Managing a Team of Sub-Agents

The modern developer’s daily life is increasingly spent managing a flat team of specialized sub-agents. Rather than one monolithic AI agent, developers are orchestrating sequential or parallel workflows between agents specialized in front-end code, security reviews, or testing.

We see this shift in how organizations are already scaling. Lennar, one of the largest homebuilders in the U.S., now deploys 1.1 million agentic workflows per month to help keep more customers engaged, increase conversion rates, and shorten the sales cycle. Similarly, paper tablet maker reMarkable launched its first AI agent in just three weeks; it has resolved more than 10,500 customer inquiries with an NPS score that matches its human support team.

For companies like these, the supervisor class of developers isn’t just writing code; they are building the skills and orchestration layers that allow these agents to function as a seamless extension of the workforce.

From Productivity to Quality: The New Metrics

If an agent can generate 1,000 lines of code in ten seconds, lines of code and raw velocity are no longer meaningful metrics for a developer’s productivity. In fact, more code often means more surface area for bugs.

We must shift our focus to the Agentic Work Unit, — the discrete task accomplished by an AI agent. At Salesforce, our own agentic implementation highlights this shift. Our support agents now handle 96% of cases autonomously, and we’ve saved over 50,000 seller hours by letting agents handle the “admin” of sales.

For developers, the Agentic Work Unit means measuring how they can leverage agents to solve complex problems with minimal friction. Success should be measured by software quality: Have we reduced the bug count? Is the architecture more resilient? Are we shipping features that actually solve user problems, rather than just filling repositories?

By moving away from token consumption as a metric and toward work quality, we empower developers to focus on what humans do best: exercise judgment, apply empathy to user needs, and design systems that are built to last.

The Enduring Need for Human Intent

We are in the early days of this transition, reminiscent of when developers first began sharing modules on Node Package Manager (NPM) or Maven. Soon, we will see global “Agent Skill Exchanges” where developers share modular agent instructions for everything from technical blogging to SEO and complex algorithmic logic.

The future belongs to the developer who masters the ability to break down human expertise into reusable agent skills. By stepping into the role of the supervisor, developers aren’t being replaced. They are finally being freed from the drudgery of syntax to focus on the one thing AI cannot replicate: the high-level judgment required to build the future of software.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As of 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil is trading at $110.69 per barrel, based on the Brent benchmark we’ll explain in a bit. That’s 41 cents below yesterday morning’s level—but about $35 higher than where it stood a year ago.

Will oil prices go up?

No one can say for sure where oil prices will go next. Many forces shape the market—but at the core, it’s still about supply and demand. When risks like a potential recession or war ramp up, oil prices can change direction quickly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

When you buy gas at the pump, you’re covering more than the cost of crude oil. You’re also paying for every step in the process, including refineries, wholesalers, taxes, and the markup your local gas station adds.

Even so, crude oil has the biggest influence on what you pay, often making up more than half the cost per gallon. When oil prices jump, gas prices usually climb right along with them. But when oil falls, gas prices often slip much more slowly—a pattern sometimes called “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

If an emergency hits, the U.S. keeps a backup supply of crude oil called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s mainly there to protect energy security during crises, such as sanctions, catastrophic storm damage, even war. It can also help cushion the blow when supply shocks send prices soaring.

It’s not meant to solve long-term problems. Instead, it provides quick relief for consumers and helps keep vital parts of the economy moving, like essential industries, emergency services, and public transit.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are two of the world’s primary energy sources. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, which which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

When looking at how oil performs, two main benchmarks stand out:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Of the two, Brent gives a better picture of global oil performance because it prices a large share of the world’s traded crude. It’s also the go-to for tracking oil’s historical trends. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now relies on Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

If you look at the Brent benchmark over several decades, oil has been far from stable. It has experienced sharp rises tied to wars and supply cuts, along with steep drops linked to global recessions and oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s delivered the first major oil shock when the Middle East slashed exports and placed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices fell in the mid-1980s due to lower demand and an influx of non-OPEC oil producers joining the market.
• Prices surged again in 2008 as global demand grew, but then crashed alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand plummeted like never before—pushing prices below $20 per barrel.

To sum up, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s heavily influenced by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, shifting energy policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• India seeks U.S. help to produce more oil and wean itself off Russia, Middle East reliance
• S&P set for another loss following worst week since Iran War began as oil keeps climbing
• Trump said the Iran war was ‘very complete’ three weeks ago. Oil has surged 50% since

Frequently asked questions

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U.S. gas prices jumped past an average of $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 on Tuesday as the Iran war pushed fuel prices to soar worldwide.

According to motor club AAA, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is now $4.02 — over a dollar more than before the war began. The last time U.S. drivers were collectively paying this much at the pump was nearly four years ago, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The price is a national average, meaning drivers in some states have been paying well over $4 a gallon for a while now. Prices vary from state to state due to factors ranging from nearby supply to differing tax rates.

Since the U.S. and Israel launched a joint war against Iran on Feb. 28, the cost of crude oil — the main ingredient in gasoline — has spiked and swung rapidly. That’s because the conflict has caused deep supply chain disruptions and cuts from major oil producers across the Middle East.

Motorists around the world are also coping with higher gas prices due to the war. In Paris, for example, gas is at 2.34 euros per liter ($2.68), which is about $10.27 a gallon.

Expensive gas could drag on the economy and drive up other prices

Higher gas prices are impacting consumers and businesses as many households continue to face wider cost of living strains. And as drivers pay more to cover necessities like gas, many may be forced to cut their budgets in other places.

More expensive fuel can also push up other spending, from utility bills to the price of many goods consumers buy each day.

Consumer prices and the cost of living already have become flashpoints in this midterm election year, with Democrats especially hammering Trump and Republicans as the GOP tries to hold majorities on Capitol Hill. A recent AP-NORC poll found that 45% of U.S. adults are “extremely” or “very” concerned about being able to afford gas in the next few months, up from 30% shortly after Trump won the 2024 presidential election with promises to lower costs.

In the immediate future, analysts point to groceries, which have to be restocked frequently and could also see price hikes as businesses’ transportation costs pile up.

But hauling other cargo and packages has also been impacted. The United Postal Service, for example, is seeking a temporary 8% added charge on some of its popular products including Priority Mail.

U.S. diesel prices — the fuel used for many freight and delivery trucks — is now going for an average of $5.45 a gallon, up from about $3.76 a gallon before the war began, per AAA.

If the war drags on, it’s possible that those prices could tick up even higher. Most tanker movement in the key Strait of Hormuz, where roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil typically sails through, remains at a halt. That’s led to cuts from major producers in the region who have no way of getting their crude to market. Meanwhile, Iran, Israel and the U.S. have all struck oil and gas facilities, worsening supply concerns.

Reserves open in an effort to cut prices

In a search for some relief, the International Energy Agency pledged to release 400 million barrels of oil from emergency stockpiles of member nations. That includes the U.S., despite Trump initially downplaying the need for reserve oil.

The Trump administration has also eased sanctions to free up some oil from Venezuela, and temporarily Russia. The White House also says it’s waiving maritime shipping requirements under a more than century-old law, known as the Jones Act, for 60 days.

It’s not yet clear if those efforts will bring relief for consumers. A lot of factors contribute to gas prices.

Refineries buy crude oil in advance, meaning some could be work with more expensive oil for a while, and it will take time for any new supply to trickle down to consumers.

And while steep crude prices are a leading driver behind today’s surge, U.S. gas prices typically tick up a bit at this time of year. More drivers are hitting the road and trying to fuel up while they can, so there’s higher demand. Warming weather also brings a shift to summer blend fuel, which is more expensive to produce than winter blend.

The US is an oil exporter, but it’s still affected by global prices

The U.S., which is a net oil exporter, hasn’t seen as stark a shock as other parts of the world that rely more heavily on fuel imports from the Middle East, notably Asia. But that doesn’t mean America is immune to price spikes.

Oil is a globally-traded commodity. And most of what the U.S. produces is light, sweet crude — but refineries on the East and West coasts are primarily designed to process heavier, sour product. As a result, the country also needs imports.

Escalating geopolitical conflicts have disrupted oil flows and contributed to a surge in gas prices in the past. The U.S. average for regular gasoline climbed to its highest level of more than $5 a gallon in June 2022, nearly four months after the Ukraine war began and world leaders imposed sanctions against Russia, a leading oil producer.

Prices at the pump later fell from that record. Before Tuesday, per AAA data, the national average had stayed below the $4 mark since mid-August of 2022.

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Associated Press journalists Angela Charlton in Paris and Bill Barrow in Washington contributed to this report.

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