Financial Mindset

Hundreds of commercial flights will be told to change their paths over the northeastern Atlantic Ocean during the next two winters to show how minor altitude adjustments can reduce aviation’s  climate  impact. The British government is backing the landmark airspace-scale trial, launched Tuesday, to avoid creating condensation trails, or contrails. Google UK is contributing its artificial intelligence-powered forecasts to identify the contrail regions. When airplanes fly through cold and humid areas, ice crystals can form around the soot particles emitted from the engine, creating clouds that  trap heat and warm the planet . The Shanwick Oceanic Control Area in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, the location of the trial, is a busy gateway for air traffic between Europe and North America. It’s also a hot spot for where contrails form. The 30-month research program known as Operation Blue Skies includes test periods this winter and nex...

The Department of Defense has ordered 30 U.S. universities to audit their partnerships with mostly Chinese universities and military training institutions as the Trump administration scrutinizes the country’s  growing global influence . If the schools don’t complete a review and terminate any arrangements deemed problematic within the next two weeks, they face losing funding. The goal is to protect taxpayer-funded research from theft and exploitation, the Pentagon said Monday. “The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, said in a news release. The release didn’t name the schools, but a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters said they include  Harvard University , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University. The schools didn’t immediately respond to emails...

Surprise U.S. tariffs. A war involving Iran. New American tech bans and Chinese export controls. The list of geopolitical shocks that CEOs must be mindful of, let alone plan for, keeps getting longer. “We’re in a world where all the assumptions about international institutions, free trade, a rules-based order—that’s all going away,” said Dominic Barton, strategic counselor to Eurasia Group and chair of Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. Barton spoke with Fortune days after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods including autos, dairy, and alcohol. The president had also threatened tariffs in response to wildfire smoke drifting across the border. “Fifteen years ago, there would have probably been diplomats bringing this forward,” he said. “Now it’s just tweeted.” (Just to show how changeable things are, on Aug. 19 Trump announced—on social media—that he will delay the new Canada tariffs by three days as th...

St. Jude  Children’s Research Hospital named Dr. Charles W. M. Roberts its new president and chief executive officer Tuesday, replacing Dr. James R. Downing, who led the nonprofit for 12 years. Roberts, who has been director of St. Jude’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and an executive vice president, will begin his new job on Jan. 1, as Downing moves into a faculty role in the hospital’s Global Pediatric Medicine department. When actor and philanthropist Danny Thomas founded St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1962, the survival rate for childhood cancer patients was around 20%. Today, it is more than 80% and Roberts says the hope is for all childhood cancers to be easily treatable someday, with major strides toward that goal are within reach. “I’m really excited because I think we are at the dawn of a new era,” Roberts told The Associated Press in an interview. “In the next several years, I believe we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve much more of Danny’s ...

In 2007, Assaf Rappaport was 24 years old and working inside Unit 81, an elite technology division of the Israeli Defense Forces that builds hardware and surveillance tools. For weeks, a friend had repeatedly badgered him about a 19-year-old soldier he was serving alongside, named Yevgeny Dibrov, insisting Rappaport needed to meet him. “He kept telling me, this guy is being wasted there, you need to talk to him,” Rappaport told Fortune . Before the two ever spoke, the friend told Rappaport that Dibrov had once won second place in a regional bout of Chidon Tanach, Israel’s national Bible trivia championship—a contest that requires memorizing scripture well enough to answer detailed trivia questions. Dibrov, who was not religious, entered purely to win. “I said, oh my God, this guy can probably do everything,” Rappaport recalled thinking. Soon after, the two men spoke on the phone, one of them a teenager, the other already a rising figure inside Israeli military intelligence. T...

Experienced CEOs know that brand equity can be a company’s most valuable asset, one that often doesn’t appear on the balance sheet. Companies build trust, credibility, and goodwill over decades through consistent performance. But as any chief executive knows, the strongest brands are rarely destroyed by their competitors. More often, brands are weakened by a company’s own choices that erode the very qualities that made them successful in the first place. This principle applies to nations as well. As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its independence, Americans need to ask not only whether their country remains one of the world’s most influential powers, but whether they have the internal qualities that sustain that influence. Recent global polling suggests that America’s reputation has weakened. Pew Research Center’s 2026 survey of 36 countries found that a median of just 37% of respondents expressed a favorable view of the United States, compared with...

Amazon Web Services’ top Asia executive is moving to Tokyo, as the global cloud computing provider bets that Japan’s potential for AI adoption makes it a far more interesting market than its sluggish headline GDP growth suggests. “Japan is in a moment of change,” Jaime Valles, AWS’ managing director of Asia-Pacific, Japan and China, tells Fortune at the firm’s Singapore office. “AI, security and competition are three strong reasons for Japanese companies to move from a traditional mainframe-based platform to the cloud.” Japan’s government has warned that a failure to modernize the country’s IT systems, which it dubs a looming “digital cliff,” could cost the economy as much as $76 billion each year.  The country was once a global pioneer in technological innovation, playing a leading role in the spread of technologies like LEDs, lithium-ion batteries, and notebook computers. But Japan’s corporate culture shifted to reward caution over disruptive innovation, a trend t...