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Last summer was hardly a fun time for popular casual dining chain Red Lobster. In May 2024, the seafood chain filed for bankruptcy. The process saw stores close and resulted in new ownership and a new CEO by the time the company exited bankruptcy in September 2024. But this summer, Red Lobster is hoping things will be different. Instead of cost-cutting and restructuring to boost its bottom line, the chain hopes a handful of new menu items will boost foot traffic and get diners back in the doors. Red Lobster announces new menu items for summer 2025 “Americas favorite seafood chain” has announced the return of its popular Crabfest event. The annual event is timed for the summer at Red Lobster, when diners have sun, surf, and seafood on their minds. The company has announced that Crabfest will run from June 23 to September 14, 2025. [Photos: Red Lobster] Red Lobster says that this years Crabfest celebrations will see the following new Crabfest dishes on the menu: Crabby Stuffed Mushrooms A flavorful appetizer packed with rich crab stuffing Crab-Topped Asparagus A premium side dish featuring asparagus topped with crab Crab-Topped Potato A premium side dish, elevating a classic dish with savory crab Steak Oscar Sirloin topped with lump meat in a creamy, decadent sauce Salmon Oscar Atlantic salmon topped with lump crab meat in a creamy, decadent sauce In addition to the new menu items mentioned above, Red Lobster will also offer two ways to customize their seafood boil, including Mariner’s Boil, which features a Maine lobster tail, a dozen shrimp, snow crab legs, corn, and red potatoes. Alternatively, customers can opt for the Sailor’s Boil, which features a selection of shrimp, smoked sausage, corn, and red potatoes. Red Lobsters 2024 bankruptcy saw significant changes at the seafood chain Red Lobster is undoubtedly hoping its festive summer Crabfest will boost sales this year and help the company put a challenging financial period behind it. When the company announced its plans to file for bankruptcy in May 2024, many headlines blamed the restaurants financial woes on its Endless Shrimp menu items, which resulted in an $11 million loss for the chain after it underestimated demand. However, the company cited several factors that affected its financial footing, including multiple owners over a relatively short period of time, burdensome cost reduction strategies by its former owners, and costs and other problems associated with renting restaurant locations. Red Lobster also faced challenges many other restaurant chains have faced in recent years: declining foot traffic as cash-strapped and inflation-weary customers choose to stay home and cook instead of going out to eat. Many of these issues were addressed during its bankruptcy process, however. When the company emerged from bankruptcy protection in September, it had over 30 fewer locations, new ownership from a group of private investors including TCW Private Credit and Blue Torch, and a new CEO to run the newly formed RL Investor Holdings, which currently owns Red Lobster. So, will the new Crabfest items help Red Lobster have a banner summer? Thats something fans of the chain will have to wait and see. But even when Crabfest ends in September, its unlikely the public will know just how well or poorly Crabfest went for Red LobsterRL Investor Holdings is a private company, so it does not release public quarterly reports.
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E-Commerce
A Republican-sponsored proposal before Congress to mandate the sale of federal public lands received a mixed reception Monday from the governors of Western states.A budget proposal from Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee would mandate the sale of more than 3,125 square miles (8,093 square kilometers) of federal lands to state or other entities. It was included recently in a draft provision of the GOP’s sweeping tax cut package.At a summit Monday of Western state governors, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the approach is problematic in New Mexico because of the close relationship residents have with those public lands.“I’m open” to the idea, said Lujan Grisham, a second-term Democratic governor and former congresswoman. “Except here.”“Our public lands, we have a very strong relationship with the openness, and they belong to all of us,” said Lujan Grisham, who was announcing written recommendations Monday on affordable housing strategies from the Western Governors’ Association. “And selling that to the private sector without a process, without putting New Mexicans first, is, for at least for me as a governor, going to be problematic.”Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum was among the leaders from several federal agencies who attended the meeting that runs through Tuesday. He has touted the many potential uses for public lands that include recreation, logging and oil and gas production, saying it could boost local economies.Several hundred protesters in downtown Santa Fe denounced efforts that might privatize federal public lands, chanting “not for sale” and carrying signs reading “This land belongs to you and me” and “keep our public land free for future generations.”Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon voiced qualified support for plans to tap federal land for development.“On a piece-by-piece basis where states have the opportunity to craft policies that make sense we can actually allow for some responsible growth in areas with communities that are landlocked at this point,” he said at a news conference outside the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. “There may be value there.”Lee has said federal land sales under his proposal would target “isolated parcels” that could be used for housing or infrastructure, and would not include national parks, national monuments or wilderness.Land in 11 Western states from Alaska to New Mexico would be eligible for sale. Montana was carved out of the proposal after its lawmakers objected.In some states, such as Utah and Nevada, the government controls the vast majority of lands, protecting them from potential exploitation but hindering growth. Morgan Lee, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The startup Warp is best known for its modern, AI-empowered take on the terminalthe decades-old, text-based interface that’s invisible to most in a world of touchscreens and mice, but still beloved by programmers and system administrators. The terminal is probably most familiar to the public from movies and TV shows, where its stark black background and arcane command-line language have come to symbolize hacker prowess. Warp added features that make the terminal and its often-cryptic commands less intimidating and easier to use, such as AI-enhanced autocomplete and suggestions, along with a collaborative system called Warp Drive that lets coworkers share frequently used commands and best practices. Now, Warp is betting that a similar kind of interface will help developers command artificial intelligence, in a world where code is increasingly generated and deployed by typing prompts to AI rather than writing it directly. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] “We’re moving from a world where developers traditionally have done most of their work by hand to one where they’re doing their work by prompt with agents,” says Zach Lloyd, Warp’s founder and CEO. Traditionally, developers have worked in an integrated development environment (IDE), which combines tools for navigating files, specialized text editing tabs for writing code, and easy access to tools that compile human-readable code into something computers can run. They’ve also often used terminal software like Warpsor more basic versionsto deploy code to servers, start automated processes, and troubleshoot errors. Zack Lloyd [Photo: Courtesy of Warp] But today, coders increasingly perform these tasks by issuing prompts to AI agents, which can generate code, execute commands to deploy it, and even diagnose problems on their own. “Our thesis is that to support this new workflow, what is needed is a workbench that really is neither the IDE or the terminal,” Lloyd says. Thats why Warp is launching what it calls an agentic development environmenta new class of tool that emphasizes terminal-style panes or tabs for typing prompts to AI agents, along with controls to help supervise the AIs operations. These controls regulate when AI agents need human approval to make changes to code or restrict them from executing certain commandssuch as deleting fileswithout explicit permission. Power users can open multiple tabs to interact with various agents, powered by AI from labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, and can monitor and guide them as they worksimilar to how developers have always invoked command-line tools from the terminal. AI agents can also execute terminal commands themselves under user supervision, useful for everything from managing cloud computing servers to debugging error messages. An enhanced version of Warp Drive even allows users to share information with AI agents as well as with human coworkers. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] “We’ve made this investment even before LLMs of, how do you centralize the team’s knowledge,” says Lloyd. “And that’s super valuable for an agent to access as well.” Since AI is still far from infallible, users can easily edit AI-generated code changescalled diffs (short for differences, in developer jargon)before approving them, or re-prompt the AI to correct errors. Individual Warp users can choose whether to operate entirely via prompts, or to open more traditional panes to edit code line by line, review AI changes, or use the classic Warp terminal. [Image: Courtesy of Warp] Lloyd says that integrating all of these features into a single AI-centric environment gives Warp an edge over other AI development tools like Cursor and Windsurf, which focus primarily on writing code. And by building a complete development environmentincluding coding and terminal toolsWarp has an advantage over Anthropic’s Claude Code, which operates from within a terminal, he says. “We are one layer outside of that, so we can be the whole agentic development environment, which means that we can do things in terms of the user experience that they just simply can’t do,” Lloyd says. “We can have diffs editable, we can do system notifications, we can have a UX for managing agents across all your panes and tabs.” Warp, which already has more than 500,000 users, plans to keep pricing the same as it rolls out these new features, with plans starting at $15 and $40 per month, alongside a limited free version and custom pricing for enterprise editions. Lloyd says revenue is growin fastbetween 5% and 15% per week during 2025and hes optimistic that trend will continue as developers look for tools to efficiently steer and collaborate with AI coding agents. “It just is cool that that interface that we built for doing this with commands works extremely well for agents,” he says.
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E-Commerce
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