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WARRENTON, Va. During a morning meeting in early May, staff at the federal air traffic command center rattle off a few of the day's obstacles: storms near the Florida coast and in Texas, a military aircraft exercise, and a report of a bird strike at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The center, about an hour's drive from Washington, D.C., is responsible for coordinating the complex web of more than 40,000 flights a day over the U.S. Shortly after 7 a.m. ET, there were already 3,500 flights in the air. During peak travel periods, that figure can climb to more than 5,000 flights at once.

As air travel rebounds to near pre-Covid pandemic levels even as airlines remain understaffed, the agency and carriers are trying to control the rising rate of delays and cancellations that can ruin vacations and cost airlines tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The problems are coming during the high-demand spring and summer travel season, which also coincides with some of the most disruptive weather for airlines thunderstorms.

LaKisha Price, the air traffic manager at the Federal Aviation Administration's Air Traffic Control SystemCommand Center, said staff are monitoring potential problems in the nation's airspace "every day, every hour."

The center is staffed 24/7.

The FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center.

Erin Black | CNBC

From the start of the year through June 13, airlines canceled 3% of the roughly 4 million commercial U.S. flights for that period, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware. Another 20% were delayed, with passengers waiting an average of 48 minutes.

Over the same period in 2019 before the pandemic, 2% of flights were canceled and 17% delayed, with a similar average wait time, according to FlightAware.

LaKisha Price Air Traffic Manager at the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center

Erin Black | CNBC

Typically, the FAA manages the flow of air traffic in part by holding inbound traffic at originating airports or slowing arrivals.

Flight cancellations and delays last year and in 2022 have raised concerns among some lawmakers.

With no quick fix in sight, the FAA and airlines are scrambling to find other solutions. One option has been allowing airlines to fly at lower altitudes to avoid weather challenges, even though the approach burns more fuel.

Airlines are coming up with their own solutions, too. In April, American Airlines launched a program called HEAT that analyzes traffic and potential disruptions, which lets it identify which flights to delay as early as possible to avoid a cascade of cancellations.

"We can start hours in advance, in some cases five, six hours in advance of what we believe the storm is going to be," said David Seymour, American Airlines' chief operating officer.

"We've got to be able to be very nimble and adaptive to the scenario as it plays out," he added.

The pandemic slowed air traffic controller training, but the FAA hired more than 500 new controllers last year to bring its workforce to about 14,000. The agency wants to hire more than 4,800 more over the next five years. The FAA said it is in the middle of a hiring a campaign called "Be ATC" and said it will work with social media influencers and hold Instagram Live events about the job.

The job isn't for everyone. Applicants can be no older than 30 and must retire when they turn 56. Pilots in the U.S. are forced to retire at 65 and airlines are currently facing a wave of retirements, some of which were sped up in the pandemic when carriers urged them to leave early to cut their costs. Lawmakers this year have been considering a bill that would raise the pilot retirement age at least two years.

Back at the command center, the cavernous room where air traffic specialists, airline and private aviation industry members, and meteorologists work features largescreens showing air traffic and weatherhigh along the main wall. It shows a bird's-eye view of the country's air traffic, which has been rebounding so fast that fares are outpacing 2019 levels.

"The problem is Texas right now," John Lucia, national traffic management officer at the center, during one of the morning meetings. He was pointing to a cluster of thunderstorms that were threatening to delay dozens of flights at east Texas airports.

He noted the weather was set to hit the Dallas-Forth Worth area at around 10 a.m.

"So it gives us a couple hours to worry about it," said Lucia, a more than three-decade FAA veteran.

Last year, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport became the world's second busiest thanks to booming U.S. travel and a dearth of international trips. The airport is the home hub of American Airlines. Nearby is also Dallas Love Field, the home base of Southwest Airlines.

Inclement weather causes 70% of U.S. flight delays in an average year, according to the FAA. But there are other reasons for delays, too.

"We've seen people streaking on the runway," said Price, the center's air traffic manager. "We've had wildlife on the runways. You have to be ready for everything."

Some of the most congested airspace has been in Florida. The state has long been a top tourist destination, but became even more of a hot spot during the pandemic for travelers seeking outdoor getaways. Some airports like Tampa and Miami are seeing higher numbers of airline capacity compared with before Covid-19 hit.

At the same time, the state is prone to thunderstorms that can back up air traffic for hours. Airlines and the FAA have sparred over who's at fault, with carriers sometimes blaming air traffic control,including ATC staffing shortfalls, for delays which cost them by the minute.

One solution from airlines has been to pare down their flying despite surging demand. JetBlue Airways, Spirit Airlines, Alaska Airlines and most recently, Delta Air Lines, have trimmed their schedules back as they grapple with staffing shortages and routine challenges like weather, to give themselves more backup for when things go wrong.

In May, the FAA organized a two-day meeting with airlines in Florida about some of the recent delays. Afterward, the FAA said it would ramp up staffing at the Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center, which oversees in-air traffic in five states Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and North and South Carolina and tends to deal with challenges from bad weather, space launches and military training exercises.

The FAA stopped short of capping flights serving Florida but had said it would help airlines come up with alternative routes and altitudes.

For example, the agency is also routing more traffic over the Gulf of Mexico, Price said.

Spring and summer thunderstorms are among the most difficult challenges because they can be so unpredictable.

American's Seymour said the airline can still improve, "We're continuing to look to find better ways to get to manage these situations."

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It's a pain to fly these days. The FAA and airlines are trying to fix that - CNBC

This has been a horrific month in America. While Ukrainians fight for their nation and their lives amid an aggressive Russian invasion, Americans are dealing with the slaughter of their schoolchildren and peaceful grocery shoppers (among others) by their own citizens. And yet at least half of our polity is unmoved and unwilling to support restrictive measures against gun ownership that have proven effective at stopping mass murders in at least 10 other wealthy countries, including the U.K., New Zealand, Scotland, and Australia.

Sadly, we have seen this movie before. The tragedy is that it is real, and the latest victims are 19 fourth graders and their two teachers killed by a troubled 18-year-old with an AR-15 in Uvalde, Texas, and elderly African American community members attacked by a white supremacist, also 18 years old, in Buffalo, New York. These were the 198th and 214th mass shootings in 2022 in the U.S., which is beyond conception of inhabitants in most other countries.

Any number of public conversations (that may or may not lead to progress in solving the problem) focus on the lack of gun control and regulation, the propensity of young men to turn to violence in troubled times, racism, the effectiveness of police responses, and much more. In this short piece, we tell a much simpler story, based on Twitter data, in the hopes that it can contribute in a positive way to potential progress. It is based on emotions and reactions to gun violence according to political affiliation. While there are some major differences, we also point out the similarities that may serve as a bridge towardgreater consensus at a time when it seems there is none.

There are some deep ironies noted by our tweeters: The police are allocated 40 percent of the municipal budget in Uvalde, yet their response to the shooting was inadequate at best; comparatively, Robb Elementary School is woefully underfunded with a majority of its students being economically disadvantaged. Governor Abbott prescribes the need for better mental health care in the aftermath of the shooting while slashing the budget of the very same mental health programs in Texas. Politicians and pundits blame everything from doors to the Azov Battalion in Ukraine and avoid conversation about the role of guns in the violence while guns become the leading cause of death for children in the U.S.

Our analysis is based on data collected in the aftermath of the recent Buffalo and Uvalde shootings. Twitter data has the advantage that it provides real-time data on reactions to events such as elections, natural disasters, mass shootings, and more, on a large scale. It has a disadvantage that the socioeconomic and demographic traits of the respondents are missing. We can roughly gauge the location of the respondents by their Twitter biographies, and we also know that, on average, Twitter users are younger and slightly more educated than the average for the general population. Another detail that is relevant to our study, andis usually self-reported in biographies, is political leaning.

The current discourse is overwhelmed with cynicism and pain that seems to unearth every associated injustice felt by right- and left-leaning users. Without compromise from both sides, no consensus will be possible.

Using this information, we created two broad categories of respondents: right-leaning, pro-gun rights and left-leaning, pro-gun control. Some of our respondents did not fit into these categories, so we dropped them for the purposes of this analysis. We ended up with 98,043 tweets from the right-leaning group and 301,858 from the left-leaning group for Buffalo, and 206,624 and 754,980 respectively for Uvalde. The tweets for Buffalo were collected from May 7-16, and for Uvalde from May 17-31.

Our findings are not surprising in that there are some very different reactions from the two groups, with the right-leaning group more likely to focus on whataboutism,the hypocrisy of not mentioning deadly crimes committed by non-white men (such as the Waukesha drive-through at a Christmas parade), and the locations Biden did and did not visit after such crimes. The left-leaning group was more likely to focus on the victims, guns, white supremacism, and the complacent nature of the right-wing media, such as Fox News. These different reactions are visually evident in the hashtag word clouds in Figure 1.

We are also able to distill the emotional response of users using the yellow face emojis and sort them into six categories: anger, disgust, fearful, happy, sadness, surprise, and neutral/other. Compared to the reactions of the overall Twitter collection, both right- and left-leaning groups showed more negative emotional responses like anger and sadness, for both shootings. As seen in Figure 2, expressed emotions are different across the two groups, with most right-leaning respondents reporting fear, followed by anger, while anger was the predominant emotion for left-leaning tweeters, followed by a much smaller percentage that reported fear. Sadness was also a prominent emotion, particularly in response to the Uvalde shooting.

There are also differences in what these emotions correspond to. For example, the expressed fears by the pro-gun, right-leaning group in the wake of the Buffalo shooting are emojis used in tweets pushing various conspiracy theories about the Azov Battalion or even that the shooting was a distraction from Hunter Bidens laptop. The anger expressed by these responders concerned the double standard of media reporting while the anger in the left-leaning group corresponded with the shooter self-identifying as an anti-Semite and white supremacist. These differences slightly converge in response to the Uvalde shooting, where right-leaning responders also shared their anger at police inaction and fear for children going to school, but the cynicism persists with many claiming this is part of a larger Democratic agenda. Particularly for the Uvalde shooting, the anger expressed by left-leaning responders was also about the hypocrisy of pro-life activists who are unable to address gun-related deaths in this country.

Unlike in earlier mass shootings we have analyzed, there was almost no mention of religion or God in these two series, suggesting that any hope in that domain in terms of resolving our gun violence problem, is long gone. Instead, there is a consistency across both groups that this is an issue that needs to be addressed. While individuals who are right- leaning shy away from gun control and left-leaning respondents seem to be angrier, their increasing fear of mass shootingsincluding their inability to send their children to school in safe placesmay change the nature of the conversation.

The current discourse is overwhelmed with cynicism and pain that seems to unearth every associated injustice felt by right- and left-leaning users. Without compromise from both sides, no consensus will be possible. Any sort of reform of gun regulation and access will fall short of what Democrats would like to see, while any such reform is unlikely to be popular with Republicans. The question then, is whether this time is different from previous ones and where the two sides are willing to budge. While the main obstacle is the Republicans unequivocal refusal to discuss gun control, that refusal will not change unless Democrats show a willingness to compromise on the extent of restrictions and to accept that there are millions of people in the U.S. that are horrified by the violence but are not willing to give up their right to own guns. While many of us cannot understand such a mindset, the only way to achieve some progress is to find measures that are acceptable to a large-enough coalition of Republicans.

We have passed a ban on assault weapons before (such as the 1994 ban under President Clinton) and gun violence fell significantly without encroaching on the sacred individual right to bear arms in this country. A similar measure, or least one that seeks to age restrict access to such weapons, would be a small if insufficient step in the right direction. While most people, including these authors, do not see why any private citizens needs to own assault weapons (nor did they exist when the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution), such a measure would be a small step toward compromise that may break the ice.

At this point, it is up to all of us to do something about the problem, and we desperately need both sides to participate in the effort. Our very brief analysis suggests that the emotional reactions to these horrific incidences of violence are not that far apart from each other, although the words that they are hidden in remain so. We hope this can provide an opening toward a solution where one did not seem to exist before.

Link:
How cynicism and misinformation add to the emotional costs of gun violence - Brookings Institution

UK newspapers remain clear of state regulation but some MPs are unwilling to let the Leveson inquirys proposal of government idea die

DOMINIC LIPINSKI/PA

A free press is integral to a liberal democracy. It is iniquitous that Labour politicians are seeking to revive the idea of statutory control of the media, a decade since David Camerons government rejected the proposal by the Leveson inquiry into press standards that the government should regulate the media. In place of a state regulator, 1,500 print titles and 1,100 online titles, including the majority of national outlets, have so far signed up to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, a body independent of the government. IPSO is acknowledged to have worked well.

Some politicians, however, are unwilling to let the idea of statutory regulation die. Kim Leadbeater proposes to tag it on to the Online Safety Bill, which is going through parliament. The bill,

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The Times view on media regulation: Free Press - The Times

Mumbai, June 15: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) president Sourav Ganguly has said the roaring success of the IPL Media Rights e-auction (2023-27) was an indicator of the extremely strong foundation the sport of cricket has in the country, adding that the numbers should be the "biggest motivation for all the young players".

The richest cricket board in the world got richer when it sold the IPL Media Rights for an astronomical sum of Rs 48,390.32 crore, but Ganguly said that the sport was not about money but talent.

"The game has never been just about money, it is about talent. The IPL e-auction just showed how strong the game is in our country. The numbers should be the biggest motivation for all the young players to take their ability and Team India to the highest level," said Ganguly in a statement on BCCI.

"IPL's growth story and its phenomenal rise in the sporting world is a result of people's immense faith and belief in the BCCI leadership and its workforce to keep on delivering under all adversities. I am sure with the constant support of everyone in the ecosystem we will be able to take brand IPL to new heights on the global sports stage," added Ganguly.

The successful bidders will now acquire the Media Rights from IPL Season 2023 to IPL Season 2027 for a cumulative figure of Rs 48,390.32 crore, subject to execution of documentation and completion of formalities as required by BCCI.

BCCI secretary, Jay Shah said the latest round of auction had catapulted the IPL into the big league of global sport.

"The e-auction today has catapulted IPL into the big league in terms of per match media rights value. We ensured that the process was transparent and fair to all stakeholders. I express my gratitude to the market forces for believing in the brand and showing their faith and confidence in the BCCI to take IPL to newer heights. I am sure, together, we will keep adding value to the IPL and make it the biggest sporting league in the world in terms of revenue, participation and performance," said Shah.

He added that the money coming into the sport will help the game at the grassroots, adding that the Board was committed to the women's IPL next year.

"The whole idea is to balance cricket and commercial interests as BCCI is committed to developing sports in the country through cricket. The money we generate through media rights will ultimately benefit grassroots cricket in India and that is what ultimately matters. The BCCI is also committed to launching the Women's IPL in 2023 apart from creating maximum opportunities for the growth of women's cricket in the country.

In the BCCI's attempt to ensure that sports should travel beyond cricket, it is also setting up indoor sports academies in the Northeast and stadiums in select locations to promote sports in every nook and corner of the country. The BCCI will also build a resource pool to provide pension and financial aid to former players and widows of cricketers."

BCCI treasurer, Arun Singh Dhumal said that the media rights revenue will also help promote IPL as a 'Made in India' property.

"What we have achieved with IPL media rights will go a long way in promoting a purely 'Made in India' sports property on the global stage. This is our first step towards what we at the BCCI have aimed to achieve in making India a sporting giant and expanding IPL's base globally and making it the biggest 'sporting' league in the world.

"IPL's craze and popularity have never ceased to surprise anyone with each playing season. This is a landmark achievement and it will help the League grow not only in stature but also in credibility on the global sporting stage. It is not every day that your partners and stakeholders entrust so much faith and trust in a brand like the IPL and the leadership qualities of BCCI."

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BCCI to have womens IPL from 2023; Ganguly says Media Rights auction should motivate young cricketers - The Assam Tribune

New Hong Kong textbooks will teach students that the city was never a British colony, after an overhaul of a school subject that authorities have blamed for driving the pro-democracy protests.

According to local reports, the new texts will teach students that the Chinese government didnt recognise the treaties that ceded the city to Britain after the opium wars. They ended in 1997 when Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese control, and therefore the texts claim Hong Kong was never a British colony.

The new books also adopt Beijings narrative that the 2019 protest movement was driven by external forces, South China Morning Post reported.

The four sets of textbooks for Hong Kongs liberal studies subject were released online last week, for schools to choose materials for the new academic year in September. They are set to be used by fourth form students in citizenship and social development classes, which replaced the liberal studies course designed in 2009 to teach students critical thinking. In 2020 the liberal studies course was attacked by pro-Beijing authorities who blamed it for driving youth towards protests and pledged rectification.

The chief executive, Carrie Lam, said students needed protection from being poisoned and fed false and biased information.

A subsequent overhaul of the education system included an increased focus on national security and patriotism, with teachers encouraged to report students who breached the national security law.

It is necessary for schools to teach students to think positively and to love their nation, the head of Hong Kongs education department said on Monday.

Several of the textbooks discuss the 2020 national security law widely criticised as infringing on basic freedoms by outlawing acts of dissent as terrorism, secessionism, foreign collusion or sedition. One reportedly says the law was introduced in response to violent terrorist activities and illegal acts in 2019 which endangered national sovereignty and security.

Another mentioned national security 400 times across 121 pages, the report said.

Chinas state-backed tabloid, the Global Times, said the changes would ensure some teachers will no longer be able to convey their wrong and poisonous political views to students when teaching this course.

Tang Fei, an editor and reviewer of two of the textbooks, and also a Hong Kong legislator, told the outlet the texts had passed internal review and were now awaiting final approval. With the new texts there will be no need for school teachers to bring in too much other content, Tang said.

The proposed new textbooks come just weeks before Hong Kong marks 25 years since the British handover. The territory was promised 50 years of semi-autonomy, but activists argue the post-2019 crackdown, national security law, electoral changes, and growing central government interventions in civil society and the media have in effect ended that autonomy already.

This years anniversary on 1 July will also mark the first day in office for the citys new Beijing-anointed leader John Lee. Lee, the former security chief, will take over from Lam.

Chinas senior leaders have traditionally attended the swearing-in ceremony. Xi Jinpings attendance has not been confirmed but speculation increased after at least one Hong Kong primary school announced it was looking for pupils to spend a week in hotel quarantine, suggesting preparations for a strict closed-loop system will allow Xi to visit.

Additional reporting by Chi Hui Lin and Xiaoqian Zhu

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New Hong Kong textbooks will claim city never was a British colony - The Guardian