It’s Finding Out Time at Trump’s FAFO Aerial Circus

Also: Venezuelan Invasion Is a No-Go

Last week air traffic controllers lost contact with aircraft heading to and from Newark Liberty International Airport during an equipment failure so severe that five air controllers subsequently took a leave of absence to recover from the stress.

Via CNN:

• A CNN analysis of FAA airspace advisories shows at least 14 straight days of FAA-imposed delays for flights to or from Newark.

• More than 150 flights into or out of the airport on Monday were canceled, with more than 350 flights delayed, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. And on Tuesday, the FAA announced a ground delay for inbound flights at the airport, causing further delays.

• The FAA has indicated it expects delays at the airport to continue due to the staffing shortages. Duffy added that authorities will have to slow traffic at Newark before restoring full capacity.

The equipment failure, which turned off air controllers' screens for more than a minute, left them unable to track and communicate with planes moving at hundreds of miles per hour. It was caused by a burned out cable that might have been foreseen by the 400 technicians laid off through Musk’s DOGE efforts six weeks ago.

Via ABC7 in New York:

• The travel nightmare at Newark Liberty International Airport continued Tuesday with at least 42 cancellations and 46 delays just before 8:30 a.m.

• Flight cancellations have increased at Newark in the wake of the outage, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company. Since April 26, an average of 39 flights per day have been canceled, compared to an average of four flights per day canceled in April, according to Cirium. On-time performance has also degraded; Newark departures were on average about 80% on time prior to April 26 and have since fallen to 63%, below industry norms, Cirium found.

• Newark was at the No. 1 spot of all airports in the world for delays and cancellations on Monday afternoon.

Newark wasn’t the only airport with flight control problems. The Army has paused flights near Reagan National Airport after two aborted landings last week due to a Black Hawk helicopter flying near the Pentagon. What military choppers were doing flying near the airport after a mid-air collision in late January killed 67 people is a question Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy was unable to answer on Fox News Tuesday morning. The host offered to call Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to find out but couldn’t get through. She might have had better luck if she’d used a messaging app, except that the knockoff from Signal used by Hegseth has shut itself down following reports that it had been hacked.

The Secretary of Transportation has been making the rounds on approved media outlets hoping to reassure travelers that system updates were coming soon… except that as of last week the contracts had not been finalized. President Trump told reporters at the White House on April 30 that IBM and Raytheon were in line to get the contract.

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A third federal judge in a New York court has found Trump's Alien Enemies Act proclamation unlawful, writing that there's no “war,” “invasion” or “predatory incursion." Judges in Texas and Colorado have also found no legal basis for the justification used for forced deportations by the government.

Also in the news, a Freedom of Information Act request has secured release of an intelligence memo contradicting a key claim Trump made to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. It was the consensus of several agencies (with an FBI dissent) that the Venezuelan gang called out by the executive order was not under control of that country’s government.

The contents of the memo had previously been written about in both the Washington Post and the New York Times, prompting angry denials and demands that the source of the information be identified and prosecuted for treason.

Via the New York Times:

• Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memo that she would roll back protections for press freedoms in leak investigations, citing the Times and Post articles as damaging examples of leaks of classified information.

• In an Espionage Act case, prosecutors must prove that someone knowingly made an unauthorized disclosure of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. The government’s declassification of the memo raises questions about any case that could be brought over the Times and Post articles.

Thanks to sloppy redaction work by Justice Department lawyers, another of the kidnapped and exiled to El Salvador migrants has been identified. The DOJ failed to scrub his name from the metadata of a court filing.

As was true with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Venezuelan Daniel Lozano-Camargo had a work permit and was the subject of a 2024 judicial ruling barring his removal while his asylum plea was processed.

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Finally –for this post– CBS News reports the Food and Drug Administration's top official overseeing drug and food safety inspections has abruptly announced his departure from the agency. Michael Rogers had worked for the FDA for more than three decades, ending up as the agency's associate commissioner for inspections and investigations.

• Two FDA officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Rogers had told colleagues privately that he was miserable in recent days, as the agency's inspections office has reeled from sweeping cuts to its ranks ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Don’t you feel safer?

The endgame for Gaza begins by Jonathan Katz at The Racket

• Today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed what anyone paying attention could have told you in late 2023: Israel’s final plan for Gaza is to occupy and ethnically cleanse the strip. This is horrific news, most of all for the shrinking population of roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. At least 52,000 people have been registered as killed (over half of those children, women, and the elderly, the true total is likely far more). Nearly all the survivors are facing shortages of water, medicine, and food, often at critical levels. Not only will many more now die but those who make it through this next phase, Haaretz reports, will be “transferred” either to the “south of the enclave” (i.e., occupied Rafah and/or the buffer with Egyptian Sinai) or, if Israel gets its way, to other countries entirely.

• It is also terrible news for the remaining Israeli hostages in whose name this murderous counterinsurgency was launched roughly 570 days ago. As Haaretz reports, the Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum said “that the plan should be named the ‘Smotrich-Netanyahu plan’”—a reference to Netanyahu and fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—to “give up on the hostages and Israel’s security and national resilience.”

• The latest reporting, sourced to a “senior security official,” is that this final invasion will not come until after Donald Trump visits Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates later this month. It could supposedly be scrapped if Israel and Hamas strike a new hostage deal. But of course there was already a hostage and ceasefire deal in place and agreed upon by the two sides, which Israel unilaterally broke in March, sixteen days before the phase including a full hostage exchange was supposed to begin.

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In the future you will have 15 friends by Hunter Lazzaro at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places

"The average American I think has, I think it's fewer than 3 friends. Three people that they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more—I think, 15 friends or something..."— Mark Zuckerberg

• You will never meet your twelve friends in person, but you will not need to. They will not eat, or sleep, or have work hours that need to be scheduled around. They will not make plans with other friends, because they will have no other friends. They will exist only for you. They will speak only with you. Their only dreams will be to have conversations with you; they will love no one but you, and desire no one but you, and will never be unavailable due to a prior commitment.

• Reach out to them at 3pm, and they will be there. Reach out to them at 10pm, and they will be there. Reach out to them at 2:30 in the morning, during a too-hot night in which you cannot sleep, and they will still be there, and they will stay there for as long as you need. They will be there whenever you click a small blue button; click a smaller red one and they will leave immediately, and without complaint, and will not need to be driven home. You will not need to buy snacks for them, or split bills with them, or feign interest in their interests.

• They will be your friends, and your friends alone.

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Trump’s Return to Power Elevates Ever Fringier Conspiracy Theories by Tiffany Hsu at The New York Times

• A feedback loop of conspiracy theories has formed at every level of American government, according to watchdog groups. Efforts to break the chain are weakening: Misinformation and disinformation researchers have faced years of political pressure, including a decision by the National Science Foundation last month to terminate grants related to research in the field.

• What other topics are going from shunned to the spotlight? Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a left-wing advocacy group that monitors misinformation, said he was “pretty bullish on demons as the next big one.”

• Mr. Trump referred to “demonic forces” on the campaign trail and called Democrats a “very demonic party.” Days before interviewing both Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Musk at Mar-a-Lago on Election Day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, posted a YouTube video claiming he had been attacked in the night “by a demon or by something unseen.” Dan Bongino, a right-wing pundit and podcaster who is now the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on his show that “demon energy is real.”