Good morning, it’s Friday. Hallelujah!
I have been traveling a lot lately – both for work and personal trips – which has required far too much flying for my taste and comfort. If you’ve been around here for a while, you know about my fear of flying, which has been exacerbated by a spate of not-great headlines related to crashes, outages, delays, accidents, extreme turbulence, and mechanical failures.
No matter how much experts (and I’ve somehow been seated next to a number of pilots lately) tell me that turbulence is almost always nothing to worry about, I cannot help but be thrown into the throes of anxiety when the plane starts to buck. It doesn’t help matters that severe clear-air turbulence has increased by 55% over the North Atlantic and 41% over the United States since 1979, thanks in large part to climate change-driven changes in the weather.
Clear-air turbulence, the kind that is invisible and occurs in clear skies, is also worsening, which is very bad news for people like me, who do not like surprises. While something inside me dies when the pilot says “it’s going to be a bumpy ride”, at least I’ve been forewarned and have time to prepare myself. Bumps – or worse yet, drops – that hit out of nowhere blindside me and send me into a tailspin from which I cannot recover for the rest of the flight.
In short, I simply cannot relate to people who love to fly, though I am definitely envious and a little in awe of them.
That might explain why I’ve always been fascinated with the story of Amelia Earhart, who was born on this day in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas. Earhart, one of the nation’s most well-known pilots and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean (among several other firsts that she accomplished during her relatively short life), famously disappeared on July 2, 1937, while attempting to fly around the world.
The twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane in which Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had been flying when they set off from Oakland, CA, on their transcontinental flight was last seen in Lae, New Guinea, during a refueling stop. Their next scheduled stop was a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, but they never made it there.
Despite a prolonged search, no sign of Earhart, Noonan or the plane was discovered, and the mystery of what happened to them remains widely speculated over, yet unsolved, to this day.
That is not to say that there haven’t been numerous attempts to figure out what happened to Earhart – where she died and how. One theory that I could not bring myself to read all the way through involves giant coconut crabs. There were bones discovered on the eastern Pacific island of Nikumaroro, but there have been contradicting reports on whether the remains belonged to Earhart.
As recently as this past March, a pilot named Justin Myers believed that he had identified the possible remains of Earhart’s plane using nothing more than Google Earth. But he was hardly the first to claim to have made this breakthrough. As of this writing, I think it’s safe to say that the mystery of what happened to Earhart and Noonan remains, well, a mystery.
It’s shaping up to be a very nice weekend, weather-wise, with sunny to mostly sunny skies and temperatures topping out in the low-to-mid 80s. Today and tomorrow will be largely clear – good beach or lake or mountain days, if you’ve got any of that on the agenda – while Sunday will bring a mix of sun and clouds, but no rain (so far) in the forecast.
I would say it’s a good day – or weekend – for flying, but again, there’s the question of that sneaky clear-air turbulence to worry about. Personally, I will be keeping my feet on the ground for the foreseeable future, and am not at all sad about that.
Enjoy!
In the headlines…
President Donald Trump said he will soon make a decision on whether to launch a “massive attack” on Iran after the conflict in the Middle East extended to a new battleground in the Red Sea.
Speaking to Axios on Thursday, the president said the proposed strikes would be bigger than anything seen in the war so far, and that Iran has not “received enough pain yet.”
The Trump administration has imposed the replacement for 10% “global tariffs” that expired at midnight yesterday. The suite of new duties went immediately into effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on Friday, levying rates of 10% to 12.5% on America’s top trading partners.
Senior administration officials said countries that have begun implementing a forced labor prohibition or law on their books will be hit with 10% duties, while those that haven’t will receive an import tax of 12.5%.
Trump feted Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House, calling the team “one of the great brands anywhere in the world” during a Rose Garden event celebrating its second title in as many years.
Trump is set to rally in Michigan next week as early in-person voting begins in the battleground state’s primary, where voters will choose nominees for open Senate and governor’s races.
The Justice Department on Thursday said it would withdraw subpoenas issued to several New York Times reporters earlier this month over their reporting on security concerns regarding the new Air Force One jet gifted by Qatar.
The withdrawal came at the end of a hearing in the Southern District of New York, during which Judge Arun Subramanian grilled federal prosecutors about “inadvertent errors” they admitted to making in filing for the subpoenas.
A majority of Americans don’t approve of President Trump’s renovation efforts in the U.S.’s capital city, according to a new survey.
The FDA committee on compounded drugs broke with agency scientists and voted in favor of adding peptides to the list of substances compounding pharmacies can make, despite concerns being raised over the lack of demonstrated benefits.
In an all-day hearing, FDA career scientists had argued against allowing broad access to unproven drugs that the agency had banned three years ago.
Over and over, the FDA came back to a major sticking point: It’s unclear, chemically, what these peptides even are. In other words, there was no universally accepted chemical formula for each peptide, making it extremely difficult for the FDA to evaluate its use.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she felt the need to sign the country’s first statewide moratorium on data center development because tech giants “are flooding the zone” with construction efforts faster than states and localities can keep up.
Hochul imposed a moratorium on data center development last week through an executive order, but a group of Tompkins County officials aren’t convinced it goes far enough.
Hudson Valley lawmakers are pressing Hochul to sign a measure that would renew a financial lifeline for schools and local governments impacted by the shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
Hochul denounced a notice issued by the DOJ that deemed sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act “not enforceable.”
One year after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act sent shockwaves through Albany as officials feared immediate and catastrophic cuts, the impact has been more gradual as changes are phased in. Some won’t be felt until after Election Day.
New York State is projected to surpass half a trillion dollars on infrastructure spending related to climate change by 2050, according to a new report.
Two men were hospitalized after being stabbed near Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday afternoon, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) said, adding that a person of interest is in custody.
Both victims were expected to survive. New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin called the Upper West Side incident an “antisemitic stabbing.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani remained silent for several hours on what officials described as an antisemitic stabbing, choosing to instead post about his millionaire housing tax initiative — even as the attack drew attention from other state officials.
Israeli officials were quick to blame Mamdani for the attacks, as the NYPD continued to investigate the attacker’s motive.
Lifelong New Yorker and real estate investor Charles Kushner is fleeing NYC for Florida because of, he says, Mayor Mamdani and First Lady Rama Duwaji’s antisemitism.
Billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman is taking another jab at Mamdani’s far-left policies – as he declines to rule out his own potential mayoral run one day.
The anguished mother of Queens’ Sgt. Angel Rampersad, who was killed last week in an Iranian attack on a U.S. airbase overseas, said she was both proud and sad over the death of her determined daughter.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy listed renaming New York’s Penn Station as an administration priority, leading to speculation the nation’s busiest transit hub could be rechristened in honor of President Trump as part of an $8 billion makeover.
After more than a decade as one of New York’s most impossible tables to book, Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar is leaving the wood-paneled Midtown perch that made it a fixture of the city’s high-society scene.
Funding has been restored for a transportation program that had long been offered by the Colonie Senior Service Centers before a town-provided subsidy for the service was cut last year.
A distributor of smart home and home security technology will be closing its facility in Feura Bush, according to a state notice.
A lawsuit the publishers of a Delaware County newspaper filed against the county after officials dropped the paper’s official designation is heading to trial three years after it was filed in federal court.
Photo credit: George fazio.
