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Southwest, pilots reach tentative agreement for contract worth $12 billion

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

(CNN) — After three years of negotiating, Southwest Airlines and the union representing the airline’s pilots reached a tentative agreement on a new contract on Wednesday.“We know that the last few years have been difficult for our pilots as well as our customers, but we believe that this TA rewards our pilots as well as improving reliability for our passengers,” said Southwest Airlines Pilots Association President Casey Murray in a statement.The SWAPA union’s 25-member board approved the deal Wednesday after union leadership reached an initial agreement in principle with Southwest earlier this week.But the deal isn’t guaranteed to go to contract: the union’s nearly 11,000 members can vote on whether or not to approve the contract until January 22.A spokesperson for SWAPA told CNN the contract is worth $12 billion. Reuters first reported the contract’s dollar amount.The agreement runs through December 2028 and “provides significant gains in compensation, with pay ...

Review of U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas: This was the right band to open this brain-bending venue

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

Bob Gendron | Chicago TribuneLAS VEGAS — Even better than the real thing? In the case of U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas, which completed the band’s 2023 residency dates Saturday in advance of a late January return, that all depends on perspective. Given the extraordinary immersion on offer during the thrilling 130-minute journey, getting a fix on what is actual versus what seems imagined can be complicated.It’s wiser to surrender to the awe-inspiring surroundings.Brilliant in conception and passionate in execution, “U2: UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere” explodes with possibility and suspends disbelief. Constructed for an approximate cost of $2.3 billion, the Sphere is the world’s largest spherical building and designed to overwhelm. Both its interior and exterior “exosphere” are covered with LEDs and inside, the dome is covered with a 16K LED screen, a wraparound engineering feat that stretches back, around and over most attendees’ heads. Some 168,000 speakers use spatial audio in ...

Norwegian Cruise Line’s latest ship caters to Gen-X crowd

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

Norwegian Cruise Line’s newest ship Norwegian Viva has some serious Gen-X appeal.Cruise lines have juggled the tastes of mixed generations on board for decades, but contemporary lines like NCL cater to the latest generation making vacation decisions, and a good chunk of that clientele call themselves children of the 80s.So while the structure of Norwegian Viva, a sister ship to Norwegian Prima, and the second of six planned vessels that look to redefine NCL’s fleet, is somewhat generation-agnostic, the entertainment programming is definitely geared toward those who find themselves in their 40s and 50s.“Beetlejuice: The Musical” is the marquee show on board Norwegian Cruise Line’s new ship Norwegian Viva, which arrived to Miami on Nov. 28, 2023 to begin its first Caribbean sailing season. (Richard Tribou/Orlando Sentinel)That includes the marquee stage show “Beetlejuice,” a visually intense musical version of the Broadway hit, although condensed down to 90 minutes.The stage sho...

Alex Cora on Red Sox quiet offseason: ‘It isn’t for lack of effort’

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

Usually by this point in the winter the Red Sox have already gotten most of their shopping done, and the majority of the big free agents will have found new teams. So far this offseason that hasn’t happened, and many Red Sox fans are growing restless waiting for the club to make a move.Yet while it looks on the surface like the Red Sox haven’t done anything, manager Alex Cora insists a lot has been going on behind the scenes.Speaking to WEEI’s Rob Bradford on the Baseball Isn’t Boring Podcast, Cora addressed the slow pace of the offseason and provided his perspective on why things have played out the way they have.“We’re working. (Craig Breslow) is working, the group is working, it just hasn’t happened, yet,” Cora said. “But it hasn’t happened (business-wide). These two guys have dominated the game, Ohtani dominated the whole Winter Meetings, Yamamoto is doing the same thing right now, and in this case I believe it’s ...

How to track Santa on Christmas Eve

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

There’s no one busier on Christmas Eve than Santa Claus, and one organization has been tracking his exceptional gift-giving abilities for more than 60 years.This modern tradition actually started in 1955, “when a young child accidentally dialed the unlisted phone number of the (Continental Air Defense Command) Operations Center upon seeing an newspaper advertisement telling kids to call Santa,” according to the bi-national organization North American Aerospace Defense Command.The director of operations at the time, Col. Harry Shoup, “answered the phone and instructed his staff to check the radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole,” the organization says on its website. And so the tracking of Mr. Claus began.It continued when NORAD formed and replaced CONAD in 1958. Since then, NORAD says it has “has dutifully reported Santa’s location on Dec. 24 to millions of children and families across the globe.”Relat...

'Fat Leonard,' a fugitive now returning to the US, was behind one of the military's biggest scandals

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Returning convicted defense contractor Leonard “Fat Leonard” Francis to U.S. custody as part of the Venezuelan prisoner swap on Wednesday is the latest twist in a decade-long salacious saga and bribery scheme that swept up dozens of American Navy officers.One of the biggest bribery investigations in U.S. military history led to the conviction and sentencing of nearly two dozen Navy officials, defense contractors and others on various fraud and corruption charges. And it was punctuated by Francis' daring escape last year, when he fled from house arrest at his San Diego home to South America.An enigmatic figure who was 6-foot-3 and weighed 350 pounds at one time, Francis owned and operated his family’s ship servicing business, Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia Ltd. or GDMA, which supplied food, water and fuel to vessels. The Malaysian defense contractor was a key contact for U.S. Navy ships at ports across Asia for more than two decades. During that time he w...

Oil companies offer $382M for offshore drilling rights in last sale before 2025

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Oil companies offered $382 million for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday after courts rejected the Biden administration’s plans to scale back the sale to protect an endangered whale species.The auction was the last of several offshore oil and gas lease sales mandated under the 2022 climate law. It comes as President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration tries to navigate between energy companies seeking greater oil and gas production and environmental activists who want to stop new drilling to help combat climate change.Companies including Chevron, Hess and BP offered bids on more than 300 parcels covering 2,700 square miles (7,000 square kilometers), according to the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.The dollar amount of the successful bids marked a sharp increase from the previous sale in March 2023, when the Interior Department awarded leases covering about 2,500 square miles (6,500 square kilometers) fo...

Methamphetamine, fentanyl drive record homeless deaths in Portland, Oregon, annual report finds

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Fentanyl and methamphetamine drove a record number of homeless deaths last year in Oregon’s Multnomah County, home to Portland, according to an annual report released by regional officials Wednesday.At least 315 homeless people died in 2022 in the Portland area, the report found. More than half of the fatalities — 123 — were from drug overdoses. Methamphetamine contributed to 85% of overdose deaths, and fentanyl contributed to 74%.Kaia Sand, executive director of Street Roots, a newspaper that covers issues related to homelessness, has worked on the annual report for years. In the report, she wrote that this year’s edition “demonstrates the devastating impact of fentanyl.” “The first year I worked on this report — 2016 — fentanyl was not associated with any deaths,” she wrote. “In 2020, four deaths were tracked to fentanyl, and by 2021, that number rose to 36 deaths. This year, the number skyrocketed to 91 deaths.”The figures underlie the increased ...

White supremacist sentenced for threatening jury and witnesses at synagogue shooter’s trial

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

WHEELING, W.Va. (AP) — A self-proclaimed white supremacist was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison Wednesday for making online threats toward the jury and witnesses at the trial of a man who killed 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue.Hardy Carroll Lloyd, 45, of Follansbee, West Virginia, was sentenced in federal court in northern West Virginia for his September guilty plea to obstruction of the due administration of justice.Lloyd admitted that the actual or perceived Jewish faith of the government witnesses and victims in the trial of Robert Bowers prompted him to target the jury and witnesses.The U.S. Justice Department described Lloyd as a self-proclaimed leader of a white supremacy movement. Prosecutors said Lloyd, who was arrested on Aug. 10, sent threatening social media posts and emails along with comments on websites during Bowers’ trial.Bowers was sentenced to death in August in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history after a jury determined that cap...

Toyota recalling 1 million vehicles for potential air bag problem

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:50:00 GMT

Toyota Motor Co. said Wednesday it is recalling 1 million vehicles over a defect that could cause airbags not to deploy, increasing the risk of injury.The recall covers a range of Toyota and Lexus vehicles with model years from 2020 to 2022. Included in the recall are Toyota Avalons, Camrys, Highlanders, RAV4s, Siennas and Corollas, plus some hybrids of those models. The Lexus models in the recall include the ES250 seddan and the RX350 SUV, among others.The vehicles being recalled have sensors in the front passenger seat that may have been manufactured improperly. Those sensors could potentially short circuit, causing the airbag system to not determine the occupant’s correct weight and potentially not deploy in certain kinds of crashes.Toyota and Lexus dealers will inspect the OCS sensors and replace them if necessary at no cost to owners. Toyota will notify customers by the middle of February 2024 if their cars are in the recall.Toyota owners who think their car might be incl...