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The CEO of United Airlines said that other airlines won’t be able to handle all the flights they plan to operate this year, leading to more disruptions for travelers. Scott Kirby said airlines that operate as if this is still 2019, before the pandemic, are bound to struggle. He said the industry is dealing with a shortage of pilots and other workers, outdated technology and strain on the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages the nation’s airspace. “The system simply can’t handle the volume today, much less the anticipated growth,” Kirby said. “There are a number of airlines who cannot fly their schedules. The customers are paying the price.” As an example of what can go wrong, Kirby referred to massive cancellations in late December. Southwest Airlines – which Kirby did not mention by…

Actor Jeremy Renner says he is out of the hospital after being treated for serious injuries from a snow plow accident. In response to a Twitter post this week about his Paramount+ TV series “Mayor of Kingstown,” Renner tweeted, “Outside my brain fog in recovery, I was very excited to watch episode 201 with my family at home.” Renner was run over by his own 7-ton Pistenbully snow groomer in Nevada while trying to use it to free a relative’s vehicle on a private road near Lake Tahoe on New Year’s Day, authorities said. The accident left him in critical condition with major chest trauma and other injuries, according to a Renner representative. Authorities are still investigating but have said there were no signs that Renner was impaired and no indication of any foul…

The countdown toward a possible U.S. government default is in the offing — with frictions between President Joe Biden and House Republicans raising alarms about whether the U.S. can sidestep a potential economic crisis. The Treasury Department projects that the federal government reached its legal borrowing capacity of $38.381 trillion, an artificially imposed cap that lawmakers have increased roughly 80 times since the 1960s. Markets so far remain calm, as the government can temporarily rely on accounting tweaks to stay open, meaning that any threats to the economy are several months away. Even many worried analysts assume there will be a deal. But this particular moment seems more fraught than past brushes with the debt limit because of the broad differences between Biden and new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who presides over…

The number of people seeking unemployment benefits in the U.S. reached a four-month low last week, a sign that employers are holding on to their workers despite the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow the economy and tamp down inflation. U.S. jobless aid applications for the week ending Jan. 14 fell by 15,000 to 190,000, from 205,000 the week before, the Labor Department said. The four-week moving average of claims, which can even out the week-to-week volatility, declined by 6,500 to 206,000. Jobless claims generally serve as a proxy for layoffs, which have been relatively low since the pandemic wiped out millions of jobs in the spring of 2020. The labor market is closely watched by the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates seven times last year in a bid to slow job growth and…

Ireland fined WhatsApp on Thursday for breaching strict European Union privacy rules by forcing users to consent to allow their personal data to be used to provide “service improvements and security.” The Data Protection Commission issued a 5.5 million euro ($5.9 million) penalty in the case, which has exposed divisions with regulators in other EU countries over regulating the chat app’s parent Meta. In a related decision earlier this month, the Irish watchdog hit Meta with a total of $390 million in fines for privacy violations involving Facebook and Instagram. All three cases date back to May 2018, when stringent EU privacy regulations took force. The commission, which is Meta’s lead European privacy regulator because the company’s regional headquarters is in Dublin, originally sided with the Silicon Valley giant. But a slew of other…

A sharp spike in Greenland temperatures since 1995 showed the giant northern island 2.7 degrees (1.5 degrees Celsius) hotter than its 20th-century average, the warmest in more than 1,000 years, according to new ice core data. Until now Greenland ice cores -- a glimpse into long-running temperatures before thermometers-- hadn’t shown much of a clear signal of global warming on the remotest north central part of the island, at least compared to the rest of the world. But the ice cores also hadn’t been updated since 1995. Newly analyzed cores, drilled in 2011, show a dramatic rise in temperature in the previous 15 years, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. “We keep on (seeing) rising temperatures between 1990s and 2011,” said study lead author Maria Hoerhold, a glaciologist at the…