LONDON: Heathrow Airport said it planned to resume some flights Friday after a large fire at an electrical substation knocked out power to Europe’s busiest flight hub and disrupted global travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers.
The London airport said it would begin flights for passengers stranded when their flights were diverted to other airports in Europe and to get airplanes back in the right place. It hopes to be in full operation on Saturday.
At least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said, and the impact was likely to last several days as passengers try to reschedule their travel and airlines work to get planes and crew to the right places.
Authorities do not know what caused the fire but so far found have no evidence it was suspicious.
Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion, followed by a fireball and clouds of smoke, when the blaze ripped through the electrical substation near the airport.
Some 120 flights were in the air when the closure was announced, with some turned around and others diverted to Gatwick Airport outside London, Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris or Ireland’s Shannon Airport, tracking services showed.
Lawrence Hayes was three-quarters of the way to London from New York when Virgin Atlantic announced they were being diverted to Glasgow.
“It was a red-eye flight and I’d already had a full day, so I don’t even know how long I’ve been up for,” Hayes told the BBC as he was getting off the plane in Scotland. “Luckily I managed to get hold of my wife and she’s kindly booked me a train ticket to get back to Euston, but it’s going to be an incredibly long day.”
Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel. It had its busiest January on record earlier this year, with more than 6.3 million passengers, up more than 5 percent from the same period last year.
Still, the disruption Friday fell short of the one caused by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and created trans-Atlantic air travel chaos for months.
Unclear what caused the fire but foul play not suspected
It was too early to determine what sparked the huge blaze about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the airport, but there’s “no suggestion” of foul play, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said.
The Metropolitan Police force said counterterrorism detectives were leading the investigation because of their ability to find the cause quickly and because of the location of the electrical substation fire and its impact on critical national infrastructure.
Heathrow said its backup power supply designed for emergencies worked as expected, but it was not enough to run the whole airport. It said it had no choice but to close the airport for the day.
“We expect significant disruption over the coming days, and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens,” the airport said.
The widespread impact of the fire that took seven hours to control led to criticism that Britain was ill prepared for disaster or some type of attack if a single blaze could shut down Europe’s busiest airport.
“The UK’s critical national infrastructure is not sufficiently hardened for anywhere near the level it would need to be at to give us confidence this won’t happen again,” said Alan Mendoza, the executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, a security think tank. “If one fire can shut down Heathrow’s primary systems and then apparently the backup systems, as well, it tells you something’s badly wrong with our system of management of such disasters.”
Tom Wells, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer, acknowledged that authorities had questions to answer and said a rigorous investigation was needed to make sure “this scale of disruption does not happen again.”
Heathrow — where the UK government plans to build a third runway — was at the heart of a shorter disruption in 2023 when Britain’s air traffic control system was hit by a breakdown that slowed takeoffs and landings across the UK on one of the busiest travel days of the year.
Disruption could last days
Heathrow had said it expected to reopen Saturday, but that it anticipated “significant disruption over the coming days and passengers should not travel to the airport under any circumstances until the airport reopens.”
Even after the airport reopens, it will take several days to mobilize planes, cargo carriers, and crews and rebook passengers, said aviation consultant Anita Mendiratta.
“It’s not only about resuming with tomorrow’s flights, it’s the backlog and the implications that have taken place,” she said. “Crew and aircraft, many are not where they’re supposed to be right now. So the recalculation of this is going to be intense.”
The London Fire Brigade sent 10 engines and around 70 firefighters to control the blaze and about 150 people were evacuated from their homes near the power station.
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said in a post on X the power outage affected more than 16,300 homes.
Diverted, canceled and in limbo
At Heathrow, a family of five traveling to Dallas showed up in the hopes their flight home — still listed as delayed — would take off.
But when Andrea Sri brought her brother, sister-in-law and their three children to the airport, they were told by police that there would be no flight.
“It was a waste of time. Very confusing,” said Sri, who lives in London. “We tried to get in touch with British Airways, but they don’t open their telephone line until 8 a.m.”
Travelers who were diverted to other cities found themselves trying to book travel onward to London. Qantas airlines sent flights from Singapore and Perth, Australia, to Paris, where it said it would bus people to London, a process likely to also include a train shuttle beneath the English Channel.
Budget airline Ryanair, which doesn’t operate out of Heathrow, said it added eight “rescue flights” between Dublin and Stansted, another London airport, to transport stranded passengers Friday and Saturday.
National Rail canceled all trains to and from the airport.
Blaze lit up the sky and darkened homes
Matthew Muirhead was working Thursday night near Heathrow when he stepped outside with a colleague and noticed smoke rising from an electrical substation and heard sirens crying out.
“We saw a bright flash of white, and all the lights in town went out,” he said.
Flights normally begin landing and taking off at Heathrow at 6 a.m. due to nighttime flying restrictions. But the skies were silent Friday morning.
“Living near Heathrow is noisy, there are planes every 90 seconds or so, plus the constant hum of traffic, but you get used to it, to the point of no longer noticing,” said James Henderson, who has lived next to the airport for more than 20 years. “Today is different, you can hear the birds singing.”
Heathrow says some flights will resume after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport
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Heathrow says some flights will resume after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport
- The London airport said it would begin flights for passengers stranded when their flights were diverted to other airports in Europe and to get airplanes back in the right place
- At least 1,350 flights to and from Heathrow were affected, flight tracking service FlightRadar 24 said
George Floyd’s uncertain legacy is marked five years on
- An anniversary event is taking place in what has been named George Floyd Square
MINNEAPOLIS: Americans on Sunday mark five years since George Floyd was killed by a US police officer, as President Donald Trump backtracks on reforms designed to tackle racism.
Floyd’s deadly arrest on May 25, 2020 helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement into a powerful force that sought to resolve America’s deeply rooted racial issues, from police violence to systemic inequality.
But since Trump’s return to power in January — he was serving his first term when Floyd died — his administration has axed civil rights investigations and cracked down on diversity hiring initiatives.
BLM, meanwhile, finds itself lacking the support it enjoyed when protesters sprawled across US cities during the Covid pandemic — with many now agreeing the movement achieved little of substance.
An anniversary event is taking place in what has been named George Floyd Square, the area of Minneapolis where the 46-year-old took his final breath as police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck during an arrest.
A small junction in a residential part of the northern US city, the square is covered with protest art including a purple mural that reads “You Changed the World, George.”
That optimistic message painted in 2020 is now, however, at odds with a president whose more extreme allies have suggested he pardon Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering Floyd and sentenced to more than 22 years in prison.
Some experts believe Trump’s re-election was partly a backlash to BLM activism, which included protests that turned to riots in some cities and calls to defund the police.
Floyd’s family members told AFP in Minneapolis on Friday that they wanted people to continue pushing for reform despite the hostile political climate.
“We don’t need an executive order to tell us that Black lives matter,” said his aunt Angela Harrelson, who wore a dark T-shirt depicting Floyd’s face.
“We cannot let a setback be a holdback for the great comeback. Donald Trump just didn’t get the memo,” she added to nods from other relatives standing beside her.
Paris Stevens, a Floyd cousin, agreed: “No one can silence us anymore.”
The Floyd relatives, with around 50 other people, held a moment of silence on Friday afternoon before placing yellow roses on the roadside spot where Floyd’s fatal arrest was filmed and shared around the world.
It was a moment of reflection — others include a candlelight vigil on Sunday night — during a weekend otherwise devoted to music, arts and dancing.
Memorial events have been held annually since Floyd’s death and the theme for this one — “The People Have Spoken” — was suggested by Nelson Mandela’s grandson Nkosi when he visited the square, according to Harrelson.
She said the defiant title was meant to reflect five years of protesting, adding that “even though it’s tiresome, we go on.”
Visitors are expected to pay their respects through the weekend.
Jill Foster, a physician from Minneapolis, told AFP at the square on Friday that she felt honoring Floyd’s legacy was partly a form of political resistance.
“Under the Trump administration, everything is trying to be rewritten and a new reality created,” the 66-year-old said.
“We have to keep the memory going and keep the information flowing.”
Meanwhile, for Courteney Ross, Floyd’s girlfriend when he died, the anniversary weekend brings up powerful feelings of personal loss.
“I miss him so much, I miss him by my side,” Ross, 49, told AFP, dressed in black and holding a bunch of yellow roses.
“It’s beautiful to see all the people come out and celebrate him,” she added.
“You see a unification that you don’t get a lot in this country lately, and people are celebrating a man who, you know, gave his life for us.”
UK renationalizes first train operator under Labour reforms
- Train passengers in Britain suffer from frequent cancelations
LONDON: Britain’s South Western Railways on Sunday becomes the first private train operator to be returned to public ownership under the Labour government’s plans to renationalize the country’s much-maligned railways.
Renationalizing all of the UK’s rail operators is among the key policies launched by Prime Minister Keir Starmer since his party’s return to government last July following 14 years in opposition.
“Today is a watershed moment in our work to return the railways to the service of passengers,” Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said in a statement.
Train passengers in Britain suffer from frequent cancelations, in addition to high ticket prices and regular confusion over which services they can be used on.
The privatization of rail operations took place in the mid-1990s under the then Conservative prime minister John Major, but the rail network remained public, run by Network Rail.
Four of the 14 operators in England are already run by the state owing to poor performance in recent years, but this was originally meant to be a temporary fix before a return to the private sector.
Labour triumphed over the Conservative party in elections last year, re-entering Downing Street with promises to fix the country’s ailing transport services.
Legislation was approved in November to bring rail operators into public ownership when the private companies’ contracts expire — or sooner in the event of poor management — and be managed by “Great British Railways.”
Alexander said this will end “30 years of fragmentation,” but she warned that “change isn’t going to happen overnight.”
“We’ve always been clear that public ownership isn’t a silver bullet, but we are really firing this starting gun in that race for a truly 21st-century railway, and that does mean refocusing away from private profit and toward the public good,” she added.
In an example of how passengers might not immediately notice much difference, South Western’s first service under public ownership on Sunday was set to be a rail replacement bus.
Government figures show that the equivalent of four percent of train services in Britain were canceled in the year to April 26.
Rail unions — which have staged a stream of strikes in recent years over pay and conditions due to a cost-of-living crisis — welcomed the state takeover.
“We’re delighted that Britain’s railways are being brought back where they belong — into the public sector,” said Mick Whelan, general secretary of union Aslef.
“Everyone in the rail industry knows that privatization... didn’t, and doesn’t, work,” he added.
Two operators serving towns and cities in southeastern and eastern England are next to be brought back into public ownership by late 2025.
All the current contracts are set to expire by 2027.
The government has said renationalization will save up to £150 million ($203 million) per year because it will no longer have to pay compensation fees to rail operators.
The main rail operators in Scotland and Wales, where transport policy is handled by the devolved administrations in Edinburgh and Cardiff, are also state-owned.
Trump hails US as ‘hottest country in the world’, takes credit for America’s military might
- Addressing US Military Academy graduates, Trump said the military needs to focus on core mission
- Says "I rebuilt the military. And we rebuilt it like nobody has ever rebuilt it before in my first term”
WEST POINT, New York: President Donald Trump used the first service academy commencement address of his second term Saturday to congratulate graduating West Point cadets on their accomplishments while also veering sharply into politics, taking credit for America’s military might and boasting about the “mandate” he says he earned in the 2024 election.
“In a few moments, you’ll become graduates of the most elite and storied military academy in human history,” Trump said at the ceremony at Michie Stadium. “And you will become officers of the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known. And I know, because I rebuilt that army, and I rebuilt the military. And we rebuilt it like nobody has ever rebuilt it before in my first term.”
Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, the Republican president told the 1,002 members of the class of 2025 at the US Military Academy that the United States is the “hottest country in the world” and underscored an “America First” ethos for the military.
“We’re getting rid of distractions and we’re focusing our military on its core mission: crushing America’s adversaries, killing America’s enemies and defending our great American flag like it has never been defended before,” Trump said. He later said that “the job of the US armed forces is not to host drag shows or transform foreign cultures,” a reference to drag shows on military bases that Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration halted after Republican criticism.
Trump said the cadets were graduating at a “defining moment” in Army history as he accused political leaders in the past of sending soldiers into “nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us.” He said he was clearing the military of transgender ideas, “critical race theory” and types of training he called divisive and political.
Past administrations, he said, “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars.”
At times, his remarks were indistinguishable from those heard in a political speech, from his assessment of the country when he left office in January 2021 to his review of last November’s victory over Democrat Kamala Harris, arguing that voters gave him a “great mandate” and “it gives us the right to do what we want to do.”
But Trump also took time to acknowledge the achievements of individual graduates.
He summoned Chris Verdugo to the stage and noted that he completed an 18.5-mile march on a freezing night in January in just two hours and 30 minutes. Trump had the nationally ranked men’s lacrosse team, which held the No. 1 spot for a time in the 2024 season, stand and be recognized. Trump also brought Army’s star quarterback, Bryson Daily, to the lectern, where the president praised Daily’s “steel”-like shoulder. Trump later used Daily as an example to make a case against transgender women participating in women’s athletics.
In a nod to presidential tradition, Trump also pardoned about half a dozen cadets who had faced disciplinary infractions.
He told graduates that “you could have done anything you wanted, you could have gone anywhere.” and that “writing your own ticket to top jobs on Wall Street or Silicon Valley wouldn’t be bad. But I think what you’re doing is better.”
His advice to them included doing what they love, thinking big, working hard, holding on to their culture, keeping faith in America and taking risks.
“This is a time of incredible change and we do not need an officer corps of careerists and yes men,” Trump said. “We need patriots with guts and vision and backbone.”
Just outside campus, about three dozen demonstrators gathered before the ceremony and were waving miniature American flags. One in the crowd carried a sign that said “Support Our Veterans” and “Stop the Cuts,” while others held up plastic buckets with the message: “Go Army Beat Fascism.”
On Friday, Vice President JD Vance spoke to the graduating class at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Vance said in his remarks that Trump was working to ensure US soldiers are deployed with clear goals, rather than the “undefined missions” and “open-ended conflicts” of the past.
Trump gave the commencement address at West Point in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the school forced cadets spread out across the country to travel, risking exposure on public transportation, and then land in New York, a coronavirus hot spot.
After brief X outage, Musk says refocusing on businesses
- As a backlash to job cuts grew and Tesla share prices slipped, Musk began drawing away from the government role and returning to his original work
WASHINGTON: Social media platform X was hit by a two-hour outage Saturday, prompting owner Elon Musk to say he needs to spend more time focusing on his companies.
The billionaire has an extraordinarily full plate as owner/CEO of X, xAI (developer of the AI-powered chatbot Grok), electric-car maker Tesla and rocket builder SpaceX — not to mention his recent polarizing efforts to help Donald Trump slash thousands of US government jobs.
As a backlash to those job cuts grew and Tesla share prices slipped, Musk began drawing away from the government role and returning to his original work.
On Saturday, following the X outage, he suggested that he might have been away too long.
“As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he said.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” the South African-born businessman posted on X.
“I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”
Of the X outage, he said: “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
X had largely returned to normal service by 11:00 am Saturday (1500 GMT).
Contacted by AFP for comment, the company did not immediately reply.
SpaceX announced Friday that it plans to attempt a new launch of its mega-rocket Starship next week. Still under development, Starship exploded in flight during two previous launches.
Musk acknowledged early this month that his ambitious effort to slash US federal spending, led by his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), did not fully reach its goals despite tens of thousands of job cuts and drastic budget reductions.
Trump administration releases people to shelters it threatened to prosecute for aiding migrants
- Border shelters were rattled by a letter from FEMA that raised “significant concerns” about potentially illegal activity
- FEMA suggested shelters may have committed felony offenses against bringing people across the border illegally or transporting them within the US
TEXAS, USA: The Trump administration has continued releasing people charged with being in the country illegally to nongovernmental shelters along the US-Mexico border after telling those organizations that providing migrants with temporary housing and other aid may violate a law used to prosecute smugglers.
Border shelters, which have long provided lodging, meals and transportation to the nearest bus station or airport, were rattled by a letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that raised “significant concerns” about potentially illegal activity and demanded detailed information in a wide-ranging investigation.
FEMA suggested shelters may have committed felony offenses against bringing people across the border illegally or transporting them within the United States.
“It was pretty scary. I’m not going to lie,” said Rebecca Solloa, executive director of Catholic Charities Diocese of Laredo.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued to ask shelters in Texas and Arizona to house people even after the March 11 letter, putting them in the awkward position of doing something that FEMA appeared to say might be illegal. Both agencies are part of the Department of Homeland Security.
After receiving the letter, Catholic Charities received eight to 10 people a day from ICE until financial losses forced it to close its shelter in the Texas border city on April 25, Solloa said.
The Holding Institute Community, also in Laredo, has been taking about 20 families a week from ICE’s family detention centers in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas, Executive Director Michael Smith said. They come from Russia, Turkiye, Iran, Iraq, Papua New Guinea and China.
Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, has been receiving five to 10 people day from ICE, including from Honduras and Venezuela, said Ruben Garcia, its executive director.
International Rescue Committee didn’t get a letter but continues receiving people from ICE in Phoenix, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not been made public. The releases include people who had been held at ICE’s Krome Detention Center in Miami, the site of severe overcrowding.
Working around conflicting issues
ICE’s requests struck Solloa as a “little bit of a contradiction,” but Catholic Charities agreed. She said some guests had been in ICE detention centers two to four weeks after getting arrested in the nation’s interior and ordered released by an immigration judge while their challenges to deportations wound through the courts. Others had been flown from San Diego after crossing the border illegally.
Those released were from India, China, Pakistan, Türkiye, and Central and South America, Solloa said.
Smith, a Methodist pastor, said that the FEMA letter was alarming and that agreeing to continue caring for people released by ICE was “probably not a good idea.” Still, it was an easy choice.
“There’s some things that are just right to do,” he said.
Tricia McLaughlin, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, drew a distinction with large-scale releases under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden. The Biden administration worked closely with shelters but, during its busiest times, released migrants at bus stops or other public locations.
“Under the Biden administration, when ICE has aliens in its custody who are ordered released, ICE does not simply release them onto the streets of a community — ICE works to verify a sponsor for the illegal alien, typically family members or friends but occasionally a non-governmental-organization,” McLaughlin said.
The government has struggled to quickly deport people from some countries because of diplomatic, financial and logistic challenges. Those hurdles have prompted ICE to deport people to countries other than their own, including El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and — this week — South Sudan. If those options aren’t available, ICE may be forced to release people in the United States.
People can challenge deportations in immigration court, though their options are much more limited when stopped at the border. If a judge orders their release, ICE is generally left with no choice but to release them.
Families pose another challenge. ICE is generally prohibited from holding families with children under 18 for more than 20 days under a long-standing court agreement that the Trump administration said Thursday it would try to end.
The Trump administration has boasted that it virtually ended the practice of releasing people who cross the border illegally with notices to appear in immigration court. The Border Patrol released only seven people from February through April, down from 130,368 the same period a year earlier under President Joe Biden. But those figures do not include ICE, whose data is not publicly available
Close ties between shelters and federal authorities
FEMA awarded $641 million to dozens of state and local governments and organizations across the country in the 2024 fiscal year to help them deal with large numbers of migrants who crossed the border from Mexico.
FEMA has suspended payments during its review, which required shelters to provide “a detailed and descriptive list of specific services provided.” Executive officers must sign sworn statements that they have no knowledge or suspicions of anyone in their organizations violating the smuggling law.
The releases show how border shelters have often maintained close, if cordial, relations with federal immigration authorities at the ground level, even when senior officials publicly criticize them.
“We have a good working relationship with our federal partners. We always have,” Solloa said. “They asked us to help, then we will continue to help, but at some point we have to say, ‘Yikes I don’t have any more money for this. Our agency is hurting and I’m sorry, we can’t do this anymore.’”
Catholic Charities hosted at least 120,000 people at its Laredo shelter since opening in 2021 and housed 600 to 700 people on its busiest nights in 2023, Solloa said. It was counting on up to $7 million from FEMA. The shelter closed with loss of nearly $1 million, after not receiving any FEMA money.
Holding Institute, part of United Women in Faith, has cut paid staff and volunteers to seven from 45 amid the absence of federal funding, Smith said. To save money, it delivers most meals without protein. Language differences have been challenging.
The International Rescue Committee said in a statement that it intends to continue providing support services to released people in Phoenix.
“As the scale and scope of these needs evolve, the IRC remains committed to ensuring individuals have access to essential humanitarian services, including food, water, hygiene supplies and information,” it said.
