World
Treasury Secretary tells Congress US projected to reach debt limit on Thursday
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notified Congress on Friday that the U.S. is projected to reach its debt limit on Thursday and will then resort to “extraordinary measures” to avoid default.
In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Yellen said her actions will buy time until Congress can pass legislation that will either raise the debt limit or suspend it again for a period of time.
Those measures include delaying some payments, such as contributions to federal employees’ retirement plans, in order to provide some headroom to make other payments that are deemed essential, including those for Social Security and debt instruments.
“Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability,” she said. “Indeed, in the past, even threats that the U.S. government might fail to meet its obligations have caused real harms, including the only credit rating downgrade in the history of our nation in 2011.”
Yellen said that while Treasury can’t estimate how long the extraordinary measures will allow the U.S. to continue to pay the government’s obligations, “it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June.”
The debate over raising the debt ceiling will almost certainly result in a political showdown between newly empowered GOP lawmakers who now control the House and President Joe Biden and Democrats, who had enjoyed one-party control of Washington for the past two years.
Past forecasts suggest a default could instantly bury the country in a deep recession, right at a moment of slowing global growth as the U.S. and much of the world face high inflation because of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
$1.35B Mega Millions prize drawing set for Friday night
Mega Millions players will have another chance Friday night to end months of losing and finally win a jackpot that has grown to $1.35 billion.
Plenty of people have won smaller prizes in the lottery game, but no one has matched all six numbers and won the grand prize since Oct. 14. Those 25 straight drawings without a winner have allowed the top prize to roll over and grow larger for three months.
It’s now the fourth-largest lottery prize in U.S. history. If there isn’t a winner Friday night, the jackpot will inch closer to the record $2.04 billion Powerball prize won last November in California.
The long stretch without a Mega Millions jackpot winner is because of the game’s steep odds of 1 in 302.6 million.
The $1.35 billion prize is for a winner who chooses an annuity with annual payments over 29 years. Winners almost always take the cash option, which for Friday night’s drawing would be an estimated $707.9 million.
Mega Millions is played in 45 states as well as in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Israel's outgoing army chief rebukes far-right government
Israel's outgoing army chief on Friday warned against plans by Benjamin Netanyahu’s new coalition to grant more control to pro-settler lawmakers and make other changes to the Israeli security establishment, joining a loud chorus of criticism against the most right-wing government in the country's history.
In several interviews with Israeli news outlets just days before he steps down, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi took unusually sharp aim at Netanyahu's coalition agreements with hard-line Jewish settler activists who seek to entrench Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank, restructure the Defense Ministry and control a special paramilitary police unit.
"This is likely to cause damage and adversely affect our preparedness for war,” Kochavi told the Israeli news site Ynet.
While the coalition deals have sparked furor from many segments of Israeli society, Kochavi's worries have deep significance. Among Jewish Israelis, the military is considered an emblem of stability and one of the country’s most trusted institutions.
Read more: Thousands of Israelis protest new government's policies
Kochavi expressed particular concern about the coalition's plans to create three separate sources of authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu gave his right-wing finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, control over an Israeli military body that regulates planning for Israeli settlements and Palestinian construction in parts of the West Bank where Israel maintains civilian control.
Smotrich is an advocate of the outright annexation of parts of the West Bank that the Palestinians want for their hoped-for independent state.
“There cannot be two commanding authorities (in the West Bank),” Kochavi said. “The separation between us is not good and may cause damage and lead to a worse situation for all populations.”
Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem — territory the Palestinians seek for a future state. Israel has constructed dozens of Jewish settlements home to around 500,000 Israelis who live alongside around 2.5 million Palestinians. Most of the international community considers Israel’s West Bank settlements illegal and an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.
Another move that Kochavi fears could undermine the army’s chain of command in the West Bank stems from Netanyahu's agreement with Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing lawmaker whose his views were so extreme that the army banned him from compulsory military service.
Read more: New Israeli government vows to develop West Bank tourism
As national security minister, Ben-Gvir now oversees the paramilitary border police, which, until now, has worked under the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank.
"The work that the border police is doing in Judea and Samaria is excellent and I hope that the situation remains just as it is today. The chain of authority must be maintained,” Kochavi said, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name.
In other interviews, Kochavi said he called Netanyahu twice to warn him about the far-reaching consequences of the coalition's moves for the cohesion of the defense establishment.
Netanyahu has sought to assure the public — as well as the U.S. and Israel's European and Arab allies — that he has veto power over any changes that the far-right ministers make. But critics say he has so far failed to restrain his coalition partners.
After serving nearly four years as chief of staff, Kochavi is set to hand over the reins to Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi next week.
Russia says it took Soledar in bloody fight in east Ukraine
Russia claimed Friday that its forces captured a fiercely contested salt mining town, in what would mark a rare victory for the Kremlin after a series of setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine.
There was no immediate confirmation from Ukrainian authorities of Soledar's fall. There have been conflicting reports over who controls the town, the site of a monthslong bloody battle in the grinding fight for Ukraine's eastern regions. Given the dangers there, The Associated Press could not confirm Russia's claim.
Soledar is located in Ukraine's Donetsk province, one of four that Moscow illegally annexed in September. From the outset, Moscow identified Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk province as priorities, and it has treated the areas as Russian territory since their alleged annexation.
“The liberation of the town of Soledar was completed in the evening of Jan. 12,” Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman, said, adding that the development was “important for the continuation of offensive operations in the Donetsk region.”
Taking control of Soledar would allow Russian forces "to cut supply lines for the Ukrainian forces” in Bakhmut and then “block and encircle the Ukrainian units there,” Konashenkov said.
Read more: Most Ukrainians left without power after Russian strikes
Still, the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, said that a Russian seizure of Soledar was "not an operationally significant development and is unlikely to presage an imminent Russian encirclement of Bakhmut.”
The institute said that Russian information operations have “overexaggerated the importance of Soledar,” a small settlement, arguing as well that the long and difficult battle has contributed to the exhaustion of Russian forces.
Just hours before Russia’s claim, Ukraine reported that there had been a heavy night of fighting but did not acknowledge loss of the town.
In a Telegram post early Friday, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said that Moscow “had sent almost all (its) main forces” to secure a victory in the east. She said that Ukrainian fighters “are bravely trying to hold the defense.”
Read more: Russian missiles cross into Poland during strike on Ukraine, killing 2
“This is a difficult stage of the war, but we will win. There is no doubt,” Maliar added.
Rifts in Russian military command seen amid Ukraine fighting
As Russian troops wage a ferocious house-to-house fight for control of strongholds in eastern Ukraine, a parallel battle is unfolding in the top echelons of military power in Moscow, with President Vladimir Putin reshuffling his top generals while rival camps try to win his favor.
The fighting for the salt mining town of Soledar and the nearby city of Bakhmut has highlighted a bitter rift between the Russian Defense Ministry leadership and Yevgeny Prigozhin, a rogue millionaire whose private military force known as the Wagner Group has played an increasingly visible role in Ukraine.
Putin's shakeup of the military brass this week was seen as a bid to show that the Defense Ministry still has his support and is in charge as the troubled conflict nears the 11-month mark.
Prigozhin rushed Wednesday to declare that his mercenary force had captured Soledar, a claim rejected by Ukrainian officials. Furthermore, his statement that the prize was won exclusively by Wagner challenged the accounts from the Defense Ministry, which described action by airborne troops and other forces in the battle for Soledar.
The 61-year-old Prigozhin, who was known as “Putin's chef” for his lucrative catering contracts and was indicted in the U.S. for meddling in the 2016 presidential election, has expanded his assets to include Wagner, as well as mining and other spheres. He has scathingly criticized the military brass for blunders in Ukraine, saying Wagner was more efficient than regular troops.
He has found a powerful ally in Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who has deployed elite troops from his southern Russian region to fight in Ukraine and also assailed the military leadership and the Kremlin for being too soft and indecisive.
While both have pledged loyalty to Putin, their public attacks on his top generals openly challenged the Kremlin’s monopoly on such criticism, something that Russia’s tightly controlled political system hadn’t seen before.
In the reshuffle announced Wednesday, the Defense Ministry said the head of the General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, was named the new chief of Russian forces in Ukraine, while the former top commander there, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, was demoted to Gerasimov’s deputy after only three months on the job.
The Washington-based Institute of the Study of War saw the reshuffle as an attempt by the Kremlin to “reassert the primacy of the Russian Ministry of Defense in an internal Russian power struggle,” weaken the influence of its foes, and send a signal to Prigozhin and others to reduce their criticism.
Prigozhin and Kadyrov have repeatedly criticized Gerasimov, the main architect of the Russian operation in Ukraine, and held him responsible for military defeats while praising Surovikin.
Russian troops were forced to retreat from Kyiv after a botched attempt to capture the Ukrainian capital in the opening weeks of the war. In the fall, they hastily pulled back from the northeastern Kharkiv region and the southern city of Kherson under the brunt of a swift Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Surovikin directed the retreat from Kherson, the only regional center captured by Russia, and was credited for shoring up command and increasing discipline in the ranks. But a Ukrainian missile strike on Jan. 1 in the eastern town of Makiivka killed scores of Russian troops and tainted his image.
Read more: Putin in Belarus, eyeing next steps in Ukraine war
Political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya observed that Gerasimov’s appointment marked yet another attempt by Putin to resolve his military problems by shaking up the brass.
“He is trying to reshuffle the pieces and is therefore giving chances to those who he finds persuasive," she wrote. "But in reality, the problem is not with the people, but with the tasks at hand.”
Stanovaya argued that Gerasimov could have asked for “carte blanche in the heat of verbal battles against the background of some very tense discussions.” For Putin, ”this is maneuvering, a tug-of-war between Surovikin (and sympathizers like Prigozhin) and Gerasimov,” she added.
Gerasimov, who began his military career as a Soviet army tank officer in the 1970s, has been chief of the General Staff since 2012 and was seen at the start of the conflict in February sitting next to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at a very long table with Putin. His appointment to directly lead the forces in Ukraine drew stinging comments from some Russian hawks.
Viktor Alksnis, a retired Soviet air force colonel who spearheaded botched attempts to preserve the USSR in 1991, noted that Gerasimov had overseen the action in Ukraine even before his appointment.
“This decision reflects the understanding by our political and military leadership that the special military operation has failed and none of its goals has been fulfilled in nearly a year of fighting,” Alksnis wrote on his messaging app channel. “Replacing Surovikin with Gerasimov will change nothing.”
Read more: Zelenskyy tells cheering US legislators funding Ukraine's war ...
Mark Galeotti, who specializes in Russian military and security affairs at University College, London, said the appointment handed Gerasimov “the most poisoned of chalices” as he now will bear direct responsibility for any more setbacks.
“Gerasimov is hanging by a thread,” Galeotti said in a commentary on Twitter. “He needs some kind of win, or a career ends in ignominy. This may well suggest some kinds of escalation.”
Galeotti also warned that frequent reshuffling of Russia's generals could erode allegiance in the officer corps.
“If you keep appointing, rotating, burning your (relative) stars, setting unrealistic expectations, arbitrarily demoting them, that’s not going to win loyalty,” he said.
Prigozhin, meanwhile, has taken advantage of military setbacks in Ukraine to expand his clout by making the Wagner Group a pivotal element of the Russian fighting force, augmenting the regular army that has suffered a heavy attrition.
Ukrainian officials alleged Wagner contractors were suffering massive losses in the fighting in Soledar and Bakhmut, advancing “on the bodies of their own comrades.”
Once convicted of assault and robbery, for which he served time in prison, Prigozhin in recent months went on a tour of Russia's sprawling network of penal colonies to recruit inmates to join Wagner's forces to fight in Ukraine in exchange for pardons.
He recently released a video showing about 20 convicts allowed to leave the ranks of fighters after a half-year on the front line, while also making clear that anyone breaking ranks will face brutal punishment.
Footage posted in the fall showed a Wagner contractor being beaten to death with a sledgehammer after allegedly defecting to the Ukrainian side. Despite public outrage and demands to investigate the incident, authorities have turned a blind eye to it.
Observers have warned that by giving Prigozhin a free hand to run Wagner as a private army governed by medieval-style rules, the government has effectively planted dangerous seeds of possible upheaval.
“In the end, there is chaos and the expansion of violence -– extrajudicial and illegal,” predicted Andrei Kolesnikov, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment.
Suspect charged with murder in assassination of Japan's Abe
Japanese prosecutors formally charged the suspect in the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with murder, sending him to stand trial, a Japanese court said Friday.
Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested immediately after allegedly shooting Abe with a homemade gun as the former leader was making a campaign speech in July outside a train station in Nara in western Japan.
Later that month, Yamagami was sent to an Osaka detention center for a nearly six-month mental evaluation, which ended Tuesday. Yamagami is back in police custody in Nara.
Prosecutors said results of his mental evaluation showed he is fit to stand trial. Yamagami was also charged with violating a gun control law, according to the Nara District Court.
Read more: Japan PM blames police for death of former leader Shinzo Abe
Police have said Yamagami told them that he killed Abe, one of Japan’s most influential and divisive politicians, because of Abe’s apparent links to a religious group that he hated. In his statements and in social media postings attributed to him, Yamagami said he developed a grudge because his mother had made massive donations to the Unification Church that bankrupted his family and ruined his life.
One of his lawyers, Masaaki Furukawa, told the Associated Press on Thursday that Yamagami was in good health during his mental evaluation in Osaka when he was only allowed to see his sister and three lawyers.
Furuawa said his trial is a serious case and involve a jury panel of citizens. Due to the complexity of the case, it would take at least several months before his trial begins, he said.
Police are also reportedly considering adding several allegations, including weapons production, vilation to explosives control law and causing damage to buildings.
Some Japanese have expressed sympathy for Yamagami, especially those who also suffered as children of followers of the South Korea-based Unification Church, which is known for pressuring adherents into making big donations and is considered a cult in Japan.
Thousands of people have signed a petition requesting leniency for Yamagami, and others have sent care packages to his relatives or the detention center.
Read more: Japan's ex-leader Shinzo Abe assassinated during a speech
The investigation into the case has led to revelations of years of cozy ties between Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party and the church since Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, helped the church take root in Japan in the 1960s over shared interests in conservative and anti-communist causes.
Current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s popularity has plunged over his handling of the church controversy and for insisting on holding a rare, controversial state funeral for Abe.
Israeli military kills 3 Palestinians during raids in occupied West Bank
The Israeli military shot and killed three Palestinians during arrest raids in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Palestinian health officials said, the latest bloodshed in months of rising violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
The military, which has been carrying out near-nightly raids in the territory since early last year, said soldiers who entered the Qalandia refugee camp before dawn were bombarded by rocks and cement blocks. In response, the military said troops opened fire at Palestinians throwing objects from rooftops. The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the man killed as Samir Aslan, 41.
Aslan's sister, Noura Aslan, said Israeli security forces broke into their house at 2:30 a.m. to arrest his 18-year-old son, Ramzi. As Ramzi was being hauled away, his father sprinted to the rooftop to see what was happening, she said. Within moments, an Israeli sniper shot him in the back.
Aslan's wife called an ambulance, but Noura said the army initially prevented medics from reaching the house. As Aslan was bleeding, his family dragged his body down the stairs and called for help. An ambulance picked him up some 20 minutes later, Noura said.
Read more: 4 Palestinians killed in flare-up as Israel counts votes
The Israeli army also raided the northern occupied West Bank on Thursday, entering the village of Qabatiya south of the flash point city of Jenin and surrounding a house in the town. The Palestinian Health Ministry reported that Israeli forces fatally shot 25-year-old Habib Kamil and 18-year-old Abdel Hadi Nazal.
The Israeli army said security forces entered Qabatiya to arrest Muhammad Alauna, a Palestinian suspected of planning militant attacks. The army said soldiers shot at a number of Palestinians during the raid, including a man who tried to flee the scene with Alauna, a gunman who fired at the forces from inside his car as well as a group of Palestinians throwing rocks at Israeli troops. It was not immediately clear what Kamil was doing when he was shot.
The deaths on Thursday bring the total number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank this year to nine, including two Palestinians killed Wednesday in separate incidents in the West Bank. One was killed during an Israeli military arrest raid in the territory’s north and another after stabbing and wounding an Israeli man in a southern settlement.
Israel ramped up its military raids last spring, after a spate of Palestinian attacks against Israelis killed 19 people. Israel says the operations are meant to dismantle militant networks and thwart future attacks. The Palestinians see them as further entrenchment of Israel's 55-year, open-ended occupation of land they seek for their future state.
The raids sharply escalated tensions and helped fuel another wave of Palestinian attacks in the fall that killed 10 Israelis. Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 2022, Israeli rights group B'Tselem reported, making last year the deadliest since 2004.
The heightened violence comes as Israel's new ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox government — it's most right-wing ever — is charting its legislative agenda, one that is expected to take a tough line against the Palestinians and drive up settlement construction in the West Bank.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, territories the Palestinians want for their future independent state. Israel has since settled 500,000 people in about 130 settlements across the West Bank, which the Palestinians and much of the international community view as an obstacle to peace.
US nuclear agency falls short on scheduling, cost estimates
The U.S. agency in charge of jumpstarting the production of key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal is falling short when it comes to having a comprehensive schedule for the multibillion-dollar project.
The Government Accountability Office said in a report released Thursday that plans by the National Nuclear Security Administration for reestablishing plutonium pit production do not follow best practices and run the risk of delays and cost overruns.
The federal government has not manufactured plutonium cores regularly in more than 30 years and faces a congressionally mandated deadline of turning out at least 80 per year by 2030.
The GAO describes the modernization effort as the agency’s largest investment in weapons production infrastructure to date, noting that plutonium is a dangerous material and making the weapon cores is difficult and time consuming.
“NNSA lacks both a comprehensive cost estimate and a schedule outlining all activities it needs to achieve this capability,” the reports states.
Read more: Japan reverts to max nuclear power to tackle energy, climate
Nuclear watchdog groups have been voicing similar concerns since the federal government first announced plans in 2018 to restart production by splitting the work between Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
At stake are billions of dollars in funding for improving infrastructure at the two locations and thousands of jobs.
Democratic members of New Mexico's congressional delegation have fought to ensure Los Alamos — a once secret city that helped develop the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project — would be among the benefactors of the lucrative mission.
Using documents prepared by the nuclear agency for justifying its fiscal year 2023 budget, the GAO identified at least $18 billion to $24 billion in potential costs to build up production capacity.
However, the GAO, other independent analysts and officials in the U.S. Defense Department all have testified in recent years that NNSA would miss the 2030 deadline, no matter how much funding was funneled toward the project.
The NNSA said in a statement Thursday that it agreed with the GAO's recommendations and that some of the work to implement best practices was underway.
“Both the lifecycle cost estimate data and (integrated master schedule) will be updated as needed to reflect the most up-to-date information as the projects and program work progress,” the agency said.
More specifically, the agency said in a letter to the GAO that it planned to complete the cost estimate for the overall project by September 2025 and that the schedule would “continue to mature over time.”
Greg Mello, director of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group, said Thursday that not having a comprehensive schedule or cost estimate means NNSA does not know what it's doing and has little likelihood of success.
“How can NNSA produce the required number of pits on schedule or on budget, when NNSA has no schedule or budget?” he asked. “These are elementary, normal components in any program or project. After more than two decades of preparation, NNSA doesn’t have them.”
Read more: UN nuclear agency to probe Russia claim of `dirty bombs'
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, pointed to some of the price tags associated with the project having doubled over the last four years. He said production overall at the two sites could cost at least $60 billion over 30 years with radioactive waste disposal and other environmental and public health concerns adding to the bill.
Until Congress and the New Mexican delegation demand credible cost estimates and schedules, Coghlan said lawmakers “should stop rewarding the guilty with yet more money.”
"That is simple good governance that could help slow our sleepwalk into the new and unpredictable nuclear arms race,” he said.
Mello agreed, saying the mission needs to be widely debated in Congress, not just discussed behind closed doors or by those lawmakers who sit on defense committees.
In its report, the GAO outlined the process for making plutonium pits along with a history of how and where the work was done during the Cold War. The long-shuttered Rocky Flats Plant outside Denver was capable of producing more than 1,000 war reserve pits annually before work stopped in 1989 due to environmental and regulatory concerns.
With a long history of leaks, fires and other violations, Rocky Flats underwent a $7 billion cleanup that was finished in 2005.
During the Obama administration, a council made up of defense and energy officials told Congress the nation needed to produce between 50 and 80 pits per year. Congress included a legal mandate for production in a 2015 defense measure that was subsequently approved and signed by the president.
That mandate was later amended to call for the 80 pits in 2030. According to the GAO, some of the construction projects and upgrades needed for the work at Los Alamos won't be finished for several years.
US air travel returns to normal after technology breakdown
U.S. air travel returned mostly to normal Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots broke down and grounded traffic from coast to coast.
By midafternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights had been canceled and more than 3,700 delayed — much lower figures than on Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were scrubbed and 11,000 delayed.
Attention turned to the federal agency where the technology failure apparently started hours before it inconvenienced more than 1 million travelers.
The Federal Aviation Administration said a damaged database file appeared to have caused the outage in the safety-alert system. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised a thorough examination to avoid another major failure.
“Our immediate focus is technical — understanding exactly how this happened, why the redundancies and the backups that were build into the system were not able to prevent the level of disruption that we saw,” Buttigieg told reporters.
Buttigieg said there was no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack but that officials would not rule that out until they know more.
Read more: Flight disruptions cascade across US after computer outage
The FAA said late Thursday that a preliminary analysis showed the breakdown came after “a data file was damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures.”
The massive disruption was the latest black eye for the agency, which has traded blame with airlines over who has inconvenienced passengers more. Critics, including airline and tourism leaders, say agency technology is underfunded.
“Investment is going to be required, no doubt,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom told CNBC. “It’s going to be billions of dollars, and it’s not something that is done overnight.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has been critical of the FAA on a variety of issues, including staffing of air traffic controllers. He says the agency makes “a heroic effort” and does well most of the time but can be overwhelmed during busy travel times.
“They need more investment for technology,” Kirby said at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event in September. “They have been saying it."
Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington state, the top Democrat on a House aviation subcommittee, said the outage shows the weakness of the FAA's technology and that the agency needs to make significant improvements.
“It's one thing to get things up and going on the old software,” Larsen said in an interview. “It's another thing to invest in the new software platforms that are necessary to ensure this doesn't happen again.”
Mike McCormick, a former FAA manager of airspace security who retired in 2017 after about 35 years at the agency, was more confident in FAA technology. He said the agency modernized computer systems over the past 15 years and is 95% up to date, having upgraded to next-generation satellite-based systems for navigation, flight tracking and communication.
“Software, hardware, the final upgrades, were completed in the last three years, so now they’re actually working on the next generation beyond that and the enhancements to the systems,” said McCormick, who now teaches air-traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
The system that generates NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions — also was upgraded, but the outage happened as an engineer was working on the main system and the database somehow became corrupted, McCormick said, citing conversations with people at the FAA.
When they switched to the backup system, its database also was corrupted, McCormick said. The system then had to be rebooted.
Read more: Number of flights canceled by Southwest Airlines is growing
“Things can still go wrong,” McCormick said. “You can still have human error, you can still have procedural errors, you can still have technological errors.”
Michael Huerta, FAA administrator from 2013 to 2018, said the systems need to be updated constantly to keep up with technology. Nothing in the FAA system is so old that it's in danger of failing, he said, especially the system that tracks and communicates with planes.
“The public should definitely be confident that the air traffic control system is safe,” he said.
But the NOTAM system is about a decade old when systems reach the point where vendors don't support it or the platform that it runs on has been upgraded.
“It's not a one-and-done type of event,” he said. “It's not very many years that go by before you have to upgrade it.”
The outage came at a bad time for both the FAA and Buttigieg.
The FAA is trying to repair its reputation after being widely criticized for the way it approved the Boeing 737 Max without fully understanding a flight-control system that malfunctioned and played a key role in two crashes that killed 346 people. The agency took a more hands-on approach when considering — and eventually improving — changes that Boeing made to get the plane back in the air.
The meltdown at an agency overseen by the Transportation Department could also undercut Buttigieg’s moral authority to chastise airlines when they cancel or delay flights. He has gone after the airlines since last summer, most recently over disruptions at Southwest Airlines.
Wednesday's breakdown showed how much American air travel depends on the computer system that generates NOTAMs.
Before a plane takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include details about weather, runway closures or other temporary factors that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based but moved online years ago.
Buttigieg said when the system broke down Tuesday night, a backup system went into effect. The FAA tried a complete reboot of the main system Wednesday morning, but that failed, leading the FAA to take the rare step of preventing planes from taking off.
'Russia forces are edging closer to capturing salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine'
Russia said Thursday that its forces are edging closer to capturing a salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine, which would mark an elusive victory for the Kremlin but come at the cost of heavy Russian casualties and extensive destruction of the territory they claim.
More than 100 Russian troops were killed in the battle for Soledar over the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said in televised remarks.
Read more: Russia will launch new capsule to return space station crew
“The Russians have literally marched on the bodies of their own soldiers, burning everything on their way,” Kyrylenko said while reporting that Russian forces had shelled a dozen towns and villages in the region in the past day.
Russian forces are using mortars and rockets to bombard Soledar in an unrelenting assault, struggling for a breakthrough after military setbacks have turned what the Kremlin hoped would be a fast victory into a grinding war of attrition that has dragged on for nearly 11 months with no end in sight.
“Civilians are trying to survive amid that bloodbath as the Russians are pressing their attacks,” Kyrylenko said. Serhii Cherevatiy, a spokesman for Ukraine’s forces in the east, said Soledar was hit by Russian artillery more than 90 times in the past day.
Soledar’s fall would be a prize for a Kremlin starved of good battlefield news in recent months, after losing the significant city of Kherson in December. It would also offer Russian troops a springboard to conquer other areas of the eastern Donetsk province that remain under Ukrainian control, particularly the nearby strategic city of Bakhmut.
The Russians’ tactic in the assault on Soledar is to send one or two waves of soldiers, many from the private Russian military contractor Wagner Group who take heavy casualties as they probe the Ukrainian defenses, a Ukrainian officer near Soledar told The Associated Press. When Ukrainian troops suffer casualties and are exhausted, the Russians send in another wave of highly-trained soldiers, paratroopers or special forces, to get a new toehold on the battlefield, said the Ukrainian officer, who insisted on anonymity for security reasons.
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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised the “selfless and courageous action” of Russian troops, which he said is helping them to press forward in Soledar.
“Gigantic work has been done in Soledar,” he said.
Peskov, however, stopped short of confirming a claim by Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin, who boasted about capturing Soledar on Wednesday.
“There is still a lot to be done and it’s too early to stop and rub our hands, the main work is still ahead,” he said in a conference call with reporters.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said at a briefing Thursday: “The enemy continues the assaults, but suffers significant losses and is not successful.”
The AP was unable to verify the claims made by either side.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed that the troops defending Soledar “will be guaranteed ammunition and everything necessary.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry made no mention of Soledar in its daily briefing on Thursday. The ministry announced Wednesday that the country’s top military officer — the chief of the military’s General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov — was put in charge of the military operation in Ukraine. He replaces Gen. Sergei Surovikin, who was demoted to deputy only three months after he was installed in that job.
Ukrainian officials also said they were taking note of personnel changes at the top levels of the Russian military command, describing them as a sign that Moscow isn’t achieving what it had hoped.
“Personnel changes would not occur with such frequency if they were doing well,” a senior Ukrainian military official, Brig. Gen. Oleksiy Hromov, said.
Fighting continued elsewhere in Ukraine.
The deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, reported Thursday that two civilians were killed and a further eight were wounded in Russian attacks on Wednesday.
Citing data from regional officials, Tymoshenko said that one civilian died and five were wounded in the southern Kherson province, where shells hit a maternity hospital, private houses and apartment buildings, while one person was killed in Donetsk.
Two people were wounded in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia province, with one further civilian sustaining injuries in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk province.
At the United Nations, Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova told the Security Council that Ukraine will seek a general assembly vote on a resolution supporting Zelenskyy’s 10-point peace formula that includes the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the Russians’ withdrawal. The plan that Zelenskyy presented to the Group of 20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia in November also includes the release of all prisoners, a tribunal for those responsible for the Russian aggression, and security guarantees for Ukraine.