US airlines have canceled more than 1,200 flights Monday as a powerful winter storm packing rain, sleet and snow slammed the East Coast on the holiday weekend and made travel difficult. On Sunday, roughly 3,000 flights were canceled. Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, an American Airlines (AAL) hub, continues to be the hardest hit. More than 400 flights were canceled there Monday and 85 delays were reported according to flight tracking site FlightAware. The airline preemptively canceled 1,100 flights Sunday across its mainline and regional operations after canceling 90 Saturday.
- CNN
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Britney Spears has had a rocky relationship with her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, that's become public in the past year as the "Toxic" singer sought to free herself from her controversial conservatorship. Britney kicked off 2022 by purging a lot of her followers on Instagram, including her famous sister. Now, she only follows about 46 people, including fiance Sam Asghari, Paris Hilton, Noah Cyrus, Will Smith, Billie Eilish, Elton John and Selena Gomez. Jamie Lynn, who has tried to remain cordial with her sister throughout her conservatorship battle in 2021, continues to follow Britney. The move marks the latest passive-aggressive move from Britney regarding both her sister and the rest of her family, who she has blamed publicly on multiple occasions for keeping her under the harmful legal deal until a judge finally terminated it in November. Jamie Lynn’s involvement with the conservatorship came to light in 2019. As revelations of Britney’s mental health treatment arose, it was revealed that Jamie Lynn was named as the trustee in Britney’s SJB Revocable Trust in 2020, which was amended by Britney’s then-co-conservators in 2018, according to legal documents. When Britney made her explosive 2021 court appearance and publicly called for her freedom from the deal for the first time, she also called out her family without naming her sister directly. She also laid out shocking allegations, like being forced to work long hours, being denied the right to remove her IUD and being completely removed from handling her own finances. Days later, Jamie Lynn released a statement after receiving backlash for not publicly supporting the #FreeBritney movement, which sought to end her sister’s conservatorship long before her 24-minute court testimony. In a video posted to her Instagram Stories, Jamie Lynn said that she stayed quiet about the situation because she believed her sister could speak for herself. However, now that she had spoken out, Jamie Lynn wanted the public to know that she supported her sister’s fight and wouldn’t benefit financially one way or the other if the conservatorship was terminated. "Since the day I was born, I've only loved adored and supported my sister. I mean this is my freaking big sister, before any of this bulls-. I don't care if she wants to run away to a rainforest and have zillion babies in the middle of nowhere, or if she wants to come back and dominate the world the way she has done so many times before, because I have nothing to gain or lose either way," she said at the time. "This situation does not affect me either way, because I'm only her sister who's only concerned about her happiness." However, tax documents obtained by Fox News Digital indicate that may not be entirely the case. Meanwhile, Britney took to her own social media in July to call out her sister and others for profiting off her during her conservatorship, whether it be through money or clout. Britney made a vague reference to the people "who never showed up" for her over the past 13 years as she had been dealing with a controlling legal conservatorship. This first post included what many believe was an indirect reference to her sister only speaking out now that she was getting public attention. In a follow-up post, Britney derided Jamie Lynn directly for performing her songs to remixes at awards shows. BRITNEY SPEARS SAYS SHE'S WRITING A BOOK ABOUT A GIRL'S GHOST 'STUCK IN LIMBO BECAUSE OF TRAUMA AND PAIN'"I don't like that my sister showed up at an awards show and performed MY SONGS to remixes !!!!!" Britney wrote in a post that was also critical of her father, Jamie, who controlled her conservatorship at the time. "My so-called support system hurt me deeply !!!! This conservatorship killed my dreams ... so all I have is hope and hope is the only thing in this world that is very hard to kill ... yet people still try !!!!" Britney added. From there on out, the former "Zoey 101" star avoided speaking too directly about her sister’s conservatorship. She noted that she was previously getting death threats over the situation. However, that all changed in October when Jamie Lynn announced that she was releasing a tell-all book about her life titled "Things I Should Have Said." Due out in January, the book promises to discuss things like her sister’s conservatorship, her first pregnancy when she was 16 and her daughter’s near-fatal ATV accident in 2017. BRITNEY SPEARS SLAMS PEOPLE 'WHO NEVER SHOWED UP FOR' HER: 'HOW DARE YOU'"I felt a strong conviction to share my story, but there was a lot of personal work and healing that had to happen before I could share my truth the proper way," the "Zoey 101" alum shared on Instagram. "I’ve spent my whole life believing that I had to pretend to be perfect, even when I wasn’t, so for the first time I am opening up about my own mental health, because this process challenged me to have to be painfully honest with myself, and face a lot of hard things, that I normally would have just glossed right over, like I was taught to," she continued. "I owe it to myself, my younger self, and to my daughters to be an example that you should never edit yourself or your truth to please anyone else," the 30-year-old concluded. She also announced that a portion of her book proceeds will be going to the mental health nonprofit This Is My Brave. However, the nonprofit eventually rejected that deal.
Days later, Britney shared a cheeky post on Instagram in which she seemingly jabbed at her sister for the decision to release a book by coming up with a list of potential titles that insinuated that Jamie Lynn shouldn’t tell these stories. "Psssssss also great news … I’m thinking of releasing a book next year," she revealed, "but I’m having issues coming up with a title so maybe my fans could help !!!!" Spears suggested either calling the book "S--t, I really don’t know" or "I really care what people think." This led many people to believe that she was taking a direct shot at her sister. Now, after months of barbing each other back and forth on social media, it seems that Britney, who is free of her conservatorship, is hoping to simply avoid seeing anything further from her sister on Instagram as well as many others who she believes contributed negativity to her life in 2021. She said as much in her latest Instagram Post following her New Year’s follower purge. "SYMBOLIC of my year this year," the singer wrote over a video of birds being freed from a truck. - Fox News New York (CNN Business)The word "metaverse" is popping up everywhere. Facebook (FB) recently changed its name to Meta Platforms. Nike (NKE) bought a virtual shoe company to help it expand to the metaverse. And other brands like Gucci and Ralph Lauren have been considering the future of fashion with digital personas. With all the attention, it can be difficult for general news consumers to parse through what is a marketing gimmick versus what really matters. It requires journalists to approach the tech industry's new favorite buzzword with an open mind and with nuance, something that the media hasn't always been consistent with in years past, according to Gideon Lichfield, global editorial director of Wired. "Every time the industry goes after a new name for something and tries to pivot, something new inevitably comes out of it. It's just not clear yet what it will be," Lichfield said. "I think one has to be really critical of this tendency and call out what is just marketing and hype, which is a large part of it, whilst remaining open-minded to the fact that something new does emerge."At Wired, Lichfield oversees how the preeminent tech magazine covers these topics and other new tech trends for its website and print magazine. The latest print issue, featuring actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II on the cover, focuses on the future of reality.Lichfield spoke with CNN Business about how tech journalism's evolution, diversity in media and his predictions of next year's biggest tech stories.This interview has been edited and condensed. You wrote in a recent editor's letter that the tech industry is at "an inflection point." What exactly do you mean by that, and where does the media fall into that turn of events?
The tech press is in the middle of covering two massive scandals right now: The Facebook Papers and the Congressional hearings about Facebook, and then there's the Elizabeth Holmes' trial. How do you see these two events being covered? What is the press getting right? What could they improve on?That's an interesting one. I think I actually can talk more about the Facebook one. I don't think I've followed the coverage of the Elizabeth Holmes trial as closely. That's okay. I just think with what you said [the Holmes trial] is a good example of someone who was lauded and changing the world and now she's on trial.What I can say about Elizabeth Holmes is I think that probably the early coverage of her — not talking about what's happening now — there was probably a bit of this tendency, which Wired has been guilty of too in the past, of going, "Oh, wow, here's this person doing this amazing thing, and it could be totally transformative." And either not being able to or not wanting to look a little harder and say, "Well, you know, just how likely is it that this will succeed?" And I think there's a certain style of tech coverage which has been this thing is really cool. It could be amazing, and we're going to completely suspend judgment on how plausible it actually is. I think it behooves us to have that critical lens. On Facebook, the thing that has struck me about it is we all, and Wired included, did a lot of coverage of the Facebook Papers and what came out of them. And that's important, and I think that it probably drives the conversation on Capitol Hill, which ultimately is where this matters. That's where the regulation is going to come out of. But part of me asked: How much does this actually talk to the general public? How much of this stuff are they reading? There was almost too much detail, too many revelations, too many little things. And as with other things in the past like the financial crisis or the health care reform, I think the public can get a certain amount of fatigue. There's all this detail, but what am I actually supposed to just think about this? I recently read a tweet from Sarah Watson, an analyst at Forrester, who wrote, "[T]he media cycle shift toward crypto, web3, metaverse etc. increasingly feels like tech has architected a successful pivot to redirect attention on to the next thing, rather than dealing with what they've already built and broken." Do you agree with that sentiment?When people are talking about the metaverse, they're appropriating a term from this novel that imagines the metaverse as a certain kind of thing and they're trying to bring the idealism or that idea to a very different and very disparate set of experiences. Web3 similarly feels like an attempt to put a new, easy to understand catchy label on a bunch of stuff that is happening. And that was true Web2 as well, and yet, in hindsight, you can say that having that label helped coalesce or crystallize some shifts that were happening on the web and on the internet in industry in general. That did mark a real trend, mark some changes. So here again, I'm trying to inject nuance. I'm saying yes, I agree. It's marketing. It's relabeling. The same problems exist, and the same problems that we have on social media spaces today will carry over into virtual spaces and metaverse spaces. And so one should approach it with a great deal of caution and at the same time open to the question: What new stuff might emerge? So good writing to you is making information easy to distill and nuance and also being very clear to the public?Nuance and clarity and not flooding people with stuff. The media and the tech industries have both suffered from a lack of diversity. The top leadership at Wired — you, the global editorial director, and your deputy Greg Williams — are white men. What effect do you think that has on your coverage?I don't know what effect directly it has on the coverage because the stories that we do on a day-to-day basis are being generated from all across the newsroom and at all levels. It's not like me and Greg are sitting there handing down assignments. What I do think it means though is that we have to absolutely make an even greater effort than we would otherwise to make sure that we're recruiting as diversely as possible and continuing to fill the ranks so that the next generation of Wired leadership can be not white men. And also so that everybody in the newsroom does feel like they can work in an environment where there are no biases, there are no assumptions, there are no things that are affecting the work or leading to exclusionary decisions and making sure that whenever there are important decisions to be taken that there are people in the room who are a mix. Do you keep an ongoing diversity report on your newsroom? Wired was doing this before I arrived. We've done a staff diversity audit, and we've a couple of times taken a month and done a contributor diversity audit. And we've talked about doing the source diversity audit as well. That's more intensive, but that's something that we want to keep on doing periodically and just try to keep track of who's writing for us. Are there any platforms that you want to grow for Wired?There's no one particular platform where I can tell you, "Yeah, this is somewhere that we're going to be." But I just want to have from the ground up honest conversation about let's say TikTok. What would it mean to be authentically Wired on TikTok, not to be a cringey form of Wired, right? Not to do something because it's cool or just because it's an audience grab but because we think this is a genuine way to express what Wired is about. What do you see as the biggest tech stories of 2022? How would you say that the media industry, Wired included, should be covering these stories?I think the crypto and NFT boom is going to continue to be a big one, and the way I want us to cover that is to try to, again, nuance. Sort the wheat from the chaff, sort the reality from the hype, but at least try to forge a path between these really polar opposites of discourse about the industry, which it's either it's all a scam or it's going to completely change the world. There's something in there that I don't know what it is yet that is going to emerge. I've not yet seen a long-term application of crypto that really convinces me that is transformative. But that doesn't mean that's not there, and I want us to keep looking for it. I think that the metaverse conversation will continue and at this point it feels to me it's almost like a terminological land grab. In other words, people are fighting for the definition of what the metaverse is. I don't think we're going to get the answer to that, at least not in the next year. But I think we should continue to cover the companies that are claiming to be building the metaverse and asking the serious questions about what are you actually building and how is it different? And continue to ask the same questions we were asking before which is how is it going to be safe for people? Who's benefiting from it? I think the regulation of Facebook and tech regulation more broadly story in the US is going to continue to be really interesting. I don't know whether it's going to get out of partisan deadlock. And there will be some sort of breakthrough before the midterm elections or whether it will just stay stuck there, but I think that'll really be interesting to watch.
Similarly, by contrast, the regulatory efforts that are going on in Europe. There's actually more happening on tech regulation in Europe and has been for a while than there is in the US and to some extent that's starting to set the agenda, I think, for US companies, and I think an interesting thing to watch. The China-US rivalry over technology and in general, whether it's on AI supremacy or export controls, trade barriers, intellectual property that I think is going to continue holding up and we have to keep covering that really closely.What if anything gets implemented from COP26, very important climate story. The continuing aftermath for the pandemic, both in terms of health, obviously, and how we manage the pandemic and whether or not we get vaccines to the places that need them, but also the continuing readjustment in work, how people work, the relation between employers and employees, the economic impact of people moving to different places, migrating, working remotely. - CNN |
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