A small airport in Pennsylvania was closed on Friday night after a suspicious package was detected in checked luggage on a flight bound for Chicago. The authorities later said that bag did not contain anything hazardous, and that the airport would reopen at 4 a.m. on Saturday. The passenger terminal at the University Park Airport…
In the summer of 1897, 20 Black U.S. Army infantrymen cycled 1,900 miles on fixed-gear, state-of-the-art bikes from Fort Missoula, Mont., to St. Louis. The Army ordered the grueling expedition to see whether soldiers could form a bicycle corps. Newspapers chronicled their progress as they pedaled 50 miles a day in mud and sand, through…
It was a chilly February morning, and my friends were impatiently stamping their skis like horses eager to leave the barn. We had miles of snowy trails to ski and I had been dawdling too long over my gear. We made final adjustments to our equipment, and I inhaled an energy bar inside a self-service…
Pilots at Delta Air Lines have approved a new contract that will increase wages 34 percent by 2026 and includes improvements to scheduling, retirement and other benefits, raising the standard for contract negotiations underway at other large U.S. airlines. Voting was conducted in February, and the results were announced on Wednesday, with 78 percent of…
Flying to Tanzania for her honeymoon on Ethiopian Airlines in November, Amanda Meeks was ready to celebrate. So, when an email arrived inviting her to bid on business class seats for the leg of the journey between Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, she jumped on it, getting two seats for the less-than-three-hour…
It was at a 1926 English department faculty meeting that he met another Oxford professor, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. The friendship propelled both toward realizing their literary worlds: Middle-earth and Narnia. First impressions were not hot. “No harm in him,” Lewis wrote of Tolkien after their first meeting. “Only needs a smack or so.” The…
Hottest, driest, lowest: Those three words are repeated often by rangers to describe Death Valley National Park, which straddles the California and Nevada borders and is the largest national park outside of Alaska. At 3.4 million acres, it is known for its blast-furnace summers, when temperatures have climbed as high as 134 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s…
Unions that represent workers at JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines are divided on the proposed merger of the two companies, with one union throwing its support behind the deal and another asking federal officials to block it. In a letter on Thursday, the Transport Workers Union, which represents 6,800 JetBlue flight attendants, asked Attorney General…
“The first time I came to London, I was 17,” the violinist Joshua Bell, now 54, told me. We were at dinner together following a recent performance of his at Wigmore Hall, a small but renowned concert hall. “I came with my parents to make my first album,” he continued. “This was in the ’80s,…
“The weather decides”: It could almost be the motto of Greenland. Visitors drawn to this North Atlantic island to see its powder blue glaciers, iceberg-clogged fjords and breathtakingly stark landscapes quickly learn to respect the elements, and they’re sometimes rewarded for it. One cold December day, I was waiting for a delayed flight in Kangerlussuaq,…