Saturday 14 November 2026

On Friday 13 November no aircraft could take off from the continental United States for more than four hours, from mid-afternoon Eastern time. It was only the third nationwide ground stop in the history of the FAA (the Federal Aviation Administration, the US civil aviation regulator), and the longest since the attacks of 11 September 2001. More than 8,000 flights were cancelled on Friday and more than 4,000 by late Saturday morning, according to the tracking site FlightAware, cited by the Guardian. On Saturday the transport secretary, Sean Duffy, gave the cause: modernisation work, not an attack.

The idea

A ground stop is an order to halt departures: aircraft already in the air carry on and land, but nothing new leaves. The FAA imposes one when it can no longer guarantee safe traffic, in this case because its en-route control centres, which track aircraft between airports, had a “communication issue”, according to Duffy. He said a contractor, L3Harris, was replacing copper lines with fibre-optic cable at a remote FAA site; a router being worked on then flooded other air traffic control systems with data and disrupted communications with aircraft. Once that site was isolated, the systems came back. Duffy says he is trying to establish whether it was “incompetence” or faulty equipment. The FAA’s head, Bryan Bedford, says he sees “zero evidence of anything nefarious” and nothing linked to artificial intelligence. L3Harris says it had completed more than 70% of the work before the incident and is supporting the investigation.

Key dates

• 11 September 2001 · The first nationwide stop: after the attacks, the FAA halted all civilian departures and ordered aircraft in the air to land; commercial flights did not resume until 13 September.
• 11 January 2023 · The second: take-offs were halted for under two hours after the outage of the Notice to Air Missions (Notam) system, which sends safety information to pilots.
• 13 November 2026 · The third: more than four hours; take-offs resumed at 8.35pm Eastern time.

Did you know?

According to Duffy, the copper wire being replaced was so old that it was being phased out. He warns that similar failures will happen again unless Congress funds the modernisation of air traffic control, for which Donald Trump is asking 30.1 billion dollars.

Further reading

Ars Technica’s account of the three nationwide stops in the FAA’s history.

US envoys asked Kyiv whether Ukraine would withdraw its forces from Donbas, the industrial eastern region most of which Russia already controls, in exchange for joining Nato, the Western military alliance, Volodymyr Zelensky said in remarks made on Friday and released by his office on Saturday 14 November. “This was the first time this had been raised,” he said, after meeting Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Dublin on Thursday, on their way back from Moscow. The Ukrainian president repeats that his country will not give up territory, but says he would put to a referendum a comprehensive deal including security guarantees, an unconstrained army and funds for reconstruction. He believes Nato is “back on the agenda”, while warning that the conversation is “extremely difficult” given Vladimir Putin’s signals. According to the BBC, Moscow has instead hardened its demands, again calling for Nato to roll back its infrastructure from central and eastern Europe. Russia occupies roughly a fifth of Ukraine.

Between 106,000 and 200,000 people marched across France on Saturday 14 November, the fifth weekend in a row of protests “against the high cost of living” called by the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) coordination and youth organisations: 106,000, including 24,000 in Paris, according to the interior ministry; 200,000, including nearly 100,000 in the capital, according to the youth unions. The ministry called the situation “broadly under control” and reported 219 arrests and ten police officers lightly injured, with incidents in Marseille, Grenoble, Lyon, Bordeaux and Poitiers; in Paris, the police prefecture described a march “without incident”. Around 70,000 police and gendarmes were deployed, according to the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez. The day drew in other causes, including child protection, championed by groups campaigning against violence towards children. The yellow-vest coordination is already calling for an “act VI” on 21 November.

The European Union urged Israel on Saturday 14 November to give aid organisations “immediate and unimpeded” access to the Gaza Strip and to “reopen all crossings”, through its foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas. For a week, heavy rain has flooded tens of thousands of tents sheltering displaced people and killed five people, three of them children, according to Palestinian rescuers. The EU reminded Israel that it must respect international humanitarian law and said the air strike on Thursday on the Nasser medical complex in the south of the territory, which killed at least six people including a surgeon according to Al Jazeera, was “deeply concerning”. On Saturday an Israeli drone strike killed two more Palestinians in Jabaliya, in the north; the Israeli military says it targeted two Hamas militants.

Hungarian investigators have seized nearly 20 million dollars (€17.7 million) in banknotes buried in forests and hidden in farm buildings, warehouses and homes, the new National Asset Recovery and Protection Office announced on Friday 13 November. The money is linked to the inquiry into Miklós Seszták, Viktor Orbán’s national development minister from 2014 to 2018, who is suspected of taking more than 37 million dollars in bribes over overpriced second-hand buses and public building projects; taken into custody in late September, he denies wrongdoing, DW reports. Twelve treasury staff took eight hours to count the notes, according to the finance minister, András Kármán. The prime minister, Péter Magyar, who defeated Orbán in April’s election, calls the seizure a turning point in his anti-corruption campaign.

Thousands of people marched in the rain on Saturday 14 November in Antalya, Turkey, host of COP31, the annual United Nations climate conference: more than 7,000 according to the police, cited by franceinfo, tens of thousands according to the organisers, cited by DW. The Turkish authorities allowed the march, in a country that often bans large public gatherings. As the second week began, the UN climate chief (head of the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), Simon Stiell, urged delegations from more than 200 countries to “avoid tactical delays” and move swiftly to the hardest issues. Organisers of a parallel people’s summit accuse Turkey, the conference’s co-president, of having no roadmap away from fossil fuels while still opening coal plants and mines.

Italy’s data protection authority (the Garante) fined Meta, Facebook’s parent company, €805 million on Saturday 14 November for accessing Android users’ photos and videos without their “specific” consent. At issue is the Facebook app feature that, since 2023, suggests images from the phone’s gallery as ideas for posts: access rested on a single, app-wide permission, preceded by a notice the regulator found too vague. Around 20 million users were not properly informed, according to the regulator, which has given Meta 60 days to switch the feature off by default. It is among the largest fines an Italian authority has ever imposed on a tech giant. Meta “strongly” disputes the assessment and the amount, and can appeal. In late October the group was ordered in New Mexico to pay 25 billion dollars for misleading the public about its use of data.

Why it's in the news. According to the Wall Street Journal, as reported by DW and Courrier international, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO, the World Health Organization’s office for the Americas) is to strip the United States of the measles-elimination status it has held since 2000; the official announcement is expected on 17 November. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US public health agency, has recorded 5,182 confirmed cases this year in 45 states, more than double 2025’s total, according to DW.

What it is. “Eliminated” is not “eradicated”: the virus can always enter a country with a traveller. A country has eliminated measles when no local chain of transmission has lasted 12 months or more, with surveillance good enough to prove it. PAHO calls transmission “endemic” when the same virus, of the same genotype and lineage, circulates without interruption for 12 months or longer in one country. An independent commission of experts reviews the epidemiological and genetic evidence, and PAHO’s director decides. For example, ten imported cases in a year change nothing; a single outbreak that does not die out for a year does. To regain the status, a country must again stop transmission for at least 12 months.

Microsoft said early on Saturday 14 November that Outlook, Teams and Copilot were fully restored after an outage of about a day that hit more than 70 countries and products used by more than 430 million people, according to the BBC. The company, which apologised, blames a “network capacity upgrade” and rules out both a cyber-attack and an artificial intelligence agent. The outage disrupted government offices, courts, hospitals and schools, from the Japanese government to the Supreme Court of the Philippines. An analysis in The Conversation sees in it above all the risk of concentration: a handful of large companies now provide most of the digital services institutions depend on.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected water and carbon dioxide ice in the debris disc around Beta Pictoris, a star about 20 million years old and 64 light years away where planets are still forming, according to a study led by Sarah Betti of the Space Telescope Science Institute and reported by Ars Technica. The water ice is almost entirely amorphous, a disordered, glass-like solid (under 7% crystalline), and the CO₂ is intimately mixed in, at roughly one molecule for every ten, a proportion close to that of comets in our Solar System. The researchers conclude that the ice probably formed in the interstellar medium, before the star itself. If that is the rule, the ingredients of water-rich worlds may be common around young stars.

At 19, Shahram Khosravi, now an anthropologist at Stockholm University, was held in a small prison on the border between Iran and Pakistan, among smugglers, undocumented workers and refugees. In this essay for Aeon he argues that wherever people are confined and displaced, a “fugitive imagination” emerges: a practical knowledge that thinks the world beyond the borders of states. A smuggler interviewed in prison told him he designs “a journey, like an architect designs a building”. Political philosophy rooted in lived experience, which makes you look at borders from the side of those who cross them.

Philosophie Magazine (in French) revisits Jean Wahl (1888-1974), a major figure of post-war intellectual life who is now largely forgotten. The philosopher Bernardo Tavares, who wrote his thesis on him, traces a life that ran from the Sorbonne to the Drancy internment camp, and a way of thinking that, convinced reality overflows our ideas, welcomed the most varied viewpoints to test their limits. A fine way into a philosophy of productive doubt, far from closed systems.

ZONE ONE is a live map of central London: every tube train, bus, mainline train, riverboat and aircraft on screen is real and moving in real time, placed from Transport for London’s public feeds, National Rail departures and aircraft and ship tracking signals. Hover over a vehicle to see what it is, click a station for its departures, or a traffic camera for its current picture. A fine tribute to open data, and a strangely calming way to watch a city breathe.

GB Studio is a drag-and-drop maker of retro games for a classic handheld: visual scripting with no programming, a built-in debugger for when the game gets complicated, and a music editor with piano-roll and tracker modes. It builds real ROM files that play on any GB emulator, and games also export to the web, with controls made for mobile. According to the site, it serves parents teaching their children to code as well as professional games with physical releases.

Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are due to meet next week on the sidelines of the Apec (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Shenzhen, China, the White House has announced; franceinfo puts the meeting on Thursday 19 November. Washington wants to discuss reducing nuclear arsenals, after the last arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expired in February. Beijing has yet to confirm, and no agreement is expected, according to a US official.

On Wednesday, according to NASA, the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, will become the first human-made object to be one light day from Earth, the distance light travels in 24 hours, about 26 billion kilometres. It still sends back daily readings from interstellar space.

PAHO’s official announcement is expected on 17 November, according to Courrier international. It would make the United States a country where measles is again endemic.

The yellow vests will join the unions’ day of action on 17 November, eight years to the day after the movement began, then call for an “act VI” on Saturday 21 November because their demands have not been met, their coordination announced on franceinfo.