Air travel: Just as air travel was getting back to normal... Omicron appears

11/30/21 7:00PM

Airlines had a lot to celebrate last week, as the TSA screened more than 2.45 million passengers through US airports on Sunday — not far off the numbers from 2019.

Unfortunately for the travel sector (and all of us personally), Omicron put a dampener on the revival.

Almost overnight, travel restrictions were tightened or re-introduced. Many of those restrictions targeted South Africa (and its neighbors) which was the first country to detect and then report the variant to the WHO, although many other countries — 19 to be exact — have now reported cases of the variant.

It might be 2022, or probably even beyond, until air travel is fully feeling itself again.

Tom Jones7/10/26

The most watched soccer match in US history got less than a third of the views the Super Bowl did

Between a top-spot finish in the group stage, a sweeping performance against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the round of 32, and the president’s controversial intervention, Monday evening’s USMNT game against Belgium had, to put it lightly, shaped up into a box-office clash.

And though the US players’ performance on the pitch might not have lived up to the high drama off it, American soccer fans certainly showed up. According to early estimates, the 4-1 defeat against Belgium was the most watched soccer telecast in US history, hauling some 40 million viewers on average across the coverage on Fox and Telemundo.

That may be a record tally in the US for the sport that much of the world calls some variant of “football” — besting the 36.2 million who tuned in to watch the team’s previous knock-out match — but it’s still peanuts in comparison to the sport that shares the same name in the States.