Why flight cancellations could drag on long after the shutdown ends

Good morning. It's Tuesday, November 11th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, President Trump's battle with the BBC explained why cars are being repossessed at record highs. And this year's Booker Prize winner could be a novel like no other.

But first, to the shutdown. Last night, the Senate formally voted to reopen the government, sending a funding measure to the Republican Majority House. As with the last vote, eight Democrats helped to get the compromise passed. According to CNN, GOP leaders are now hopeful of reopening the government as early as Wednesday.

But while the shutdown may be reaching its endgame, its consequences are still being felt, especially at the airports. With Washington still officially closed for the time being, the government is continuing to limit takeoffs. Across the U.S. on Monday, more than 2,000 flights were canceled. And that comes after Sunday was recorded as one of the worst days for cancellations in nearly two years.

Airport concierge Julie Gainsley captured the atmosphere of departure gates across the country when she spoke to San Francisco's KPIX-TV. But seeing the canceled flights and the frustration and the people sitting with their babies for hours because they can't get somewhere. So, you know, the irritability level is rising.

And there are no indications of a quick fix if and when the shutdown formally ends. FAA-mandated flight cancellations are set to hit 6% today, with potential increases later this week. Here's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaking to CNN on Sunday. It's going to be harder for me to come back after the shutdown and have more controllers controlling the airspace. So this is going to live on.

in air travel well beyond the time frame that this government opens back up. Part of the reason issues could persist beyond a successful funding bill in Congress is that the FAA had been short of air traffic controllers since before the shutdown even started. The system is about 3,000 controllers short of what it needs. Lori Aratani is a national transportation reporter for The Washington Post. She spoke with us before the Senate reached a tentative deal.

So there's a lot of stress and strain on the controllers that are working because if you're short 3,000 people, a lot of controllers even before the shutdown were working six-day weeks. 10-hour days, mandatory overtime while they try and train enough traffic controllers. Duffy and FAA Administrator Brian Bedford say the mandated flight reductions are all in the name of safety, and that they were informed in part by what they were hearing from pilots.

They were seeing these confidential reports come in where pilots were saying something's not right. They sound like they're more stressed out. I mean, there were reports like that, I'm sure, coming in even before the shutdown. But it sounds like the data that Secretary... Duffy and Administrator Bedford are looking at is concerning. With Thanksgiving fast approaching, Artani says airlines won't be able to just flip a switch and put everything back to normal.

There are definitely going to be speed bumps along the way. I mean, some experts have told us that you don't just say, oh, hey, you can restore all your flights. There's sort of the logistics of trying to rearrange your schedule again if you're an airline. Today marks the second missed payday for air traffic controllers and other FAA employees, and the signals coming from the administration toward staff appear to have suddenly shifted.

Throughout the shutdown, Duffy has heaped praise on the rank and file workers, even as absences rose. But yesterday, President Trump criticized those who took time off and demanded that air traffic controllers get back to work or be substantially docked. if they don't. He also said controllers who missed no work during the shutdown could receive bonuses of up to $10,000.

The president of the Air Traffic Controllers Union responded to Trump's offer of bonuses by saying anything that recognizes their hard work is a good thing and called them unsung heroes during the government shutdown.

Now to President Trump's latest battle with the media, this time involving the BBC. The British broadcaster is in the middle of a full-blown crisis after accusations about some of its editorial decisions, in particular how it edited one of Trump's speeches. Over the weekend, its topmost senior leaders resigned. So over the past few days, the BBC's leading news story has been, well, itself. Good morning, eight o'clock. Welcome to Breakfast with Sally Nugent and John Cote. Our headlines today.

The director general of the BBC, Tim Davey, has resigned along with the corporation's CEO of News, Deborah Turness. Trump now says he wants $1 billion in damages for the way the BBC stitched together his words in a program released last year. There was this moment in the documentary showing Trump's speech.

before the January 6th insurrection. And the way it was edited stitched together two different parts of Trump's speech in a way that any journalist would get in trouble for doing. That's Brian Stelter, CNN's chief media analyst. The edit gave the impression that Trump was explicitly encouraging the rioters to storm the Capitol. This was the edited clip in the documentary. We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. But in reality, this was what he said. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And Trump's reference to fighting like hell came nearly an hour later.

Stelter described the whole incident as a drastic overreaction to a bad but understandable mistake. In a year-old documentary. Nobody noticed it at the time. Nobody called it out at the time. But about a week ago, an internal memo from a former BBC advisor detailing this mistake in the edit, but also a number of other complaints about BBC coverage, was leaked and covered by the Telegraph newspaper. And that's what has started this snowball effect that is ongoing to this time.

Trump's lawyers sent the BBC a legal note demanding a full and fair retraction of the documentary and to appropriately compensate the president or face a lawsuit. Since then, the BBC has apologized and said an error of judgment was made. For Stelter, Trump's letter is a familiar move.

Even before he was elected the first time, Trump was notorious for sending threatening legal letters and sometimes filing blustery lawsuits that would get thrown out of court. He oftentimes uses the courts in order to send a message, in order to gain publicity. but not necessarily to actually win a legal victory. What we've seen now with Trump back in office is that he uses lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits in order to win settlements and win other concessions from media companies.

Trump has pursued The New York Times in a lawsuit that was recently thrown out. He's now refiled that claim, and he has pending cases against The Wall Street Journal and Iowa's Des Moines Register. He's also received out-of-court settlements from news outlets like CBS and ABC. In this case, Stelter doubts Trump would have a strong case for proving defamation in a year-old documentary that caused little controversy at the time, even with the BBC admitting to an error.

If Trump does carry through on his threat, the BBC would face a choice of fighting it or joining other broadcasters in reaching a settlement. But with settling, the costs can be more than just financial. When media companies cave... when they try to write him a check to make him go away. The companies suffer reputationally. They suffer in the court of public opinion. Remember when Disney briefly suspended Jimmy Kimmel and the blowback, the backlash from the audience was ferocious.

The resignations at the very top of the BBC come off the back of a series of other domestic controversies and complaints, so they can't be attributed to Trump alone. But Stelter told us that the Trump administration, along with elements of a hostile press in the UK see a vulnerability here. The BBC is unlike anything in the US, unlike anything in most other countries for that matter.

But it's also a subject of never-ending debate and argument. Every day you wake up to new front-page headlines in the British papers all about the BBC scandals. Trump sees that weakness, and he sees it as an opportunity.

In recent weeks, economists have turned their attention to one particular warning sign of what's under the hood of top-line economic numbers, car loan delinquency rates. The percentage of subprime borrowers who are at least 60 days late on their car loans has doubled since 2021. It's just another data point in what's being described as a K-shaped economy, where wealthier Americans keep seeing gains and lower-income Americans are struggling.

It's been sort of building for a while. It kind of goes back in a way to the period after the pandemic. That's Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Calvert. He spent time with the people who are on the other side of that delinquency equation, the so-called repo men, who take these cars when people can't pay. There are a lot of cars out there that are subject to repossession. And if you're in the repo business, that means there's a lot out there for the taking.

An estimated 1.73 million vehicles were repossessed last year, which is the most since 2009. But the business has changed since then, Calvert reported, as he rode along with repo men armed with laptops, license plate readers, and maps dotted with locations where the cars could be found. What used to happen is that banks would work directly with the car repossessors, but more middlemen have gotten involved in the process. Increasingly, over the last few decades...

there's been the emergence of these middlemen known as forwarders. And basically the bank or the credit union will hire the forwarder, and then the forwarder does a whole lot of things, including finding the repossession company to actually go out and get the car. And as a consequence of that, the amount of money that the repossessors get per car has fallen by about half in a lot of cases.

Speed Kings, a business Calvert followed in his reporting, makes an average of $550 for every car found on the road when it deals directly with a bank. With a forwarder involved, that number drops to $275. And that's before the driver gets paid their share. These financial challenges are on top of what was already a dangerous job that often takes place at night. Car owners are not inclined to necessarily part with vehicles so easily.

People who are about to lose their car, their ability to get to work, to take their kids to school, to do a lot of things that they need to do, there's a certain amount of, I think, desperation. It's pretty distressing to see that happen. One Speed Kings driver was shot at on the job, and in another case, a repo man went to tow a Dodge Charger, and a man and woman jumped in the driver and passenger seats mid-tow.

The man turned the car on, put it in drive, and floored it. And he eventually was able to drive off of the tow truck, and the rear bumper was just left hanging in the air. The last time repossession numbers were so high was during the 2008-2009 recession.

Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. The Supreme Court had a busy day on Monday. First, the court decided to decline to revisit its landmark decision that recognized the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. And it decided it will hear a case on whether counting mail-in ballots after Election Day is legal.

30 states have laws that allow for tallying votes after Election Day. Officials have defended the practice, saying it helps voters like military service members that often have their ballots delayed for reasons they can't control. President Trump has been a vocal opponent of the practice.

Yesterday at the White House, the president's guest of honor was the leader of a once pariah state. Syria's President Ahmad al-Shirah was not so long ago labeled a terrorist by U.S. intelligence, but he is now leading his country's recovery.

following the toppling of Bashar al-Assad last year. It was a historic meeting, the first ever for a Syrian leader, and he left with a deal that brings an end to many of the sanctions that would threaten the country's future. In return, he pledged to join the U.S. mission to defeat ISIS. And finally, the chair of the prestigious Booker Prize in Literature says this year's winner was unlike anything he's ever read.

Flesh by David Soloy tells the story of a Hungarian-British man from the time he was a teenager into middle age. NPR describes the book's protagonist as a person of very few words in a novel that uses sparse language to convey a tumultuous... The prize chair said he's never read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well, inviting the reader to fill that space.

You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. The Atlantic has the story of a kayaker who went missing in a lake in Wisconsin, prompting a two-month search that turned up nothing and baffled police.

But when his passport was logged on the Canadian border, it led authorities to a much bigger mystery. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.