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A construction project on one of Newark Liberty International Airport‘s three main runways wrapped up nearly two weeks early, so the Federal Aviation Administration expects to be able to ease flight limits next week despite the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. Federal Transportation Department officials said Monday that some of the runway equipment must be tested before the FAA can increase the flight limits at the second busiest airport in the New York City area. The runway began to be used for departures Monday but won’t be available for arrivals until after that testing is completed early next week. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that if all goes well, the runway should be certified by June 10. Crews worked day and night to complete the $121 million construction project 13 days ahead of schedule and ease some of the problems at the airport. But Newark has also been plagued by cancellations and delays this spring because of a shortage of air traffic controllers after the FAA had technical problems that twice briefly knocked out the radar and communications at a facility in Philadelphia that directs planes in and out of the airport. Five air traffic controllers went on 45-day trauma leaves after the first radar and communications outage at the Philadelphia facility on April 28, and another one is out on medical leave. That left the facility with only 16 certified controllers and five supervisors. Officials have said there are another 16 experienced controllers in training who should get certified sometime between now and October. The FAA limited the Newark airport to 28 arrivals and 28 departures an hour last month because of the construction and staff shortages. The agency has said that it expects to be able to bump up the number of flights daily in Newark to 34 arrivals and 34 departures once the runway construction is done. The controllers on trauma leave are scheduled to return around the middle of the month. But Duffy said the FAA has enough controllers now to handle the higher limit of 34 arrivals and departures per hour. Before the air traffic control problems this spring, 38 or 39 flights typically took off and landed hourly at the Newark airport. The FAA has said it will revisit the limits again in October because it hopes to have more controllers trained by then. The government also upgraded the software at the air traffic control facility after a second radar outage on May 9. That helped prevent a repeat problem on May 11 when there was another problem with the lines carrying the radar signal down from New York. Verizon has installed a new fiber optic line between Philadelphia and New York after the problems but that isn’t expected to go into service until July after testing is completed. Josh Funk, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The fifth and final season of Netflixs Stranger Things is dropping on Netflix just in time for Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And also New Years Eve. The industry-leading streaming service, whose stock reached a record high on Monday after the weekends successful Tudum 2025 event, just announced that the conclusion to its monster hit series will arrive in three batches. The first four episodes are set to debut on November 26 (the day before Thanksgiving) at 8pm ET, the following three air on Christmas Day at the same time, and the final episode will come out on New Years Eve, also at 8pm ET. Its an innovative, carefully calibrated twist on the staggered streaming release schedule, although some fans seem to find Netflixs upcoming stranglehold on holiday viewing as diabolical as a demogorgon. Streaming services can go any number of ways these days when putting out a new season of a beloved show. As they assess the right drop pattern, executives tend to consider target audience, episode length, and total number of episodes, alongside other less tangible factors such as whether the show has a 10-hour movie-style continuous story, lending itself more to the binge model, or an intense character-study vibe, which smolders as its doled out. Netflix has been breaking up hits like Bridgerton into two batched binges for years, while Hulu sticks with full-binge for The Bear, Prime Video offers three episodes to kick off The Boys before slowing down with weekly episodes, and Maxs Hacks sometimes airs an episode or two per week with seemingly no rhyme or reason. If it could be said that there are any rules to how a streamer releases a hot show, these services are rewriting and codifying them in real time. When Netflix released the most recent season of Stranger Things three summers ago, it set out to monopolize two close-together holidays: Memorial Day and July 4th. The first volume of the fourth season arrived on May 27, 2022, with seven episodes, and then concluded on July 1, with two more. It proved a successful scheduling gambit. All told, the season racked up a seismic 1.352 billion hours of viewing in its first 28 days, ranking as Netflix’s most-watched English-language series, and second overall after the first season of Squid Game. Even more impressive, the fourth season of Stranger Things had no small part in helping the company add 2.41 million subscribers in Q3 2022, when it dropped. Netflixs approach to scheduling the final season of Stranger Things takes that blatant holiday-ownership approach a step further, though. By stretching out the season across three major end-of-year holidaysduring which families are frequently hunkered down together, hunting for crowd-pleasing popcorn fareNetflix is capitalizing on its captive audience. As if to underscore the point, the service is bumping up its usual 3am ET drop time for new releases to what is known in terrestrial TV world as prime time, at 8pm ET, when families are more likely to fill up couches together. Its an ingenuous tactic for driving up end-of-year subscriptions, one that will almost certainly end up breaking viewership records. But it also feels rather brazen in its attempt to conquer all family holidays with a gargantuan four-quadrant hit. When Netflix offered a holiday release for the second season of Squid Game last year, for instance, the service waited until the day after Christmasperhaps out of respect for the sanctity of the holiday, or in fear of being crowded out by too many Home Alone, Elf and National Lampoons Christmas Vacation viewingsand dropped the entire season all at once. This year, Netflix is owning its ambition to dominate the holidays. (To that end, its also building on last years Christmas Day NFL games, which collectively attracted 65 million U.S. viewers, a record for most-streamed NFL games ever, with two more Christmas Day games.) The service clearly has faith that the draw of Stranger Things wrapping up is enough to put A Muppet Christmas Carol and its ilk on the backburner for one year. Plenty of Stranger Things fans are only too happy to have their family time supplemented by the suburban, supernatural hijinks of the worlds most twentysomething teens. Guess Im spending the holidays in Hawkins this year, a typical commenter replied to Netflixs tweet announcing the release dates. (And were happy to have ya nerd, Netflix wrote back.) Not all fans were as excited, though, about the way the final season is being teased out. Some of them complained about Netflix breaking up the conclusion theyve been waiting three years for into three chunks, prolonging their anticipation. Others seem more opposed to the idea of Netflix encroaching on so much family time with an offer Stranger Things fans cant refusethe TV equivalent of bumping up Black Friday deals to Thursday around dinner time. All of them will likely tune in to watch, though, along with a billion or two fellow subscribers. If the grand finale succeeds at the level Netflix expects it to, perhaps the end of Stranger Things will spell the beginning of a new arms race for holiday streaming content, launching in 2026.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump faces the challenge of convincing Republican senators, global investors, voters and even Elon Musk that he won’t bury the federal government in debt with his multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package. The response so far from financial markets has been skeptical as Trump seems unable to trim deficits as promised. All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing and the tax bill codifies that, said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier. The White House has viciously lashed out at anyone who has voiced concern about the debt snowballing under Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after his 2017 tax cuts. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted to debunk some false claims” about his tax cuts. Leavitt said the “blatantly wrong claim that the One, Big, Beautiful Bill increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike. House Speaker Mike Johnson piled onto Congress’ number crunchers on Sunday, telling NBC’s Meet the Press, The CBO sometimes gets projections correct, but theyre always off, every single time, when they project economic growth. They always underestimate the growth that will be brought about by tax cuts and reduction in regulations. But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together. We have to get a lot of votes, Trump said last week. We cant be cutting. That has left the administration betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick, a belief that few outside of Trump’s orbit think is viable. Most economists consider the non-partisan CBO to be the foundational standard for assessing policies, though it does not produce cost estimates for actions taken by the executive branch such as Trumps unilateral tariffs. Tech billionaire Musk, who was until recently part of Trump’s inner sanctum as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, told CBS News: I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.” Federal debt keeps rising The tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Financial Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. To make the bill’s price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. This same tactic was used with Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and it set up this year’s dilemma, in which many of the tax cuts in that earlier package will sunset next year unless Congress renews them. But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. Investors are demanding the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury Note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate being charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. The White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that its policies will unleash so much rapid growth that the annual budget deficits will shrink in size relative to the overall economy, putting the U.S. government on a fiscally sustainable path. The council argues the economy would expand over the next four years at an annual average of about 3.2%, instead of the Congressional Budget Office’s expected 1.9%, and as many as 7.4 million jobs would be created or saved. Council chair Stephen Miran told reporters that when the growth being forecast by the White House is coupled with expected revenues from tariffs, the expected budget deficits will fall. The tax cuts will increase the supply of money for investment, the supply of workers and the supply of domestically produced goods all of which, by Mirans logic, would cause faster growth without creating new inflationary pressures. I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration, Miran said. White House budget director Russell Vought told reporters the idea that the bill is in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue. Economists doubt Trump’s plan can spark enough growth to reduce deficits Most outside economists expect additional debt would keep interest rates higher and slow overall economic growth as the cost of borrowing for homes, cars, businesses and even college educations would increase. This just adds to the problem future policymakers are going to face, said Brendan Duke, a former Biden administration aide now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Duke said that with the tax cuts in the bill set to expire in 2028, lawmakers would be dealing with Social Security, Medicare and expiring tax cuts at the same time. Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the growth projections from Trump’s economic team are a work of fiction. He said the bill would lead some workers to choose to work fewer hours in order to qualify for Medicaid. I dont know of any serious forecaster that has meaningfully raised their growth forecast because of this legislation, said Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was the Council of Economic Advisers chair under the Obama administration. These are mostly not growth- and competitiveness-oriented tax cuts. And, in fact, the higher long-term interest rates will go the other way and hurt growth. The White House’s inability so far to calm deficit concerns is stirring up political blowback for Trump as the tax and spending cuts approved by the House now move to the Senate. Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky have both expressed concerns about the likely defict increases, with Paul saying Sunday there are enough GOP senators to stall the bill until deficits are addressed. I think there are four of us at this point” who would oppose the legislation if the bill, at least, is not modified in a good direction, Paul said on CBS’ Face the Nation.” The GOP will own the debt once they vote for this,” Paul said. Four Republican holdouts would be enough to halt the bill in the Senate, where the party holds a three-seat majority. Trump banking on tariff revenues to help The White House is also banking that tariff revenues will help cover the additional deficits, even though recent court rulings cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump declaring an economic emergency to impose sweeping taxes on imports. When Trump announced his near-universal tariffs in April, he specifically said his policies would generate enough new revenues to start paying down the national debt. His comments dovetailed with remarks by aides, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that yearly budget deficits could be more than halved. Its our turn to prosper and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and itll all happen very quickly, Trump said two months ago as he talked up his import taxes and encouraged lawmakers to pass the separate tax and spending cuts. The Trump administration is correct that growth can help reduce deficit pressures, but it’s not enough on its own to accomplish the task, according to new research by economists Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard and Zachary Liscow. Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, said additional growth doesn’t even get us close to where we need to be. The government would need $10 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years just to stabilize the debt, Tedeschi said. And even though the White House says the tax cuts would add to growth, most of the cost goes to preserve existing tax breaks, so that’s unlikely to boost the economy meaningfully. It’s treading water, Tedeschi said. Josh Boak, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
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