The FAA announced today that it is finally phasing out floppy disks from air traffic control systems at more than 400 facilities. Engadget reports: They'll be replaced by a more modern system called Enterprise -- Information Display System (E-IDS), which is comprised of a digital display for relaying status information, updates and other alerts to air traffic teams. The FAA plans to have E-IDS installed in 435 sites by the end of 2028; the first five locations to receive the upgrades are the Atlantic City International Airport, Nashville International Airport and Greater Rochester International Airport, as well as data processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City.

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Pope Leo XIV’s tour of Uruguay, Argentina and Peru is his first major trip since an operation on his lung last month.

Less than a month after lung surgery, Pope Leo XIV is landing in Uruguay on Friday, the first stop of a 12-day voyage across South America.

In Trappes, a suburb of Paris with a large immigrant population, residents believe that a shooting rampage was fueled by years of anti-immigrant sentiment.

A summit could bolster Xi Jinping’s stature. But talks about Ukraine’s future and limits on nuclear weapons pose uncomfortable choices for China.

The 45-year-old City Council member defeated the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, 73, a sweeping success for a new generation of progressive leaders.

President Trump’s 250-foot arch project was approved on Thursday by a federal planning board led by his allies. Court action and Democrats’ upcoming control of Congress could halt the plans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific Ocean where debris naturally accumulates, is full of tiny bits of plastic -- so full, in fact, that it seems to be changing the color of the ocean. [...] To better understand how microplastics may have influenced the ocean's color, [Daniel Koestner, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway] and his colleagues looked at 20 years of satellite data from the spot in the ocean with perhaps the most of plastic -- the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a zone between Hawaii and California where trash trapped by ocean currents accumulates. Between 2002 and 2022, the researchers found, waters near the garbage patch have gotten brighter in both blue and green wavelengths compared with surrounding areas. The results, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday, don't yet prove that microplastics have directly brightened the ocean, the researchers emphasize, though their findings are backed up by lab experiments with microplastics. But without taking direct ocean samples, it's hard to know for sure what's causing the ocean's color to change. "We're still one step away from proving definitively that microplastics are causing the shift in color that that we're seeing," adds study co-author Shea Cheatham, a Ph.D. student also at the University of Bergen. "We just have to get in there [to the garbage patch] to verify." The hope is that detecting these color shifts could help identify other areas around the world where microplastics have accumulated.

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Millions of Americans cast their ballots on Tuesday in an election that showed the resiliency of democracy. The president said he would accept the results.

Obviously, the Texas election was about more than shoes. But the symbolism mattered.

Six people died in a blaze at a home in Sunset Park, the deadliest fire in the city this year. The cause is not yet clear, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani raised concerns about electric bikes.

The move came after conflicts with Justice Department leaders, including disagreements over legal strategy in the midterm elections, people familiar with the matter said.

The president’s announcement reinforced his post-midterm elections preoccupation on White House renovation projects.

Investigators, using subpoenas and other law enforcement powers, are accelerating an inquiry that takes the Trump administration into the inner workings of the court.

A phalanx of lawyers, observers and campaign officials are watching the counting of votes in the race for Senate, where a Democratic challenger has a slim lead.

The S&P 500 slumped to its worst daily decline since April 2025 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq entered correction territory, as investors fretted about the durability of the A.I. build-out.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is considering a run for president, called capital punishment morally objectionable. Though California hasn’t executed anyone for 20 years, that represents about a quarter of death sentences nationwide.

The midterms vote was an epic rebuke of Silicon Valley.

Joe_Dragon shares a report from TechCrunch: Applebee's has fixed a security flaw that allowed anyone to access the personal information of its registered customers, after a researcher found a password for an internal database inside Applebee's mobile app, TechCrunch has learned. The popular restaurant chain confirmed [last Thursday] that it had taken action to address the security issue to prevent any unauthorized access to its customer database. [...] The exposed database contained customer names, email addresses (including whether or not the customer verified their email), dates of birth, phone numbers, and ZIP codes. The data also included veteran status, the number of times customers had logged in, when their accounts were created, and the IP addresses of their most recent log-ins, which can be used to reveal the person's approximate location. [...] When asked by TechCrunch, the spokesperson would not say if the company has server logs that it can review to determine whether anyone accessed the database, or if it has any logs at all. "Our investigation is ongoing, and we will take appropriate steps based on our findings," the company added. It's unclear how many customers were affected by the data exposure. [...] Applebee's had at least 8.5 million customers enrolled in its rewards program as of last year, though the company would not provide a number of how many customers had their personal information exposed by this security flaw.

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In a new video, the defense secretary vowed to “finish what we have started.” Some Republicans say the Iran war was a big factor in their party’s midterm losses.