If you think the freakiest New York experience is a trash can rat jumpscare, then you haven’t heard what’s happening at a major airport serving the city.

Air traffic controllers directing planes at Newark Liberty International briefly lost contact with pilots on April 28, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said this week. Malfunctioning equipment left them unable to hear or see aircraft traveling to and from the busy hub for 90 seconds, Bloomberg reported.

The terrifying incident—the result of a failure of radar and radio communication systems—comes amid a national air traffic controller shortage at an airport that is especially strained due to one of its three runways being closed for construction.

Bedlam at EWR

Multiple air traffic controllers took trauma leave to recover from the experience of being in the dark about the fate of planes they were tasked with safely coordinating, further straining controller staffing.

Flying in and out of Newark has been a nightmare in recent days, with bad weather exacerbating disruptions:

• An average of 39 flights per day has been canceled since April 26, compared to just four per day before the outage incident, according to aviation data tracker Cirium.
• On this week’s rainy Monday, the airport had 420 delayed and 160 cancelled flights, per FlightAware.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that Newark is intentionally limiting traffic to ensure that flights proceed safely and assured the public that pilots have backups for system failures. But he warned that such incidents could happen at other airports, with aviation safety experts saying problems at Newark mirror a national issue of air traffic control towers being short on trained workers and filled with antiquated equipment.

Duffy has vowed to fix things: Tomorrow, he’s expected to announce plans to overhaul the air traffic control system “from new telecom, to new radars, to new infrastructure.” Last week, he unveiled various incentives to recruit more air traffic controllers.—SK

Carney tells Trump that Canada “won’t be for sale, ever.” In a mostly friendly meeting at the White House yesterday, newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada will remain a sovereign country after President Trump repeated his desire for it to become the 51st US state. “There are some places that are never for sale. You’re sitting in one right now,” Carney told Trump, referring to the Oval Office. Earlier in the day, Trump antagonized Canada in a post on Truth Social but then took a more cordial tone during the in-person meeting, even joking that his rhetoric and trade policies, which are unpopular in Canada, helped Carney and his Liberal Party get elected last month.

The DOJ wants Google to break up its advertising empire. Following a federal court’s ruling that Google operates an illegal ad-tech monopoly, the Justice Department requested that the company be forced to sell two major products—its Ad Exchange and a management platform—as an appropriate remedy. Google, unsurprisingly, asked the judge for a less drastic remedy that would see the company make certain changes to its practices without having to break up its ad business. The judge won’t rule until the remedies trial starts in September. Until then, Google has another thing to dread: The government also wants the tech giant to sell Chrome to remedy its other monopoly (in search).

Merz approved as German chancellor on second try. It wasn’t quite the 15 rounds of voting that the US House of Representatives needed to name a speaker in 2023, but after a surprising failure to secure enough parliamentary votes to officially become the leader of Germany on Tuesday morning, Friedrich Merz was confirmed as chancellor in a frantic afternoon vote. The last-minute durcheinander adds to the instability in Germany as its economy struggles and various factions compete over how to fix it. Merz’s center-right party has formed a coalition with the main center-left party to build a firewall against the far-right AfD.—AE

The biggest food-delivery service in the US is shopping for a worldwide empire: Hot off its third-ever profitable quarter, DoorDash is spending billions to grab more of the international takeout market and expand into hospitality, the company announced yesterday.

Big swing: Citing record grocery ordering, DoorDash did $3 billion in revenue for Q1, netting $193 million in profit—a sharp reversal from the same period last year, when the company lost $23 million.

Now, with $4.5 billion in cash on hand and a $2.9 billion loan from JPMorgan, DoorDash has struck deals to buy:

• Deliveroo, a UK-based food-delivery service, for $3.9 billion—a 44% premium on its current value. The acquisition will triple DoorDash’s delivery business outside the US, analysts say, if Deliveroo shareholders approve. Amazon also owns a 16% stake and could counter DoorDash’s bid.
• SevenRooms, a data-rich reservation platform, for $1.2 billion. The Resy competitor works with 13,000 restaurant and hotel groups, including Wolfgang Puck and Marriott.

Meanwhile…DoorDash is paying nearly $17 million to settle an investigation that found that the company took tips from New York delivery workers between 2017 and 2019.

Zoom out: The industry is quickly consolidating. Yesterday, Uber announced a $700 million deal to acquire most of a Turkish food-delivery company, and Instacart debuted an alcohol-ordering app.—ML

Ranchers, vets, and scientists are sounding the alarm on an invasive parasite called the New World screwworm as it gets dangerously close to (once again) devastating the US’ livestock.

Put down your breakfast. A screwworm, which is actually a fly, lays its eggs (as many as 400 at a time) inside the wound or orifice of a warm-blooded animal. When the larvae hatch, they burrow into the living flesh. An infection, called myiasis, can eat a full-grown steer in about a week.

Not their first rodeo: Screwworms wreaked havoc on cattle farms in Texas from the 1930s through the 1980s.

• In the 1950s, USDA scientists started dropping millions of sterilized male flies by aircraft over infected areas to create a barren fly barrier, which eventually pushed screwworms South and out of the country.
• By 2000, the USDA managed to push that barrier far away to Panama’s Darién Gap, where a sterile fly facility still churns out as many as 100 million screwworms weekly to hold the line.

But in the last few years, that barrier has been breached due to understaffing at cattle checkpoints in Central America, US federal cutbacks, and US–Mexico border tensions. The USDA warns that a modest infestation could wipe $1.8 billion from Texas’s economy.

Some good news: Mexico and the US reached an agreement last Friday on a plan to stop the screwworms.—MM

It’s going to be tough to come up with a portmanteau as fun to say as “Barbenheimer,” but Hollywood is hopeful that this summer’s collection of films can rival the financial haul of those simultaneous blockbuster releases two years ago.

Leading box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian told Variety that this summer’s slate of films can generate a combined $4 billion at the box office, which was an annual occurrence before the pandemic but has happened only once since—in 2023, thanks to Barbie and Oppenheimer.

But this year’s summer popcorn fodder could put butts in seats like movies used to. Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the final installment of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise headline a summer jam-packed with sequels and big-budget tentpoles. If this summer doesn’t bring us a viral “Jurassicman: Impossible Steps” box-office phenomenon, well, at least we’ll still get Cruise falling out of several planes.—AE