Por Rebekah Riess, CNN

Mientras muchos viajeros enfrentan largas y serpenteantes filas de seguridad en todo Estados Unidos durante el cierre parcial del Gobierno, muchos quizá no se den cuenta del complicado recorrido que sigue el dinero hasta llegar a los cheques de pago de los agentes de la Administración de Seguridad en el Transporte (TSA, por sus siglas en inglés).

Hay alrededor de 61.000 empleados de la TSA que actualmente están atrapados en medio, mientras el Congreso sigue estancado en un punto muerto sobre la financiación del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional, que supervisa a la TSA. Considerados trabajadores esenciales, deben permanecer en sus puestos en los más de 430 aeropuertos comerciales del país durante el cierre, aunque no cobrarán hasta que termine la interrupción de la financiación.

El presidente Donald Trump dijo que agentes del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés) se dirigirán este lunes a los aeropuertos de Estados Unidos para ayudar a aliviar la presión sobre los trabajadores de la TSA si los legisladores no llegan a un acuerdo para financiar el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional (DHS, por sus siglas en inglés).

Muchos pasajeros realmente no saben quién paga a los agentes de la TSA —si es el Gobierno federal, los aeropuertos o las aerolíneas—, según grupos focales realizados por la US Travel Association, una organización sin fines de lucro y no partidista que aboga por la industria de viajes de Estados Unidos.

El presupuesto de la TSA se financia en parte con una tarifa que usted paga al reservar su boleto de avión. Esa tarifa para pasajeros, también conocida como la Tarifa de Seguridad del 11 de Septiembre, fue establecida por el Congreso tras los atentados terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001. Actualmente es de 5,60 dólares por viaje de ida y está limitada a US$ 11,20 por viaje de ida y vuelta.

La tarifa la recauda la aerolínea con la que usted reserva y aparece desglosada junto con los impuestos y las tarifas impuestas por la aerolínea en su recibo. Luego, las aerolíneas transfieren a la TSA los ingresos recaudados por esa tarifa.

“La idea de la tarifa de seguridad de la aviación, la tarifa del 11 de septiembre, era que cubriera la mayor parte, si no la totalidad, de los salarios y beneficios y de todas las demás cosas asociadas con el presupuesto de la TSA”, dijo el exadministrador de la TSA John Pistole. Su objetivo era “que los usuarios de los servicios —es decir, los pasajeros— pagaran por esos servicios, en lugar de que fuera simplemente un regalo del gobierno”, añadió Pistole.

La tarifa es clave para cubrir los costos de la seguridad de los pasajeros en los viajes aéreos, incluidos los beneficios y salarios de los agentes federales de control, junto con programas como el Servicio Federal de Alguaciles Aéreos, según la US Travel Association.

De los más de US$ 4.000 millones recaudados cada año por tarifas de seguridad de pasajeros, casi todos los ingresos se depositan en el fondo general del Departamento del Tesoro. Solo US$ 250 millones pueden ser utilizados directamente por la TSA para gastar en un número limitado de costos de seguridad.

Y en 2013, la Ley de Presupuesto Bipartidista dispuso que una parte de los ingresos de la tarifa de seg

CNN

By Karina Tsui, Martin Goillandeau, Lex Harvey, Shimon Prokupecz, Gloria Pazmino, Aaron Cooper, CNN

(CNN) — An Air Canada plane collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport Sunday, killing the pilot and copilot and injuring dozens, officials said.

Around 11:40 p.m., a Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada struck a Port Authority Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting vehicle, which was responding to a separate incident, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in a statement.

“Emergency response protocols were immediately activated,” the statement said. “The airport is currently closed to facilitate the response and allow for a thorough investigation.”

The plane was carrying 72 passengers and 4 crew members, the airline said.

Initial reports indicate 41 passengers and crew were transported to the hospital and 32 of those have since been released, Port Authority Executive Director Kathryn Garcia said at a news conference early Monday morning.

Two people in the fire truck were also taken to the hospital and are in stable condition, Garcia said.

Passengers from the flight were directed to Air Canada’s ticket counter to be reunited with their families, according to Garcia, who said that included one unaccompanied minor who was on the plane.

The airport will be closed at least until 2 p.m. Monday for the investigation into the collision, Garcia said.

The truck had preliminarily been cleared and was responding to a nearby flight that had requested assistance for an unknown odor in the cockpit, a law enforcement official told CNN.

Photos and videos from the scene showed severe damage to the nose of the plane.

Jazz confirmed the incident involving Air Canada flight 8646 from Montreal in a statement early Monday.

The flight took off from Montreal Trudeau International Airport shortly after 10:30 p.m. ET and arrived at LaGuardia about an hour later, according to the flight tracking site FlightRadar24.

The plane was going about 130 miles per hour just before it hit the fire truck, according to the last data point collected before the collision by Flightradar24.

The New York City Fire Department said it responded to a reported incident involving a plane and vehicle on the airport’s runway at around 11:38 p.m.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop at LaGuardia shortly after the collision due to an “aircraft emergency.” The airport is expected to be closed until 2 p.m. Monday, according to the FAA.

Sunday’s collision comes as airports across the US have been thrown into turmoil amid the ongoing lapse of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which has left Transportation Security Administration officers working without pay.

Half of the nation’s busiest airports had more than a third of TSA officers call out Saturday, as passengers reported waiting hours in security lines. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will deploy to airports Monday to help fill the gaps, federal officials said.

Air traffic control audio captures the moments leading up to the collision, which began with another flight reporting an emergency on the other side of the airport.

United flight 2384 aborted a takeoff due to a warning light, and the pilots reported an odor in the cabin had sickened the flight attendants, according to a Read more

By Amarachi Orie, CNN

(CNN) — Cambodia’s largely unexplored limestone caves stretch for thousands of miles, are home to countless undiscovered species and host unique ecosystems, with creatures found nowhere else on Earth.

Now, a new survey of caves in the northwestern province of Battambang has uncovered a range of species that are new to science, including a turquoise pit viper, a flying snake, several geckos, two micro-snails and two millipedes.

The viper and three of the newly discovered gecko species are still being formally named and characterized. The other finds have been officially recognized over the course of the biodiversity survey, which explored 64 caves across 10 hills between November 2023 and July 2025, and was published in a report Monday.

Each hill and cave in Cambodia’s rocky karst landscape –– a term for a landscape created when rocks break down, forming large cave springs, sinking streams and sinkholes –– is isolated from the others. Each performs as its own individual “island laboratory” of evolution, holding numerous distinct life forms that have adapted to their niche habitat, according to UK-based conservation charity Fauna & Flora, which led the survey along with Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment and field experts.

“Think of it as their own vignette of biodiversity, where nature is performing the same experiment over and over again independently,” evolutionary biologist Lee Grismer, professor of biology at La Sierra University in California, who supported the survey team, said in a statement.

“We go to these separate places and analyse the DNA of the species, and we see how the experiment has run. Some look alike, some look different, and by analysing this we can get an idea of what the driving forces are behind the way they evolve,” he added.

For instance, while researchers identified one species of the striped Kamping Poi bent-toed gecko, named Cyrtodactylus kampingpoiensis, during fieldwork in 2024, they found four different populations evolving in different ways.

“If we are truly going to conserve the biodiversity on this planet, we need to understand what is there,” Grismer continued. “We can’t protect something if we don’t know it exists.”

Globally threatened species such as the Sunda pangolin, green peafowl, long-tailed macaque and northern pig-tailed macaque were also found in the landscape during the latest survey.

Only ‘scratched the surface’

Conservation biologist Pablo Sinovas led the Fauna & Flora team in Cambodia, working with local researchers to get an idea of the terrain during the day and –– the “fun part” –– look for creatures such as snakes and geckos at night, “when they are most active, when they come out of hiding,” he told CNN.

The team would head out after sunset and spend hours traversing “sharp, rocky terrain” with torches, “looking around every crevice, looking around caves in the landscape, rocks, branches, vegetation, really everywhere. It was kind of a nice search party,” said Sinovas, who is now a senior program manager at the charity.

Some caves in the region hold up to one million bats, although the research team did not enter caves with large bat colonies due to health concerns, according to the report.

Karst landscapes make up about 9% of Cambodia’s land area, at 20,000 square kilometers (or 7,722 square miles), said the report, which outlined that “a large portion of this is still unknown to science.”

Fourteen caves that had not previously been surveyed were registered on one karst hill in the Banan district of the Battambang Province.

“There is more exploration to be done,” said Sinovas

CNN

By Laila Shahrokhshahi, Clare Sebastian, Laura Sharman, Teele Rebane, Lex Harvey, CNN

(CNN) — Several ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer rescue organization were set on fire outside a synagogue in a neighborhood home to London’s largest Jewish community early on Monday, in an antisemitic attack.

Flames lit up the night sky and residents of the northern suburb of Golders Green were woken by loud explosions, as dozens of firefighters rushed to the area.

“The arson attack is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime,” London’s Met Police said in a statement, adding that some residents had been evacuated as a precaution.

Security camera footage shared with CNN showed three masked people approach an ambulance belonging to the Hatzola Northwest organization and set it on fire.

The timestamp on the video reads 1:36 a.m Monday and the location marked reads Machzikei Hadath, which matches the name of the adjacent synagogue.

Police confirmed they are looking for three suspects but said there “have been no arrests yet.”

Local resident Charlie Richards told CNN she heard “multiple explosions.” Video filmed by Richards showed a large orange explosion and smoke emanating into the sky. The explosions were thought to be due to gas canisters on board the ambulances, police said.

Hatzola Northwest Chairman Shloimie Richman confirmed to CNN that four of the organization’s six ambulances had been set alight, saying they were “deliberately targeted in an arson attack.”

Golders Green is home to many synagogues, schools and kosher restaurants and is known for its large Jewish and Orthodox Jewish community.

“Obviously we have concerns that this is a direct attack on the Jewish community,” Richman told CNN, adding that the organization had not received any threats before the arson attacks.

Gedale Weinberg and Anita Zadeh, who live just around the corner, could smell the smoke from the burning ambulances from their living room and were shocked to discover the Hatzola organization had been targeted.

“It’s a terrible, terrible act what happened… Why is it happening to us?” Weinberg told CNN. “We’re living in scary times.”

“There should be more police going around because this area here is the main area for all the Jews (in London),” said Zadeh.

Local councillor Dean Cohen said the attack had sent shockwaves through Britain’s Jewish community. “You cannot get more low than destroying ambulances that are there to save lives,” he said.

Rise of antisemitism in Britain

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has previously faced criticism for not doing enough to stamp out antisemitism in Britain, called the ambulance fires a “deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack.”

Starmer said antisemitism has “no place” in British society, while his Justice Minister Sarah Sackman –– who also represents the people of Golders Greens in Parliament –– said the “perpetrators must feel the full force of the law.”

Just under 300,000 people identified as Jewish in England and Wales in 2021, during th

By Gloria Pazmino, CNN

New York (CNN) — The illustration took City Hall by surprise.

Rama Duwaji’s artwork depicted the face of a woman drawn in black and white, her eyebrows full and scrunched above a sharp nose, and her almond-shaped eyes sitting above a pair of hands reaching outward.

The image was published in February by the online magazine Slow Factory alongside an essay written by Diana Islayih about a Gaza camp for people internally displaced in the Israel-Hamas war. The essay is part of a compilation of essays edited by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa.

As New York City’s new first lady, Duwaji’s art created days of headlines and tough questions at press conferences for Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Key City Hall staffers did not know Duwaji had been commissioned to do the artwork or about Abulhawa’s posts, which were first reported by the conservative Washington Free Beacon earlier this month, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Abulhawa has referred to Israeli forces as “Jewish supremacist demons” and described Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack shortly after it happened as “a spectacular moment that shocked the world” after what she described as “Israel’s criminally merciless siege of Gaza.”

While Duwaji has not publicly commented, Mamdani spoke out against Abulhawa’s language. He also explained Duwaji’s freelance work was secured through a third party, that Duwaji had not been in direct communication with the author and that she was not aware of Abulhawa’s posts.

“I think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible,” Mamdani said on March 13 in reference to Abulhawa.

A spokesperson for Mamdani declined to comment on what his administration knew beforehand about the artwork. The people briefed on the episode, who declined to be named so as to not antagonize the mayor, argued the backlash raises questions about whether her work should be more closely vetted.

“The mayor condemned the author’s language, to his credit,” said Scott Richman, New York regional director for the Anti-Defamation League. “However, we have not heard from her. Does she have a problem with the author and her statements? We just don’t know.”

Abulhawa, meanwhile, denied that she was anti-Jewish and said she was disappointed in what Mamdani had said.

“You succumbed to forces that seek to pick away at you, at your talented, beautiful wife, and at your work, clawing harder with each apology or concession you make,” she said. “If you are not careful, they will siphon your soul before you even realize it.”

There have been subsequent revelations of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel posts Duwaji had shared and liked.

They went unnoticed during Mamdani’s mayoral campaign but are now creating new scrutiny for both of them, particularly as Mamdani faces skepticism from many in the city’s Jewish community, the largest of any city outside Israel.

A private person in the public eye

Mamdani said in a press conference earlier this month that Duwaji, a Texas-born professional artist of Syrian descent, is a “private person who has he