Air travel in the United States could soon “slow to a trickle,” authorities warned Sunday as thousands more flights were cancelled or delayed and passengers faced chaos triggered by the federal government shutdown.Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the number of flights being snarled or cut would multiply if the funding impasse between Democrats and Republicans continues while Americans gear up to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday later this month.”It’s only going to get worse,” Duffy said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” a Sunday news talk show. “The two weeks before Thanksgiving, you’re going to see air travel be reduced to a trickle.”Meanwhile, the Senate took the rare step of meeting Sunday to convene a test-vote on ending the shutdown, which has stretched to a record 40 days.Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican, told reporters Sunday that a potential deal was “coming together,” in the latest sign of activity on Capitol Hill that could see a reopening of government on the horizon.US media reported the potential deal would be a budget package that includes short-term government funding through January.By Sunday evening the number of cancellations of flights within the United States and to and from the US had surpassed 2,300, with more than 8,000 delays, according to data from tracking platform FlightAware.Airports that were particularly hard hit included the three New York City area airports, Chicago’s O’Hare, and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta.Newark’s Liberty International Airport — a major northeastern US hub — was among the worst-hit. Twenty-seven percent of flights due to leave Newark were scrapped, with delays to 40 percent of outbound flights, FlightAware showed.At New York’s LaGuardia Airport more than half of all outbound flights were delayed.Duffy warned that many Americans planning to travel for the November 27 Thanksgiving holiday “are not going to be able to get on an airplane, because there are not going to be that many flights that fly if this thing doesn’t open back up.”The Thanksgiving weekend also kicks off the busy winter shopping season on which many retailers rely.- ‘People are hurting’ -Travelers expressed their frustration on social media. “Moral of the story, if you don’t have to travel and have a low patience threshold, don’t fly,” said one.Sunday marked the third day of flight reductions at airports nationwide, after the Trump administration ordered reductions to ease strain on air traffic controllers working without pay.”We’re going to see air traffic controllers, very few of them coming to work, which means you’ll have a few flights taking off and landing,” Duffy told Fox News Sunday.Duffy sought to blame Democrats for the high-stakes political standoff, but Senator Adam Schiff said Republicans were rejecting a “reasonable” compromise deal to end the shutdown.”And the result from the Senate Republicans was ‘no,’ from the House Republicans ‘we are staying on vacation,’ and from the president ‘I’m going out to play golf,’ and that’s where we are while people are hurting,” Schiff said.When asked whether Democrats would turn around and vote with Republicans, Schiff, a California Democrat, indicated that the issue of healthcare subsidies remained a sticking point in negotiations.Democrats to date have refused to vote for re-opening the government unless the subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are extended as part of the deal. They are set to expire at the end of this year. “Let’s just extend the ACA for a year, reopen the government, and then we can negotiate a more permanent fix to this crisis in health care in this country,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.””We need to end this. We proposed something, I think very reasonable. It was a compromise. Certainly wasn’t everything I want, which is a permanent extension of the tax credits,” he said, urging Republicans to allow “more time to work on this and reopen the government.” 

The director general of the BBC announced his resignation Sunday following a row over the editing of a documentary about Donald Trump as the US president attacked “corrupt journalists”.Tim Davie and the broadcaster’s head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned after accusations that a documentary by its flagship Panorama programme had edited a speech by Trump in a misleading way.Reacting to the news, Trump said “corrupt journalists” had been exposed, adding “these are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election”.Announcing his resignation Davie said in a statement posted on the BBC website: “Like all public organisations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent and accountable.”While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision… I have to take ultimate responsibility.”The latest controversy follows a Daily Telegraph report this week that said concerns were first raised in the summer in a memo on impartiality by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee.Earlier Sunday, the UK Culture, Media and Sport Minister Lisa Nandy called the allegations “incredibly serious”.The BBC has promised “a full response” to parliament’s culture media and sport committee on Monday.- Trump speech edited -The criticism emerged over clips spliced together from sections of a Trump speech on January 6, 2021, when he was accused of fomenting the mob attack on the US Capitol seeking to keep him in power despite losing his re-election bid. The edit made it appear he had told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them and “fight like hell”.In the undoctored clip, however, the president urged the audience to walk with him “and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women”.At the time, Trump was still disputing President Joe Biden’s election victory, in a vote that saw him ousted after his first term in office.The edit was included in a documentary entitled “Trump: A Second Chance?” that was broadcast by the BBC the week before last year’s US election.- ‘Bias’ allegation -Nandy had said earlier Sunday that the Trump edit was one of several concerns about editorial standards at the BBC.”It isn’t just about the Panorama programme, although that is incredibly serious,” she told BBC television in an interview.”There are a series of very serious allegations made, the most serious of which is that there is systemic bias in the way that difficult issues are reported at the BBC,” she said.Nandy said she was concerned about a tendency for editorial standards and the language used in reports to be “entirely inconsistent” whether it be on “Israel, Gaza… trans people or on this issue about President Trump”.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to rejoice over the news, posting on X a screen-shot of the BBC news site announcing the resignation.Leavitt was previously quoted by the Telegraph condemning “this purposefully dishonestly, selectively edited clip by the BBC”.The BBC is funded by a licence fee paid by anyone who watches live TV in the UK.Earlier this year, it issued several apologies for “serious flaws” in the making of another documentary entitled “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone”, broadcast in February.In October it accepted a sanction from the UK media watchdog for what was deemed a “materially misleading” programme, whose child narrator was later revealed to be the son of Hamas’s former deputy agriculture minister.