WTF Is the FAA Doing in El Paso?

The Federal Aviation Administration will now reopen the El Paso Texas Airport and surrounding airspace, after initially planning to close it for 10 days, a bizarre reversal of an even more bizarre move that would have a massive negative impact on the communities and businesses in the region.

“The temporary closure of airspace over El Paso has been lifted,” the FAA wrote on X Wednesday morning. “There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal.”

But the FAA had just said late Tuesday that the flight restrictions were being imposed for “special security reasons.”

A Trump administration official told NBC News on Wednesday that the planned 10-day closure was actually because Mexican cartel drones had entered U.S. airspace, but they have since been disabled.

There has been no additional explanation for the decision—or the sudden reversal—but there were multiple theories about why Trump’s FAA would halt all aviation activity above this southern border town of 700,000.

Other possibilities that were floated included a planned military action or exercise, a credible security threat, or a very sensitive package or person that needed to be transported.

“Important context: the El Paso TFR is not like the 9/11 nationwide airspace shutdown. DC & NY restrictions were created later,” CNN’s Pete Muntean said. “A ban on all flights over a U.S. city—including medevac and police helicopters—has no modern precedent.”

What could have merited shutting down a major airport—and a hub of U.S.-Mexico trade—for 10 whole days?

“The highly consequential decision by FAA to shut down the El Paso Airport for 10 days is unprecedented and has resulted in significant concern within the community,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, who represents the El Paso region. “From what my office and I have been able to gather overnight and early this morning there is no immediate threat to the community or surrounding areas.”

This story has been updated.

Yet another member of the American Olympic team has chosen to call out the state-sponsored violence taking place back home.

Richard Ruohonen—a member of the U.S. curling team from Minnesota—separated his love for his countrymen from the government Tuesday, telling reporters that while he’s “proud to represent Team USA” and the country, he did not condone the actions of ICE and the rest of the Trump administration in his home state.

“What’s happening in Minnesota is wrong,” Ruohonen said, citing the Bill of Rights and his 28 years of experience as an attorney. “There’s no shades of gray. It’s clear.

“I really love what’s been happening there now, with people coming out, showing the love, the compassion, integrity, and respect for others that they don’t know, and helping them out. And we love Minnesota for that,” he continued. “I want to make it clear: We are out here, we love our country. We’re playing for the U.S., we’re playing for Team USA, and we’re playing for each other, and we’re playing for our family and our friends that sacrificed so much to get here today.

“What the Olympics means is excellence, respect, friendship. And we all, I think, exemplify that,” Ruohonen added. “And we are playing for the people of Minnesota and the people around the country who share those same values, that compassion, that love, and that respect.”

In standing up to address the injustices taking place across America, Ruohonen effectively placed a target on his back. Within minutes, MAGA-aligned social media influencers were busy tearing him apart, arguing that Ruohonen should stay in Italy, that there should be censors placed on the U.S team, and that the curling team’s sponsors should be boycotted.

But he’s not the first U.S. athlete to announce their discontent with the state of the country. On Sunday, Donald Trump referred to Olympic freestyle skier Hunter Hess as a “loser” after Hess candidly expressed to reporters that he had “mixed emotions” representing the U.S. in the current climate.

“It’s a little hard; there’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t,” Hess said at a news conference Friday. “I think for me it’s more I’m representing my friends and family back home … all the things I believe are good about the U.S.”

Hess’s teammate, Chris Lillis, took his criticism a step further.

“I feel heartbroken about what’s happened in the United States. I’m pretty sure you’re referencing ICE and some of the protests,” Lillis said. “I think that, as a country, we need to focus on respecting everybody’s rights and making sure that we’re treating our citizens, as well as anybody, with love and respect.… I hope that when people look at athletes [competing] in the Olympics, they realize that that’s the America that we’re trying to represent.”

Representative Jamie Raskin has claimed that President Trump is named over a million times in the unredacted Epstein files.

“The idea that we could get through a meaningful fraction of them is just ridiculous,” he told Axios Tuesday, after viewing the unredacted files a day earlier. “I mean, there’s tons of redacted stuff.… And [Trump’s] name, I think I put his name, and it appears more than a million times. So it’s all over the place.

“To me, this whole rollout of saying that members can come from nine to five to sit at those four computers, is just part of the coverup,” Raskin continued.

“If this is true, it would mean the Department of Justice redacted more than 96% of the mentions of Trump,” MS NOW’s Matt Fuller wrote.

“Unfortunately the GOP set the line for removal at 2 million mentions,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s press office quipped.

The DOJ’s release of the files has been extremely contentious, as it redacted the names of multiple associates and potential co-conspirators of Epstein for no apparent reason, while revealing identifying information about the victims.

One of the more notable files that Raskin and other Democrats who viewed the unredacted files have pointed to is an email chain between Epstein and his primary accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in which Epstein details a phone call between his lawyers and Trump.

“Trump is paraphrased and quoted as saying, ‘No, Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and no, we never asked him to leave,’” Raskin told reporters on Monday. The exchange is from 2009—two years after Trump supposedly kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago.

A 23-year-old British woman was reportedly shot and killed by her father after arguing with him about Donald Trump.

New testimony offered as part of a coroner’s inquest Tuesday shed more light on the death of Lucy Harrison, who was fatally shot in January last year while visiting her father, Kris Harrison, in a suburb outside of Dallas.

Lucy Harrison’s boyfriend, Sam Littler, who had traveled with her to Texas for the holidays, told an inquest at Cheshire Coroner’s Court that the day the couple was expected to return to the United Kingdom, Harrison and her father got into “quite a big argument.”

He noted that Harrison’s father had previously been to rehab for alcohol abuse issues and that Lucy would often get upset with her father over his gun ownership. But their argument on January 10, 2025, wasn’t about guns—it was about Trump.

Littler recounted that Harrison had asked her father: “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?”

Harrison’s father replied that it wouldn’t upset him much considering that he had two other daughters who lived with him, Littler recalled.

A few hours later, Harrison’s father led her into the ground floor bedroom—and then Littler heard a loud bang. “I remember running into the room and Lucy was lying on the floor near the entrance to the bathroom and Kris was just screaming, just sort of nonsense,” Littler said.

It’s not entirely clear what specific “situation” Harrison was referring to in her argument with her father, but Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many women, he once tried to to defend himself by invoking his high rate of accusations after he was found liable for sexual abuse. Trump has also appeared tens of thousands of times in the most recent release of Epstein files.

Harrison’s father was not present at the inquest Tuesday, but in a statement sent to court, he claimed that he’d relapsed on alcohol, drinking an entire bottle of white wine. He claimed that he’d been inspired to show his daughter his Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun after the two had watched a news segment about gun crime.

“As I lifted the gun to show her I suddenly heard a loud bang. I did not understand what had happened. Lucy immediately fell,” he said. American authorities have previously said they did not intend to press charges related to Harrison’s death.

If Harrison’s death was indeed the result of their earlier argument about Trump, it wouldn’t be the first time the president has been invoked by someone committing or threatening a violent act.

It was Canada that footed the bill for the Gordie Howe International Bridge that connects Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. The project created new American labor, and was constructed with U.S. supplies. The six-lane bridge was scheduled to open sometime in 2026—but then Donald Trump got involved.

On Monday night, the president claimed that he would block the opening unless Canada “fully compensated” America “for everything” and gives him what he wants: “at least half” ownership of the bridge. Since then, his administration has attempted to reframe the botched deal as an inexplicable White House win.

“I think the president was very clear and direct in his truth,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. “But just to reiterate, the fact that Canada will control what crosses the Gordie Howe bridge and will own land on both sides is unacceptable to the president. It is also unacceptable that more of this bridge is not made with more American-made materials.

“Even more so than what President Barack Obama committed to the Canadians at the time, at the start of the project,” she continued.

“This is just another example of President Trump putting America’s interests first,” Leavitt added.

Trump hopped on Truth Social Monday to effectively kill the project as it stands, backtracking on his 2018 position that the bridge would be a welcome addition to American commerce.

“Canada is building a massive bridge between Ontario and Michigan. They own both the Canada and the United States side and, of course, built it with virtually no U.S. content,” Trump wrote online. “President Barack Hussein Obama stupidly gave them a waiver so they could get around the BUY AMERICAN Act, and not use any American products, including our Steel. Now, the Canadian Government expects me, as President of the United States, to PERMIT them to just ‘take advantage of America!’”

Ahead of a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters that Michigan already has an ownership stake in the bridge, and that—despite what Trump said—the construction was made with U.S. steel and labor.

“This is going to be resolved,” Carney said.