Latest news with #JohnConnor
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Vertical Cold Storage acquires Detroit operator Arctic Logistics
Vertical Cold Storage announced the acquisition of Canton, Michigan-based Arctic Logistics on Wednesday, making it the sixth-largest cold storage company in North America. The acquired location adds 140,000 square feet, 19 dock doors and more than 20,000 pallet positions to Vertical Cold's network. The site is U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection-certified and provides storage temperatures ranging from negative 20 degrees to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The deal marks Vertical Cold's fifth facility acquisition in the past year. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 'This acquisition strengthens our ability to support customers engaged in cross-border trade and adds a critical location to our growing national footprint,' said Jim Henderson, chief commercial officer of Vertical Cold, in a news release. 'With evolving complexities in U.S.-Canada trade, we're committed to being a reliable cold chain partner for producers and buyers on both sides of the border.' Kansas City, Missouri-based Vertical Cold specializes in the handling and distribution of frozen commodities across a network of 12 locations in major markets like Chicago, Dallas, Indianapolis, Miami and Charlotte, North Carolina. Its services include blast freezing, case picking, import-export and storage, among others. Backed by Platform Ventures, the company focuses on the acquisition and buildout of temperature-controlled facilities. 'In Vertical Cold we have found the perfect partners to bring our business to the next level for the benefit of our customers and our team. All of us are looking forward to a quick and easy transition, and then to sustained growth,' said John Connor, president of Arctic Logistics. More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden: Lineage finalizes acquisition of Bellingham Cold Storage March supply chain data craters following inventory pull-forward Yellow's new bankruptcy plan revealed, next steps still uncertain The post Vertical Cold Storage acquires Detroit operator Arctic Logistics appeared first on FreightWaves.
The Independent
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Mea Culpa: Hanging on to some intriguing etymology
I enjoyed our feature on the 29 worst movie mistakes, as I suppose it is just a different kind of pedantry. Muphry's Law ensured that it had a mistake of its own. (Muphry's Law holds: 'If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.' It often applies to this column.) In the item about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, we said: 'John Connor's Cessna plane numbers keep changing in the film. When he is in the hanger on the runway it is N3035C, but once it's flying, the numbers change to N3413F.' That was changed to 'hangar' when it was spotted by a colleague. A trivial error, because nobody could have been confused as to the meaning, and who really cares that two words that sound the same are spelt differently? Regular readers will be familiar with my response to that, which is that as long as some people recognise the departure from conventional spelling, it makes our writing seem less authoritative, so we should care. But also, the origins of the two words are fascinating. Hangar is French, an alteration of 14th-century French hanghart, shed. That in turn may be from Middle Dutch ham-gaerd, an enclosure near a house; or it may be from medieval Latin angarium, a shed in which horses are shod. It was first recorded meaning 'shed for aeroplanes' in English in 1902, the year before the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. Hanger, on the other hand, is from hang, of ancient Indo-European origin (the source of Gothic hahan, Hittite gang and Sanskrit sankate, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary). What I did not know is that 'hung' emerged as the past participle in northern English dialect in the 16th century, becoming the standard form, while 'hanged' endured in legal language, which is more conservative – and that is why 'hanged' remains the usual word for a judicial execution, while 'hung' is used for everything else. Murder mystery: We had this short headline on our front page on Thursday: 'Husband charged with murder of wife found dead in car boot.' I stumbled over it, because it was unclear whether it was the husband or the wife who had been found. Because English is so flexible, a verb can attach itself either to the first person mentioned or to the person nearest to the verb in the sentence. A simple rewrite could have solved it, and would have fitted in the space: 'Husband charged with murder of wife after body found in car boot.' O to be in Estonia: In our report of Prince William visiting British troops in Estonia, the sub-headline said: 'The prince meets with country's president Alar Karis before travelling to visit Nato forces guarding the Russian border.' The Independent 's style for articles aimed at readers outside North America is just 'meets', without the 'with'. Secondly, as Roger Thetford pointed out, 'the Russian border' suggests the border as seen from the Russian side – the border belonging to Russia, between it and other countries. 'The border with Russia' would have been clearer. Too much punctuation: In an article about a farmer who was struggling to make ends meet, we described him as 'the 39-year-old father-of-three'. That had too many hyphens, which were needed in '39-year-old', because that is an adjectival phrase – describing the noun, which is 'father of three', without hyphens.
New York Times
21-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Heathrow Rumbles Back to Life After Substation Fire Shut Down Airport
Heathrow Airport in London was plunged into chaos after a fire at an electrical substation shut down operations at one of Europe's busiest air hubs, forcing the airport to cancel or divert more than 1,000 flights on Friday and removing a global linchpin of air travel. Heathrow's chief executive, Thomas Woldbye, described the disruption as 'unprecedented,' telling reporters on Friday that the airport had lost power equal to that of a midsize city, and that though a backup transformer worked as it should, there had not been not enough to power the entire airport. But he said, 'We expect to be back in full operation, so 100 percent operation as a normal day,' by Saturday. The British authorities said the counterterrorism police would lead the investigation into the cause of the blaze, which broke out at an electrical substation in North Hyde, northeast of Heathrow. But the Metropolitan Police in London said later Friday, 'After initial assessment, we are not treating this incident as suspicious, although inquiries do remain ongoing.' It was too early on Friday to calculate the precise cost of the outage. But the outage raised questions about the resilience of Britain's largest airport and why it appeared to be so reliant on a single electrical substation. Residents of the Hayes neighborhood near the airport described hearing two loud bangs and seeing 'a massive ball of flame' shoot into the sky on Thursday night. Minutes later, the airport said it was shutting down all air traffic, incoming flights were diverted, and passengers at Heathrow were sent home. Nearby residents were also evacuated. By Friday morning, roads around the power station were cordoned off, and a helicopter hovered above. An odd stillness had descended on Heathrow. The runways were empty, the check-in desks quiet, digital flight information screens were blank, and passageways were dimly lit by emergency lighting. It was a lifeless calm not seen even during the early panicked weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Britain's National Grid said on Friday afternoon that it had reconfigured its network to partly restore power at Heathrow on an interim basis. The London Fire Brigade said in the afternoon that 10 percent of the fire was still burning but that it was under control. The closure resulted in dozens of flights from the United States landing far from their original destination. They were diverted to airports in Glasgow, Madrid and even Happy Valley-Goose Bay, a tiny town in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. John Connor, 22, sat at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Friday, waiting in vain to get home to England after backpacking abroad for two years. 'We sat on the plane for about five hours before they said the flight was called off,' he said. 'I'm trying to get a plane somewhere close — Paris, Dublin, anywhere else,' he added. 'We're being told straight up no.' Frantic travelers swarmed social media to ask airlines about managing canceled flights and upcoming departures, claiming in posts on X that airline apps were lagging in notifying passengers about cancellations and that customer service could not be reached by phone. Some travelers stuck in Europe were urged to consider traveling to Britain by rail. A Delta spokesperson said the airline would reimburse the cost of traveling to London by train for passengers who had their flights diverted to Amsterdam. By Friday morning, only a few British Airways passengers remained camped out in Terminal 8 at Kennedy International Airport in New York. After making new travel arrangements, some waited for cars to take them to nearby hotels. Others said they planned to spend all day Friday in the terminal. Some airlines affected by the outage said they would issue waivers allowing free rebookings, including British Airways, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines. Cirium, an aviation data company, estimated that as many as 290,000 passengers could be affected by Heathrow's closure. By late Friday, several flights had landed at Heathrow, as the airport began to rumble back to life, about 16 hours after the fire. The first to touch down was a British Airways plane. It had not traveled far, arriving from Gatwick Airport in London after being diverted there from its original destination, Singapore, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware. A Heathrow spokeswoman said the airport was working to first restore 'repatriation flights and relocating aircraft' as it sought to untangle a day of disrupted service. Officials said that airlines would make it a priority to also relocate planes and crews and bring in flights diverted to other cities. Britain's Department of Transport said it was temporarily lifting restrictions on overnight flights to ease congestion while Heathrow Airport resumes normal operations. But the chief executive of British Airways, Sean Doyle, warned earlier that Heathrow's closure would have 'a huge impact' on the airline's customers over the coming days. British Airways had been set to operate more than 670 flights carrying about 107,000 customers on Friday, and similar numbers were planned over the weekend, he added. 'We have flight and cabin crew colleagues and planes that are currently at locations where we weren't planning on them to be,' he said. The Heathrow crisis was likely to upset not only the movement of people, but the flow of goods, as well. The closure of such a crucial aviation hub, even for a short while, would cause delays and logistical headaches for the many businesses that ship products through Heathrow, supply chain experts said. Heathrow has two runways and four terminals that serve more than 230 destinations in 90 countries. Last year, about 83.9 million passengers and 1.7 million tons of cargo were flown through the airport. It is the third-largest hub for air cargo in Western Europe, measured in metric tons shipped. Goods worth nearly 200 billion pounds ($258 billion) went through Heathrow in 2023, about a fifth of the value of the British goods trade. 'Goods move around the globe in a really precise, timed way on a daily basis,' said Ben Farrell, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, a global network of supply chain professionals based in London. 'Any disruptions to any part of that leads to a knock-on effect elsewhere.' British businesses will likely be most affected, experts said. Global trade can be handled by other large airports in Europe, said Eytan Buchman, chief marketing officer at Freightos, a digital shipping marketplace. 'This will likely be a localized problem rather than a broader European or global one,' he said. Mr. Woldbye, Heathrow's chief executive, apologized to travelers for the shutdown and said the airport had done well to resume flights by Friday evening, given the scale of the outage. But he said such disruption had 'never happened before.' The closure of Heathrow came 15 years after one of Europe's most severe air travel disruptions, when a volcano eruption in Iceland sent ash miles into the sky and obstructing travel for millions, including at Heathrow. The ash cloud grounded more than 100,000 flights over nearly a week in April 2010 as it drifted across Northern Europe, including the English Channel. The airline industry's losses from the volcanic disruption were estimated at $1.7 billion.
