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CNN
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Air traffic controller staffing shortages have been causing major flight disruptions for a week at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport, a United Airlines hub.

Numerous factors, including runway “rehabilitation work” and outdated technology, have also contributed to the massive delays, which are just the latest major issue to hit US air travel.

United Airlines has just cut 35 daily roundtrip flights from its schedule to minimize disruptions, the airline said over the weekend.

Newark officials have urged travelers to check with airlines about flight status before coming to the airport.

Whether it’s staffing shortages, a technical meltdown or a weather system that wreaks havoc on schedules, here’s some advice on what to do if your flight is delayed or canceled.

As bad as it is to find out your flight has been delayed for a long time, or worse, canceled, it’s better to find out from the comfort of home or a hotel room.

“Check your flight status before you go the airport. Most of these notifications are not happening at the last minute,” said Scott Keyes, the founder of Going.com. “Save yourself the drive to the airport.”

Other tips from Keyes:

Sometimes, the delays and cancellations happen after you’ve arrived at the airport.

Keyes said to head as fast as you can to the airline agents’ desk. “It’s going to make a difference who arrives first. It’s first-come, first-serve. Positioning yourself close to the desk can pay off,” Keyes said.

Then you might want to call up your carrier while you’re waiting. It might be faster to get through to a call center. “Whatever happens first, great,” he said.

Other tactics you can try:

Attitude and research matter

Whether you’re dealing with an agent in person or over the phone, how you approach things can make a big difference.

“Honey attracts more flies than vinegar,” Keyes said. “Look at this from the airline agents’ perspective. … The agent is the one who has the most ability to help you. Asking nicely and sympathetically is far more likely to get what you want than being a jerk about it.”

He had another tip when it’s your turn to talk to an agent about making new arrangements: “Come prepared to offer your own options already. Doing your own research is absolutely helpful.”

Other considerations:

Cooperation between airlines could work in your favor.

“When flights are canceled, many airlines have the option of putting you on another carrier’s flight because they have interline agreements,” Lousson Smith, product operations specialist at Going.com, told CNN Travel.

“This means, for example, if Delta is having service interruptions but American is running a flight to your destination, you may be able to get on that flight.”

Thanks to changes in frequent flyer programs over the past several years, airlines often still have flights available with miles even when demand is high during a weather event, Julian Kheel, founder and CEO of Points Path, told CNN Travel in an email.

“You’ll need to be prepared to spend a lot of miles, and you may not get the best value for them. But you could save yourself some significant cash if you’re trying to evacuate away from a storm,” Kheel said.

“Most US airlines now allow you to cancel flights booked with frequent flyer miles without any fee or penalty right up until departure time. That means you can book multiple alternate flights on different airlines using your miles in case one of them ends up delayed or canceled.

“But don’t try to book alternate flights on the same airline, as duplicates can be automatically canceled. And don’t forget to cancel the remaining flights you don’t end up using so you can get your miles back.”

What do you do if it looks like you’re not going to be able to fly out until the next day and you’re not in your home city?

This depends on the specifics of your situation — in the US, for example, airlines aren’t legally required to put you up in a hotel. US-based airlines have their own individual policies for situations “within the airline’s control” that are tracked by the Department of Transportation, here.

But requirements in other countries are different. In the United Kingdom, for example, you’ll likely be automatically entitled to food and drink vouchers and accommodation. You can read all the details at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)’s website.

Your canceled flight will be covered by UK law if it was supposed to be departing from the UK, no matter who you were flying with.

And if your flight was supposed to be arriving in the UK, you’ll be covered by UK law as long as you were traveling on an EU or UK airline. This document from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority explains all the ins and outs of these rules.

Despite this, sometimes airlines can’t help everyone, as the CAA says, “this can happen when staff are stretched during major disruptions.” The CAA advice is to organize “reasonable care and assistance yourself, then claim the cost back later. If you end up paying for things yourself, keep every receipt and do not spend more than is reasonable.”

Other things to consider:

Travel insurance and receipts

Consider buying travel insurance, advised Airport Parking Reservations in an email to CNN Travel.

It said “most travel insurance policies provide additional cover for travel uncertainty. Additional [coverage] usually becomes applicable if your flight is postponed by more than 12 hours due to a strike, adverse weather or a mechanical breakdown.”

The site also advises that you keep any receipts of airport purchases. You can try to get the money back from the airline later.

Airlines in the United States are now required to give passengers cash refunds if their flight is significantly delayed or canceled, even if that person does not explicitly ask for a refund.

The Department of Transportation says the final federal rule requiring that airlines dole out refunds — not vouchers — went into effect on October 28, 2024. Find out the details here.

London
CNN
 — 

The Trump administration has sent an unmistakable message to Europe: You’re on your own.

In three dizzying months, the White House has reversed decades’ worth of American foreign policy, pledged to scale back its presence on the continent, and pushed to wrap up Russia’s war in Ukraine, even if that might mean handing Ukrainian land to Moscow.

The new reality is one to which Europe is still adjusting. But 80 years to the week after American and European allies forced the surrender of Nazi Germany, a future in which the continent is left alone to defend itself from the Russian menace is no longer hypothetical.

“Europe has been living for 80 years in a situation in which peace was given for granted. And apparently peace was offered for free,” Roberto Cingolani, a former Italian government minister who’s now chief executive of European defense giant Leonardo, told CNN during a recent visit to the company’s headquarters in northern Italy.

“Now, all of a sudden, after the invasion (of) Ukraine, we realize that peace must be defended.”

A breakneck race is underway in Europe’s NATO-member states to ready the continent in case of confrontation with Russia. The race is winnable: Europe boasts militaries large and expensive enough to at least partially plug the hole Washington is threatening to leave.

But armies in Western Europe need a serious influx of funds and expertise to prepare themselves for the worst-case scenario.

In recent years, Britain, France and Germany have pumped funds into their aging militaries after a plateau in spending during the middle of the 2010s.

But it could be several years until the impact of those funds are felt on the front lines. Troop numbers, weaponry and military readiness have waned in Western Europe since the end of the Cold War. “The high level of attrition in the Ukraine War has painfully highlighted European countries’ current shortcomings,” the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, wrote in a blunt review of Europe’s forces last year.

Nations nearer the Russian border are moving faster. The Trump administration has hailed Poland as a paragon of self-sufficiency. “We see Poland as the model ally on the continent: willing to invest not just in their defense, but in our shared defense and the defense of the continent,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in Warsaw during the first European bilateral meeting of Trump’s second term.

But Poland’s rapid escalation in defense spending has more to do with its own, generations-old tensions with Russia than with a desire to earn a place in Trump’s good graces. Warsaw and Washington are at odds on the conflict in Ukraine; Poland has for years warned Europe of the threat posed by Russia, and has steadfastly supported its neighbor as it defends territory from Putin’s advances.

The US has stationed troops in Europe since the end of the Cold War, and their numbers have grown since Russia’s full-scale invasion, with around 80,000 on the continent last year, according to a Congressional report. But the deployment is still far smaller than at the height of the Cold War, when nearly half a million American troops were stationed in Europe.

For decades, American foreign policy emphasized the importance of those deployments not just to European security, but to its own. Troops on the continent provide forward defense, help train allied forces, and manage nuclear warheads.

Now, the future of those deployments is not clear. European leaders have publicly urged Washington not to reduce numbers, but Trump, Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance have all made clear their intention to strengthen the US military posture in the South China Sea.

Today, most US land and air bases are located in Germany, Italy and Poland. US bases in central Europe provide a counterweight to the Russian threat, while naval and aerial locations in Turkey, Greece and Italy also support missions in the Middle East.

The locations serve as “a crucial foundation for NATO operations, regional deterrence, and global power projection,” according to the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis think tank.

The most important deterrent Europe holds, however, is its nuclear warheads.

During the early stages of Russia’s war, President Vladimir Putin repeatedly prompted worldwide alarm by hinting at the use of a nuclear weapon. That fear subsided after the war became bogged down in Ukraine’s east.

But nuclear deterrence is an area on which Europe is heavily reliant on the US. Britain and France – the two European countries with nuclear weapons – have only about a tenth of Russia’s arsenal between them. But the American nuclear war chest roughly matches Russia’s, and dozens of those US warheads are located in Europe.

CNN
 — 

One of them often dons a Trump-style red baseball cap and wants to make his country “great again.” The other visited the US president at the White House to drum up support. Both could soon become presidents of major allies on Ukraine’s border.

In Romania, the hard-right euroskeptic George Simion convincingly won the first round of the presidential re-run on Sunday, making him a strong favorite to win the final round on May 18.

On that same day, Poland will also hold the first round of a presidential ballot, where both the nationalist candidate Karol Nawrocki and the far-right upstart Sławomir Mentzen have been making gains. If no candidate wins more than 50% of votes, a second round will be held two weeks later.

Although victory for Simion is much more likely than for Poland’s right-wing candidates, Europe is now facing the prospect that two of Ukraine’s neighbors could by next month be led by presidents who are hostile towards Brussels and aping a MAGA-style politics.

“Congratulations,” Nawrocki said to Simion on Monday in a message of support on X.

Also hailing Simion’s first-round victory, Mentzen jokingly asked if Romanian authorities “will cancel the elections again.” This was a reference to the decision last year by Romania’s constitutional court to annul the first-round victory of Calin Georgescu, a Kremlin-friendly ultranationalist, after intelligence services pointed to possible Russian interference in his TikTok-fueled campaign, which he and Moscow denied. Georgescu was later banned from May’s re-run, after prosecutors charged him with establishing a fascist group and other crimes.

The court’s decision to cancel the election had little precedent, outraged many in the country and caught the attention of officials in the Trump administration. In his blistering speech in Munich in February, US Vice President JD Vance singled out Romania as the grossest case of what he called Europe’s “threat from within.”

Sunday’s first-round results showed the court’s decision did little to quell Romania’s simmering nationalist fervor and may even have inflamed it. Whereas Georgescu secured 22% of votes in November, Simion won a resounding 41% in May’s do-over, far exceeding polling expectations. His nearest contender, Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of the capital Bucharest, came second at around 21%.

Many in Brussels will be hoping that the pro-European Union voters will rally around Dan in the second round, shutting the far-right out of power, as happened in France in its parliamentary election last year. But analysts say divisions among the mainstream parties mean Simion is likely to win the May 18 second round.

Although Romania, like Poland, has a parliamentary system, the presidents of both countries are commanders of the armed forces and have significant sway over military spending and foreign policy.

While not as brazen as Georgescu, Simion shares many of his views and even cast his ballot alongside him on Sunday. Simion has long voiced his opposition to military aid for Ukraine, and last year was banned by Kyiv from entering the country, citing his “systematic anti-Ukrainian activities.” He is also barred from visiting neighboring Moldova. Simion has claimed he is not anti-Ukraine or pro-Russia, but simply “pro-Romanian.”

In Poland, the picture is less clear-cut. With President Andrzej Duda of the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) unable to run for a third term, Karol Nawrocki – currently head of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance – is attempting to pick up his mantle. Meanwhile, Sławomir Mentzen, a leader of the far-right Confederation Liberty and Independence alliance, has climbed up the polls – but is deemed unlikely to reach the second round.

Although technically running as an independent, Nawrocki has the backing of PiS, which became increasingly authoritarian over its eight years in power, before its defeat in a 2023 parliamentary election by an alliance led by Donald Tusk’s liberal Civic Platform party.

Nawrocki met Trump at the White House last week to mark the National Day of Prayer. “President Trump said, ‘you will win,’” Nawrocki told private broadcaster TV Republika after his reception in the Oval Office.

Nawrocki has accused Volodymyr Zelensky of behaving “indecently” towards his allies, echoing criticism by Vance that the Ukrainian president is not sufficiently “grateful” for the support his country receives. In the fallout from Zelensky’s Oval Office meeting with Trump and Vance, Tusk – prime minister since 2023 – said it is “becoming clear who in Poland wants to pursue Russian interests.”

Currently polling at around 25%, Nawrocki is trailing Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist mayor of Warsaw representing Tusk’s Civic Platform party, who is leading at around 33%.

But Simion’s overperforming polling expectations will provide encouragement to Poland’s conservative candidates.

Mentzen said Simion’s first-round victory showed that “Romanians again want to choose differently than the EU elites would like.” Further to the right than Nawrocki, Mentzen has also tacked closely to Trump, calling for a MAGA-style “revolution of common sense” in Poland.