Business
FAA Shuts Down El Paso International Airport for 10 Days: Security Order
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) late Tuesday night issued a sweeping and sudden emergency order halting all air traffic at El Paso International Airport (ELP) for a period of 10 days, citing “special security reasons” that have left travelers stranded and local officials scrambling for answers.

The temporary flight restriction (TFR), which went into effect at 11:30 p.m. MST on Feb. 10, 2026, effectively severs the air link to one of the largest cities on the U.S.-Mexico border. The FAA’s notice to air missions (NOTAM) classifies the 10-mile radius around the airport as “National Defense Airspace,” warning pilots that the federal government may use “deadly force” against aircraft that violate the restriction.
An Abrupt and Unexplained Closure
Unlike typical airport closures for weather or scheduled maintenance, this shutdown was issued with less than three hours’ notice. Radio communications from the ELP control tower captured the moment dumbfounded pilots were informed they would be unable to depart.
“Apparently, we just got informed about 30 minutes to an hour ago,” an air traffic controller told a Southwest Airlines pilot late Tuesday.
The restriction extends from the surface up to 18,000 feet, covering not only El Paso International but also surrounding general aviation corridors and parts of Santa Teresa, New Mexico. While the order excludes Mexican airspace, it effectively shuts down commercial, cargo, and private aviation for the 23rd largest city in the United States through Feb. 20, 2026.
Mounting Questions Over “Special Security”
The FAA has declined to elaborate on the nature of the “special security reasons.” The lack of transparency has fueled intense speculation among aviation experts and local leaders.
“I have never heard of an American airspace being shut down for 10 days absent a major emergency,” said Texas State Rep. Vincent Perez. “To do this on such short notice without a clear explanation to the public is extraordinary.”
The closure comes during a period of heightened tension along the border, though federal authorities have not linked the grounding to any specific threat or law enforcement operation. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-El Paso) confirmed Wednesday morning that her office is in urgent communication with the Department of Transportation, seeking a justification for the massive regional disruption.
Chaos for Travelers and Commerce
The timing of the shutdown is particularly painful for the region’s economy. El Paso International serves nearly 4 million passengers annually and is a vital hub for Southwest, American, and United Airlines.
- Commercial Impact: More than 1,200 flights are expected to be canceled or diverted over the 10-day window.
- Alternative Routes: Travelers are being urged to seek transport through Albuquerque, New Mexico (270 miles away), or Tucson, Arizona (320 miles away).
- Cargo & Military: The shutdown also affects critical cargo shipments and logistics for neighboring Fort Bliss, one of the U.S. Army’s largest installations.
Conflicting Information and “Runway” Myths
Despite rumors and some initial reports suggesting the closure was for a $42 million runway reconstruction project, airport records and the FAA’s own “National Defense” classification contradict this. The primary commercial runway at ELP is 8R-26L, while the smaller 8L-26R runway—which some had claimed was the cause of the closure—has not been authorized for major commercial jet carriers for several years.
Furthermore, the official cited in some reports as the Airport Director, Sam Rodríguez, actually departed El Paso in 2024 to take a development role at San Antonio International Airport. Current airport staff confirmed they were as surprised by the FAA mandate as the public.
Looking Toward February 20
The FAA has indicated the restriction will remain in place until 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 20, 2026, unless “modified or rescinded.” As of Wednesday morning, the airport terminal remained open but largely deserted, with airline staff assisting a handful of stranded passengers who were caught in the late-night grounding.
“We are pending additional guidance from the FAA,” the airport said in a brief social media statement. “We encourage all travelers to contact their airlines directly for rebooking options.”
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Barron Trump listed as business partner in new beverage company
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Barron Trump is listed in public records as a director of a new beverage business based near Mar-a-Lago.
Filings submitted last month in Florida and Delaware show that Barron Trump is one of five directors of SOLLOS Yerba Mate Inc., described by one of its directors as a “yerba mate beverage company” and headquartered just minutes from the Trump family’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach.
Yerba mate – a caffeinated herbal tea popular in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay – has gained traction in the U.S. as a coffee alternative.
FOX Business was unable to independently confirm that the Barron Trump named in the filings is the 19-year-old son of President Donald Trump.

Barron Trump gestures during a rally on the inauguration day of President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings show the company raised $1 million through a private placement, as first reported by Newsweek.
In addition to Barron Trump, the documents list Spencer Bernstein, Rudolfo Castello, Stephen Hall and Valentino Gomez as directors – two of whom appear to have attended high school with the president’s son.
Bernstein, a Villanova University student who previously attended Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach with Barron Trump, described SOLLOS on LinkedIn as “a lifestyle beverage brand built around clean [and] functional ingredients.”
A LOOK AT THE TRUMP FAMILY’S BUSINESS EMPIRE

Yerba mate trees grow in Colonia Liebig, Argentina, on Aug. 7, 2025. (Natalia Favre/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“I’ve decided to postpone my final semester at Villanova University to focus on something I’ve been building for the past 8 months,” Bernstein wrote last month. “Since the end of last school year I have been working alongside my co-founder, Stephen Hall, and a few close friends on SOLLOS Yerba Mate.”
Hall, now a student at the University of Notre Dame who also attended Oxbridge Academy, said the beverage company is preparing for a spring consumer launch.
An official launch date has not been announced.
The company marks the latest business venture tied to Barron Trump, a sophomore at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
HERE’S HOW MUCH TRUMP ACCOUNT BALANCES COULD GROW OVER TIME

Display of various containers of Yerba Mate in Duncans Mills, California, on June 8, 2025. (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
In July 2024, Barron Trump and two partners – including a former classmate – incorporated a real estate firm, Trump, Fulcher & Roxburgh Capital Inc., in Wyoming. The company was dissolved on Nov. 14, 2024, days after the presidential election.
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The White House, first lady Melania Trump’s office, Stephen Hall and Spencer Bernstein could not be immediately reached by FOX Business for comment.
FOX Business’ Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
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Microfinance shows spark but shrinks to lowest in 3 years
The sharp decline in the third quarter of this financial year resulted from a bulk reclassification of micro loans as retail loans by one of the private sector banks with significant microfinance exposure, said three people aware of the matter.
The gross loan portfolio stood at ₹3.42 lakh crore at the end of September last year. At the end of November, it was ₹3.40 lakh crore.
Besides, the cumulative loan disbursement is yet to offset the size of loan rundown, said industry executives. The strategy of acceleration in writing off bad loans was another reason behind the yearly decline of loan portfolio at the aggregate level, even as some large non-banking financial company-micro finance institutions (NBFC-MFIs) showed higher loan disbursement and annual growth in the portfolio after the end of the third quarter.
“At the sectoral level, the book run-down, including loan write-offs is still higher than total loan disbursement, which is the reason behind the contraction in the overall microfinance market,” Sanjay Garyali, managing director at Fusion Finance, told ET.
Bandhan Bank, for instance, sold bad loans worth ₹3,212 crore to asset reconstruction companies. Of those, micro loans accounted for ₹2,800 crore.
AgenciesMicrofin market sees 16% YoY drop in Q3; Loan reclassification as retail hits numbers
The microfinance market peaked at ₹4.43 lakh crore in the quarter to March 2024. Thereafter, there has been a steady fall every quarter as lenders across the spectrum slowed lending to the bottom of the pyramid borrower segment which was largely overleveraged and witnessing a surge in defaults. The industry experienced a year-on-year contraction in disbursement in 2025, with volume declining 34% and value decreasing 24%, according to an Equifax report.
The number of active loans declined 9% quarter-on-quarter and 23% year-on-year to 107.4 million, the data showed.
The lenders are also shifting their focus on providing gold jewellery-backed loans instead of collateral-free loans to the same customer segment, leading to the fall in micro loan disbursement year-on-year, said Subhankar Mishra, head of strategy at Equifax India.
The December quarter, however, saw a modest increase in disbursements to Rs 61,000 crore from Rs 56,535 crore in the preceding quarter, signalling business normalisation, as per industry level data collated by Crif High Mark data. The gross loan portfolio declined to Rs 3.21 lakh crore at the end of December from Rs 3.46 lakh crore three months prior, said people aware of the matter. Crif High Mark did not respond to ET’s queries seeking details.
Small finance banks such as ESAF, Equitas, Jana and Ujjivan reported quarter-on-quarter growth in their respective micro loan asset portfolios at the end of December.
CreditAccess Grameen, India’s largest NBFC-MFI, also reported a quarter-on-quarter increase in gross loan portfolio. The signs of business normalisation led to recovery of share prices for several microfinance lenders over the past few weeks.
Bandhan Bank shares surged 17% in the past one month to Rs 168.25 apiece on BSE. Shares of Fusion Finance jumped 17.4% to Rs 194 each, while Satin Creditcare Network saw a 5% increase in share price to Rs 155.10 each during this period.
Spandana Sphoorty Financial, which cut net loss to Rs 93 crore in the December quarter from Rs 249 crore in the preceding three-month period, saw a 9% increase in share prices in a month to Rs 264.5 apiece.
At the end of 2025, NBFC-MFIs controlled 40.9% of the market, followed by private banks (25.6%), small finance banks (16.9%) and other NBFCs (14%). The balance 2.6% was with notfor-profit entities.
Business
NewsGuild battles New York Times over hybrid work, ‘wrongly excluding jobs’ from union and health fund
Former Education Department press secretary Angela Morabito criticizes the National Education Associations vow to fight I.C.E. and more on The Bottom Line.
FIRST ON FOX — The NewsGuild of New York is irked at The New York Times leadership.
The Times Guild Bargaining Committee sent staffers a newsletter on Tuesday detailing the latest labor negotiations. The Guild said it made a “big push to end the two-tier system The New York Times created and perpetuates by wrongly excluding jobs and workers from the Times Guild” and received a revised proposal from the company to end all hybrid work guarantees on March 1, 2027.
“At that point, they would have the right to require us to work in the office five days a week and to eliminate our contractually guaranteed three weeks of remote work per year. As we saw this fall: If the company can reduce our guaranteed remote-work days, they will. But when asked for data on how in-office work makes our news product, advertising and business operations better, the management side of the table was silent,” the Guild wrote in the email obtained by Fox News Digital.
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The NewsGuild of New York and The New York Times leadership held a bargaining session on Tuesday. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“On our side, we made a big push to end the two-tier system The New York Times created and perpetuates by wrongly excluding jobs and workers from the Times Guild. Today, we asked the company to recognize more than 50 of our colleagues’ proper place in our bargaining unit, people with whom we work side by side as members of the Times Guild,” the Times Guild Bargaining Committee continued. “Keeping union work in the union is one of our core priorities.”
The Guild believes positions including audio engineers, puzzle editors, audience and SEO editors, bureau chiefs based in cities across the country and editors on the Newsroom Development and Support team deserve “the same critical protections and benefits we have fought for under our union contract” and listed “annual raises, just cause job protections, hour-for-hour overtime or comp time and minimum salaries for each position” as key examples.
“One of the five core priorities we all identified for this contract campaign is keeping union work in our union. These wrongly excluded jobs represent another way the company has undercut our union by arbitrarily excluding colleagues who are doing the same work as us, thus creating a two-tier system of pay and benefits,” the Guild wrote.

The Times Guild Bargaining Committee sent staffers a newsletter on Tuesday detailing the latest labor negotiations. (Getty Images)
The Guild told members it proposed that the Times should give the Guild 30 days notice when it creates a new job “whether such job falls within the jurisdiction of the Guild or the position is excluded,” and that any disputes over newly created jobs should be “referred to the expedited arbitration provisions utilizing the parties’ Jurisdiction panel of arbitrators on a rotational basis.”
The Guild wants the Times to supply it with a description of the duties, responsibilities, proposed classification and effective date of a new job. The Guild is also asking it to be clearly noted that open jobs are Guild-represented positions when posted internally or externally, and for 30-days’ notice when individuals currently represented by the Guild are transferred to Guild-excluded positions.
“We received the company’s responses to our requests for information related to several of our core issues in these negotiations: badge-swipe surveillance being used to enforce in-office expectations; the company’s existing and planned uses of artificial intelligence; and the creation of a two-tier system by excluding The Athletic from our union,” the Times Guild Bargaining Committee wrote.
“Unfortunately, management declined to respond — nearly across the board — in detail to our requests, instead dismissing our questions as ‘overly broad,’ ‘speculative,’ ‘unduly burdensome,’ and ‘not relevant,’” they added.
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Members of the Times Tech Guild picket outside the New York Times headquarters in New York on Nov. 4, 2024. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Guild also told members that the Times “updated its proposal for financing our health fund,” but dismissed the notion it would “bankrupt the fund.”
“We understand that. It still goes back to [cost] sharing and responsibility,” Times Executive Director for Labor Relations Chris Biegner told the Guild, according to the newsletter distributed to members.
“In their counter to our performance evaluation proposal, management rejected several of our proposed changes, including exemptions from the rating system for employees who take a certain amount of leave, transparency about who (such as desk heads, masthead editors and H.R.) contributed to an employee’s evaluation, and shifting the review period so that it covers a full year of work,” the Guild wrote.
The next bargaining session is scheduled for Feb. 18. The current contract expires at the end of the month.

The Guild told members it proposed that the Times should give the Guild 30 days notice when it creates a new job “whether such job falls within the jurisdiction of the Guild or the position is excluded.”
When reached for comment, The New York Times provided Fox News Digital with a series of internal notes that managing editors Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan have sent to Times Guild unit members.
In January, Lacey and Ryan said conversations have been “productive,” but feel too much focus is being spent worrying about staffers who are not members of the Guild. The Athletic, a separate entity with its own leadership team that is owned by the Times, has been a sticking point.
“In the room, the Guild indicated that they would not accept any contract terms that don’t cover The Athletic joining The New York Times newsroom bargaining unit. We fear that setting this condition undermines the path to getting to a good deal any time soon,” Lacey and Ryan wrote last month after the first negotiating session.
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“The company has said many times that we would recognize unionization for Athletic employees as a separate unit if they choose to pursue it,” they continued. “We also want to state up front that we don’t think we should hold up a new contract and higher salaries for some 1,500 Times Guild employees because of a demand to incorporate employees from an entirely separate newsroom.”
Lacey and Ryan have insisted they would like to reach a deal.
The Athletic publisher David Perpich previously stated that he believes “the best approach is to have The Athletic’s journalists form a separate bargaining unit within the NewsGuild, not to have them absorbed into the Times unit.”
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