����ֱ��

LONDON: At least 16 flights to and from London’s Heathrow Airport were canceled on Thursday, a day after technical problems with Britain’s air traffic control system caused widespread disruption across the country’s airports.
National Air Traffic Services (NATS), which provides air traffic control services for planes flying in UK airspace and the eastern part of the North Atlantic, said on Wednesday its systems were fully operational with capacity returning to normal after it switched to a back-up system.
The second outage in as many years at NATS also affected Gatwick Airport near London, Edinburgh Airport in Scotland and other locations, resulting in 122 cancelations as of 1830 GMT on Wednesday, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
Heathrow’s website showed that at least 16 flights, including departures to Brussels and Toronto and arrivals from New York and Berlin, had been canceled on Thursday.
Heathrow, Britain’s largest and Europe’s busiest airport, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the latest cancelations.
Ryanair Chief Operating Officer Neal McMahon called on NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign, saying no lessons had been learnt since the August 2023 disruption caused by a malfunctioning in the automatic processing of flight plans.
NATS, which on Wednesday apologized to those affected by the failure, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for a response to McMahon’s comments.
Heathrow was also hit by a fire at a power sub-station in March which stranded thousands of passengers.

HELSINKI: Finland on Thursday hosts a conference marking 50 years since the signing of the “Helsinki Final Act” on respecting borders and territorial integrity, principles that have come under assault following the war in Ukraine.
Keynote speakers for the conference include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Zelensky had been invited to attend the conference but will give his address remotely, the Finnish foreign ministry told AFP. Guterres will also only speak via a video message.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last week that Russia would be participating but would not be sending any high-level representatives to the meeting.
“Russia does not see the expediency of participating in the event at a high political level,” she told reporters, adding representatives would still “take part in the conversation.”
Notable guests include UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, as well as Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga, who arrived in Helsinki on Wednesday.
An opening speech is scheduled for 10:00 am (0700 GMT) by the Chairperson-in-Office of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE), Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen.
On August 1, 1975, 50 years ago, the Eastern and Western blocs signed the Helsinki Final Act in the Finnish capital.
The historic agreement between 35 states, including the Soviet Union and the United States, led to the creation of the OSCE, which today brings together 57 countries.
Among the key principles enshrined in the treaty are state sovereignty, non-use of force, and above all, the inviolability of borders.
“The participating States regard as inviolable all one another’s frontiers as well as the frontiers of all States in Europe and therefore they will refrain now and in the future from assaulting these frontiers,” the text of the treaty reads.
These commitments have been gravely challenged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has caused the most severe crisis in OSCE history.
Since then, Kyiv has unsuccessfully demanded that Russia be excluded from the international body.
However, in July 2024, Russian lawmakers earlier voted to suspend participation in the body’s parliamentary assembly, branding it anti-Russian and discriminatory, although the country is still listed as a member state on the organization’s official website.
While in Finland, Sybiga is also scheduled to hold bilateral talks with several Finnish officials, including Finnish President Alexander Stubb, and other high-level officials visiting the conference, according to the Ukrainian diplomacy.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement Wednesday that “key topics” would include “synchronizing allied pressure on Moscow.”
Finland shut its 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) eastern border with Russia in mid-December 2023 after the arrival of around 1,000 migrants without visas.
Helsinki has claimed the surge was orchestrated by Russia — a charge the Kremlin has denied.