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More Travel Chaos to Hit Europe as Cold Snap Brings More Snow

People walk along the Baltic Sea shore covered in a thick blanket of snow, in Stralsund, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. (Stefan Sauer/dpa via AP)
People walk along the Baltic Sea shore covered in a thick blanket of snow, in Stralsund, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. (Stefan Sauer/dpa via AP)
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More Travel Chaos to Hit Europe as Cold Snap Brings More Snow

People walk along the Baltic Sea shore covered in a thick blanket of snow, in Stralsund, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. (Stefan Sauer/dpa via AP)
People walk along the Baltic Sea shore covered in a thick blanket of snow, in Stralsund, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. (Stefan Sauer/dpa via AP)

More flights will be cancelled, trains will run late and roads will be blocked by snow across Europe in coming days as a cold snap is expected to worsen, bringing even more heavy snowfall after several days of travel disruption.

Authorities in the Netherlands told people to plan to stay at home if at all possible on Wednesday, with a fresh blizzard expected to arrive overnight.

French Transportation Minister Philippe Tabarot said on Tuesday that airlines had already been ordered to cancel at least 40% of flights at Paris's main Charles de Gaulle airport the following morning, ‌and a quarter ‌of flights at smaller Orly.

Public transportation in the Paris ‌region ⁠will probably also be ‌disrupted by the snow, he added.

At Amsterdam's Schiphol, where more than 400 flights were cancelled on Tuesday, authorities told travelers whose flights had been called off to stay away from the airport to prevent overcrowding.

"We haven't experienced such extreme weather conditions in years," Dutch airline KLM's spokesperson Anoesjka Aspeslagh said, as winter weather crippled traffic at one of Europe's main transit hubs for a fifth day.

A BIRTHDAY IN TRANSIT

Stranded at Schiphol, Simiao Sun said she feared she'd spend her 40th birthday in transit. ⁠She had been told she would have to wait three days for a rescheduled flight to Beijing.

"My child would miss ‌school and we would both miss work, so I'm queuing ‍here...hoping to get a slightly earlier ‍flight."

KLM said it was offering alternative flights where possible and doing everything to help travelers, ‍but it was "overwhelmed with inquiries".

On top of that, all domestic rail services in the Netherlands were suspended early on Tuesday after an IT outage hit the rail network. Trains began running in parts of the country after 0900 GMT, but problems persisted around Amsterdam, with high-speed Eurostar services from Amsterdam to Paris either cancelled or late.

Roads in France were gradually clearing on Tuesday after snow caused severe accidents all over the country, killing at least five people, according to ⁠BFMTV news station. Traffic in the Paris area hit a record 1,000 kilometers of jams on Monday evening.

SNOW FALLS OVER LARGE PARTS OF GERMANY AND FRANCE

In Germany, temperatures fell well below minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in the south and east early on Tuesday. Much of the country was covered in snow.

In Britain, the Meteorological Office said winter weather hazards could continue throughout the week for most of the country. Temperatures overnight to Tuesday had fallen as low as -12.5 degrees Celsius in Marham, Norfolk, in east England, marking the coldest night of the winter so far.

Heavy snow and rain have also caused havoc across the Western Balkans, closing roads, cutting power and causing rivers to flood. A woman died in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on Monday after a ‌tree overburdened with wet snow fell on her.

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Varieties

CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool

CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool
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CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool

CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool

Close the cover on the CIA World Factbook: The spy agency announced Wednesday that after more than 60 years, it is shuttering the popular reference manual.

The announcement posted to the CIA’s website offered no reason for the decision to end the Factbook, but it follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions, The Associated Press said.

First launched in 1962 as a printed, classified reference manual for intelligence officers, the Factbook offered a detailed, by-the-numbers picture of foreign nations, their economies, militaries, resources and societies. The Factbook proved so useful that other federal agencies began using it, and within a decade, an unclassified version was released to the public.

After going online in 1997, the Factbook quickly became a popular reference site for journalists, trivia aficionados and the writers of college essays, racking up millions of visits per year.

The White House has moved to cut staffing at the CIA and the National Security Agency early in Trump's second term, forcing the agency to do more with less.

The CIA did not return a message seeking comment Wednesday about the decision to cease publication of the Factbook.

Varieties

The Coming End of ISS, Symbol of An Era of Global Cooperation

The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File
The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File
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The Coming End of ISS, Symbol of An Era of Global Cooperation

The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File
The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File

When the International Space Station comes back to Earth in 2030, it will mark the end of three decades of peaceful international cooperation -- and an era when space became central to our daily lives.

Since November 2000, there have always been several humans on board the football field-sized scientific laboratory, whipping around the planet at eight kilometers per second.

With a new crew of astronauts set to blast off for the station as soon as next week, some of those who have helped the station from the ground are nostalgic about its looming demise.

"The ISS is a cathedral to human cooperation and collaboration across borders, languages and cultures," John Horack, the former manager of NASA's Science and Mission Systems Office, told AFP.

"For more than 25 years, we have had people in space, 24/7/365," added Horack, who now holds the Neil Armstrong Chair in aerospace policy at Ohio State University.

"It is a testament to how we can 'figure it out' rather than 'fight it out' when we wish to interact with each other."

The ISS was first proposed in the aftermath of the Cold War, illustrating a newfound spirit of cooperation between space race rivals Russia and the United States.

While many ties between Russia and the West have been severed over Moscow's war in Ukraine, cooperation has continued on board the space station.

"The history of human spaceflight is first and foremost the space race," Lionel Suchet of France's space agency CNES told AFP.

"This is a very interesting moment in the evolution of space exploration," said Suchet, who coordinated several early ISS projects after witnessing its predecessor, the Mir space station, de-orbiting in 2001.

Back to Earth

However, the ISS is getting old and its equipment is outdated.

NASA announced last year it had selected Elon Musk's SpaceX to build a vehicle that can push the station back into Earth's atmosphere in 2030, where it will break up.

"This large rocket engine will slow down the ISS, and enable it to have a precise re-entry over the Pacific Ocean, far from land, people or any other potential hazards," Horack explained.

Several spacecraft and telescopes -- including Mir -- have met a similar fate, splashing down at an isolated spot in the ocean called Point Nemo.

After 2030, the only space station orbiting Earth will be China's Tiangong.

For the future, the US is focusing more on space stations built and operated by private companies.

"We are moving into an era where space stations have a much more commercial dimension," similar to what has already happened with rockets and satellites, Horack said.

National space agencies would then need to pay these companies to stay on board.

Several companies, including Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Axiom Space, are already working on plans to build the first commercial space station.

Suchet emphasized that "the business model will still be largely institutional because countries are always interested in sending astronauts into low-Earth orbit".

Scientific research and exploration also remain an "objective of all humanity", he added, pointing to treaties that govern how nations are supposed to act in space.

Whether these treaties will hold once humans make it to the Moon -- the US and China both have plans to build lunar bases -- remains to be seen.

'Quite sad'

For Horack, the end of the ISS could be seen as "quite sad".

His children "had a lifetime of going out into the backyard to watch the ISS fly over".

But the end of this era will mark the opening of another, he added.

"We must grow as humans in our space-faring capacity, in our exploration of space, and in the use of space to generate social, economic, educational and quality of life outcomes for all people everywhere."

He finished by quoting the former head of the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Varieties

NASA's Juno finds Jupiter is a tiny bit smaller than previously thought

An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS
An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS
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NASA's Juno finds Jupiter is a tiny bit smaller than previously thought

An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS
An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS

Jupiter, without a doubt, is the biggest planet in our solar system. But it turns out that it is not quite as large - by ever so small an amount - as scientists had previously thought.

Using new data obtained by NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft, scientists have obtained the most precise measurements to date of Jupiter's size and shape. This is important information to gain a fuller understanding of this gas giant, including studying its complex interior structure.

The Juno observations showed that Jupiter has an equatorial diameter of 88,841 miles (142,976 km), which is about 5 miles (8 km) smaller than previous measurements had indicated. The observations also showed that Jupiter's diameter from north pole to south pole is 83,067 miles (133,684 km), about 15 miles (24 km) smaller than previously estimated, Reuters reported.

The planet, like our own, is not a perfect sphere, but rather a bit flattened - and, based on the new data, slightly more so than previously known. Jupiter is about 7% larger at the equator than at the poles. For comparison, Earth's equator is only 0.33% larger than its diameter at the poles.

The previous measurements of Jupiter were based on data gathered by NASA's Voyager and Pioneer robotic spacecraft in the late 1970s. Juno, launched in 2011, has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, transmitting raw data back to Earth. NASA extended the Juno mission in 2021, giving scientists the opportunity to carry out the type of observations needed in order to fine-tune the measurements of its size and shape, including traveling behind Jupiter from Earth's point of view.

"When Juno passed behind Jupiter from Earth's perspective, its radio signal traveled through the planet's atmosphere before reaching Earth," said planetary scientist Eli Galanti of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"Measuring how the signal changed due to Jupiter's atmospheric composition, density and temperature allowed us to probe the atmosphere and determine the planet's size and shape with high precision. Interestingly, this geometrical configuration did not occur during Juno's prime mission, so these experiments were not originally planned," Galanti said.

Earth, which is the third from the sun among the solar system's eight planets, is a relatively small rocky world.

Jupiter, fifth from the sun, is so immense that all the other planets could fit inside it, including more than 1,300 Earths. Jupiter is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, with traces of other gases. Strong winds seen as stripes and a few storms dominate Jupiter's colorful outward appearance.

Juno has been collecting data about Jupiter's atmosphere, interior structure, internal magnetic field and magnetosphere, the region around the planet created by its internal magnetism.

Precise new measurements of Jupiter are helpful to scientists because its radius - a measure that is half its diameter - is a fundamental reference used in models of the planet's interior and its atmospheric structure.

"Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and contains most of its planetary mass, so understanding its composition and internal structure is central to understanding how the solar system formed and evolved. Jupiter likely formed early, and strongly influenced the distribution of material, the growth of other planets and the delivery of volatiles to the inner solar system, including Earth," Galanti said.

Volatiles are substances like water, carbon dioxide and ammonia that evaporate easily. The delivery of these to the inner solar system, where the four rocky planets reside, was essential because volatiles, Galanti said, "supplied Earth with water and key ingredients for its atmosphere and for life."