Wall Street Journal

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the federal government would take steps to hire more air-traffic controllers and spend billions of dollars to upgrade the nation’s aviation system. Duffy said he would ask Congress to fund upgrades to the technology underpinning the nation’s air-traffic control system, pointing to its reliance on decades-old copper wire, floppy disks and phone jacks. Duffy said he hadn’t made a decision about whether to use the Starlink satellite communications system to improve air-traffic-control technology.

A federal appeals court’s rejection of the Federal Communications Commission’s decade-plus push for stronger oversight of the internet was a crushing defeat for “net neutrality” as it has been pursued since the Obama administration. But the ruling could also be seen as the latest indictment of the inability of Congress to regulate at anywhere near the speed of tech.

The Senate voted 51-45 to confirm Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary, putting in place a billionaire Wall Street veteran turned avowed protectionist to lead the president’s global trade agenda. The former chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm, ran the personnel operation for Trump’s presidential transition. Lutnick, age 63, took the reins at Cantor in 1991. He stepped down following the confirmation vote. President Trump has said the secretary will lead the second-term trade portfolio as well as oversee an agency of roughly 47,000 employees.

Elon Musk’s X has agreed to pay about $10 million to settle a lawsuit that President Donald Trump brought against the company and its former chief executive. The agreement makes X the second social-media platform to settle litigation that Trump filed when the companies deplatformed him over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.