Arts & Life

Airlines are slashing service, canceling hundreds of flights a day as the number of people traveling on planes plummets. And the numbers from just the past month are stark. The TSA screened only 146,000 people at airport security checkpoints across the country on March 31, down 93.5% from the almost 2.3 million screened on March 1.

Arriving at Reagan National Airport in Washington on Tuesday for a flight to Newark, N.J., Greg Weinman expected to see at least a few other people. Instead, "It's empty. It was eerily quiet. There was nobody in the security line," he says.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti requested Thursday that all city residents wear makeshift masks in public to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The mayor says it’s an announcement he’s wanted to make for a few days, drawing inspiration from countries like Taiwan and the Czech Republic where a culture of mask-wearing has coincided with lower COVID-19 case numbers.

Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Patrick Payton, mayor of Midland, Texas, about how his town is dealing with the collapse of oil prices amid the coronavirus outbreak.

As a former pastor, he’s worried unemployment and isolation could lead to more deaths than the coronavirus in his town.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Terence Lester decided to place portable sinks throughout Atlanta, so the city’s homeless population could wash their hands.

A Pakistani court on Thursday overturned the murder conviction of a British national for the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl 18 years ago.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had been facing a death sentence. The Karachi court instead reduced his sentence to seven years, after hearing an appeal last month.

For more than two decades, trauma surgeon David Nott spent several weeks each year volunteering in some of the world's most dangerous conflict zones, including Syria, Afghanistan, Congo, Iraq, Yemen and Sarajevo. Now he's in London, applying some of what he learned in war zones and disaster areas as he treats patients with COVID-19.

A train engineer told police in Los Angeles that he intentionally crashed his locomotive at high speed near the USNS Mercy hospital ship in what seems to be a bizarre attempt to expose a perceived conspiracy.

Eduardo Moreno said he doesn't believe "the ship is what they say it's for," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles.

Updated at 10:38 a.m. ET

The number of new people claiming unemployment benefits totaled a staggering 6.648 million last week — doubling the record set a week earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday.

In the prior week, ending March 21, a revised 3.307 million initial claims were filed.

In just two weeks, nearly all of the jobs gained in the last five years have been lost.

This new world of social distancing has hit the restaurant industry particularly hard — and some of the biggest names in that world are scrambling for solutions.

Updated Thursday at 3 a.m. ET

In describing steps the military is taking to confront the coronavirus pandemic within its ranks, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Wednesday that some are calling for the U.S. military to cease operations.

"There seems to be this narrative out there that we should just shut down the entire United States military and address the problem that way. That's not feasible," said Esper during the White House's coronavirus task force briefing.

President Trump was asked Wednesday why his administration hasn't reopened the healthcare.gov exchanges to help bridge the insurance coverage gap for those who do not have private insurance and who do not qualify for Medicaid.

On this broadcast of The National Conversation, we answer your questions about the economy, face masks, pregnancy during the pandemic and the U.S. Census.

Mobile carrier T-Mobile announced today that it's officially completed a merger with Sprint. The deal, which was announced in 2018, means that the previously third and fourth largest wireless companies in the United States have now become the third — rivaling AT&T and Verizon. The new company, just called T-Mobile, is hoping to use its new pool of resources to expand its 5G capabilities, aiming to provide faster internet speeds to 99% of the population within the next six years.