No one appears to be more surprised by Donald Trump’s endorsement of J.D. Vance for the Ohio Senate than the former president himself, who on Sunday appeared not to know the former Never-Trumper’s name. Speaking at a “Save America” rally in Nebraska in support of Charles Herbster, a Republican gubernatorial candidate accused of sexually assaulting eight women, Trump crowed to a crowd: “You know, we’ve endorsed Dr. Oz. We’ve endorsed—J.P., right? J.D. Mandel, and he’s doing great. They’re all doing good.” Trump appeared to be confusing the names of Ohio Republican primary candidates Josh Mandel, whom he hasn’t endorsed, and J.D. Vance, whom he (reluctantly) has. Mandel, a former Ohio State treasurer running on a pro-Trump platform, was long presumed the front-runner in a crowded primary field until the former president issued his endorsement of Vance last month. “In the Great State of Ohio, the candidate most qualified and ready to win in November is J.D. Vance,” Trump’s April 15 statement said. “We cannot play games. It is all about winning!” With the primary coming up on May 3, Trump may want to brush up with a rousing round of “Guess Who: Ohio Senate Edition.”
Tag Archives: Confusing
New Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Proves It’s Getting Confusing
I don’t need to tell you that the Call of Duty franchise is massively popular. Equally, you’re already well aware that the Modern Warfare sub-franchise within Call of Duty is pretty successful too. So it’s no surprise that we are getting another Call of Duty Modern Warfare, this one a sequel to the 2019 MW reboot. However, did you know that this is actually the 10th Modern Warfare game and the fourth one to end in a 2? What a world we live in…
Yesterday, after much speculation and a lot of rumors, Infinity Ward and Activision formally announced that the next entry in the long-running Call of Duty franchise would be titled Modern Warfare II. We even got a new logo for the upcoming shooter. It uh…it’s fine. It’s a fine logo. Moving on.
Now we don’t know much about this game, beyond it being a follow-up to the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot. I assume there will be guns. Some multiplayer modes. Probably a cool mission involving night-vision goggles or tanks. Y’know, Call of Duty shit. But while I can’t predict the future, at least not yet, I can look to the past and pull apart the crazy web of a franchise that Activision has created with the Modern Warfare series.
Here is the full list of Call of Duty games that use the Modern Warfare name. Some of these are mobile ports or handheld spin-offs, but they all officially shipped with “Modern Warfare” slapped on the front of the box, so in my book they count:
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
- Modern Warfare 2
- Modern Warfare 3
- Modern Warfare Reflex Edition
- Modern Warfare Mobilized
- Modern Warfare Remastered
- Modern Warfare 2 Remastered
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: Force Recon
- Modern Warfare (2019 Reboot)
- Modern Warfare II (Reboot Sequel)
Let’s try to clear this up. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is the sequel to Modern Warfare (2019), which was a reboot of Modern Warfare, and is not related to Modern Warfare Remastered or Modern Warfare 2 Remastered, both of which are part of the same sub-series within Call of Duty that includes Modern Warfare 2: Force Recon and Modern Warfare Mobilized, which is a DS port of Modern Warfare 2, but not the remastered edition but instead the original, which is not the new game just announced, which is a sequel to the rebooted Modern Warfare.
Wait, I’m more confused. Regardless, Modern Warfare II (Not Modern Warfare 2) will be out later this year across the usual platforms, I assume. It’s technically, by my count, the 47th Call of Duty game ever made. We all live in Hell.
Marjorie Taylor Greene mocked for confusing Nazi secret police with cold tomato soup
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been mocked online for a video in which she confuses the name of the Nazi secret police with a chilled tomato soup.
In the video, the Republican lawmaker from Georgia first calls the Washington, DC jail “the DC gulag” and then complains about “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police” spying on members of Congress.
As The Republican Accountability Project notes: “Gazpacho: a vegetable-based Spanish cold soup.”
“Gestapo: Nazi Germany’s secret police.”
Matt Fuller of The Daily Beast tweeted: “The Gazpacho Police: The most refreshing, but filling law enforcement agency.”
Former adviser to Mike Pence Alyssa Farah Griffin posted: “Thank goodness my wedding caterers knew the difference between gazpacho and the gestapo. coulda gotten weird.”
“Dear MTG, No Soup For You!” tweeted one person, referencing the classic Seinfeld character “the Soup Nazi”.
Commercial litigator Akiva Cohen wrote: “I join her in her fight against both the Gazpacho police and their collaborationist allies in the Vichyssoise.”
“Wait, gulag… or goulash? Better check with the gazpacho police,” posted The Maddow Blog.
“Coming next: ‘The Bouillabassi Stasi’” tweeted Bloomberg Opinion’s Robert George.
Actor Josh Malina wryly commented: “Stupidity, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.”
Ms Taylor Greene, famous for her support of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, Covid-19, and other issues, was temporarily suspended from Facebook recently, hours after being banned permanently from Twitter.
John Bowden contributed.
CES 2022 will introduce HDMI 2.1a, another confusing new spec
The HDMI standards are a mess. HDMI 2.1, in particular, is a uniquely frustrating mess, with haphazard support among TV manufacturers, cable makers, and devices that make setting up, say 120Hz gaming on a PS5 or Xbox Series X a uniquely harrowing experience.
Fortunately, the HDMI Forum is swooping in ahead of CES with its latest revision to the HDMI specification stack, HDMI 2.1a, which is here to make everything better and simpler.
… I’m kidding, of course. It’s gonna make things more complicated. It’s a new HDMI standard, what on earth did you expect?
Let’s start with the good: HDMI 2.1a is an upcoming revision to the HDMI 2.1 stack and adds a major new feature, Source-Based Tone Mapping, or SBTM. SBTM is a new HDR feature that offloads some of the HDR tone mapping to the content source (like your computer or set-top box) alongside the tone mapping that your TV or monitor is doing.
SBTM isn’t a new HDR standard — it’s not here to replace HDR10 or Dolby Vision. Instead, it’s intended to help existing HDR setups work better by letting the content source better optimize the content it passes to the display or by removing the need to have the user manually calibrate their screens for HDR by having the source device configure content for the specific display. Other use cases could be for when there’s a mix of content types, like for streamers (who could have an HDR game playing alongside a window of black and white text), displaying each area of content
The HDMI Forum does note that it’ll be possible for set-top box, gaming companies, and TV manufacturers to add support through firmware updates for HDMI 2.1a and its source-based tone mapping “depending upon their design.” Given the usual trajectory of TV spec updates, though, it seems virtually guaranteed that in the majority of cases, users won’t be getting the new features until they buy a new TV that supports HDMI 2.1a right out of the box (which, as of now, is precisely zero of them, given that the spec has yet to be fully released).
Now here’s the bad: like every other unique HDMI 2.1 feature, including variable refresh rates, automatic low latency connections, and the bandwidth necessary to offer things like 10K resolution or 120Hz refresh rates, SBTM will be an optional feature that manufacturers can support — but not something that they’re required to support.
That’s because the HDMI Forum and HDMI Licensing Administrator (the two organizations that define and license out HDMI standards, respectively) run the standards as a set that contains all the previous standards. As TFTCentral explains, according to the HDMI Licensing Administrator, now that HDMI 2.1 exists, there is no HDMI 2.0 standard anymore: all new HDMI 2.0 ports should be lumped into the HDMI 2.1 branding, despite not using any of the new features included in the “new” 2.1 standard.
HDMI 2.1a will function in a similar manner: once the standard is released, by the HDMI Licensing Administrator’s rules, all new ports will, in theory, be labeled HDMI 2.1a — but they won’t have to offer the new SBTM or even any HDMI 2.1 features. The HDMI Forum’s argument is that this is always how its standards have worked, and that optional features allow manufacturers to have flexibility in what functionality they offer (an entry-level set, for example, probably doesn’t need ports that support 8K 120Hz VRR gaming). And the group says companies are required to list what features their hardware supports so that it’s clear to customers what their hardware is capable of, beyond the number expectation.
That argument doesn’t really hold up, though. The whole point of standards is that they’re meant to simplify this sort of thing by, you know, standardizing it across devices — if you have to dig into a spec sheet to figure out if the specific refresh rate feature you want is supported on a new TV, why bother with the HDMI 2.x branding in the first place?
Even better, TFTCentral’s report notes that most manufacturers aren’t following the HDMI licensing recommendations for port labeling. At least for now, TV companies have for the most part still listed HDMI 2.0 ports as “HDMI 2.0” and reserved the HDMI 2.1 labeling for ports that actually support the newer features. But the crucial issue is that under the rules of the organization that licenses out the standard, these companies don’t have to do this — and technically, shouldn’t be labeling things like this, despite the fact that it’s more helpful to customers. This means that there is a chance less scrupulous (or simply more ignorant) companies could start to market HDMI 2.1 ports that don’t actually offer any 2.1 or 2.1a features.
That leaves the upcoming HDMI 2.1a standard and its new SBTM feature in much the same place as the rest of HDMI 2.1 and its feature set: a potentially helpful new feature that could make the content you watch and play look better, but that will likely require buying new hardware and cables, and which may not even be actually supported by devices that claim to have “HDMI 2.1a” ports. That means that as CES 2022 and its slew of TV announcements are about to arrive, the only way to make sure that you’re getting the HDMI features that you want is to — as always — make sure to read the fine print.
Artemis I Moon Mission Explained in a Few Easy Steps and Some Confusing Acronyms
With the preparation of both the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule in their final stages, NASA has begun taking a deeper look into how the entire make-it-or-break-it mission is supposed to go. Sure, it’s a dry run, with no actual humans on board, and with the ship meant just to circle the Moon and come back, but it is one that will let us know if everything is ready and safe for humans to begin their exploration efforts.
To help us all get a better understanding of how the Artemis I mission is going to go, NASA released some time ago something it calls the Artemis I map. We dusted it off from the agency’s archives and brought it back into focus as, in theory, only four months now separate us from the historic flight.
As a side note, before we dive into it, remember these are pretty much the same steps all subsequent Artemis missions to the Moon will have to go through (plus the actual landing), so take notes if you plan on really understanding how this goes.
As said, Artemis I is the first integrated flight test of the SLS-Orion combo. Like most other historic space missions, it would take its first step, the launch, from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center – that’s from where Apollo missions departed for the Moon.
SLS will lift the Orion thanks to the immense power provided by the core stage and two solid rocket boosters. Once the needed altitude is reached, the SLS becomes useless, and this is where the second step comes in, the jettison of the rocket, boosters, fairings, and launch abort system.
The cutoff and separation of the core stage will take place, and the Orion will be on its own, in Earth orbit. This is where a perigee raise maneuver meant to place the capsule into position comes in.
Up next is the systems check and solar panel adjustments, operations that take place while the Orion is still circling Earth. If everything checks out, mission control down at the Kennedy Space Center will move to a trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn of the Orion’s engines.
This procedure should take about 20 minutes, and will put the spaceship on a course to the Moon. After the ship is committed, interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) separation and disposal take place.
Next on the list are outbound trajectory correction (OTC) burns, conducted as necessary to steer the capsule to its target. Then comes the actual flight to the satellite, something NASA calls outbound powered flyby (OPF). The flight should take Orion to within 60 nautical miles from the surface, opening the doors for orbit insertion.
After this is achieved, the ship will perform something called distant retrograde orbit (DRO), moving around the Moon one and a half times at a distance of 38,000 nautical miles. Once the orbits are completed, Orion will start heading back to Earth by performing something called return powered flyby (RPF).
On the way back, as it did on the way out, the ship will probably have to perform return trajectory correction (RTC) burns to keep it aimed at our planet.
As it approaches Earth, Orion will split, separating the crew module from the service one. The crew module will enter the Earth’s atmosphere (something NASA calls EI, or Earth Interface) and splash down in the Pacific Ocean, from where it will be recovered by the U.S. Navy. The entire mission duration is estimated at between 26 to 42 days, which is a hell of a lot more than Apollo.
And that’s how you make space exploration history. In a more compact way, the entire mission should go a bit like this:
Launch – drop boosters – drop core stage – perigee raise maneuver – in-orbit systems checks – lunar injection burn – cryogen stage separation – trip to the moon – lunar orbit insertion – spin around the Moon – leave Moon orbit – make trip back – adjust course as needed – separate crew module – enter atmosphere – splashdown – get saved.
Or, if you prefer acronyms:
Launch – drop boosters – drop core stage – perigee raise maneuver – in-orbit systems checks – TLI – ICPS – OTC – OPF – DRO – DRO – RPF – RTC – separate crew module – EI – splashdown – get saved.
CDC plagued by confusing messaging, critics say
WASHINGTON — On Oct. 22, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top medical adviser to President Biden, sat for a CNN interview that touched on coronavirus booster shots. The host of the program, John Berman, asked Fauci if people should seek out booster shots of the same brand of vaccine they’d initially received.
“It’s generally recommended that you get the booster that is the original regimen that you got in the first place,” Fauci said. He conceded that mixing different types of vaccines was allowable but reiterated that brand loyalty was best.
About two hours after that interview aired, the White House pandemic response team held a briefing for the press. A reporter asked Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the same question about mixing vaccines. “We will not articulate a preference,” Walensky said, seeming to contradict what Fauci had just said on CNN.
He had, in fact, added that there was no danger in mixing vaccine types, but a casual observer might have been led to believe that the federal government didn’t know its own plan. “I’ve been a nurse for 40 years and I am confused,” Donna Gallipeau wrote that day on Twitter, describing how she had gone into a Publix supermarket for a booster, only to be turned away.
The disconnect between Fauci and Walensky was a minor matter. But critics say that the CDC has struggled to communicate clearly to the American people the fine points of late-stage pandemic policy, in particular when it comes to mask guidance and the need for booster shots.
“It is a challenge — and can be challenging — to communicate clearly,” a CDC official conceded to Yahoo News, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to express what the official described as their own views on the pandemic. “I think we tried our best to address the nuance,” the official added.
There has been marked improvement in consistency, to be sure. President Biden does not routinely contradict the CDC as Donald Trump did in unpredictable press briefings and interviews. At the same time, plenty of disagreements remain, each one of them a potential land mine for the CDC: Are booster shots even necessary? If boosters are necessary, how does that effort square with the ongoing push for millions to get their initial vaccine jabs? What about masks for fully vaccinated people? For that matter, what does fully vaccinated mean, now that some people have been boosted?
Aside from these specific questions is a broader one that, some believe, needs to be frankly addressed: Is the pandemic becoming endemic, or will we be in a state of high emergency for many months to come? That is, are we finally near the end?
These questions play out in full view, at press briefings, on cable news and during Zoom meetings of advisory boards. And though the CDC is only one of several agencies involved in pandemic decision making, it is the one tasked with translating scientific research for the public, making sense of the inevitable scientific ambiguity or inconclusiveness.
The CDC is failing in that regard, critics say. The headline of a New York Times opinion essay by Zeynep Tufekci, a University of North Carolina sociologist who has gained a large following for her coronavirus-related observations, put the matter bluntly: “The C.D.C. Needs to Stop Confusing the Public.”
A lot of the confusion began with a July 4 outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., that seemed to suggest that the Delta variant was rapidly proliferating across the United States and had a greater ability to infect vaccinated people than previously thought. In response to Provincetown, Walensky reinstituted an indoor masking guidance, which the CDC had lifted in mid-May. Now even the vaccinated were advised to wear masks indoors again. The CDC reimposed a guidance for masking in schools, as well.
Walensky and other top public health officials labored to remind a newly frightened populace that the vaccines remained exceptionally effective, at both preventing infection in the first place and keeping people out of the hospital. “As we look at our hospitalizations and as we look at our deaths, they are overwhelmingly unvaccinated people,” Walensky said during an Aug. 5 press briefing.
Yet the Delta outbreak required that high-vaccination communities return to the kinds of measures they’d been taking before the availability of vaccines. A CDC public affairs officer told Yahoo News that the agency stood by “a layered prevention strategy, including vaccination and mask wearing in areas of substantial and high community transmission. These measures, which we often talk about in tandem and as complementary, are proven to slow the spread of the virus.”
Pro-Trump personalities in conservative media outlets seized on the return of indoor masking in late July to argue that the medical establishment had exaggerated the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines. Many of these anchors and hosts have never forgiven public health officials for the initial reversal on masks in the early days of the pandemic, when masking went abruptly from unnecessary to mandatory, with little explanation accompanying the change.
“There’s still an awful lot we don’t know. These are, after all, experimental drugs, and they’re behaving like it,” Tucker Carlson of Fox News said in a monologue rife with exaggerations and untruths. “The bottom line is that a huge number of vaccinated people are getting COVID, and some of them are getting very sick, even dying.”
In fact, very few people die from COVID-19 after having been vaccinated. “We put vaccines on a pedestal,” the CDC official acknowledges. “They are not going to prevent every single infection.”
Former Baltimore Health Commissioner Leana Wen told Yahoo News in an email that “it would be helpful if the CDC can specify what conditions masks are no longer needed — for example, if everyone in a workplace or school is vaccinated and tested, or if everyone is vaccinated and the community transmission is below a certain level.”
Wen added that doing so would “set expectations for employers and school administrators, assist families and friends who want to get together safely and add an additional incentive for vaccination.”
By the end of the summer, there was not only Delta to contend with but increasing worries that vaccine protection was waning, necessitating booster shots for people who had received their second doses in early 2021. Those worries were compounded by a spike in Israel, which had been the first nation in the world to vaccinate its population in early 2021. Now its vaccine firewall appeared to be petering out.
“The time to lay out a plan for COVID-19 boosters is now,” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in mid-August. “Recent data makes clear that protection against mild and moderate disease has decreased over time.”
Some federal regulators disagreed, with two top scientists at the Food and Drug Administration resigning over what they described as pressure over approving boosters for the general population, an action they felt the science — to which the Biden administration had vowed unfailing adherence — did not justify. Eventually, a key CDC advisory panel said that only immunocompromised people and those over the age of 65 should receive booster shots — only to be overruled by Walensky, who said that some people exposed to elevated risk by their occupations should also be eligible.
Some medical experts argued that it was wrong to shift the government’s focus away from the unvaccinated — who continued to account for the vast majority of new infections — to those who had been vaccinated but might want or need the protection afforded by a third shot (or, in the case of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, a second one). The booster talk muddles the conversation, these critics charge.
“We have a really effective vaccine, and it is like saying that it is not working, and it is working.” the Ohio State pediatrician Pablo J. Sanchez said during the booster debate.
In a statement to Yahoo News, the CDC public affairs officer said that the agency’s “recent recommendations on boosters has not distracted from the critical work of ensuring that unvaccinated people take the first step and get an initial COVID-19 vaccine.”
At the heart of the debate is the question of just how close we are to the end of the pandemic. Whereas the full return to normal life seemed close in May, it seems impossibly distant now. Asked in mid-October if the nation were “turning the corner” on the Delta surge, Walensky both acknowledged and downplayed the drop in infection rates, hospitalizations and deaths.
“We absolutely need to stay focused on continuing to get COVID under control around the country, especially as we head into the fall and winter season — respiratory virus season,” Walensky said, sounding very much as if it were the winter of 2020, not the fall of 2021.
The White House no longer discusses needing to hit a specific vaccination benchmark, despite touting such benchmarks for much of the spring and early summer. The talk of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” has also subsided, despite that still being an accurate, if bracing, framing of the current state of affairs.
Vaccinated people may benefit from booster shots, but the nation would benefit as a whole if the unvaccinated people got their first shot. Walensky knows this, of course, but her powers as a public health official are limited. Many of the vaccine holdouts are in pro-Trump areas of the country, where some conservatives refuse to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy as president. The White House can’t write them off, but it also can’t persuade them. Resistance to coronavirus vaccines has become a core part of many people’s political identity.
The intractability of that divide helps explain why vaccinated people are still wearing masks. Some continue to do so outside, presumably as a show of how seriously they still take the pandemic. And yet more than 60 million eligible Americans have not been vaccinated at all. Reaching them is urgent, but difficult.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, a University of California at San Francisco oncologist who has emerged as a widely followed pandemic contrarian, believes that boosters and masks distract from the sole factor that will help end the pandemic: first-time vaccinations. “Everything else is diminishing returns,” Prasad told Yahoo News in a recent interview.
“I find their messaging, and their strategy, problematic and even to some degree self-defeating.” Prasad said of the CDC’s approach, which he argues fails to address the main challenges at this stage of the pandemic.
Walensky had been inching towards the goal of returning to normal throughout May and June. The feeling of “impending doom” she had expressed in March waned as vaccination rates rose throughout the spring.
June saw COVID-19 deaths per day dip below 300 for the first time in a year. “We were all hopeful that either things would settle into a low simmer or really kind of peter out,” the CDC official said.
Then came Delta.
By the time Walensky reinstituted the mask mandate, many vaccinated Americans had been ready to get on with their lives, only to be yanked back into a state of emergency. At the same time, Republican governors in Florida, Texas and other states mounted a new campaign against masks and vaccines, reviving culture wars that had appeared to be receding only weeks before. Some Republican governors and state legislators worked to ban local governments from implementing mask and vaccine mandates meant to blunt Delta’s spread.
“We are in a perfect storm of viral changes and behavioral changes,” University of Texas biologist Lauren Ancel Meyers told the Washington Post in the first week of September, as daily deaths jumped back up to 1,500, the grim but predictable result of a wave centered on the Southeast and lower Midwest, where the Delta variant raged without evident hindrance, helped along by low vaccination rates, lack of mask mandates and, in some cases, the rise of misinformation.
Inside the CDC, there is a feeling of exhaustion and exasperation, both with an unpredictable pandemic and the persistent stream of misinformation, much of it coming from conservative media, that has frustrated attempts at clarity, nuance and flexibility.
“Everything is just really loaded,” the CDC official said. “Everybody’s tired of this.”
Even as the Delta variant subsides, Walensky has made no suggestion that mask guidances will be revised, at least on the federal level. She has made clear that the CDC will continue to recommend masking in schools, too, even as children between the ages of 5 and 11 stand to receive their inoculations in November.
“We are acting like it was before we had vaccines,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California at San Francisco, in an interview with Yahoo News.
Walensky has said she is worried about the arrival of colder weather, which could lead to yet another spike in cases as people spend more time indoors and gather for winter holidays. It may simply be easier to stay the course than to keep revising CDC guidance. “Look at the U.K,” said Dr. Kavita Patel, referencing a surge now building across the United Kingdom. “She does not want that,” Patel said of Walensky.
The danger is that people will conclude that nothing will change, which will give them little incentive to follow guidance, whether for masking, vaccination or other measures, like indoor occupancy limits.
In a late October cable news appearance, Walensky did allow that Halloween would be safe this year. “Put on those costumes, stay outside and enjoy your trick-or-treating,” she said. This time, her message echoed neatly what Fauci had said in mid-October: “Go out there and enjoy Halloween,” he said, adding that vaccinations would make the holiday even safer.
Maybe it wasn’t much, but it was still progress.
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Read more from Yahoo News:
Travelers’ Frustration Mounts at ‘Confusing’ British Covid Restrictions
For the government’s last assessment, on July 14, industry experts had expected countries such as Italy, Germany and Canada to be moved to the “green list,” and Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to be upgraded to “amber” from “red,” based on the countries’ case numbers and vaccination rates. But only Bulgaria and Hong Kong were upgraded to green. No country has been moved off the red list since the traffic light system started.
The government has rejected criticism of its cautious approach, saying that it is necessary to protect the country’s successful vaccination program while it grapples with a new surge in Covid cases, which is driven by the highly contagious Delta variant.
“Our international travel policy is guided by one overwhelming priority — public health,” a spokesman for the Department of Transport, speaking anonymously in line with government policy, said in an email. “Traffic light allocations are based on a range of factors including genomic surveillance capability, transmission risk and variants of concern.”
Britain’s travel operators have called for an immediate overhaul of the system, saying that the lack of transparency and sudden changes have wreaked havoc among consumers and businesses and could put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk.
More than 300,000 jobs were lost in the British travel sector last year, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, and a further 218,000 jobs are at serious risk if international travel remains restricted, it said.
“While the domestic holiday market is reaping the benefits of ‘Freedom Day,’ with staycations booming, we are not out of the woods yet,” said Virginia Messina, a senior vice president of the W.T.T.C.
“International travel remains either off limits or frustratingly difficult for many,” she added. “This means the door to significant overseas travel still remains effectively closed.”