we re beginning with chaos in the skies during what may be the busiest weekend so far this year for air travel. according to the flight tracking website flight aware more than 900 flights were canceled on sunday alone across the u.s. since friday there have been more than 3,000 flight cancellations. so the airlines are blaming weather problems and ongoing staff shortages, in particular a shortage of pilots, so can travelers expect more of this as we enter the peak summer travel season? cnn s aviation correspondent pete muntean is live at reagan national airport. a lot of unhappy travelers this morning, pete. reporter: no doubt, john. in fact, a lot of people probably still trying to get home even today after traveling this weekend. these new numbers are huge, but the cause of this really is not. we were reporting over and over again that airlines got a lot smaller over the pandemic and that has led to these massive flight crew shortages. the deck of cards really comes tum
what greg norman is saying here. by pointing at the pga and this guy and that guy he s distracting us from the suffering of the victims. those people are not taking saudi money, those people are being crushed by the saudi regime and their voices are the ones that need to be elevated not the voices of greg norman and phil mickelson because they are the ones undergoing great suffering at the hands of mohammed bin salman and his thuggish regime. what do you think of how the biden administration, how they have answered questions about the president s trip to saudi arabia and whether he would meet one-on-one with mohammed bin salman, what he s been promised prior to the trip? you know, i think their line of, oh, well, maybe we will see mohammed bin salman because he might be at the meeting is pretty disingenuous actually because of course everybody knows that president biden has been avoiding the meeting with mohammed bin salman for a year and a half and now he s folding because he want
specific program of sports watching which is mohammed bin salman s efforts to buy off sports franchises in order to distract people from his crimes like the murder of jamal khashoggi, the execution of gays which is ongoing. so it s one thing to do business with a regime that commits atrocities it s another thing to take a specific project that s meant for a specific sports watching effort and to endorse it because what greg norman is getting paid for is not just organizing a golf league it s getting paid for doing these press conferences, saying, oh, everyone is doing it, what s the big deal? it is a big deal. it s an escalation of the white washing of the saudi atrocities and an escalation of the payment that he s getting to participate. josh, how would you assess the difference between though greg norman handles these questions or in that case dodges the question and phil mickelson who, look, he received a lot of criticism for how he responded
their hypocrisy in all this it s so loud, it s deafening. joining us now washington post columnist and cnn political analyst josh rogin. what do you go to that, josh? he says it s hypocritical. this is just the latest effort by greg norman to do what we call sports washing which is to take money from a brutal regime and use it to legitimize that regime in the eyes of his fans and the world. the basic argument is the i am rubber you are glue defense which is most often found on school yards by 5 year olds. i m not the only one that took blood money. is he wrong? is there something different between what he s doing which is this entire saudi-backed league versus sponsors who have business in saudi arabia? yes. why? to be clear, taking blood money is always wrong so it doesn t justify people doing business with odious regimes but he s taking specific money for a