After working weeks without paychecks, most Transportation Security Administration agents are finally getting some back pay.
Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said most TSA agents received a “retroactive paycheck” on Monday that covered “pay periods 4 and 5.”
Bis added that the department is working to get pay for half of period 3.
A TSA agent working in the southeast confirmed to Business Insider that he received his compensation for pay periods 4 and 5.
TSA agents have been working without pay due to the ongoing partial government shutdown, which started nearly six weeks ago. It’s resulted in some TSA agents struggling to pay their bills, as well as chaos at some airports, where agents calling out of work contributed to hourslong security lines.
“Working without pay forced more than 500 officers to leave TSA, and thousands were forced to call out,” Bis said in a statement on Monday.
She added that some TSA agents could face delays in receiving their paychecks due to various reasons, including processing times at financial institutions or issues with direct deposit.
On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to pay TSA agents the compensation they were owed.
However, it’s unclear when TSA agents can expect to be paid again, as the partial government shutdown is ongoing.
As of Monday, some airports were still experiencing long lines at TSA security checkpoints, while wait times at some airports had eased.
This interview is based on a conversation with Emily Susman, 42, a chef and cookbook author from Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I don’t blame anyone else for my alcoholism — it was all on me — but I grew up in a family where beer, wine, and liquor were part of the culture.
I’m half Lebanese, and every holiday and other social occasion centered on eating and drinking.
At 14, my grandfather handed me a vodka and tonic and said, “This is the way to drink responsibly, surrounded by your family in the safety of home.”
I dealt with stress by reaching for the bottle
In college, I joined a sorority where we partied hard. During rush season, our older sisters presented us with bottles of hard liquor covered with ribbons.
I was never far away from alcohol, whether I was working for my uncle as a bartender or establishing my own successful restaurant and catering firm in Dallas in my thirties.
But the bad habits really set in after I sold the business and started working with my husband, Drake, 43, at his gas-and-oil brokerage. I was in charge of the books and dealt with the ongoing financial stress by reaching for the bottle.
Susman was an emotional drinker who spent an average $30 a day on alcohol.
Courtesy of Emily Susman.
It got to the point where I was getting through a large bottle of vodka every few days. I’d hide the evidence in the pantry because I didn’t want Drake to see how often it was happening.
I’d use any excuse to drink, whether it was to celebrate the good times or commiserate with myself when something went wrong.
The tell-tale signs were there. I was overweight from all the wasted calories and my habit of eating more when I was drunk. I’d experience crushing hangovers, get the shakes, and vomit the morning after.
My family started to get on my case. “This is a problem for you,” they would say. “You need to get your act together.” Every time, I’d make an excuse. I’ll tell them that I’d cut down after Thanksgiving or give up entirely on New Year’s Day.
I tried fad diets and didn’t exercise
Inevitably, I’d be back drinking by Blake’s birthday in the middle of January.
Things got even worse when the pandemic began in March 2020. I was often confined to the house and passed the time drinking. I disregarded the needs of my body by not exercising and trying fad diets that weren’t sustainable.
Then, a month into 2021, I awoke from a particularly bad episode and stared at myself in the mirror. At 5ft 8in, I was 230 pounds and a size 16. I bawled my eyes out because I was so miserable.
Susman before and after she quit drinking and lost almost half of her body weight.
Courtesy of Emily Susman
Something changed. I came downstairs and said to Blake, “I can’t do this anymore.” I sought therapy and had my last drink in early February.
I realized the all-or-nothing approach that fueled my alcoholism could be redirected to something positive.
It was a simple process without frills. I took pride in reaching each milestone: five days, then 30 days, then 120 days, and so on.
My weight-loss journey was slow and steady
Distractions made all the difference, whether I was using adult coloring books, painting with acrylics, or even sucking on lollipops when I craved sugar or the oral fixation of drinking.
Best of all, I reignited my love of cooking. I relied on my professional culinary background to make nutritious, balanced meals, which broke the cycle of binge-eating, restricting, and guilt.
My sensible diet, combined with simple exercises such as walking and strength training, helped me lose 100 pounds. I did it slowly and surely — losing around one pound a week — and now weigh 126 pounds.
Susman with her husband, Blake, and their Pomeranians, Bonnie and Clyde.
Courtesy of Emily Susman.
I’m a size zero to two and no longer hide my figure in baggy clothing. I’ve been sober for five years.
Another benefit is the amount of money I’ve saved. I found an app that took my average spending on alcohol of $30 a day to calculate that I’ve saved nearly $55,500 since 2021.
Meanwhile, I launched my company, Emma Claire’s Kitchen, the same year I got sober. It offers practical, tasty recipes and products, such as spices and, soon, mocktail powders.
I’m so grateful to my husband and my family
I’m a completely different person from the wreck I saw in the mirror that terrible morning. I love and value myself and am so grateful to Blake and the rest of my family for staying by my side.
It’s scary to think that I nearly lost everything — including my life — to alcohol. I’ll never go back to what passed as an existence, just getting through the day.
Lufthansa can finally start making money on its Boeing 787 Dreamliners after a certification debacle left one of its most lucrative cabins largely empty for months.
The German flag carrier said on Monday that it will begin selling tickets for its Allegris business class on the 787. Allegris, Lufthansa’s signature cabin concept, spans economy, premium economy, business, and first class, but the business class rollout has been particularly tricky.
The program first launched on the Airbus A350 in May 2024, with the cabin spanning the entire plane. The first Allegris-equipped 787 followed in October 2025, but certification of business class dragged on due to the cabin’s complexity: there are five staggered seat configurations in a single airplane cabin — some with doors or more legroom, others with extra-long beds.
The first-row window seats have extra workspace. Some window seats don’t have doors but are billed as being more private.
Lufthansa
This is because the Dreamliner’s geometry — including a slightly tighter usable footprint and different fuselage contouring compared to the A350 — made it harder to demonstrate to regulators that passengers could evacuate quickly from every seat, whether staggered, partially enclosed, or fully cocooned, in an emergency.
The result? For months, only four of the 28 business class seats could be sold — the front-row Business Class Suites — leaving the remaining 24 empty. Business class is a cash cow for airlines, and by flying most of the cabin empty as competitors pour investments into their own premium seats, Lufthansa was essentially leaving money on the table.
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It has been a particularly costly headache for a carrier in the midst of a multi-year turnaround plan to restore profitability after years of financial pressure from frequent maintenance, aircraft shortages, rising operating costs, and labor strikes.
Lufthansa even opted for an already-certified business-class seat to retrofit onto its Airbus A380s rather than risk another prolonged and costly certification process.
But the saga is nearing the finish line. Beginning April 15, Lufthansa plans to carry passengers in 25 business-class seats on its 787s, with three remaining blocked in the second row of the cabin.
Bookings are open, though it’s unclear whether the news indicates the seats have been fully certified or if that’s just Lufthansa’s expected timeline.
Lufthansa said “Classic” seats — one of the Allegris categories available — are free to secure with the premium fare.
The others require an extra fee: this includes the first-row suites, the “Privacy” seat next to the window, the “Extra Space” seat with more legroom, and the “Extra Long Bed” with an over seven-foot sleeping surface.
The three second-row seats that are blocked — and not yet available for booking — are two privacy seats and an extra-legroom seat.
One of the large, door-equipped Allegris suites on Lufthansa’s A350. It has a larger business-class cabin than the 787 and also features a luxe, ultra-private first class.
LUKAS BARTH/AFP via Getty Images
Lufthansa flies eight Allegris-equipped Dreamliners and expects to have 29 by the end of 2027.
They are set to first fly from Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro, Bogota, Cape Town, Shanghai, Hyderabad, Hong Kong, and Austin; New York-JFK and Los Angeles join the roster in June, followed by Delhi in July.
As part of Lufthansa’s greater multibillion-dollar fleet overhaul plan, Allegris is also being fit onto the airline’s existing A350s and Boeing 747-8s, as well as its future, yet-to-be-certified Boeing 777Xs.
A similar spacing issue on the 747 double-deckers’ upper level means it will have a split business class: the lower deck will have Allegris, while upstairs will feature the plane’s original cabin.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 61-year-old Doug Beachy, a Cincinnati-based business owner who bought a vacation home with Pacaso in 2022. Pacaso is a platform for fractional ownership of luxury vacation homes. The company allows multiple individuals to co-own a second home and share ownership of the property. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been married to my wife, Jamie, for 37 years. We have four married children and 16 grandchildren. Our oldest grandchild is 12, and our youngest isn’t quite one yet.
Once our kids started having children, they all moved back closer to home in Cincinnati, where we live. We own a five-bedroom home that’s about 4,000 square feet. We’re empty nesters, so there’s plenty of space for us, but when the whole family is over, everyone is on top of each other.
We’ve converted one room into a kids’ playroom and another into a nursery, and we have a finished basement where the kids can play, but family gatherings are still a bit hectic.
In the past, to bring everyone together, we would either rent a large beach house or book a cabin-style retreat in the woods here in Ohio.
We did that about every other year because it’s hard to coordinate everyone’s schedules — especially with grandkids in school — and seasonal rates for a large home are expensive. It was a big chunk of money for just a week’s experience.
We bought a vacation home
Hilton Head Island has always been a fun family destination for us. It’s an island in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, just outside Savannah, Georgia, with about 12 miles of pristine beaches.
There’s so much to do here from a family activity standpoint, in addition to simply soaking up the sun and going to the beach — it’s just a great place to relax and unwind.
Homes here can be expensive, though. The average home is priced in the upper $700,000s, and properties can sell for as much as $10 million. For a while, I thought about buying a second, larger home here, but I’m not retired yet, and I realized that putting that much money into a house where I don’t live full time just didn’t make sense.
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
EyeEm Mobile GmbH/Getty Images
In early 2022, I started exploring different homeownership options, including shared or fractional ownership. That’s when I found Pacaso online and saw they had some homes available in Hilton Head.
We ultimately settled on an about 5,000-square-foot home with six spacious suite-like bedrooms — five with king-sized beds, large walk-in closets, and private bathrooms, and one with several bunk beds for the children — and seven and a half bathrooms.
As you can imagine, taking 20 people out to eat all the time is not exactly fun, so we wanted a house with a large, well-stocked kitchen. Our kitchen almost occupies the entire second floor and, by my last count, it can seat 19 or 20 people. It also has a beautiful ocean view.
Co-ownership was the best fit for us
When we bought the home, it was valued at over $5 million. We own a 1/8 share — we made a 50% down payment on our portion of the home — and there are seven other owners, whom we don’t know.
Our friends will say, “It sounds like a timeshare.” But I think it’s much more transparent than a traditional timeshare. There are no extra markups or mystery fees added on top.
I also feel that, unlike a timeshare, which can leave you feeling stuck and lose value over time, this is a long-term investment. Of course, everything depends on the real-estate market, but I feel fairly confident this is an appreciating asset.
The Beachy vacation home.
Courtesy of Pacaso
I think going this route, instead of buying another second or vacation home, has eliminated all the concerns I had about upsizing — like having to maintain the home ourselves or deal with high HOA fees. We wanted a place we could share with family, and this setup works well for us at this stage of our lives.
We spend more time together as a family
Pacaso provides a house manager who handles everything. It’s essentially a concierge service — the home is clean when we arrive and fully stocked with towels, linens, soaps, and disposable items, such as paper towels and paper plates.
When we go, the only thing we really need to think about is what food we want to buy, depending on what we plan to cook — and we have a lot of good cooks in the family.
We have the home reserved for 44 nights a year, and we use nearly all of that time. Not everyone in the family is there for every stay, but they come as they please.
Our family gets together more often now, about twice a year. In the summer, during the high season when the kids are out of school, we typically reserve the house for a couple of weeks at a time.
Beachy and his granddaughter.
Courtesy of Doug Beachy
The grandkids look forward to each trip and talk about it all the time. Many of them are around the same age, and they love the opportunity to spend time with their cousins.
The house came with six beach cruiser bikes, which is perfect because there are plenty of biking trails on the island. It also has a private pool and hot tub, and the grandkids love that it’s fully stocked with games and puzzles.
Our favorite things to do with them are spending time in the pool, watching the sunrise, and hanging out on the beach. We also take a lot of bike rides and play pickleball. We just love how much more quality time we’re spending together as a family.
Before December, Ed Bambas was among the sizable swath of older Americans still working with retirement nowhere in sight. Then, he met content creator Samuel Weidenhofer.
Weidenhofer, who has 12 million followers across social media, set up a GoFundMe fundraiser for Bambas on Monday to help him leave his job at a Detroit supermarket and retire.
“I’m opening a fundraiser to help Ed live the life he deserves to finally give him some relief, comfort and the peace of mind that comes from knowing he can enjoy his later years without constant struggle,” Weidenhofer wrote on GoFundMe.
The fundraiser had a $1 million goal.As of Sunday, over 65,000 people have donated, reaching a total of almost $2 million.
In a video shared to Weidenhofer’s social media accounts, Bambas said he’s an 88-year-old veteran who works at the supermarket five days a week, eight hours a day. Bambas said he retired from General Motors in 1999, but lost his pension after the company went bankrupt in 2009.
Bambas told Weidenhofer that his wife, who died seven years ago, had been sick around the time his pension stopped. Without his pension, Bambas had to re-enter the workforce.
Nearly 550,000 Americans 80 and older are still working, according to 2023 US Census data.
As part of Business Insider’s “80 over 80” series, reporters interviewed nearly 200 workers over 80 — in addition to conducting surveys and receiving emails — in an effort to understand why.
While some older Americans are driven by a personal desire to work, others take on jobs to combat financial insecurity. Some workers over 80 told Business Insider that they use their income to supplement their Social Security and other retirement payments. They fear that without the income, they can’t afford the cost of living.
Weidenhofer shared a video of Bambas receiving his GoFundMe check on Friday.
“It’s something dreams are made of,” Bambas said in the video.
Bambas also thanked everyone who donated to the fundraiser.
“I cannot express in any words how thankful I am to all the people,” he said.
I grew up in a house where coordinated family photos were the norm. My mom would line up the four of us kids in matching outfits — one year, freshly pressed sailor suits; the next, velvet dresses, with my brother in a matching tie. Every stray hair would be tucked in or sprayed down.
We were bribed (or more like lightly threatened) to smile with our eyes open, something that’s more difficult than it should be when you’re a kid who just wants to be DONE.
Then came the card — glossy, cheerful, and perfectly posed — the proof that our family had it all together, at least for one photo.
I kept the tradition going with my own kids
So when I had my own kids, I continued this tradition without question. Every year, I’d book a family photo session well in advance of Thanksgiving, hoping that temperamental Chicago weather wouldn’t put a damper on our outdoor photos.
I’d scour Pinterest for outfit inspiration, aiming for a coordinated but not totally matching vibe. The goal was to capture one frame of perfection — a photo worthy of the hundreds of envelopes I’d soon address by hand.
The author continued the tradition of holiday cards with her family.
Courtesy of the author
But the reality behind those photos was far from picture-perfect. There were bribes of hot chocolate and complaints about itchy sweaters. I’d smile through gritted teeth while the photographer tried to get everyone looking in the same direction. By the end, the kids were shivering, my husband was done, and I was wondering why we put ourselves through this every year.
And that was just phase one.
Once we had a “good enough” photo, I’d spend hours designing the cards online, tweaking fonts, choosing layouts, and agonizing over whether to include a photo of the whole family or the cuter one of just the kids.
Then came the addressing, stamping, and mailing — usually squeezed in between wrapping gifts, decorating the house, and trying to keep the ambiance somewhat festive. What was meant to be a joyful holiday tradition had turned into yet another item on my never-ending to-do list.
Quitting holiday cards lifted a huge weight
Two years ago, I finally asked myself, “Why am I doing this?”
When I couldn’t come up with a satisfying answer beyond “because we’ve always done it,” I decided to stop. No family photo shoot. No card design. No envelopes or stamps.
The author feels her family photos feel more authentic now.
Courtesy of the author
That first year without holiday cards felt strange at first, like I’d forgotten to do something important. December rolled around, and my mailbox filled with cheerful greetings from family and friends, each one featuring those perfectly posed families and braggy year-end recaps. For a fleeting moment, I felt a pang of guilt, like I’d dropped out of a club I’d been part of my entire adult life.
But then the feeling passed. What replaced it was a deep sense of relief.
Without the looming card deadline, December suddenly opened up. I had more time to actually enjoy the holidays — to bake sugar cookies in the shape of stars and drive through neighborhoods adorned in holiday lights. The pressure to present our family in a certain way — smiling, coordinated, festive — simply disappeared.
Now our photos (and holidays) feel more authentic
Instead of orchestrating a posed photo, we started taking more spontaneous pictures: messy, candid, real. A selfie at a local holiday market. A blurry shot of everyone laughing in front of our silver faux Christmas tree. A snowy mountain scene after a day of skiing. These pictures weren’t perfect, but they were us. And when I looked at them later, they didn’t remind me of how stressed I felt trying to get everyone to cooperate — they reminded me of how much fun we actually had.
The author and her family.
Courtesy of the author
Something else unexpected also happened: no one seemed to miss the cards. The people who truly wanted to connect reached out in other ways. It made me realize that keeping in touch didn’t have to involve postage and cardstock.
Letting go of the holiday card tradition didn’t make the end of the year any less special — it made them more so. It gave me permission to simplify and remember that the memories that matter most aren’t ones you send in the mail. They’re the ones you make together, no matching outfits required.
Hidden off the US Western shore, beneath the Pacific Ocean, is the Cascadia Subduction Zone. This fault is capable of generating earthquakes larger than magnitude 8 that can be felt hundreds of miles away, and a recent study has pinpointed the most dangerous segment along its 700-mile-long stretch.
The results will help scientists assess earthquake and tsunami risk for this region, including one particularly vulnerable state: Washington.
“This has been a subduction zone that’s been under-studied with the kinds of tools that we have available now,” geophysicist Suzanne Carbotte, a Bruce Heezen Lamont research professor at Columbia University, told Business Insider.
Armed with state-of-the-art technology that can probe deep beneath the ocean floor and create images, Carbotte and her team produced the first comprehensive survey of Cascadia’s complex, below-ground composition. They published their work today in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.
The researchers discovered that Cascadia is broken up into at least four segments, which had been suggested by previous studies but never confirmed, Carbotte said.
The picture “before our study was a smooth surface with no obvious relationship to this segmentation,” Carbotte said. “But that smooth surface was based on very, very sparse data. And in places, no data.”
This new picture provides a much more accurate view of Cascadia’s complexity, and of the risk it poses to the US West Coast.
How the Cascadia Subduction Zone causes earthquakes
In the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the Juan de Fuca plate is slowly subducting under North America. As these two tectonic plates move against each other, it could trigger a giant earthquake.
USGS/Wikimedia commons
Cascadia is essentially the border between two tectonic plates: the massive North American continent, and the smaller Juan de Fuca plate.
The Juan de Fuca plate is gradually sliding (or subducting) eastward beneath the North American plate, which creates a megathrust fault: a place where tectonic plates move against each other in a dangerous way.
The stress that’s driving the Juan de Fuca plate under North America is continuous, Carbotte explained, but the plate’s movement is not. Sometimes, it gets stuck.
When locking up like this, the plates can only absorb stress for so long before they finally rupture, triggering an earthquake, she said.
This is what scientists think happened about 300 years ago when the zone ruptured offshore and the resulting earthquake formed a massive tsunami that slammed into the coast of Japan.
While Cascadia hasn’t produced a great earthquake since 1700, it’s only a matter of time.
Scientists can’t predict earthquakes but they can get a better idea of risk by understanding the fault’s complex structure deep below ground.
Carbotte and her team have moved the needle significantly on that front.
Zeroing in on risk
A partially collapsed building in Gaziantep, Turkey, after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the city. The Cascadia Subduction Zone can produce even larger, more dangerous quakes.
Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Carbotte and her team found lots of variability in the megathrust’s structure, which likely means that the hazard varies at different locations along the fault, said Janet Watt, research geophysicist at US Geological Survey Santa Cruz who was not involved in the study.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer, but it gives us an appreciation for that complexity,” Watt, speaking about Carbotte’s results, told BI.
Additionally, understanding that Cascadia is broken up into segments is key to assessing earthquake hazard, Watt said. That’s because this segmentation means that the megathrust could rupture in pieces, rather than all at once. This could impact the size of future earthquakes, because shorter ruptures trigger smaller quakes.
What’s more, the unique characteristics of each of these segments means each one poses a different level of risk. Another key finding from Carbotte’s study is that one of Cascadia’s segments is probably more likely to produce a great earthquake than the others.
This particularly dangerous segment essentially spans the coast of Washington, running from the northern Oregon border to southern British Columbia. It’s flatter and smoother than the other segments, meaning it could trigger the largest earthquakes, Carbotte told BI in an email.
Plus, this segment likely extends further into the US than the others, which is bad news for the state of Washington. If this segment ruptured, Washington’s coastal communities could face the most extreme shaking, although the quake would extend far beyond state borders, Carbotte wrote.
Knowing that could help this state prepare for the worst-case scenario. “I think this is an example of a study that will lead to action in the future in terms of building resiliency along the coastline. And it’ll be exciting to see where the science takes us,” Watt said.
Carbotte’s research emerges in the context of many other studies that are currently working to bring our picture of Cascadia into sharper focus.
“This is one particular study of a larger community effort that is going on to [understand] the system, and then communicate what that means to communities on the coastline and inland, and how we can actually turn science into action,” Watt said.
