Cancellations

One of the arguments made for the 2010 healthcare law was that it attacked the problem of underinsurance -- the threadbare policies that offered such poor coverage, they allowed millions of Americans to be bankrupted by medical bills. Now, however, Democrats are confronting the fact that the law they wrote is forcing thousands of people to lose their current insurance plans because the coverage doesn't meet the new standards. It's a perfect example of the road to political hell being paved by good intentions.

The slew of storms that has pummeled the nation's Midwest and East Coast this winter has resulted in some horrible numbers: 77,000 canceled flights carrying nearly 6 million passengers so far this year. An additional 43 million people were on delayed flights. At Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, about 1,000 passengers slept in the terminals Thursday night because of 675 canceled flights in and out of the airport. The airport offered cots, blankets and baby items to delayed travelers.

The busiest travel day of the year collided with an ugly storm that swept up from the Southeast to the East Coast, drifting into the nation's busiest airspace. The results were 667 canceled flights and 6,435 flights delayed at least 15 minutes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, according to the travel monitoring site Flightstats.com. By comparison, only 189 flights were canceled and 3,560 were delayed last year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, according to Flightstats.com.

The Culver City Ice Arena, which closed earlier this month after losing its lease, might reopen after the rock-climbing company that had planned to take over the space revealed last week that it would not. But City Manager John Nachbar said the city and the rink employees would first have to resolve many issues, including whether the facility's refrigeration system was safe. The unexpected news of Planet Granite's lease cancellation was a relief to the Takahashi family, longtime employees of the rink who hope to operate it for at least six months.

Storms that hit the Midwest and East Coast last month were to blame for 49,000 canceled flights, the highest number for any January in the last five years. An additional 300,000 flights were delayed last month by U.S. airlines. The cancellations last month even exceeded those caused by Hurricane Sandy in October and November of 2012, according to an analysis from MasFlight, an aviation operations technology company based in Bethesda, Md. January's airline woes cost passengers more than $2.5 billion in lost productivity, hotel expenses and meals and inflicted $75 million to 150 million in losses to the airline industry, MasFlight said.

Getting good care when you cancel Jane Engle's well-written article regarding cancellations of hotel reservations ["Canceling Your Room?" Oct. 25] was right on point. As an attorney, I've made it a prerequisite to view the relevant cancellation provisions on websites and in written documents. One point, however, should be noted. As rigid and clear as some of the provisions may be, there is still, thankfully, a human factor that should not be ignored. My wife and I recently had planned a trip to New York City and bought "nonrefundable" tickets via Telecharge to some Broadway shows.

  Airline cancellations continued to mount, with a few carriers beginning to cancel flights scheduled for Thursday. Super storm Sandy is now blamed for the cancellation of 18,100 flights, stretching from Saturday to Wednesday, according to the travel monitoring site, Flightaware.com. The canceled flights were primarily to and from storm-ravaged cities along the East Coast. About 50 or so flights were already canceled for Thursday. The website Flightstats.com has animated the effects of the storm on flights in an online video, shown above.

WASHINGTON — What's behind the unusually high rate of contract cancellations and settlement delays in the real estate market? With signs of recovery emerging in many parts of the country, shouldn't deals be zipping along with minimal complications? Apparently not. Nearly one-third of realty agents in a new national survey reported experiencing contract cancellations — purchases crumbling before closing — in February. That's up dramatically from a similar poll 12 months earlier, when just 9% of agents reported cancellations.

Qantas and Virgin Australia canceled flights that were scheduled Thursday (Australia time) to New Zealand and the western Australian city of Perth as an ash cloud from a Chilean volcano continued to spread into the area and strand thousands more travelers. The cloud has also wreaked havoc in South America . Disruptions of air travel in various parts of the world could last for months, experts say. The Sydney Morning Herald dubbed the cloud over Perth the "plume of gloom" and explained that levels of ash as low as 15,000 feet posed a safety risk for airlines.

Super storm Sandy has led to the cancellation of about 19,500 flights since Saturday but cancellations are on the decline and two key East Coast airports reopened Wednesday. John F. Kennedy International in New York and Newark Liberty International in New Jersey reopened Wednesday for limited service, but La Guardia International Airport in New York remains closed because of flooding. It remains unclear when La Guardia will reopen and airline officials urged passengers to check on their flight status by phone or online before heading for an airport.

A winter storm hitting the Midwest and East Coast prompted airlines to cancel two dozen flights scheduled to either depart or arrive at LAX today, airport officials said. The flights include 19 arrivals and five departures scheduled from 8:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. The majority of those arriving flights were scheduled from Boston, Chicago and New York, said Amanda Parsons of Los Angeles International Airport. Nationwide, 2,571 flights have been delayed and 2,689 canceled that were scheduled within, into or out of the U.S., according to the website FlightAware . Parsons said travelers should call their airline for the most up-to-date information about their flight.

Storms that hit the Midwest and East Coast last month were to blame for 49,000 canceled flights, the highest number for any January in the last five years. An additional 300,000 flights were delayed last month by U.S. airlines. The cancellations last month even exceeded those caused by Hurricane Sandy in October and November of 2012, according to an analysis from MasFlight, an aviation operations technology company based in Bethesda, Md. January's airline woes cost passengers more than $2.5 billion in lost productivity, hotel expenses and meals and inflicted $75 million to 150 million in losses to the airline industry, MasFlight said.

Perhaps the U.S. Postal Service should commission a stamp honoring Shirley Familian. For 25 years she has been honoring mail carriers everywhere by turning canceled postage stamps into art. Friends from around the world clip the stamps from envelopes and send them to Familian, who patiently sorts them, stores them in zip-lock pages and then uses them to create fanciful designs that have a nearly hypnotic quality. She's now 93, and a three-month exhibition of her work has opened at the Los Angeles Craft & Folk Art Museum . Titled "Shirley Familian: 19,275 Stamps," the show features 14 hanging pieces and seven stamp-covered objects, including a skateboard, an iron and a teapot.

GENEVA - The United Nations canceled a scheduled afternoon round of Syria peace talks Tuesday after a second consecutive day of apparent stalemate and angry exchanges between government officials and representatives of the U.S.-backed opposition bloc. Negotiations were to resume Wednesday, Lakhdar Brahimi, the chief U.N. mediator, told reporters. “Nobody is walking out,” Brahimi said, after a fourth day of face-to-face meetings between the two rival camps. “Nobody is running away.” He said he hoped for a “better session” Wednesday.

The Weather Channel wants DirecTV to waive its steep cancellation fees for customers seeking to drop the satellite service because it no longer carries the network. The request is being made in an open letter being sent to DirecTV's board of directors Wednesday morning and in advertisements scheduled to be published in several newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. In the letter, Weather Co. Chairman and Chief Executive David Kenny writes that since the network was dropped Jan. 13, "many thousands have called your customer service centers asking to terminate their contracts since they are now getting less content for the same price.

Don Engel had only a small law firm in Los Angeles - just two or three attorneys in addition to him and his wife. But a phone call from Engel could strike fear among the loftiest executives in the music business. Engel, who represented some of the biggest pop stars of the 1970s, '80s and '90s, was a fierce, tireless and some say overbearing fighter on behalf of clients who wanted to revise or cancel their recording contracts. Among his clients were hit makers Olivia Newton-John, Donna Summer, Don Henley and the band Boston.

Getting home after the Christmas holiday continues to be a predicament as a massive storm that has now hit the Northeast grounded thousands of planes for the third straight day. As of Thursday morning, more than 800 flights had been canceled and nearly 5,000 more had been delayed, with most of the planes grounded in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Detroit and New Jersey, according to the flight monitoring site Flightstats.com. Still, the storm's effect has declined compared to Wednesday, when more than 2,000 flights were canceled and more than 12,000 were delayed as the storm cut a wide swath through the mid-Atlantic states, heading northeast.

As a nor'easter storm threatens the East Coast, the nation's airlines have canceled more than 1,500 flights scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday. The cancellations, about 1,200 for Wednesday and 313 on Thursday, were primarily scheduled to fly in and out of Newark Liberty International in New Jersey and La Guardia and John F. Kennedy International airports in New York. Cancellations were also made for flights in and out of Philadelphia International, Chicago's O'Hare International and Dallas/Fort Worth International airports, according to the flight-monitoring site Flightaware.com.

 The Los Angeles Unified School District has instructed its schools to cancel outdoor athletic events scheduled for Friday because of air-quality concerns with the fire in Glendora, according to district athletics spokesman Trent Cornelius. Eric.sondheimer@latimes.com  

The so-called polar vortex continued its frigid march across the U.S. on Tuesday, bringing record lows to the East Coast and parts of the South. Fountains froze in typically balmier states like South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Texas. New York City reached a record low of 4 degrees. Farther south, Atlanta broke its record with a low of 6 degrees. Pipes burst in areas where homes were insufficiently insulated, said Ryan Willis, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Atlanta.