Pelé, the Brazilian soccer legend who won three World Cups and became the sport’s first global icon, has died at the age of 82.

“Everything that we are is thanks to you,” his daughter Kely Nascimento wrote in a post on Instagram, under an image of family members holding Pele’s hands. “We love you infinitely. Rest in peace.”

Pelé was admitted to a hospital in São Paulo in late November for a respiratory infection and for complications related to colon cancer. Last week, the hospital said his health had worsened as his cancer progressed. He died on Thursday from multiple organ failure due to the progression of colon cancer, according to a statement from Albert Einstein Hospital.

For more than 60 years, the name Pelé has been synonymous with soccer. He played in four World Cups and is the only player in history to win three, but his legacy stretched far beyond his trophy haul and remarkable goal-scoring record.

“I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint,” Pelé famously said.

Tributes have been pouring in for the soccer legend. Pelé’s first club, Santos FC, responded to the news on Twitter with the words “eternal” shared next to an image of a crown.

Brazilian footballer Neymar said Pelé “changed everything.” In a post on Instagram, he wrote: “He turned football into art, into entertainment. He gave a voice to the poor, to black people, and especially: He gave visibility to Brazil. Football and Brazil have raised their status thanks to the King!” he added.

Portuguese star forward Cristiano Ronaldo sent his condolences to Brazil in a post on Instagram, saying “a mere “goodbye” to the eternal King Pelé will never be enough to express the pain that currently engulfs the entire football world.”

Kylian Mbappé of Paris Saint-Germain said of Pelé’s death: “The king of football has left us but his legacy will never be forgotten.”

Former English soccer player Geoff Hurst wrote on Twitter of his memories of Pelé, calling the late star “without doubt the best footballer I ever played against (with Bobby Moore being the best footballer I ever played alongside). For me, Pele remains the greatest of all time and I was proud to be on the pitch with him. RIP Pele and thank you.”

Pelé’s wake will be held at Vila Belmiro, the headquarters of the Santos FC in São Paulo state, a spokesperson told CNN. The time and date of the event have yet to be announced.

Dazzling ability

Pelé was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento in Três Corações – an inland city roughly 155 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro – in 1940, before his family moved to the city of Bauru in São Paulo.

The genesis of the nickname Pelé is unclear, even to the footballer. He once wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian that it likely started with school classmates teasing him for mangling the nickname of another player, Bilé. Whatever the origin, the moniker stuck.

As a child, his first taste of soccer involved playing barefoot with socks and rags rolled up into a ball – a humble beginning that would grow into a long and fruitful career.

But when he first took up the game, his ambitions were modest.

“My dad was a good football player, he scored a lot of goals,” Pelé told CNN in 2015. “His name was Dondinho; I wanted to be like him.

“He was famous in Brazil, in Minas Gerais. He was my role model. I always wanted to be like him, but what happened, to this day, only God can explain.”

As a teenager, Pelé left home and began training with Santos, scoring his first goal for the club side before his 16th birthday. He would go on to score 619 times over 638 appearances for the club, but it is his feats in the iconic yellow jersey of Brazil for which he is best remembered.

The world first got a glimpse of Pelé’s dazzling ability in 1958, when he made his World Cup debut aged 17. He scored Brazil’s only goal in the country’s quarterfinal victory against Wales, then netted a hat-trick in the semifinal against France and two in the final against host Sweden.

“When Pelé scored the fifth goal in that final, I have to be honest and say I felt like applauding,” said Sweden’s Sigvard Parling.

For Pelé, the standout memory from the tournament was putting his country on the sporting map.

“When we won the World Cup, everybody knew about Brazil,” he told CNN’s Don Riddell in 2016. “I think this was the most important thing I gave to my country because we were well known after that World Cup.”

Another World Cup victory came in 1962, although an injury sidelined Pelé for the tournament’s later stages. Further injuries hampered his next campaign in 1966 as Brazil exited the competition after the group stage, but redemption came in 1970.

“Pelé was saying that we were going to win, and if Pelé was saying that, then we were going to win the World Cup,” Brazil’s co-captain Carlos Alberto said about the tournament.

That team – featuring the likes of Jairzinho, Gerson, Tostão, Rivellino, and, of course, Pelé – is regarded as one of the greatest ever assembled.

In the final – a 4-1 victory against Italy – Brazil scored arguably the most famous World Cup goal of all time, a sweeping, length-of-the-pitch move involving nine of the team’s 10 outfield players.

It ended with Pelé teeing up Alberto, who drilled the ball into the bottom corner of the net. Brazil’s mantra of jogo bonito (the beautiful game) has never been better encapsulated.

Pelé, who had considered retiring before the 1970 World Cup, scored a goal of his own in the final and a total of four over the course of the tournament.

“Before the match, I told myself that Pelé was just flesh and bones like the rest of us,” Italian defender Tarcisio Burgnich said after his side’s defeat in the final. “Later, I realized I’d been wrong.”

The tournament capped Pelé’s World Cup career but not his time in the spotlight. In 1975, he signed a $1.67-million-a-year contract in the United States with the New York Cosmos.

One of the greatest players

With his larger-than-life personality and extraordinary dribbling skills – a trademark of his game – Pele’s helped the Cosmos win the North American Soccer League championship in 1977 before officially retiring from football.

The league, which attracted further big names like Giorgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer, wouldn’t last, ultimately folding in 1984. But around the world, Pelé’s influence endured.

He remained in the public eye through endorsement deals and as an outspoken political voice who championed the poor in Brazil. He served as a Goodwill UNICEF ambassador for many years, promoting peace and support for vulnerable children.

Health problems persisted for much of Pelé’s later life. He got around with the support of a walker – an item he was filmed shoving around with disdain in a documentary released last year – and in September 2021, he underwent surgery to remove a tumor from his right colon.

Russia has hit back at the G7’s attempts to cap gains from the country’s oil revenues after Vladimir Putin signed a decree banning sales under contracts that comply with the $60 price ceiling imposed by Ukraine’s western allies. The decree, signed by Russia’s president and published on Tuesday, said the Kremlin would ban the sale of the country’s crude and crude-related products under contracts that “directly or indirectly imply a price cap mechanism”.

However, the decree says Putin “may grant special permission” to sell oil and oil products in certain circumstances even if purchasers comply with the cap — a wording that potentially paves the way for Russia to continue to sell crude to producers in markets such as India and China. The price cap, imposed in early December, aims to sap funding for the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine by targeting the oil and gas revenues that makeup nearly half of Russia’s budget. In practice, the cap is yet to apply, with Urals, Russia’s main crude blend, selling at prices below $60 a barrel.

Russia has shrugged off the G7’s move, which primarily targets insurance for the oil shipments, and has assembled a “shadow fleet” of vessels that continues to ship its oil in response. Ten days after the cap took effect the Financial Times reported that at least seven crude oil tankers were sailing from Russia to India with western insurance, in what appeared to be trades executed under the terms of the G7 price cap.  Putin’s move is less stringent than harsher options for retaliation floated in the Russian media, such as a “bottom” oil price or a minimum discount level for its sales.

The Kremlin’s decree comes into force on February 1 and will remain effective for five months, while the date for the similar measure on oil products is yet to be determined. Putin labelled the G7’s move “stupid and premature” in December, noting that Urals was already being sold at a discount to Brent, the global benchmark. After western nations moved to wind down their purchases of Russian oil and gas following the invasion of Ukraine in early February, Urals has commonly sold at levels below the cap.

Russia has offered generous discounts for the main importers of its oil, India and China. At present, Russia sells almost 80 per cent of its crude to Asia and only 17 per cent to Europe, two-thirds of which is transported through the Druzhba pipeline, according to figures from Kpler, a data provider. In the 10 months since Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, the spread of Urals crude against Brent has widened from the prewar standard of between $1 and $2 to the current level of between $20 and $30 a barrel. Even at $60, the cap is close to the $70-a-barrel price on which Russia’s 2023 budget is based, raising doubts about the cap’s effectiveness in limiting the Kremlin’s fossil fuel revenues.

Source: ft

The temporary stay in lifting the pandemic rule known as Title 42 is a provisional victory for 19 states, led mostly by Republicans, that had sought to keep it in place on the border.

A punishing winter storm that dumped multiple feet of snow across much of America led to widespread flight cancellations over the Christmas holiday. By Monday, air travel was more or less back to normal – unless you booked your holiday travel with Southwest Airlines.

More than 90% of Wednesday’s US flight cancellations were Southwest flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Southwest canceled more than 2,500 flights. The next highest: SkyWest, with 77.

Southwest warned that it would continue canceling flights until it could get its operations back on track. The company’s CEO said this has been the biggest disruption he’s seen in his career. The Biden administration is investigating.

What gives? Southwest had a combination of bad luck and bad planning.

The storm hit Chicago and Denver hard, where Southwest has two of its biggest hubs – Chicago Midway airport and Denver International airport.

More bad luck: The storm hit just as the so-called tripledemic surged across America, leaving people and their families sick with Covid, the flu and RSV. Although Southwest says it was fully staffed for the holiday weekend, illness makes adjusting to increased system stress difficult. Many airlines still lack sufficient staff to recover when events like bad weather cause delays or flight crews max out the hours they’re allowed to work under federal safety regulations.

Underinvestment

But Southwest (LUV) also hurt itself with an aggressive schedule and by underinvesting in its operations.

Southwest’s schedule includes shorter flights with tighter turnaround times, which are causing some of the problems, Kathleen Bangs, a FlightAware spokesperson, told CNN.

“Those turnaround times bog things down,” Bangs said.

Stranded customers have been unable to get through to Southwest’s customer service lines to rebook flights or find lost baggage.

Employees also said they have not been able to communicate with the airline, the president of the union that represents Southwest’s flight attendants told CNN Monday.

“The phone system the company uses is just not working,” Lyn Montgomery, President of TWU Local 556, told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “They’re just not manned with enough manpower in order to give the scheduling changes to flight attendants, and that’s created a ripple effect that is creating chaos throughout the nation.”

On a call with employees Monday, Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson explained that the company’s outdated scheduling software quickly became the main culprit of the cancellations once the storm cleared, according to a transcript of the call that was obtained by CNN from an aviation source.

The extreme cold, ice and snow grounded planes and left some crew members stranded, so Southwest’s crew schedulers worked furiously to put a new schedule together, matching available crew with aircraft that were ready to fly. But the Federal Aviation Administration strictly regulates when flight crews can work, complicating Southwest’s scheduling efforts.

“The process of matching up those crew members with the aircraft could not be handled by our technology,” Watterson said.

Southwest ended up with planes that were ready to take off with available crew, but the company’s scheduling software wasn’t able to match them quickly and accurately, Watterson added.

“As a result, we had to ask our crew schedulers to do this manually, and it’s extraordinarily difficult,” he said. “That is a tedious, long process.”

Watterson noted that manual scheduling left Southwest building an incredibly delicate house of cards that could quickly tumble when the company encountered a problem.

“They would make great progress, and then some other disruption would happen, and it would unravel their work,” Watterson said. “So, we spent multiple days where we kind of got close to finishing the problem, and then it had to be reset.”

In reducing the company’s flights by two thirds, Southwest should have “more than ample crew resources to handle that amount of activity,” Watterson said.

A lack of tools

The problems Southwest faces have been brewing for a long time, said Captain Casey Murray, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.

“We’ve been having these issues for the past 20 months,” he told CNN. “We’ve seen these sorts of meltdowns occur on a much more regular basis and it really just has to do with outdated processes and outdated IT.”

He said the airline’s operations haven’t changed much since the 1990s.

“It’s phones, it’s computers, it’s processing power, it’s the programs used to connect us to airplanes – that’s where the problem lies, and it’s systemic throughout the whole airline,” he said.

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan, in a message to employees obtained by CNN, acknowledged many of Murray’s concerns, and promised the company will invest in better systems.

“Part of what we’re suffering is a lack of tools,” Jordan told employees. “We’ve talked an awful lot about modernizing the operation, and the need to do that.”

He said the airline is “committed to and invested in” improving its systems, but “we need to be able to produce solutions faster.”

President Joe Biden on Tuesday urged consumers to check if they’re eligible for compensation as cascading airline delays have disrupted holiday travel across the country.

“Our Administration is working to ensure airlines are held accountable,” Biden tweeted.

The US Department of Transportation said it is investigating.

“USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service,” the agency tweeted. “The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.”

To recover, Jordan told the Wall Street Journal the company plans to operate just over a third of its schedule in upcoming days to give itself the ability for crews to get into the right positions.

Not Southwest’s first rodeo

If this is all ringing a bell, that’s because this isn’t the first time Southwest’s service melted down in epic fashion. In October 2021, Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights over a four-day period, costing the airline $75 million.

Southwest blamed that service meltdown on a combination of bad weather in Florida, a brief problem with air traffic control in the area and a lack of available staff to adjust to those problems. It has admitted it was having service problems caused by short staffing even before the thousands of canceled flights stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Similar to this month’s service mayhem, Southwest fared far worse than its competitors last October. While Southwest canceled hundreds of flights in the days following the peak of October’s disruption, competitors quickly returned to normal service.

Later that month, on a call with Wall Street analysts, then-CEO Gary Kelly said the company had made adjustments to prevent a similar meltdown in the future.

“We have reined in our capacity plans to adjust to the current staffing environment, and our ontime performance has improved, accordingly,” said Kelly on October 21. “We are aggressively hiring to a goal of approximately 5,000 new employees by the end of this year, and we are currently more than halfway toward that goal.”

And, just like the latest disruption, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association claimed the cancellations were due to “management’s poor planning.”

Source: CNN