Word: baing
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...squabble with cabin crew employees in January over pay and working conditions triggered flight cancellations that set BA back $150 million. Last month, a report by the Association of European Airlines placed the firm near the bottom of the region's carriers for punctuality. In a ranking of lost luggage, BA performed worse than any other airline that provided data, losing 75% more bags than Air France or Lufthansa (archrival Virgin Atlantic did not participate). Even worse, Britain's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the U.S. Department of Justice fined BA more than $500 million in August after determining...
...confuse this with a crisis. Really. These ignominies, significant though they may be, risk overshadowing the real progress that the 45-year-old Dubliner has made at BA since taking over in 2005 as its youngest-ever boss. Adjusting to the scale of the challenge of running Europe's third-largest airline after four years as boss of Irish carrier Aer Lingus "was easy," says Walsh. "I just multiplied everything by 10." Not all of BA's bigger numbers meant better. When he arrived, the company's pension fund was short of almost $3 billion, more than the shortfall...
...coalition's most likely candidate is Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a French-trained economist and political chameleon. Having been, at various points in his career, a communist, a Ba'athist and a secular liberal democrat, he has switched directions so many times it's hard to know which way he's going. These days, Abdul-Mahdi represents the Shi'ite-fundamentalist Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), which, like Maliki's Dawa Party, is beholden to Tehran. Twice in the past two years, Abdul-Mahdi has told journalists he was on the verge of quitting the SIIC to form his own party...
...think that it would be possible to hold a referendum on the status of Kirkuk this year. Iraqi Kurds consider the oil-rich city of Kirkuk - which is currently under control of the central government of Baghdad - to be the "Jerusalem" of Kurdistan, stolen from them by a Ba'athist ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. The Kurds have made the return of Kirkuk a central precondition to their participation in a federal Iraq, and will regard any delay as a betrayal. But then again, they are used to betrayal. As the saying goes, the Kurds - a small ethnic group...
...Still, the opening in March of Heathrow's $8.5 billion Terminal 5, where BA will centralize its operation from two of the hub's other terminals, ought to offer a welcome boost. According to investment bank Merrill Lynch, T5, as the new terminal is known, should allow the airline to coordinate schedules and squeeze costs by, for instance, not having to ferry passengers between terminals. Maybe BA will have better luck next summer...