user: Feds: Two air traffic controllers fired for sleeping on duty
In February, a controller was found sleeping while on duty in the radar room at the McGhee Tyson Airport in Knoxville. The FAA said earlier this month it was taking steps to fire that controller.

Aside from Miami and Knoxville, cases of sleeping controllers have been reported in Washington; Seattle, and Reno, Nevada. There have been two suspected cases in Lubbock, Texas.

All the incidents occurred during controllers' midnight shifts. Most -- though not all -- of the lapses occurred at local control towers.

In at least one incident, the FAA has said the controller deliberately went to sleep, while some of the others appear to have been accidental.

In response to the reports, top officials from the FAA and the air traffic controllers' union began a cross-country tour of air traffic control facilities this week to hold a series of meetings about safety and professionalism.

And federal officials announced a series of new regulations Saturday aimed at preventing air traffic controllers from falling asleep while on duty.

Among other things, controllers now must have a minimum of nine hours off between shifts, instead of the current minimum of eight hours, LaHood said. In addition, controllers can no longer be put on an unscheduled midnight shift following a day off.

FAA managers also will schedule their own shifts so as to ensure greater coverage in the early morning and late night hours, the secretary added.

LaHood said the FAA and the air traffic controllers' union agreed to implement changes immediately following the series of recent incidents involving sleeping air traffic controllers.
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The Federal Aviation Administration has fired two air traffic controllers, one of whom worked in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the other in Miami, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Wednesday.Both
Mitt Romney: We don’t need more cops, firefighters or teachers
When Republicans attack public workers, they often take care to exempt cops and firefighters, because they are culturally sympathetic figures, and muddle the message that government workers are parasites who are destroying the economic conditions of ordinary Americans.

But today Mitt Romney got a good deal more specific, claiming we do not need to hire more cops or firefighters specifically, which would, he said, cut against the interests of the American people. He also specifically named teachers.

Romney made the comments in response to Obama’s presser today, at which the president claimed the “private sector is doing fine.” Per CNN:

It’s hard to argue that the message from Wisconsin was that Americans don’t think we should hire more firefighters and cops. They were exempted from Scott Walker’s crackdown on public employee bargaining rights, which enabled him to “divide and conquer” labor.

But beyond that, this could resonate in the presidential race: It will allow the White House to reframe the debate over public sector workers and job creation on more favorable terms.

One of the components of the American Jobs Act that Obama continues to demand that Republicans pass would invest $35 billion in federal funds to keep cops, firefighters, and teachers on the job. Republicans, Romney included, oppose this plan. Central to their argument against this type of investment is to keep the focus on public sector workers as a class, arguing that they are bilking the taxpayer and are to blame for the economic plight of struggling Americans. As Romney recently put it: “We have 145,000 more government workers under this president. Let’s send them home and put you back to work.”

At the same time, however, Romney takes care to show great sympathy with first responders. As Jonathan Chait has noted, Romney has spoken movingly of the financial plight of firefighters under Obama, even though they belong to the parasitic class that he is trying to scapegoat for the economic misery of other Americans. Since teachers are associated with the education of our children, Republicans generally refrain from attacking them directly and instead target teachers union bosses. And in his quest for the female vote, Romney has spoken sympathetically about women bearing the brunt of the Obama economy, even though many of them are teachers, and hence, public workers, too.

This time, however, Romney deserves points for honesty: He has forthrightly declared that the class of government workers holding back other Americans does include cops, firefighters and teachers. And in so doing, he has singlehandedly reframed the debate from one over despised government bureaucrats to one over whether we should hire more cops, firefighters and teachers to get the economy going. This is a debate the White House will be happy to have.

Or, to put it another way: #WedgeFail!

UPDATE: The Obama campaign is now circulating video:
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Another “gaffe”?
3-man Soyuz crew departs for space station
ALMATY, Kazakhstan – A three-man crew blasted off from a space center in southern Kazakhstan Tuesday morning on board a Russian-made Soyuz craft for a four-and-half-month stay at the International Space Station.

The Soyuz TMA-04M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, May 15, 2012.

The Soyuz TMA-04M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, May 15, 2012.

NASA astronaut Joseph Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin set off from the Baikonur facility as scheduled at 9:01 a.m. local time.

Russia's space agency says the craft is due to dock with the space station Thursday morning Moscow time and will join the three astronauts currently staying at the orbiting laboratory.

The crew, which is being commanded by retired 53-year old Russian Air Force Col. Padalka, will immediately get to work preparing for the arrival next week of privately owned SpaceX's Dragon Capsule. It will be the first time a private company has launched space station supplies.

The space station is currently occupied by Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Holland's Andre Kuipers.

Padalka is a seasoned space traveler, having spent a total of 585 days in space on three previous missions on board the now-defunct Mir station and the current International Space Station. Inglewood, California-native Acaba, who turns 45 on Thursday, on the day that Soyuz is due to dock, makes his second venture into space after his maiden orbital voyage on the shuttle in 2009. Revin, 46, is making his first trip to space.

Until NASA either brings a new craft online or private companies are able to arrange manned trips to the orbiting station, the Soviet-designed Soyuz spacecraft will remain the only means to deliver crews to the orbiting outpost.

The Russian space program has been blighted by a string of technical glitches in the recent past, raising questions over its dependability.

Tuesday's launch had been pushed back by two months due to depressurization of the spacecraft's descent module during the ground testing phase. It was the second significant postponement of a manned Russian launch in the space of a year.

A Russian Mars moon probe crashed to Earth in January in what the nation's space agency described as the result of cosmic radiation.

That came only weeks after the crash of a communications satellite and the crash in August of a supply ship destined for the space station.

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assistant: Two cosmonauts and an American are on their way to the International Space Station.