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By RIO YAMAT

Spirit Airlines plans to furlough 1,800 flight attendants before the end of the year, the cash-strapped budget carrier said Monday.

The company said it made the “difficult decision” to put cabin crew members on temporary leave to match staffing needs with expected flight demand during Spirit’s second bankruptcy in a year.

“We recognize the impact of this decision on affected team members, and we are committed to treating them with care and respect during this process,” the airline said in a statement.

Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month and subsequently announced that it planned to suspend operations in about a dozen U.S. cities beginning in October.

The union that represents the airline’s flight attendants said Monday that Spirit would seek candidates willing to take six month or one year voluntary furloughs starting Nov. 1 before moving forward with involuntary furloughs based on seniority effective Dec. 1.

The Association of Flight Attendants said it was working to secure “preferential interviews” with other airlines for furloughed flight attendants. read more

By ALEX VEIGA, Associated Press

Two of the nation’s biggest real estate services companies are combining in a deal that will bring Century 21, Compass and several other major brokerage brands under the same umbrella.

New York-based Compass has agreed to acquire rival Anywhere Real Estate in an all-stock transaction that will create a combined company with a total value of roughly $10 billion, including debt, the companies said Monday.

Shares in Anywhere Real Estate soared more than 48% in afternoon trading Monday. Compass shares slid about 16%.

Compass runs a platform for use by real estate agents in customer relationship management, marketing and other tasks. It also operates its namesake real estate brokerage and Christie’s International Real Estate.

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NASA named 10 new astronaut candidates for its 24th class of astronauts Monday, including one person who has already been to space.

Anna Menon, 39, a SpaceX engineer from Houston, was one of the four crew on Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn mission that launched from Kennedy Space Center in 2024 and was one of the six women and four men announced to join the astronaut corps.

The others were Ben Bailey, 38, of Charlottesville, Virginia; Lauren Edgar, 40, of Sammamish, Washington; Adam Fuhrmann, 35, of Leesburg, Virginia; Cameron Jones, 35, of Savanna, Illinois; Yuri Kubo, 40, of Columbus, Indiana; Rebecca Lawler, 38, of Little Elm, Texas; Imelda Muller, 34, of Copake Falls, New York; Erin Overcash, 34, of Goshen, Kentucky; and Katherine Spies, 43, of San Diego.

“We picked the best and brightest, the most skilled, the best looking, the best personalities to take these 10 spots, and again, you represent your country,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy during the ceremony at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “You are America’s best and brightest and we’re going to need American’s best and brightest because we have a bold exploration plan for the future.” read more

By The Associated Press

Chipmaker Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a partnership announced Monday that will add at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI data centers to ramp up the computing power for the owner of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

Per the letter of intent signed by the companies, the first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026. Nvidia and OpenAI said they would be finalizing the details of the arrangement in the coming weeks.

“This partnership complements the deep work OpenAI and Nvidia are already doing with a broad network of collaborators, including Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and Stargate partners, focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure,” the companies said in a release.

The Nvidia-OpenAI partnership comes about 10 days after OpenAI said it had reached a new tentative agreement that will give Microsoft a $100 billion equity stake in its for-profit corporation. OpenAI is technically controlled by its nonprofit. read more

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s appointee to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors said Monday that the central bank’s key interest rate should be much lower than its current 4.1% level, staking out a position far different than his colleagues.

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Stephen Miran, who is also a top economic adviser to Trump, said in remarks to the Economic Club of New York that sharp declines in immigration, rising tariff revenue, and an aging population all suggest that the Fed’s rate should be closer to 2.5% instead. According to projections released last week, that’s almost a full percentage point lower than any of his 18 colleagues on the Fed’s rate-setting committee, an unusually high divergence. read more