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Good morning and welcome to Kid News.
I'm Tori.
Today is Tuesday, November 18th, 2025.
And we begin with back to normal in the skies, or hopefully close to it.
The Federal Aviation Administration has now undone all the mandatory cancellations put in place during the country's record-setting 43-day government shutdown.
Most airlines resumed their typical schedules at 6 am yesterday morning, which wasn't a moment too soon for holiday travelers.
According to AAA, 6 million Americans are expected to fly somewhere for Thanksgiving, up 2 over last year, with the busiest getaway day shaping up to be this Friday.
However, many people have nixed plans that involved a plane, so that figure could end up being a bit lower.
As always, road warriors will have a lot of company.
At least 73 million people plan to turkey, trot their way to Grandma's house using the nation's highways and byways, a million more than last year.
Southern California is recovering from a record-setting atmospheric river.
More than four inches of rain drenched L.A.
County over the weekend.
The good news?
Despite a second round that started yesterday, the worst seems to be over.
Evacuation warnings and orders have been lifted, though the saturated ground remains a concern for potential mudslides and flooding.
Santa Barbara Airport saw the wettest three-day stretch ever recorded in November, with more than six inches of rain, while 32 inches was reported in Oxnard on Saturday, breaking the previous high of 18 set way back in 1934.
A measure of 165 inches of rain in downtown Los Angeles just barely surpassed the previous record of 164 inches in 1952.
Some NASA officials, along with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, are throwing cold water on the effort to get Americans back to the moon by 2027.
Former NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, is just one government official who is saying lack of coordination among different agencies and ongoing technical snags in SpaceX's hardware almost guarantees China will win this space race.
He says, refueling in space, which is necessary to get the huge craft that will carry the astronauts to the moon, has never been tried and won't be easy.
Some NASA engineers estimate that a single moon landing would require SpaceX to launch more than 40 tankers, which they say is unrealistically ambitious.
As Bill Nye previously put it, China will put its flag on the south pole of the moon.
It will be on every newspaper in the world, and that will be dispiriting.
It sounds like something from a creepy horror story.
Deep inside a cave on the border between Albania and Greece, researchers have found a huge colony of spiders weaving what appears to be the world's largest spider web.
Spanning about 1150 square feet, or about the size of an average house.
The web forms a patchwork of thousands of funnel-shaped structures.
It was created in an area that's always in total darkness.
Weirder still, it's the work of two different spider species that scientists didn't know cooperated with one another.
The spiders of both species also show subtle changes from spiders outside the cave, meaning they've adapted to their unique and strange environment.
The box office is turning out to be a real head-scratcher.
The Lionsgate Now You See Me franchise was revived this past weekend with a third film in the series Now You See Me, Now You Don't, topping ticket sales at 213 million in the US and Canada.
However, the big expectations were for The Running Man, a reboot of the 1987 action film with Glenn Powell taking on the role originally played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But the film staggered and fell down like that Russian robot we mentioned yesterday.
It netted only $17 million in the U.S. against a budget of more than $110 million.
The rest of the top five were pretty lackluster too, making for a bleak November that, according to the New York Times, followed the slowest October on record and the worst summer season since 1981, not including pandemic years.
Still to come, a driver tries to use a clever trick to get out of a ticket.
All it gets him is a laugh from the officer.
But first, we want to say hello and happy birthday to Rhett Maloney of Baltimore, Maryland.
Rhett, your parents, Blake and Liam, hope you have an awesome day today.
And they want to make sure we shout out all the kids listening at Hampstead Hill Academy during Mrs Knudsen's class.
Now, today's Kid News Quiz.
How many Americans are expected to fly over the Thanksgiving holiday?
6 million, give or take.
What part of the country is recovering from a weekend drenching?
Southern California.
What ambitious NASA project now looks to be behind its 2027 launch goal?
The return of astronauts to the moon.
What creepy thing did scientists discover deep in an underground cave on the Albanian border with Greece?
A spider web the size of a house.
In today's Kid News Kicker.
The police officer appreciated the effort, but it didn't get the driver out of his ticket.
That driver, who was pulled over for a violation in Fullerton California, handed the cop a Monopoly Get Out of Jail Free card in an attempt to duck a traffic citation.
The officer laughed at the joke but told the motorist his Monopoly card wouldn't cut it.
Police added the hashtags A for Effort and Nice Try to their post about the incident on Instagram.
One commenter on the Instagram post noted that the driver didn't actually go to jail, so the card kind of worked.
Thanks again to the Maloney family of Baltimore Maryland, for sponsoring today's quiz and a big shout out to awesome skier and baseball player Rhett Maloney on his ninth birthday.
And hello to our terrific Kid News teachers, Ms.
Clift and her Wildcats at Washington School in Gallipolis, Ohio.
Mrs. Paff and her Salt Hawks at Wiley in Hutchinson, Kansas.
Mrs. Delizia and her Dublin Shamrocks at Dublin in White Lake, Michigan.
I'm Mrs. McGuire and her pirates at Oakwood in Hannibal, Missouri.
Thanks for listening.
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Have a great day.
We'll see you back here for more Kid News tomorrow morning.
