The skies over Europe have reopened after days and days of being blocked by ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, with 80% of scheduled flights expected to take off today and all of them supposedly going airborne tomorrow! But given that there are some 95,000 cancellations that need to have their passengers rerouted, we can probably expect to hear complaining about The Deal With Airports for another couple of days, at the very least.

Yesterday's explosion of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland has resulted in a giant cloud of ash making its way across northern Europe's higher altitudes and closing down the airspace over the UK until tomorrow morning at the earliest; Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden have followed suit. Hoity-toity economists across the pond are idly wondering if this disruption is actually some sort of cosmic revenge for the UK's trade embargo against the financially strapped nation! Which conveniently ignores the ruinous floods that can occur as a result of the volcano melting glacial ice.

According to De Tijd, which is the ultimate authority on volcano and Twitter news to us, the "Twitter-hysterie over Hekla blijkt ongegrond." That's right. ONGEGROND, people! As in, the flurry of reports that indicate that Angela Lansbury is dead that major Icelandic volcano Hekla is erupting are totally false. Which is why reports of said eruption aren't in any major newspapers, you see.

Taking about 8,400 words to arrive at a puzzled shrug, Steve Brill conducts patient readers of this week's New York Times Sunday magazine through the elaborate reckonings of executive pay that have convulsed the seven firms benefiting from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program. Brill, the former publisher of American Lawyer and able chronicler of the Washington bureaucracy's response to Sept. 11, homes in on the agons of Kenneth Feinberg, the former 9/11 compensation master now tasked by the Treasury Department with the thankless work of serving as TARP's "compensation czar."

Wednesday's explosion of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, and the gigantic cloud of ash that it spawned, is still causing flights to and from many European countries to be canceled; one doomsaying volcanologist who clearly hasn't planned any transatlantic trips claims that fallout from the ash could affect travel "for weeks to even months." The Times has a handy chart of airports' status here, and while some airports have allowed a few flights through these cancellations are going to probably go on through the weekend. [Pic via]