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(CNN) — They fought to end slavery more than 150 years ago. Now, statues of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are standing in the room where it was abolished in Maryland.The two life-size bronze statues of the American-American abolitionists were unveiled in the Maryland State House during a Monday night ceremony. They stand in the Old House Chambers, the very room where Maryland adopted a new constitution banning slavery in November 1864. Both Tubman and Douglass were born in Maryland in the 1800s and both made strides and became leaders within the abolitionist movement. Tubman, after escaping slavery herself, became known as “the Moses of her people” after helping other slaves run away to freedom. Douglass, who also escaped slavery wrote and published books about his life, founded a newspaper and continued to write and give speeches about his experience.Statue of Frederick DouglassJulio Cortez/AP”For a time, neither could legally return to the state of Maryland after their escape,” Maryland lawmaker Jheanelle Wilkins, who attended the unveiling, wrote on Twitter. “But tonight we return them to their rightful place in (Maryland) history.”According to a news release from the governor’s office, descendants of both Tubman and Douglass attended the unveiling. “It is my hope that when we view these wonderful statues of these incredible heroes and reflect on the countless contributions of these remarkable leaders, it will remind each of us to always stand on the side of goodness and love, and on the side of unity and justice,” Gov. Larry Hogan said in a statement. Each of the statues weighs about 400 to 500 pounds, the news release said. The project began a little more than a year ago, when the state’s Board of Public Works voted for a contract to design and install the two figures, the release said. “All Marylanders and visitors to the State House will have the opportunity to admire these national heroes for generations to come,” said Ellington E. Churchill, Jr., the Maryland Department of General Services secretary.CNN’s Connor Spielmaker contributed to this report.

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A storm battered Northern Europe with damaging winds and caused bumpy travel for some airline passengers.

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The firework shell weighed almost 2,800 pounds, about the weight of a Toyota Corolla, and was 62 inches — a little more than five feet — in diameter.A team at Steamboat Fireworks launched the shell from a 26-foot steel tube buried in Emerald Mountain, which overlooks the festival. Explosives propelled the shell out of the tube at 300 mph, and it rose nearly a mile in the air before exploding.”We invested hundreds of hours into this project, and we anticipate that we will enjoy the satisfaction of this success for months to come,” said project manager and financier Tim Borden, in a press release.An official from Guinness World Records attended the launch and presented a certificate to Borden and his team of three other men: Ed MacArthur, Eric Krug, and Jim Widmann, according to the press release.The former world record for the largest firework was set in the United Arab Emirates in 2018 with a 2,397-pound shell. Borden told CNN that his team has been working to break the record for seven years and spent thousands of hours building progressively larger fireworks.The team tried to break the record last year, but the shell exploded too early.”When you think of it on the physics level, to get a ton of anything up in the air with one explosion takes quite a bit of thinking,” Borden said.As one of this year’s precautions, the group made a shell casing out of sixty miles of tape.”It took a month of eight-hour days just to wrap this firework,” Borden said, “Last year, we think the shell might not have been quite thick enough to withstand the burst that sent it into the air.”Their hard work paid off. Video shows the shell exploding in a massive burst of red that illuminated the sky and nearby ridgelines.”People are already asking us, ‘What’s next?'” Borden said in a press release, “I really can’t answer that question, other than to say, whatever it is, I hope to do it with this same bunch of guys.”

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Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (CNN) — If you’re already asleep during the pre-flight announcements, you’re likely to miss it. Southwest Airlines is asking passengers to report any “unwelcome behavior” on their airplanes to the flight attendants on duty. As of January 22, it’s now part of the airline’s required pre-flight emergency briefing and demonstration, right after the instructions about operating oxygen masks.”We are here for your comfort and safety,” said the flight attendant on the ground at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia. “Please report any unwelcome behavior to your flight attendant. Thank you for your attention.””This change reflects Southwest’s commitment to ensuring a safe and welcoming environment at all times,” Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish told CNN, via email, confirming the language had recently been added to the airline’s pre-flight briefing. The airline wants to remind customers that their flight attendants, who are known throughout the industry for making their flights fun, “are an approachable, professional resource for reporting any unwelcome behaviors or conduct during a flight,” Parrish said. Southwest’s flight attendants have established procedures, which may include re-seating a customer away from the person exhibiting the “unwelcome behavior,” requesting that the offending customer stop whatever offensive behavior they’re doing, notifying the captain and seeking law enforcement assistance upon landing, Parrish said. There are a growing number of reports of people being assaulted in flight and not knowing what to do at 30,000 feet, including kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart. FBI investigations into midair sexual assaults increased by 66% from fiscal year 2014 to 2017. The bureau said it had opened 63 investigations into sexual assault on aircraft in 2017, compared with 57 in 2016, 40 in 2015 and 38 in 2014.Other airline crews have had to deal with sexual harassment in the sky as well. The airline told CNN in October 2019 that its that seat-to-seat messaging was already being phased out across the fleet at the time of the incident. While United Airlines doesn’t include harassment-related language in its pre-flight briefing, the airline instituted enhanced training in 2018 to help flight attendants recognize harassment and unwelcome conduct. Flight attendants are empowered to remove customers who are being harassed from those situations, United spokeswoman Kimberly Gibbs said. American Airlines doesn’t include such language either, but a spokesman says its flight attendants “are trained to address a wide range of issues that may arise inflight, and are empowered to take action in response to any situation that would detract from a customer’s journey with us. “We strive to create a safe, inclusive and comfortable environment for our customers and team members, and we do not tolerate unwelcome or inappropriate behavior of any kind,” said American spokesman Derek Walls. Anthony L. Black, a representative for Delta Air Lines, told CNN Travel that “We have language for both our on-board video and in-flight announcements that encourages customers to flight attendants if they need assistance.” He added: “We also continue to review our communications for opportunities to update our messages.”CNN Travel has reached out to Alaska Airways and JetBlue Airways about their policies. The airlines have not yet responded.

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Paris (CNN) — In the near future, visitors to Paris will be able to take a dip in the Seine and dine in an abandoned, underground subway station.Landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Montparnasse Tower will go under the proverbial knife and undergo major makeovers, while a Paris rooftop will earn the title of the world’s largest urban farm.These are among some of the innovative revitalization projects poised to write a new chapter in one of the most popular and mythologized tourist destinations in the world in advance of 2024, when Paris hosts the Summer Olympic Games.Over the next four years, abandoned, disused and outdated spaces will be given a second life as new dining destinations, themed hotels, museums and leisure hotspots.Urban renewalParis’ urban renewal campaign, titled “Reinventing Paris,” includes making the Seine clean enough to host the 2024 Olympic triathletes. A photo rendering shows just what this would look like.Courtesy Apur – LuxigonSome of the projects were hand-picked under the city’s urban renewal campaign “Reinventing Paris,” which first launched in 2014 under Anne Hidalgo, the city’s socially progressive, eco-minded mayor, and her deputy mayor Jean-Louis Missika, who oversees the city’s urban planning and economic development strategies. (Hidalgo is up for re-election this spring.)One of the overarching edicts of the campaign? Instead of selling off public assets to the highest bidder, the city took a decidedly different approach, says Missika: “less quantitative, more qualitative.””Instead of a competition that awarded assets to those who offered the biggest check, we decided to make the competition about the most innovative and interesting project proposals, projects that would be eco-minded and of use to the general public,” he tells CNN Travel.Proposals that featured multi-disciplinary teams — architects, economists, landscape artists, sociologists, researchers and urban agriculturalists — were given special preference, as were projects in underserved areas that featured mixed-use spaces, be it co-working offices, hotels, residences, daycare centers, sport centers or pools.Over the next four years, abandoned, disused and outdated spaces in Paris will be given a second life as new dining destinations, themed hotels, museums and leisure hot spots.Courtesy ViParisThey were looking for projects that fight against gentrification and promote inclusion, Missika says. “Because a city that becomes a ghetto for the rich, is a city that dies,” he adds.While some of the projects were awarded well ahead of Paris’s successful bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, Missika is particularly proud of La Cité Universelle in the 19th arrondissement, a mixed-use development that will host the Paralympic Games. Entirely accessible for wheelchair users, the building will feature hotel rooms, offices, a rooftop restaurant, gym, fitness centers and retailers.From a massive cleanup of the Seine to the greening of the Eiffel Tower, here’s a look at some of the most dynamic and innovative revitalization projects that are poised to “reinvent Paris” ahead of its star turn as host of the 2024 Olympic Games. Swimming in the SeineThe Seine is set to undergo a huge cleanup operation.Courtesy Apur – LuxigonIt’s one of the boldest, most ambitious goals of Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s eco-conscious mandate: to clean up the Seine river in time for the 2024 Olympic Games and host the swimming portion of the triathlon.By the time the games kick off in 2024, the waterway will have undergone a massive billion-euro clean-up operation to reduce levels of E. coli, fecal matter and other pollutants. But more than just providing a dramatic backdrop to an Olympic competition, the cleanup will also give locals an outdoor urban beach in the center of Paris.The city has already successfully piloted the idea in the 19th arrondissement, turning parts of the Bassin de la Villette canal into an outdoor swimming hole in 2017. In 2018, more than 110,000 people swam in the canal. By 2025, the overall goal is to create 23 swimming sites along the Seine, five of which would be in Paris.Turning the Eiffel Tower into the “lungs” of Paris in advance of the Olympic Games in 2024, one of the world’s most recognizable towers is set to get a major boost to its curb appeal and address issues like overcrowding and accessibility. The plan is to turn one of the world’s most visited landmarks into a family-friendly, urban park. Courtesy Apur – LuxigonThe overall goal is to turn one of the most visited landmarks in the world — every year, 7 million tourists ascend the tower, while 30 million visit the site — into a family-friendly, urban park for both tourists and local Parisians alike.One of the boldest changes coming to the area is the greening and pedestrianization of the Pont d’Iéna bridge which links the tower to Trocadéro Gardens across the Seine. Today the bridge is a concrete passageway for cars and scooters.But in a few years, it will be transformed into a tree-lined, grass-carpeted promenade for pedestrians. That’s according to the sketches from landscape architects at London-based Gustafson Porter + Bowman, who are leading the project. Meanwhile, the busy roundabout Place de Trocadéro will also be transformed to feature more green space and ampitheater-style seating for optimal views of the Eiffel Tower. And in spring, Trocadéro Gardens will burst to life with newly planted cherry trees that will border the fountains for a dramatic and romantic stroll down towards the Eiffel Tower.Le Terminus: Underground dining at the end of the lineIn its previous life, trains roared through Métro Croix Rouge in the 6th arrondissement before it shuttered and became an abandoned phantom subway station. But in 2022, the disused station will be given a second life, this time as a new and unexpected dining destination in Paris.Le Terminus will be a subterranean dining hall across two platforms. Courtesy SAME/NovaxiaDesigned by architects at SAME Architecte and overseen by developer Novaxia, Le Terminus (the French word to denote the final stop) will transform 246 feet of subway platforms into a subterranean dining hall, with food courts, restaurants and wine and cocktail bars in a first for Paris. Overall, the two platforms will feature about a dozen bars, cafes, bistros and gourmet food shops where locally sourced ingredients will be given the spotlight.World’s largest rooftop urban farmSet to open in 2020, it’s estimated that the rooftop urban farm will produce 1,000 fruits and vegetables every day and grow 30 different varieties of plants. Courtesy ViParisParis is set to become home to the largest urban farm in the world with the transformation of 150,700 square feet (around the size of two and a half football fields) of rooftop space atop the convention and exhibition center Paris Expo Porte de Versailles in the southwest end of the city.Set to open in April 2020, it’s estimated that the farm will produce 1,000 fruits and vegetables every day, and grow 30 different varieties of plants. The urban farm will also offer workshops for the public and feature garden lots that locals can lease to grow their own fruits, vegetables and herbs. A rooftop restaurant and bar from Le Perchoir, the group that already owns a chain of trendy rooftop venues across Paris, will serve up a menu featuring produce harvested from the farm.The project is being overseen by Viparis, which manages the convention center, Agripolis and Cultures en Ville, specialists in urban agriculture, and Le Perchoir.New sports-themed hotelThe as-yet unnamed sports-themed property is meant to fill a void in the Paris’ local hotel market by catering to fitness, sports and health-conscious travelers. Courtesy NP2FIn another first for Paris the city will see the opening of a new hotel specifically designed with professional and amateur athletes in mind. Located in the northeast end of the city in the 19th arrondissement, the project will turn a former electrical substation and historical building into a hybrid hotel, studio and training center where visiting athletes will be able to prepare for — and recover from — their sporting events.Running the Paris Marathon in the spring? Guests will be able to prepare themselves both mentally and physically for the big event with yoga and Pilates classes at the on-site studio and use the dedicated “mental training area” featuring individual meditation cubicles to visualize success and focus on their goals.After their runs, guests can use the sports spa to recover their sore muscles in cold and hot baths, book massages and sign up for treatments with physiotherapists and healthcare specialists.The sports-themed property is meant to fill a void in the local hotel market by catering to fitness, sports and health-conscious travelers, be it marathon runners, or athletes competing in martial arts, rugby or rowing tournaments which take place regularly in the city. Overall, the as-yet-unnamed hotel will feature more than 60 rooms and is expected to open in 2021.Aerog’Art: A new art and culture destinationFor decades, a huge Air France sign has hung on the facade of the Esplanade des Invalides in the 7th arrondissement, laying public claim to the site with a dedicated museum and airline terminal.But under the vision of Dominique Perrault Architecture, which is also overseeing the construction of the Olympic and Paralympic village in Paris, the landmark will take on a new identity as Aerog’Art, the city’s newest destination for art and culture, with a children’s museum, food hall, restaurant, outdoor patio and courtyard, as well as art exposition spaces and an art lab. The project is expected to be completed in 2025.Architects at the Nouvelle AOM group are reinventing the skyscraper Parisians love to hate by replacing its opacity with a bright, transparent façade for a “breathable” effect. Courtesy Nouvelle AOMNow Paris’s most maligned tower is getting a makeover: Montparnasse TowerIt’s the lonely skyscraper Parisians love to hate. Visible from as far as the Sacré-Coeur Basilica clear across town, the Montparnasse Tower has long been considered an eyesore for locals who decry its modern, utilitarian esthetic — a jarring monolith against Paris’s historic and romantic architecture.With this in mind, architects at the Nouvelle AOM group are reinventing the building completely, replacing its opacity with a bright, transparent facade for a “breathable” effect on the Paris skyline. Designs also call for thousands of square feet worth of gardens and plants, including the highest rooftop garden in the city and a greenhouse that will supply the tower’s food and beverage offerings.Moreover, the building is being designed to be as energy-efficient as possible with the installation of solar panels and rainwater capture. Overall, the tower will meet 70% of its own energy needs during the work day. When complete in 2024, the tower will also house a hotel between the 42nd and 45th floors.Gare Masséna: Reinventing the food modelAn experimental micro-village is coming to the 13th arrondissement. Courtesy Lina Ghotmeh ArchitectureYou could call the project Réalimenter Masséna (which loosely translated means “re-feeding Masséna”) an experimental, vertical micro-village.When complete in 2022, the old, disused train station Gare Masséna will introduce a mixed-used development to Parisians in the 13th arrondissement centered around urban farming and sustainable food ecosystems.Along with vertical farms and gardens, the building, which will strike a commanding presence with its wood facade, will also feature farmer’s markets, R&D lab, community center, residential, retail and office spaces. At the heart of Architect Lina Ghotmeh’s vision is a new kind of food system centered around sustainability, farming, the elimination of food waste and public education.

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(CNN) — The silent and oppressive hunk of metal in the corner comes alive as Erin Gregory tells its story. The nervousness of the soldiers who climbed aboard the aircraft almost 80 years ago is practically palpable.While it’s a rare treat for Gregory herself to give tours to the public, her passion for the subject matter and emphasis on storytelling is something she’s passed on to the museum’s tour guides and is evident throughout the space.The Canadian National Aviation and Space Museum is located in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.Courtesy IngeniumGregory’s aim is for the museum to spark interest in those who don’t think they care about planes — especially (but not exclusively) women, who often don’t feel like aviation museums are a place for them. For anyone other than the most dedicated airplane gearhead, aviation museums can be boring. (Sorry to paint an entire category with a single brush, but it’s true.)Gregory and her team, on the other hand, can paint the picture through stories culled from much education and learning.”There will always be people who come into the museum because they want to see the machines, and we still have all of that for them,” Gregory says. “But our goal is to also engage with people who got dragged along and are not expecting to enjoy themselves or learn anything.” And so they share stories: about the people who once flew the tremendous aircraft that make up the museum’s impressive collection. Stories, for instance featuring an Avro 683 Lancaster X, which WWII soldiers boarded for late-night bombings over Europe. Women. Where are they?Curator Erin Gregory is passionate about the museum’s archive and loves sharing stories with visitors.Courtesy IngeniumAviation is still to this day seen largely as a man’s domain — the romanticized notion of the Wright brothers getting off the ground and dashing flyboys valiantly going off to war has long dominated our collective understanding of aviation history. Especially for women and people of color, they rarely themselves in the stories of those who are traditionally profiled in museums. And the number of female pilots compared to men in 2020? Well, it further serves the narrative. (Gregory says that only about five percent of airline pilots around the world are women.)Meanwhile, the female pioneers, like Katherine Stinson, who taught at her family’s Texas flying school in the early 1900s, are often presented as little more than footnotes. With the exception of glamorous outliers like Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman (the first black American woman to hold a pilot’s license), most women pilots are left out of the cultural zeitgeist. While it’s a rare treat for Gregory herself to give tours to the public, her passion for the subject matter and emphasis on storytelling is something she’s passed on to the museum’s tour guides.Courtesy IngeniumThis is what Gregory is working to change. As a female historian, making sure female aviators’ stories are heard and remembered is part of what drives her. “One of my goals as a curator is to feminize the collection and to try to have the floor be much more representative of all the people who fly, including women,” she says. “I’m working to revise and revamp the museum to make it as inclusive as possible.”Gregory is uniquely equipped to tackle this problem because despite her palpable adoration for all things aviation, it’s an interest that hasn’t always come naturally to her. Before getting the job at the museum, Gregory wouldn’t have counted aviation as even a passing interest. As a child, like most young girls, she wasn’t encouraged to develop an interest in airplanes and other heavy machinery. This is a museum for people who often find aviation museums dull.Courtesy IngeniumAfter graduating from university with a Master’s degree in Canadian history, she got a job with Ingenium, which operates three of Canada’s nine national museums. When she was assigned to the Aviation and Space Museum seven years ago, Gregory was far from overjoyed. “I thought ‘oh no, this is not going to go well.’ But it’s become such a huge part of my life in ways that I couldn’t have even imagined,” she says, noting that while she isn’t trained as a pilot, she has gone to ground school — the classroom instruction before in-air training for future pilots — since landing the job. “My assumption is that if I was exposed to this when I was younger, it may have sparked something.”Understanding the historySince the museum has a Canadian focus, Gregory uses her displays to tell stories of Candian pioneers in aviation.Courtesy IngeniumIf Gregory herself is living proof that aviation can become fascinating to people who typically yawn at the sight of a plane in a museum, she knew she could create that same kind of interest among her visitors, especially other women who have always been told aviation is a masculine pursuit. One way of doing this is getting more of those nearly forgotten women’s faces and artifacts into the museum. Many determined women got their private licenses even in the early days of aviation, she says. But until the 1980s, very few Canadian and American women even bothered to try for a commercial license since it was unlikely that they’d land jobs as commercial pilots. Still, many extraordinary women persisted and prevailef, like the British “Attagirls” who would transport planes to the front during WWII so that male pilots could fly them into battle. Since the museum has a Canadian focus, she tells stories of Canada’s Rosella Bjornson, who became North America’s first woman commercial airline pilot in 1973 and become the first female Canadian airline captain in 1990. (No, Canada didn’t have a woman captaining an airline flight until the 1990s and the United States isn’t much better, with Beverley Bass captaining her first American Airlines flight in 1986.) Gregory’s curation brings alive stories of women aviators from history. Two members of the flying club with an aircraft from the 1930s are featured in this photo from the museum’s archive.CASM Archives/CAVM-22369Part of what makes the museum special is Gregory’s refusal to segregate women’s stories or succumb to tokenism with a “women in aviation” display, grouping all of these women together. Instead, she’s been planting stories of these pioneering women throughout the museum to put them on the same level as their male colleagues. “We don’t necessarily want to single them or any other group out,” Gregory says. “Our approach is to be as holistic as possible. When you encounter these stories, you’re encountering them on the same level as you would the story of a famous man in the aviation industry.” Unflappable and determinedGregory says that many of these women aviators share personality traits — primarily an unflappable determination and refusal to take “no” for an answer — which plays into the second strategy she’s using to make the museum more compelling. Rather than simply posting a photo of a smiling woman in a flight cap beside a list of a plane’s specs, she works to tell stories by creating more engaging text on the panels, ensuring that her tour guides bring some life to their presentations, and supporting video games that the museum is developing to connect on an interactive level. Original members of the Flying Seven Women’s Flying Club the Flying Seven pose in front of a biplane in 1936. Gregory’s interested in shared personality traits of female aviators such as these.CASM Archives/CAVM-22373Whether these stories are about women pilots, pilots of color who broke racial barriers, or those young soldiers who manned the big black Lancaster, it’s the human element that ultimately pulls in visitors of all genders and backgrounds — people who perhaps didn’t realize an aviation museum could be interesting and even inspiring. “There’s an emotional connection you get with a story,” Gregory says. “For many people their entry point into aviation history isn’t about this machine. It’s about the person who served on this machine — maybe the grandfather who flew it or the mother who built parts for it in a factory. There are so many ways we can grab people because aviation is so much a part of all of our lives. I’m trying to grab all people at that storytelling level.” If you go:The Canada National Aviation and Space Museum is located in the city of Ottawa, about 15 minutes by car from Parliament Hill. From September 3 to April 30, the museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Wednesday to Monday (closed on Tuesday). It is open seven days a week from May 1 to September 2, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is about $11 ($15 CAD) for adults, $10 for seniors, and $7.50 for youth ages three to 17. Children ages two and under are admitted for free. Active Canadian military personnel, Canadian military veterans, and Indigenous peoples are also granted complementary admission. Guided tours are included with the price of admission. Elizabeth Chorney-Booth is a freelance writer based in Calgary, Canada. She is the weekly restaurant columnist for the Calgary Herald and her work has also appeared in a number of other Canadian and International publications.

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