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Southwest Airlines, which canceled thousands of flights last week and infuriated passengers, said Tuesday it was making "solid progress " on processing refund s even as another problem caused more travel woes. Multiple people tweeted Tuesday that crews told them planes couldn’t take off because the weather system was down or they lacked necessary weather information. The reports of delays Tuesday came just days after the airline said it resumed normal operations following the holiday travel chaos. Travelers queue up at the check-in counters for Southwest Airlines in Denver International Airport, on Dec. 30, 2022. David Zalubowski / AP Southwest in a statement late Tuesday said third-party vendor IBM “experienced a brief outage in their service that provides weather data prior to Southwest dispatching flights.” The airline said in the statement that “only minor delays ” were anticipated for the rest of the evening.  "We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate every...

The Internal Revenue Service is alerting taxpayers about a number of changes hitting in the 2023 tax filing year. Among the most significant: Your tax refund , if you are eligible for one, may be smaller than the one you received in 2022. That's because there were no federal stimulus payments issued this year — and many taxpayers received their stimulus checks alongside the refund s they got after filing their 2021 tax returns. The average refund jumped from $2,863 in 2021 (for the 2020 tax filing year) to $3,253 in 2022 (for the 2021 tax filing year). Another change: Taxpayers who take the standard deduction instead of itemizing their deductions won’t be able to use their charitable contributions to help lower their taxable income. The tax preparation website CPA Practice Advisor notes that in 2021, the IRS allowed individuals to deduct $300 per person, or up to $600 per family, in charitable contributions even if they didn’t itemize other deductions. That allowance will no lon...