U.S. ESTA Travel Pass News

As the summer vacation season approaches, more and more people travel by plane. However, while travel demand is rapidly increasing, the number of flight delays or cancellations in the airline industry is increasing due to the COVID-19 outbreak, such as a shortage of manpower. Find out what to do if this happens suddenly.

What to prepare before departure – If possible, we recommend that you book directly through the airline’s website. In case of cancellation or delay, it is easier to change the itinerary through the airline website rather than the internet reservation site.

In addition, it is recommended to check in advance 24 hours before boarding to reduce the time for check-in and baggage check-in. It also downloads the airline’s application in case flights are delayed or changed.

What to do if delayed – Federal law requires airlines to issue full refunds to passengers if their flight is delayed and the passenger abandons travel. If you want to continue your journey even if your flight is delayed, you will have to wait in line at the gate and then take the next flight, but it is also a good idea to call the airline and complain.

Some airlines offer compensation in case of delays due to airline problems. In the case of American Airlines, if a flight is delayed and cannot be boarded before midnight on the expected arrival date, it may provide accommodation vouchers.

JetBlue offers compensation ranging from $50 to $200 depending on the delay. If you made a reservation through the airline’s website, the reward can be emailed to you within 7 days of the scheduled departure date. If you made a reservation through a reservation site such as Expedia or Orbits, you must call the customer center directly and explain the situation.

What if the flight is canceled – If a flight is canceled by the airline, the next flight is available and if you abandon your trip, you will be entitled to a full refund under federal law. If you make a transfer, you can get a refund for the flight you didn’t board. Many airlines offer travel credits or gift certificates valid for one year in lieu of a full refund.

“It’s very important to know the law and uphold your rights,” said Scott Keyes, a low-cost airline booking site at Scott.

How to get travel credit – If your flight is canceled by the airline, you can only get your travel credit back if you book directly on the airline’s website. Airlines send emails to redeem travel credits, but you can also find them on the airline’s website. If you purchase a non-refundable economy class ticket, you can call the airline directly and make a reservation again. If you made a reservation through an online travel site, you must connect to the travel site and make a reservation again.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 9th that luggage loss is increasing one after another as demand for air travel is soaring around the world.

According to reports, on the 20th of last month (local time), thousands of suitcases were piled up and left at the airport after a technical defect occurred in a conveyor belt carrying luggage at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Air France announced on the 2nd that the arrival of 17,000 pieces of luggage was delayed due to poor management of the luggage after an employee went on strike at Charles de Gaulle Airport in France.

Peter Drummond, head of SITA, a Swiss technology company that tracks baggage, said, “The global baggage loss rate in June far surpassed the 2019 level before the spread of COVID-19.”

He added that “on international and transit flights, the probability of losing your luggage is six times higher than on direct flights.”

Reports of lost baggage have surged over the past two months, according to Blue Ribbon Bags, an American company that tracks and retrieves baggage if it is lost by paying $5 before boarding.

CEO Gabriel Menkin said, “Recently, 10 out of 1,000 pieces of luggage were reported lost or delayed.

In the aftermath of COVID-19, the airline industry reduced the number of employees, but recently the travel restrictions were lifted, and air demand surged.

A spokesperson for Swissport International, a luggage transport company, said, “Before COVID-19, the number of employees had reached 65 thousand, but as of the end of December last year, the number had decreased to 45 thousand.”

Currently, Swissport International is pouring out carrots, such as paying $5,000 (about 6.5 million won) to new employees at some airports in the United States.

However, the number of manpower to be put into the field is not expected to increase rapidly.

“It takes only two weeks to hire and train a new employee, but it takes an average of 65 days for an employee to get the security clearance they need to actually work, and can take up to 90 days,” said Philippe Joynig, chief executive officer of luggage company Menzies Airlines. It can take,” he said.

With the U.S.-China strategic competition getting fiercer day by day, there are speculations that China is weaponizing its strong purchasing power by purchasing large quantities of Airbus airliners in Europe.

According to China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, and Air China International (Air China), China’s state-owned airlines on the 3rd (local time), these three companies announced on the 1st that they would purchase Airbus A320 passenger planes at once.

A total of 292 passenger planes have been agreed to be delivered by the three companies by 2027, with a total contract value of $37.2 billion (about 48 trillion won).

The ‘group purchase’ of Airbus passenger planes by Chinese airlines is eye-catching in that it was made amid evaluations that bilateral relations had fallen to the worst level since diplomatic ties were established in 1979 as strategic competition between the US and China intensified.

As Boeing of the United States and Airbus of Europe have been competing fiercely for the world’s largest commercial aircraft market in China, some observers say that China has weaponized its strong purchasing power.

Despite the deterioration of US-China relations, the US government has been hoping that China will actively purchase its Boeing airliners.

In particular, the United States has brought strong dissatisfaction, saying that the Chinese side is not purchasing Boeing airliners as promised in the US-China trade agreement signed during the former administration of Donald Trump.

Catherine Tai, the head of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), expressed dissatisfaction with China’s implementation of the trade agreement at the end of last year, citing the lack of commercial aircraft purchases as a major complaint.

Boeing also expressed dissatisfaction with China’s mass purchase of Airbus airliners, saying that there was a political background.

“It is disappointing that geopolitical differences are becoming a constraint on US aircraft exports,” Boeing said in a statement.

China’s bulk purchase of Airbus airliners could be an unspoken protest to the US, which is putting pressure on the country in all directions, including diplomacy, security, trade, technology, and human rights.

At the same time, China has shown favor with Europe, where China strongly hopes to improve relations.

Under the Joe Biden administration, as the United States restored relations with key allies such as Europe and began to build anti-authoritarian solidarity based on common values ​​such as democracy and human rights, China felt the need to maintain amicable relations with Europe even stronger. have.

While fierce competition with Airbus was taking place, Boeing had many bad things in the past.

In 2018 and 2019, a series of large-scale accidents in which Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashed one after another in Indonesia and Ethiopia increased the market’s anxiety about the safety of Boeing’s next-generation flagship product, the 737 Max.

The cause of the accident is still under investigation, but in March, a Boeing 737-800 belonging to Eastern Airlines crashed in China, killing 132 people.

In the competition between Airbus and Boeing, Airbus laughed at the moment, but as China is putting its domestic passenger planes into the market in earnest, the competition in the Chinese airliner market is expected to intensify in the future.

The C919 passenger plane, developed by China Commercial Aircraft (COMAC), a Chinese state-owned aircraft manufacturer, completed its last test flight in May and is expected to be delivered to customers for the first time soon.

The importance of the Chinese civil aircraft market, which is rapidly growing, is growing day by day for Boeing and Airbus, the two major airliner manufacturers.

Boeing predicted last year that Chinese airlines would need 8,700 new aircraft, including freighters, by 2040.

As many Americans travel to celebrate the US Independence Day (4th) holiday, the number of passengers by plane is the highest since February 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokesperson Lisa Favstein tweeted on the 2nd, “On the 1st, airport security checkpoints across the country searched 2,49,490 people. It is the highest since then.”

This figure is a 13% increase compared to July 1 of last year.

According to the TSA, an average of 2.33 million passengers per day passed through airport screening for a week through July 1. This is close to the daily average of 2.38 million people during the same period in 2019, when there was no Corona 19, and shows that travel demand has returned to pre-coronavirus, the Associated Press reported.

However, as flights continue to be unable to keep up with travel demand due to problems such as a shortage of manpower at airlines, cancellations and delays are occurring one after another during this holiday season.

According to flight tracking site FlightAware, 550 flights to and from the United States were canceled and 2,200 delayed until noon on the same day.

Is the White House losing confidence? This is at least what the American channel CNN indicates, while the international summits have been linked in recent days, where the question of Ukraine is on everyone’s lips.

American officials have, in fact, indicated to our colleagues that they believe less and less in the fact that Kyiv will one day be able to regain the land it has lost to Russia. Particularly in the Donbass where Vladimir Putin’s army continues to bomb at an infernal rate. Another definition of victory?

This pessimistic assessment does not mean, however, “that the United States plans to pressure Kyiv to make formal territorial concessions to Russia in order to end the war”, abound the advisers of Joe Biden to CNN. But it is possible that the Ukrainian authorities “must review their definition of victory”, considering an “irreversible” reduction of the country, support the latter.

Faced with the members of the G7, Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Monday that he hoped for an end to the conflict by the end of the year, fearing the extension of the latter. Its “ability” to take back its territories “depends largely, if not entirely, on the support we give them,” a congressman told CNN.

This beginning of the week, Washington indicated that it was preparing the purchase of the Nasams systems before delivering it to the Ukrainian authorities. For its part, France has confirmed sending armoured transport vehicles, in addition to new Caesar guns, to the forces of Kyiv.

The total number of victims of the ‘steamed hell’ trailer disaster that carried smugglers to the United States has risen to 51.

The New York Times and CNN reported that 39 men and 21 women were killed in the disaster, citing investigative authorities on the 28th (local time).

The deceased bodies of 46 alleged illegal immigrants were found in a large trailer located on the outskirts of southwestern San Antonio, Texas.

Among the deceased, found alive were 12 adults and 4 children all requiring urgent medical attention.  The survivors rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment. It has been reported that among those taken for treatment five have since passed taking the death toll to over 50. It is also reported that of victims some were teenagers.

According to the hospital, some patients with high fever and dehydration are in critical condition, so the death toll is likely to rise.

Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, which borders Texas, said on Twitter that the number of deaths confirmed so far by nationality is 22 in Mexico, 7 in Guatemala and 2 in Honduras.

U.S. authorities continue to identify the victims through an autopsy process.

Search operations are also underway around the accident site to find other occupants who may have jumped off the trailer or fell dead.

Authorities estimate that the trailer carrying smuggled migrants turned into a ‘steaming hell’ in the sweltering heat, and that the death toll occurred one after another due to heat illness and suffocation.

This unventilated trailer had no air conditioning and no drinking water found. The previous day, the highest temperature in the San Antonio area reached 39.4 degrees Celsius.

The Washington Post (WP) reported that the temperature inside the trailer may have exceeded 78 degrees, judging from similar past accidents.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has launched an investigation, including sending investigators to the scene to collect evidence.

Investigator Craig LaRoughby said it was the worst smuggling case with the highest number of deaths.

Henry Cuella from Texas told the Associated Press that the trailer went through a border checkpoint northeast of Laredo but was not caught.

Reuters reported that the smugglers had sprayed stimulants on illegal immigrants to deodorize people and disguise themselves as cargo, citing sources.

Texas police arrested three people, including the trailer driver, in connection with the accident, but did not disclose details.

The Gafam are once again pinned for their processing of medical data. After the National Health Service (NHS), the British public health service, which in 2016 allowed DeepMind, a Google subsidiary dedicated to artificial intelligence, to access the personal data of 1.6 million patients without their consent, it is Meta’s turn to find itself in the spotlight. And for good reason, many American hospitals have collected sensitive information on the health of patients before sending them to the parent company of Facebook, according to a study by The Markup, an NGO of investigative journalism which is interested in the impact of technology on society.

By testing the websites of the 100 best American hospitals according to Newsweek, the organization discovered that 33 of them were equipped with the tracker Meta Pixel, a tool for collecting data from the group of Mark Zuckerberg. The latter, which is like a piece of computer code that can be placed on any website, makes it possible to record the identifier of each visitor to a site to follow his path on other sites, to offer them targeted advertisements on Facebook. A common and authorized practice if it does not concern overly sensitive data.

However, with Meta Pixel, the American giant has precisely recovered confidential medical information from American hospitals, such as details on the state of health of patients, their prescriptions, or their appointments with the doctor. As soon as they pressed the button to schedule a medical appointment, that information was sent to Facebook’s parent company via Meta Pixel. The American group could thus have knowledge of the name of the doctor and the pathology that was the subject of this appointment.

It also found Meta Pixel installed inside the password-protected patient-only online portals of several healthcare systems. Enough to allow the Californian firm to recover other sensitive information, such as the names of patients’ medications, details of their allergic reactions and details of their next medical appointments.

Healthcare data security experts and privacy advocates believe that hospitals using Meta Pixel may have violated HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). And for good reason, this federal law prohibits hospitals from sharing personally identifiable health information with third parties like Meta, unless the individuals concerned have clearly expressed their consent or contracts provide for such a practice.

However, neither the pinned hospitals nor Meta declared having put in place such contracts, The Markup having found no evidence that the health establishments or the American group had expressly obtained the consent of the patients. There were 33 hospitals that were affected, and it was found that more than 26 million patients and outpatients in 2020 have also been affected Meta and its strange conception of sensitive data Pending possible legal action that could be launched by the American authorities, some hospitals have decided to take the lead after discovering the conclusions of The Markup’s investigation.

Already seven hospitals have removed this system from their booking pages and have also uninstalled it from there patient portals. Although Meta is not subject to HIPAA, the Menlo Park firm launched a system for filtering sensitive health information in the summer of 2020. But according to a survey conducted jointly by The Markup and Reveal, this device did not block information on appointments made by a journalist with crisis centers dedicated to pregnant women.

Reveal and The Markup have also found that 294 websites of these centers, out of 2,500 analyzed, shared information with Meta. In many cases, the information was extremely sensitive, such as whether a person was considering an abortion or seeking a pregnancy test or emergency contraceptives. Not really reassuring for patient.

Uber, a ride-hailing service provider in the United States, is resuming its carpooling service, which was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, after more than two years, Bloomberg News reported on the 21st.

Uber announced that it will start the carpooling service ‘Uber X Share’ in nine metropolitan areas, including New York, Los Angeles (LA), Chicago and San Francisco, and will further expand the service area in the future.

Uber has suspended its ride-sharing service in response to quarantine measures such as social distancing since March 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak began in earnest.

According to Bloomberg, Uber has resumed carpooling services as workers who have been working from home during the coronavirus are returning to their offices.

Uber said carpooling would be a cheaper service for customers given the current economic situation, including rising prices, and said that if you choose the prepaid option and share with other passengers going to the same destination, you can get up to 20% discount on fares.

In March this year it was reported that Uber and Lyft drivers were clashing with passengers after the mask requirement lifted.

After the mandatory wearing of masks in the US was lifted, drivers of ride-hailing services, Uber and Lyft, were disagreeing with passengers over the mask issue.

Uber and Lyft are still requiring their passengers to wear a face mask when riding in accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. Drivers must also wear masks. But drivers say it’s getting harder to enforce as state and local governments repeal mandatory indoor masks.

Occasionally, there are conflicts between the driver and passengers over wearing a mask.

“It’s no longer worth doing,” said Anwar Malik, New York City’s ride-hailing driver.

He took a few months off work due to health concerns, increased crime, and inflation, before starting to pick up passengers again earlier this month. He said he realized he realized that many people were hesitant to wear a mask.

Some drivers have also said that they have been suspended for demanding that passengers continue to wear masks. However, the company did not disclose the reason, so it is difficult to determine the exact reason for the suspension.

South Carolina Uber driver Seolman Brown recently refused to ride a passenger without a mask and reported it to the company. The company told Brown that it would notify passengers of any violations.

But that day, he was informed of the suspension of work. Brown complained, “It looks good as it is written. They say, ‘You can’t board without a mask’. But if you do, you will fire me for my wrong behavior that the passenger falsely claimed.”

Xinhua News Agency, Washington, June 13 (Reporter Sun Ding) Last year, the United Farm Workers Union of the United States posted a photo on social media-a 7-year-old boy in Indiana, United States, under the scorching sun. Hard work in the fields, picking strawberries In the American fields, some teenagers and even children are doing the work that adult farm workers do.

According to estimates by the non-profit American Farm Worker Employment Training Program, there are still about 500,000 child laborers in the country who work in agriculture, and child labour deaths are frequent. Throughout U.S. history, child labour has emerged in a variety of forms, including child slavery and indentured labour. In 1938, the United States promulgated the “Fair Labour Standards Act”, which stipulated and restricted the use of juveniles and children by employers to participate in labour, but “opened the net” to farmers, and even allowed them to hire children to harvest crops under certain conditions.

To this day, some children in the United States start working from the age of 8, working up to 72 hours a week. In October last year, due to the “labour shortage”, some parts of the United States took up the idea of minors again and passed legislation to extend the hours that teenagers can work. On October 20, 2021, the Wisconsin State Assembly Senate passed Bill 332 to amend the working hours regulations for minors aged 14-16. Pictured is a screenshot of the bill’s webpage. U.S. farms are labour-intensive and harsh, and child labour is often at risk from weather, pesticides, and the use of farm implements and machinery.

A report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2018 revealed that from 2003 to 2016, 452 children died in the United States due to work-related injuries, of which more than 230 died from agricultural-related activities. While working, children can experience health problems from exposure to the sun, including heat stroke, dehydration, and even death. In addition, many tobacco farms in the United States employ children to harvest and dry tobacco leaves, resulting in nicotine poisoning and even lung infection in many child laborers.

At the same time, child laborers on farms often operate adult-only farm implements, including large equipment such as tractors, without adequate training or care, leading to many tragedies. On October 17, 2019, in Iowa, the United States, agricultural machinery was busy in the corn field of Grant Kimberley’s family farm.

Xinhua News Agency For growing children, long-term labour can not only have a huge impact on the body, but also may damage their mental health and even cause psychological trauma. Children are the hope of the future.

It is the consensus of the international community to respect and protect children’s rights and free them from heavy labour. The United States has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and has even been repeatedly named and criticized by the International Labour Organization for its serious child labour problem.

President Biden signed a bill to establish a committee to study the creation of the National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture. Biden also said the move was a “big moment” in the United States. Biden on Monday incorporated research proposed by Chinese American Representative Grace Meng and Senator Mazie Hirono to establish a bill to create the National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture.

“Today, the battle for America’s soul clearly continues, and that’s why a museum like this is so important,” Biden said at the signing ceremony. “A museum of this size and impact will inspire and educate. That’s more than anything. All will help people see themselves in the American story.”

The bill requires majority and minority leaders in both the House and Senate to appoint a committee to study feasible issues such as the cost and ownership of the National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture. Biden also praised the study of the bill to create the “National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture” “at an important time,” and “long overdue.” “It’s time for a national museum to showcase the courage, character, imagination, dreams and hearts of our fellow Americans for generations,” Biden said.

Biden said it has been a year since the Atlanta massage parlour shooting that killed eight people, including six Asian women, and 80 years since the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. “I look forward to one day visiting the Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture with all of you,” Biden said. U.S. Vice President Harris said at the signing ceremony that Asian-American history is both “a story of the heroes who made our country a better place,” and “a story of some of our nation’s darkest moments,” including the history of The Chinese Exclusion Act, etc. “It’s also American history,” Harris said.

“We have to teach it because it happened so that we can learn from our best moments and from our darkest moments.” “To teach this history is to help all of us Americans understand where we came from, and to teach this history is to help us understand who we are.” President Biden and Vice President Harris celebrated Asian Pacific American Heritage Month at the White House last month, during which they condemned violence and hate speech against minorities.