The US House of Representatives voted to delay for one year the deadline for 27 countries to provide their citizens with tamper-proof passports that can be read by machine.
The voice vote Monday responds to complaints, mostly from European nations with visa waiver agreements with the US, that they will be unable to meet the Oct. 26 deadline for issuing the new biometric passports.
It also challenges administrative assertions that other countries need an extra two years to overcome technology problems and resolve privacy questions.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in March that without a two-year extension, millions of new visas would have to be issued in countries whose citizens currently do not need visas to visit the US. They said US consular offices in the affected countries would be overwhelmed.
On the US side, State Department consular affairs spokesman Stuart Patt said last month that technical standards are being developed for the passports and the machines that can read them. He said biometric US passports are not likely to be ready until the end of next year.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, the bill's sponsor, said many countries under the visa waiver program, such as Belgium, are making significant progress toward biometric passports. He said Austria, Denmark and Slovenia have developed working prototypes.
Congress voted in 2002 to require the biometric passports that will enable officials to match a person's unique characteristics with the digital image in the passports or travel documents.
Sensenbrenner said more than 10 million visitors enter the US every year from countries participating in the visa waiver program, established with nations whose citizens were thought to pose little security threat or risk of overstaying the 90-day limit.
The program has come under reconsideration since the Sept. 11 attacks and the recognition that terrorists could use the passports of visa waiver countries, sometimes counterfeited, to gain access to the US.
In April, the government announced that a program that would require foreigners to be fingerprinted and photographed before entering this country would be expanded to include visitors from the 27 countries. Those changes will take effect Sept. 30.
Twenty-two of the visa waiver countries are in Europe. The others are Australia, Brunei, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore.
The bill must still be taken up by the Senate.
Also, the US is days away from launching a scheme that would create an elite class of airline traveller entitled to bypass long queues for security checks at American airports, it emerged Monday.
Frequent flyers wishing to join the registered traveller program will pay a one-off fee, understood to be about US$100, and undergo extensive background checks in return for a faster journey to their departure gate.
Members will carry a card containing biometric data, and will probably avoid having to remove coats and shoes, as well being exempt from pat-down searches.
One supporter of the scheme, David Stempler of the Air Travelers Association, said members would even be allowed to use security channels usually reserved for flight crew and airport employees.
A spokeswoman for the transportation security authority, part of the department for homeland security, said that a pilot version would be running by July. An official announcement this week is expected to name Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in Minnesota as the first location for the trial.
"We need to get away from treating the travelling public as if all of them are equally liable to have terroristic tendencies and concentrate on folks we don't know much about," Tim Anderson, Minneapolis-St. Paul's deputy director of operations, said.
Many business travelers relish the idea -- according to one poll, almost three-quarters would be happy to pay US$100 to cut waiting times.
But civil liberties campaigners argue that there will be disadvantages for everyone: Those who do not join could be subjected to more intrusive searches, while those who give the government permission to access their backgrounds would not be able to guarantee the data would not be abused.
"We're not convinced the information will remain restricted -- the history of mission creep in the US is long and sordid," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS