ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida’s busiest airport will be the first in the nation to require a face scan of passengers on all arriving and departing international flights, officials said Thursday, a move that pleases airport executives but worries privacy advocates.
Officials at Orlando International Airport said the expansion of face scans would speed up the time it takes for passengers to go through customs.
“It’s almost like Christmas in June for me,” said Phil Brown, chief executive of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority. “The process of going into and out of Orlando is going to be greatly enhanced.”
But some privacy advocates say there are no formal rules in place for handling data gleaned from the scans, nor formal guidelines on what should happen if a passenger is wrongly prevented from boarding.
Airports in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Washington already use face scans for some departing international flights, but they don’t involve all international flights at the airports as the program’s expansion in Orlando would.
WASHINGTON — First lady Melania Trump wore a jacket that read “I really don’t care, do u?” as she boarded a flight Thursday to a facility housing migrant children separated from their parents.
The green, hooded military jacket from Zara had the words written graffiti-style on the back.
When asked what message the first lady’s jacket intends to send, spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said: “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message. After today’s important visit to Texas, I hope the media isn’t going to choose to focus on her wardrobe.”
Grisham underscored that message in a tweet with the hashtags #SheCares and #ItsJustAJacket.
Mrs. Trump changed into a pale yellow jacket before the plane landed in McAllen, Texas, for a visit to the Upbring New Hope Children’s Center, which houses 55 migrant children.
WASHINGTON — The House killed a hard-right immigration bill Thursday, and Republican leaders delayed a planned vote on a compromise GOP package with the party’s lawmakers fiercely divided over an issue that has long confounded them.
The conservative measure was defeated 231-193, with 41 Republicans — mostly moderates — joining Democrats in voting against it. Those defections — nearly 1 in 5 GOP lawmakers — underscored the party’s chasm over immigration and the election-year pressures Republicans face to stay true to districts that range from staunchly conservative to pro-immigrant.
Thursday’s vote set the stage for debate on the second bill, this one crafted by Republican leaders in hopes of finding an accord between the party’s sparring moderate and conservative wings. That compromise was considered too lenient by some conservatives and seemed likely to fall, too, and aides said the final roll call would wait till Friday.
Rejection of both would represent an embarrassment for President Donald Trump, who has supported them. As if the internal GOP turmoil was not enough, the party’s political exposure on the issue has been intensified by heartbreaking images of migrant children separated from families and complicated by opaque statements by Trump.
At the White House, Trump defended his administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all migrants caught illegally entering the country, a change that has caused thousands of families to be divided while the parents are detained. He said without it, “you would have a run on this country the likes of which nobody has ever seen.”
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is trumpeting results of his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that get ahead of reality.
He is declaring that North Korea has already begun ridding itself fully of nuclear weapons following an agreement with Kim in Singapore earlier this month, even though his Defense Department says otherwise.
Trump also prematurely claimed the return of remains of U.S. servicemen missing from the 1950-53 Korean War.
A look at how his statements compare with the facts:
TRUMP: “The big thing is, it will be a total denuclearization, which has already started taking place.” — remarks Thursday at Cabinet meeting.
From Associated Press