Portal4Travel.com

EU interior ministers gave a mandate on Friday to the European Commission to negotiate the conditions for visa-free travel to the United States of America for all of the bloc’s citizens, its Slovenian presidency said.  Most older EU states are already part of a US visa waiver scheme, but Greece and most of the 12 mainly ex-communist nations who have joined the bloc since 2004 are not.

Washington has sought bilateral deals with some countries that do not enjoy visa-free US travel, rather than dealing with the European Union as a whole, fuelling tensions.The mandate will allow the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to negotiate in the name of the entire 27-nation bloc and to sound out Washington about its demands for a deal.  I think the US is too paraniod to approve this.

Amir Khan says he becomes frustrated and humiliated every time he enters the United States and federal agents search his computers. Khan, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, says it has happened five times since 2003 and it is happening more often that we would like to even know about..

He says agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have even forced him to give them access to password-protected, confidential information from his company and his banking records. An IT consultant who travels to Europe, Turkey and Pakistan, Khan says he has cooperated with the questions and searches but feels by now border agents should know he doesn’t pose a threat.

Situations for travelers such as Khan are at issue in a lawsuit filed last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Asian Law Caucus in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The suit accuses customs agents of “lengthy questioning and intrusive searches” and seeks clarification on the law that allows such searches.

The San Francisco, California-based foundation, which works to defend people’s rights in the digital world, says it knows of more than a dozen cases in which electronic devices such as cell phones, BlackBerries, MP3 players and laptops have been searched by customs agents. In some cases, they have been confiscated and never returned.

As always it is very tough to judge how far the authorities powers should extend while protecting the masses.

A new report shows a quarter of domestic flights failed to arrive on time in 2007 — the industry’s second poorest performance on record — and analysts say it is likely to get worse.

More than 26 percent of commercial flights in the U.S. arrived late or were canceled last year as rising passenger demand and an industry preference for smaller planes intensified congestion in the skies and on runways. The air-travel logjam, reported Tuesday by the Department of Transportation, comes as a growing number of air traffic controllers near retirement age — a trend the controllers’ union says will magnify the problem.

The only time passengers had more difficulty getting to their destinations on time was in 2000, when more than 27 percent of flights were tardy or canceled. Back then, there were 31 percent fewer flights than in 2007, when carriers operated nearly 7.5 million one-way trips. Excluding cancellations, however, 2007 was the worst on record for flight delays, with 24.2 percent arriving late, compared with 23.9 percent in 2000, according to government statistics that date back to 1995. The worst month of the year for the nation’s 20 largest airlines was December, when more than a third of all flights were late or canceled, mostly because of the weather.

There is no sign of improvement on the horizon, analysts said, because airlines continue to replace larger aircraft with smaller ones. The practice is intended to maximize profit margins by flying with fewer empty seats, but it also means more flights and more congestion and delays.  As the air travel industry struggles with these challenges expect travellers to pay the price.