United Airlines loses girl on solo trip to camp
Newsday
Should you let your child fly alone?
Parents may wonder after a couple alleged this week that their 10-year-old daughter flying to summer camp was stranded at one of the world’s busiest airports after United Airlines failed to keep track of her.
The girl ultimately made it to camp safely. But the incident highlights some of the risks of children flying alone, including the a little-known industry practice of hiring outside companies to escort kids from gate to gate.
Kashmir No Longer World’s Most Dangerous Place as Tourism Climbs
Businessweek
Hotel owner Wahid Malik drives his ball down the fairway at the Royal Springs Golf Course in Indian Kashmir, taking a break from hosting tourists flocking to the disputed region guarded by half a million soldiers and police.
Malik plans to build a new guest house to cash in on a tourism boom that has seen the number of visitors double to a record 2 million in the past year, to an area over which nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have fought two wars. With an anti-Indian insurgency causing the fewest deaths since it began in 1989, five-star hotels are full and the cost of flights to Kashmir’s summer capital of Srinagar is up 40 percent.
“Our hope is that a few years from now, Kashmir will no longer be known as a place of tanks and troops,” said Malik, 50, whose hotel is overlooked by 2,700-meter (8,800-feet) Himalayan peaks and served as a residence for the army for 15 years until 2005. “No one who lived through the dark days wants a return.”
The tourist rush promises jobs in a region where half the population aged between 18 and 30 are out of work. Getting more young Kashmiris into full-time employment can further lower violence and aid peace moves along the subcontinent’s most intractable fault line, where fighting between militants and India’s army has killed 50,000 people over more than two decades.
Sleeping tourist on baggage carousel goes through X-ray
USA TODAY
The 36-year-old Norwegian man was at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport to catch a flight to Oslo. He did not awaken when the belt began to move, and proceeded to travel on it for 15 minutes before airport officials spotted his curled-up body on the X-ray monitors.
Frustrations of Air Travel Push Passengers to Amtrak
New York Times
Long a punch line for harried Northeast travelers, Amtrak has come to dominate commercial travel in the corridor connecting Washington, New York and Boston, and this summer its trains are packed.
A decade ago, Delta and US Airways shuttles were the preferred mode of travel between the cities. But high fares, slow airport security and frequent flight delays — along with Amtrak’s high-speed Acela trains, online ticketing and workstation amenities — have eaten away at the airlines’ share of passengers.
Between New York and Washington, Amtrak said, 75 percent of travelers go by train, a huge share that has been building steadily since the Acela was introduced in 2000 and airport security was tightened after 2001. Before that, Amtrak had just over a third of the business between New York and Washington.
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