On the Road: Growing Pains for PreCheck Airport Security Program

All he wanted was some information about PreCheck, the program of the Transportation Security Administration that gives eligible fliers a quick-pass through airport security. His boarding pass had the PreCheck certification, but the PreCheck lane was available only in a terminal separate from the one where his flight was to depart at Newark Liberty International Airport.

After 15 minutes with one of those dreaded automated phone systems, Mr. Ax finally got through to an airline agent and inquired politely about the machinations of getting through PreCheck in one terminal while flying out of another. Couldn’t be done easily, it turned out.

“The guy starts yelling at me, ‘That’s not my problem, that’s the T.S.A.’s problem!’ ” he said. “He was literally shouting.”

Mr. Ax says he does about 85 concerts a year, about 50 of them requiring air travel. He belongs to Global Entry, the popular “trusted traveler” program of the Customs and Border Protection agency that gives a quick-pass re-entry into the country for international travelers. Global Entry members also are automatically enrolled in PreCheck.

“So that’s fantastic. But I’ve had PreCheck for six months, and unfortunately I’ve been able to use it exactly once, at O’Hare, despite all the flying I do,” he said.

Mr. Ax’s frustration with PreCheck partly reflects high expectations that bump into the realities of how limited the program really has been so far. It’s operating in 40 airports, but the availability is limited to participating airlines, and only at certain terminals.

Last week, the T.S.A. announced an aggressive expansion of PreCheck that the agency says will add 60 new airports by the end of this year. Participating airlines now are Alaska, American, Delta, Hawaiian, United, US Airways and Virgin America. JetBlue and Southwest are expected to join the program soon, the agency said.

When it began in October 2011, PreCheck was available only to high-status, high-revenue passengers chosen by individual airlines to participate — an approach that irritated many frequent travelers who failed to make the invitation lists. Then PreCheck also became open to those who belong to Global Entry and other so-called known-traveler programs. That prompted many travelers to join Global Entry, even if they didn’t fly internationally. Global Entry costs $100 for five years and requires a background check, fingerprinting and a personal interview.

In July, John S. Pistole, the T.S.A. administrator, announced a major expansion to increase the numbers of travelers in PreCheck, starting this fall in an initiative that he has referred to as “Global Entry Lite.” Travelers will be able to apply directly for PreCheck, paying an $85 fee good for five years, and reporting to airport enrollment centers for fingerprinting. That expansion is expected to start at two airports, Washington Dulles and Indianapolis, and roll out more widely through the fall.

The ambitious goal of the T.S.A. is to have 25 percent of all airline travelers in the United States eligible for expedited screening by the end of this year through PreCheck. On Monday, the T.S.A. said it would also offer PreCheck on a case-by-case basis to randomly selected passengers based only on the information they provide at booking.

Still, there’s a good amount of confusion about PreCheck. For one thing, even some frequent business travelers that I hear from who belong to Global Entry don’t realize that to also qualify for PreCheck, they have to enter their Global Entry identification numbers in their frequent-flier profiles of participating airlines. (Those entering PreCheck in the new application process will receive what the T.S.A. calls a Known Traveler Number.)

Once enrolled, a traveler should see the PreCheck certification on the bar code of each boarding pass from a participating airline. But that doesn’t always ensure an expedited passage through security, in not having to take off shoes or remove laptops from their cases. A certain amount of randomness is built into the system, so a passenger with PreCheck still may occasionally be directed instead to the regular screening lanes.

The T.S.A. has detailed information on PreCheck, including links for participating airlines and locations of PreCheck lanes in the 40 airports where the program is now operating.

Incidentally, I hear nothing but good things from readers about Global Entry, which allows returning travelers to be whisked through international airport border-entry points using special kiosks that eliminate those hated long waits in line. PreCheck is a work in progress.

“Global Entry works very well. It’s just excellent. PreCheck, however? They keep advertising it, but the truth is, it’s just not available in many places yet,” Mr. Ax said.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

In Europe, Growing Concern Slovenia Is Next to Need Bailout

The rewards of success included an imposing mountainside retreat and frequent mention of his name as a possible future finance minister of this small, idyllic Alpine country.

Now, though, Mr. Kordez stands convicted of forgery and abuse of office for financial dealings as Merkur struggled under a mountain of debt.

“My mistake and the mistake of the banks was to vastly underestimate the risk,” Mr. Kordez, 56, said in a recent interview at his home near the picturesque town of Bled, with a view of Slovenia’s highest peak. He awaits a decision later this month on an appeal of his conviction, which could send him to prison for five years.

As fears grow that Slovenia could follow Cyprus and become the sixth euro zone country to seek a bailout, his rise and fall have come to symbolize the way easy and cheap credit, combined with Balkan-style crony capitalism and corporate mismanagement, fueled a banking crisis that has unhinged a country previously praised as a regional model of peaceful prosperity.

The recent bailout of Cyprus at a cost of €10 billion, or $13 billion, which included stringent conditions forcing losses on bank depositors, has focused minds in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital. Slovenia’s struggling banking sector is saddled with about €6.8 billion worth of nonperforming loans, about one-fifth of the national economy. Slovenia is now in recession, and the gloom across the euro zone shows little sign of abating. A European Commission forecast released Friday said that France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands — four of the five largest euro zone economies — will be in recession through 2013.

Last Thursday, Slovenia bought time by borrowing $3.5 billion on international markets. That was two days after Moody’s Investors Service cut the country’s credit rating to junk status, citing the banking turmoil and a deteriorating national balance sheet. Analysts said the bond sale would probably enable the government of the new prime minister, Alenka Bratusek, to stay afloat at least through the end of the year.

The Cypriot debacle has shown how bailing out even a small country can damage the credibility of the euro currency union. But Slovenia, with two million people, insists that it is not Cyprus and will not seek emergency aid.

“For the time being, I have a sound sleep,” Ms. Bratusek, the 42-year-old prime minister, said in a recent interview.

This week, on Thursday, Ms. Bratusek, only a little more than a month in office, is expected to present a financial turnaround plan to the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union. She said that privatizing Slovenia’s largely state-owned banking sector was a priority, along with creating a “bad bank” to take over nonperforming loans.

Her government, she said, will also unveil plans by July to sell the country’s second-largest bank, Nova Kreditna Banka Maribor, along with two large state companies that she declined to specify. The sales could raise up to €2 billion, she said.

Ms. Bratusek, who once headed the state budget office at the Finance Ministry, said Slovenia’s government debt, which analysts say rose from about 54 percent of gross domestic product to around 64 percent with last week’s bond sale, still ranked at the lower end of that scale in the euro area.

But the 6 percent interest rate Slovenia offered on the 10-year bonds in last week’s debt sale, at a time when some euro zone countries are enjoying historically low borrowing costs — Germany’s equivalent bond is trading below 1.2 percent — might only add to the country’s financial problems.

Mujtaba Rahman, director of Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, said the new financing could backfire if it lulled the government into laxity about making vital structural changes.

“The new financing was not a vote of confidence in the Slovenian government or in the economy, but rather reflects investors attracted by high bond yields,” Mr. Rahman said. “A bailout could still prove inevitable.”

What went wrong in Slovenia? The country, wedged between Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, was considered the most promising among the 10 new European Union entrants when it joined in 2004. That was 13 years after it declared independence from Yugoslavia, avoiding a bloody Balkan war that had swept up other countries in the region.

Cost of Environmental Degradation in China Is Growing

The statistic came from a study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, which is part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

The figure of $230 billion, or 1.54 trillion renminbi, is based on costs arising from pollution and damage to the ecosystem, the price that China is paying for its rapid industrialization.

“This cuts to the heart of China’s economic challenge: how to transform from the explosive growth of the past 30 years to the sustainable growth of the next 30 years,” said Alistair Thornton, a China economist at the research firm IHS Global Insight. “Digging a hole and filling it back in again gives you G.D.P. growth. It doesn’t give you economic value. A lot of the activity in China over the last few years has been digging holes to fill them back in again — anything from bailing out failing solar companies to ignoring the ‘externalities’ of economic growth.”

And the costs could be even higher than the ministry’s estimate, he said. The $230 billion figure is incomplete because the researchers did not have a full set of data. Making such calculations is “notoriously difficult,” Mr. Thornton said.

The 2010 figure was reported on Monday by a newspaper associated with the ministry, and so far only partial results of the study are available. In 2006, the ministry began releasing an estimate of the cost of environmental degradation. The ministry has issued statistics only intermittently, though its original goal was to do the calculation — what it called “green G.D.P.” — annually.

The rapidly eroding environment across the country has become an issue of paramount concern to many Chinese. In January, outrage boiled over as air pollution in north China reached record levels, well beyond what Western environmental agencies consider hazardous. The public fury forced propaganda officials to allow official Chinese news organizations to report more candidly on the pollution.

Chinese state-owned enterprises in the oil and power industries have consistently blocked efforts by pro-environment government officials to impose policies that would alleviate the pollution.

There have also been constant concerns over water and soil pollution. The discovery of at least 16,000 dead pigs in rivers that supply drinking water to Shanghai has ignited alarm there. This week, China Central Television reported that farmers in a village in Henan Province were using wastewater from a paper mill to grow wheat. But one farmer said they would not dare to eat the wheat themselves. It is sold outside the village, perhaps ending up in cities, while the farmers grow their own wheat with well water.

The Beijing government on Thursday released details of a three-year plan that is aimed at curbing various forms of pollution, according to a report on Friday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper. The report quoted Wang Anshun, Beijing’s mayor, as saying that sewage treatment, garbage incineration and forestry development would cost at least $16 billion.

In 2006, the environmental ministry said the cost of environmental degradation in 2004 was more than $62 billion, or 3.05 percent of G.D.P. In 2010, it released partial results for 2008 that totaled about $185 billion, or 3.9 percent of G.D.P. Several foreign scholars have criticized the methods by which Chinese researchers have reached those numbers, saying some crucial measures of environmental degradation are not included in the calculations.

There is consensus now that China’s decades of double-digit economic growth exacted an enormous environmental cost. But growth remains the priority; the Communist Party’s legitimacy is based largely on rapidly expanding the economy, and China officially estimates that its G.D.P., which was $8.3 trillion in 2012, will grow at a rate of 7.5 percent this year and at an average of 7 percent in the five-year plan that runs to 2015. A Deutsche Bank report released last month said the current growth policies would lead to a continuing steep decline of the environment for the next decade, especially given the expected coal consumption and boom in automobile sales.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.

Stradley Ronon, Blank Rome Growing in D.C.; Blank Rome Expands in Florida

While the country?s firms scramble over Dewey & LeBoeuf lateral groups, some area firms have been focused elsewhere to find some high-profile additions.