A big winter storm packing high wind, ice and heavy snow caused major disruptions for travellers returning from the Thanksgiving holiday at airports across the United States. The storm was threatening to dump more than a foot of snow on upstate New York and parts of New England on Monday. New York City could get up to 3 inches and Boston could get up to 6, according to federal forecasters. As of Monday evening, 814 flights were cancelled and more than 6,200 were delayed, according to flight-tracking website Flightaware.com, with disruptions worsening throughout the day. Some arriving flights into New York’s LaGuardia Airport and Boston Logan International Airport were delayed two hours and more than three hours into Newark Liberty International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Newark was the hardest hit by cancellations with more than 13% of its schedule, or 190 flights, while more than a quarter of Newark and LaGuardia’s flights were delayed. The disruptions come on top of more than 950 cancellations, ranging from Boston to San Francisco, on Sunday due to stormy weather. Some 8,400 flights were delayed across the US Sunday. American Airlines waived date change-fees for travellers booked to fly on Monday and Tuesday to or from more than 30 airports in the Northeast, including LaGuardia, Kennedy, Newark, Philadelphia and Boston, if travellers can fly as late as Sunday. Travellers can also cancel their trips without paying a fee. Delta, JetBlue and United issued similar waivers for travellers.<br/>
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The Department of Homeland Security wants to be able to use facial-recognition technology to identify all people entering and leaving the United States — including US citizens. In a recent filing, the DHS proposed changing existing regulations "to provide that all travellers, including US citizens, may be required to be photographed upon entry and/or departure" from the United States, such as at airports. Michael Hardin, director of exit/entry policy and planning at the DHS, told CNN Business that the rule is in the "final stages of clearance." But because it hasn't yet been published it won't go into effect until after a period of public comment, he said. Facial recognition technology, which typically matches an image of a person from a photo or video with a still image of them in a database, is becoming increasingly common in airports throughout the world as governments and airlines use it for security and check-in purposes. The US govt in particular has used facial recognition for the past 20 years or so, although it has only recently ramped up biometric boarding at airports. Since the mid-aughts, any non-US citizen travelling to the US gets their picture taken and fingerprints scanned on arrival, but this has not been a requirement for citizens. In 2017 President Donald Trump signed an executive order to accelerate a full roll out of airport biometrics for all domestic and international travellers. This was also supported by the Obama Administration. Yet while the DHS said the proposed regulation change is meant to help spot criminals and prevent travel-document fraud, the American Civil Liberties Union noted on Monday that the filing contradicts US Customs and Border Protection's previous statement that US citizens would not be subject to such surveillance.<br/>
The head of the FAA will testify on Dec. 11 before a US House panel on the agency’s review of the grounded Boeing 737 MAX, which was involved in two fatal crashes in five months. Administrator Steve Dickson will testify before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the committee and the FAA confirmed Monday. Boeing has struggled to complete requirements necessary before it can win approval from the agency to resume flights, and US officials told Reuters last week it is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that the FAA will unground the plane before the end of December. US lawmakers have been critical of the FAA’s prior decisions to delegate a significant amount of plane certification tasks to Boeing. The FAA said last week it is not delegating any of the ongoing review of the plane to Boeing, and will be the only issuer of airworthiness certificates for all new 737 MAX planes. The FAA told Boeing it “determined that the public interest and safety in air commerce require that the FAA retain authority to issue airworthiness certificates and export certificates of airworthiness for all 737 MAX airplanes.” Boeing still must complete a software audit and schedule a key certification test flight before the plane can be ungrounded. Dickson, a veteran airline pilot, also has said he will personally fly the plane before he allows it to return to service. The three US airlines that operate the 737 MAX - Southwest, American Airlines and United - are scheduling flights without use of the aircraft until early March 2020, nearly a year since the grounding after crashes killed 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.<br/>
Boeing is inviting airline industry members, experts and analysts to its facilities in the Seattle area this week in an effort to outline its plan to bring the beleaguered 737 Max back to service after two fatal crashes. The manufacturer is scrambling to gain regulator approval to return the jets to the skies, a process it hopes to conclude this month, but regulators have publicly said several times that they don’t have ant timeline. Boeing on Tuesday and Wednesday will host the invitees, who do not include the media, and offer briefings with executives, according to an invitation. The invitation, which includes a visit to Boeing’s aircraft delivery center and its Max production facility in Renton, offers to cover flight and hotel expenses. It is the latest attempt by Boeing to gain support and rebuild public trust in the planes as the grounding enters its 10th month. Airlines have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and curbed their growth plans because of the grounding. In addition to industry analysts, representatives from flight attendant unions are also attending, including those that represent cabin crews at United and American. Pilots and flight attendants will be key in reassuring the public about the planes after approval, executives have said.<br/>
A WTO panel ruled Monday that the EU has not complied with an order to end illegal subsidies for plane-maker Airbus, which prompted the Trump administration to impose tariffs on nearly $7.5b worth of EU goods in October. In its ruling, a WTO compliance panel found that the EU had not taken sufficient steps to end harm to Boeing, the major rival to Europe’s Airbus. The EU is expected to appeal, though the United States is on the cusp of preventing the WTO’s appeals court — the Appellate Body — from ruling on any new appeals. US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer on Monday welcomed the WTO ruling. “Strong action is needed to convince the EU that its interests lie in eliminating these market-distorting subsidies now and in the future, so that our industries can compete on a level playing field,’’ Lighthizer said. Responding to Monday’s ruling, the EU’s executive commission faulted the panel for making a “number of serious legal errors in its assessment of EU compliance,” and said its recommended ways of compliance would be “very problematic for a larger part of the WTO membership.” “The European Commission will decide on its course of action in light of this assessment, including the possibility of bringing an appeal in order to have these legal errors corrected,” it said. <br/>
Typhoon Kammuri barrelled towards the Philippines yesterday, leaving one person dead while pushing tens of thousands of others into evacuation centres and prompting the temporary closure of Manila's international airport. Kammuri was expected to make landfall in the nation's east late yesterday or early today. It will then be expected to pass to the south of the capital, which is home to some 13 million people and is hosting thousands of athletes for the regional SEA Games. Airport officials said they made the call to suspend operations based on the potency of the storm, which was forecast to come ashore with intense rain and sustained winds of up to 165kmh as well as gusts of up to 230kmh, forecasters said. "Based on our estimate, it will be closed from 11am to 11pm tomorrow, Dec 3," said Ed Monreal, GM of Manila's airport authority.<br/>