The case of the woman who dodged TSA checkpoints and a US airline’s boarding protocols to hop on a flight to Paris is raising alarms about a wider aviation security problem. Multiple similar breaches of security have occurred within air travel, including some this year, but they often go undocumented. During one of the busiest travel periods on record for the Transportation Security Administration, Svetlana Dali, 57, slipped past airport security and made her way onto a flight over Thanksgiving from New York to Paris, making it most of the way there before being detected. Her case made international headlines, but stowaways are not as uncommon as travelers may think. This example, and many others over the years, have sounded alarms to public officials on protocols and safety. Airlines, too, have developed security plans to ensure things go according to plan. But even then, people can slip through. Although the reported cases are few, they happen all over the world, according to Alexandra James, an analysis output manager at Osprey Flight Solutions , which analyzes security risks in the aviation sector. She has written a case study on stowaway situations. James said she draws information from open-sourced information, such as media reports. “I hesitate to say [this happens] a lot, but I wouldn’t hesitate to acknowledge it as a security weakness,” James said. One potential solution — electronic gate technology that allows only one passenger to pass through at a time — would require more federal investment, aviation security officials have said. Security failures Dali was charged with being a stowaway on a vessel or aircraft without consent, among other federal charges. She was released from custody with more than a dozen conditions, CNN reported, but then 10 days later, she was taken into custody again, this time trying to sneak into Canada on a bus. Prosecutor Brooke Theodora said Dali told investigators she had tried to stow away before at a number of airports. She highlighted a police report from February 2024 indicating Dali tried to enter a secure arrivals area at Miami International Airport and get through customs to the planes, going against people arriving and trying to leave the airport. Around the busy Thanksgiving travel holiday, Dali bypassed an airport terminal employee in charge of the security lane reserved for airline flight crews at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 4 main checkpoint, a TSA spokesperson told CNN after the incident. Dali managed to skip the station where her ID and boarding pass would have been checked, the spokesperson said. She then joined the line for standard TSA carry-on baggage screening. It remains unclear how Dali was able to get past Delta Air Lines gate agents at JFK. Delta has not said how she was able to board the plane once she made it past the TSA checkpoint. Delta later told CNN it was “thoroughly addressing” what it described as a “deviation from standard procedures” that enabled Dali to board the plane without a boarding pass. The airline did not provide specifics but said in a statement it reviewed its own security and its infrastructure is “sound.” The airline did not have anything additional to add after CNN asked for further comment following the incident for this story. TSA is conducting its own investigation of the incident. TSA Administrator David P. Pekoske suggested this month that installing electronic gate technology — known as e-gates — could be a solution to making sure all passengers are screened. The technology could integrate with the agency’s facial recognition systems at checkpoints, but it would require more federal investment, the agency has said. Two types of stowaway incidents James categorizes stowaway incidents two different ways. There are stowaways who breach perimeter fences illegally or are smuggled inside the airport by someone else, and then there are stowaways such as Dali, who are unticketed passengers trying to get on a flight. She points to a handful of reported cases in 2024, including Dali’s case, which happened despite a slew of security measures implemented at airports in the more than two decades since 9/11. These include not allowing unticketed passengers past security checkpoints, sophisticated ID checks by the TSA and electronic scans of boarding passes at gates. Aviation security, she said, is like an onion. There are layers of elements that comprise it. “If you’re the last layer in the onion [where a passenger gets on an aircraft], then it shouldn’t be considered the least important,” James explained. “It should be considered the most important.” Many stowaways take an incredibly risky route outside the airplane cabin in their attempts to travel undetected. In 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration reported 89 people had attempted to fly in the wheel well or other compartments exterior to the aircraft cabin, excluding the cargo area. Of those 89, only 18 survived. There are no more recent statistics from the FAA. And the FAA confirmed to CNN that it has never formally tracked stowaway cases. Other would-be stowaways try to bypass security measures to travel in the passenger cabin. In February of this year, there was a woman who bypassed the TSA documentation checkpoint by jumping a barrier to an unattended section. In March, a Texas man who took photos of other passengers’ tickets boarded a Delta Air Lines flight from Salt Lake City International Airport to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Last year, another woman boarded an Air France flight bound for London-Heathrow International Airport with no identification or boarding pass. The crew noticed her, and she was removed from the aircraft before takeoff. There’s also the famous case of Marilyn Hartman, the serial stowaway, who was thought to have boarded at least 30 flights between 2002 and 2019, including international flights. James said Hartman’s and Dali’s cases are interesting because their demographics, white women in their 50s and 60s, may not seem like a threat to some security officers. “This incident demonstrates that possibly more needs to be done to raise awareness of the fact that profiling isn’t necessarily the most effective way of determining whether somebody’s a threat,” James said. The upside, according to Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official, is that Dali didn’t end up being much of a threat. Despite this, Kayyem, also a senior national security analyst for CNN, called it a “complete failure.” “She falls outside of every high-risk profile by age, gender and ethnicity and therefore, that might explain why the systems did not pick her up,” Kayyem said. Lessons learned While these instances might occur more than we realize, they are still “exceedingly rare,” according to former TSA administrator John Pistole. “It gets a lot of attention because it shouldn’t happen,” Pistole said. While he was running TSA during the Obama administration, Pistole said TSA introduced risk-based security. He explained that can mean screening before a traveler is even at the airport, based on who they are and if they are on a watch list or should be on a watch list. The actual screening of a passenger should be one of the final layers of screening, he said. “There’s no perfect security,” he said. “There’s no guarantee.” Dennis Tajer is a pilot and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, the union that represents American Airlines’ pilots. He said he hasn’t encountered this situation at American, but says he hears about stowaway incidents across the industry including ones where stowaways are found inside the aircraft’s various compartments. “Clearly, the system failed,” Tajer said. “No matter what airline it happened to.” He said the union will want to hear from American Airlines about the lesson learned from the recent Delta incident. “Crews are trained,” Tajer said. “We have procedures, and when security comes into call during flight, we have an entire team of security professionals on the ground to advise, to cross check and make sure that that airplane is kept secure and safe.” James added that the reputations of airlines where these situations occur take a hit to some degree, with not only the breach in security, but also any traveler delays associated with the stowaway situation. “The fact is that these incidents represent a major flaw in security processes, and so that can result in your customers not feeling safe, which can potentially result in a decline in ticket sales,” James said. Kayyem hopes that airlines and the TSA will look at the Dali case and learn lessons about where the system failed. “I think the lesson is that it really does fall on the original breach, which is once she got through security as a ticketed passenger,” Kayyam said, even though Dali did not have a ticket. “Everyone on the other side of that is making assumptions about how that person [made it to the gate.] ... I’m not apologizing for Delta. They let her on a plane. I don’t even get how that happened.” CNN’s Pete Muntean and Ray Sanchez contributed to this report.Randy Macchi, Houston Public Works director, announced during a Dec. 11 City Council meeting that Houston Public Works has installed 125,000 new remote water usage reading equipments as of Thanksgiving. How we got here As part of Mayor John Whitmire’s Water Improvement Plan , Houston Public Works began replacing broken remote-read devices that were causing inaccurate water bills for Houston residents earlier this year. Diving in deeper The new remote readers were installed to residential and commercial customers, with nearly 100,000 of those installations done at single-residential households, Macchi said. “We’ve been able to go through and make a five-year plan, and condense it into a few months and get it done really quickly,” Macchi said. A Houston Public Works employee installed the new water usage reading equipment. (Courtesy of Houston Public Works) However, there are still 15,000 readers that are buried underneath people’s driveways or placed in inaccessible areas that require the department to work with the homeowners individually, Macchi said. The replacement and installations of these readers required a temporary charge to single-family residential customers as a fixed set monthly amount. Macchi said the department is working on communicating with residents to transition them back to their actual usage bill and verifying the accuracy of the readings. “Roughly 50,000 people have already transitioned and have been back on actual usage,” Macchi said. “There’s 75,000 right now that are still on set, [and] 30,000 in the next 60 days will transition back to actual usage. Looking ahead Macchi noted that there is still a total of 437,000 water meters across the city of Houston, with 273,000 devices in the ground that will need to be replaced. Erin Jones, the Houston Public Works spokesperson, said the department will address those in the future. “The next 273,000 in the future, which are customers who have working devices, will need a replacement at some point soon," Macchi said. "Many of them have devices that are older technology, they don’t provide the advanced metrics, the advanced alert systems that the customers that have received the new devices have. They are going to need to be upgraded." Council members commended Macchi and the public works department on the installations, and how they worked diligently on a problem that has plagued the city for years. Abbie Kamin, District C, said she has seen a decrease in water bill complaints and applauded the department for ramping up the installations. “During the pandemic, we had huge equipment issues, we could not get the equipment that we needed to install a lot of these,” Kamin said. “To see it ramp up, so expeditiously, it’s tremendous.”
Beyond evangelicals, Trump and his allies courted smaller faith groups, from the Amish to ChabadDALLAS — As Perry Minasian prepared to leave the winter meetings on Wednesday, he wasn’t sure what he’d actually accomplished during his few days in Dallas. The Angels didn’t acquire any players during the event — aside from a left-handed reliever picked in the Rule 5 draft — but Minasian said he hoped he laid some groundwork for deals that could come to fruition throughout the rest of the winter. “We’ll find out,” he said. “I hope so. There are a lot of conversations.” The Angels still need some of everything. Minasian, per usual, would not rank the needs. “We want to get better,” he said. “We want to get deeper. Is that the bullpen? Is that the position players? Is that infield? Is that outfield? Is that starting rotation? We’ll find out. But we would definitely like to add to the team, not only the 26 but below that too.” Considering what the Angels have done and what they have currently, the infield nonetheless still seems to be a pressing need. Shortstop Zach Neto, third baseman Anthony Rendon and utility infielder Luis Rengifo will all be coming off injuries. So far the Angels have only added Kevin Newman and Scott Kingery to provide depth behind that group. A player who can start at third or second would be ideal. The Angels have checked in on trades for at least three third basemen: Nolan Arenado of the St. Louis Cardinals, Alec Bohm of the Philadelphia Phillies and Eugenio Suarez of the Arizona Diamondbacks. A deal for any of those players could be costly — in terms of money with Arenado and talent with Bohm or Suarez. Among free agents, third baseman Alex Bregman is the top of the market, followed by second baseman Gleyber Torres. Bregman is certainly out of their price range, and Torres may be as well. One intriguing option below them would be Jorge Polanco, who is a 31-year-old bounce-back candidate who can play second, third or shortstop. He could likely be had for $8 million to $10 million. Polanco had a career .780 OPS over parts of 10 seasons with the Minnesota Twins, but that dropped to .651 last season with the Seattle Mariners, who declined his option. Seattle is a notorious pitcher’s park, and Polanco had a .606 OPS at home, and a more reasonable .694 mark on the road. Some of last year’s decline could have been attributed to playing through knee issues that ultimately required surgery. He also had a .740 OPS with 11 homers in the second half. Polanco is also a switch-hitter who has been better from the left side over his career. The Angels are in need of any good hitters, but ideally they’d add some who are better against righties, because that was their weaker side last season. “You always want to balance the lineup as best as you can,” Minasian said. “It’s just about what’s available. So we wouldn’t pass on a right-handed hitter that we feel like is productive.” RULE 5 PICK The Angels selected left-handed reliever Garrett McDaniels from the Dodgers in the Rule 5 draft. McDaniels joins the Angels’ 40-man roster. They must keep him on the major league roster all season or else offer him back to the Dodgers. McDaniels, 24, had a 3.19 ERA with 84 strikeouts in 73 1⁄3 innings last season. He pitched just three innings at Double-A, and the rest were at two levels of Class-A. “Good arm, can spin two breaking balls, heater’s 94-95, combination of ground balls and strikeouts,” Minasian said. “Now, it’s at lower levels, but stuff is stuff. We felt like it was worth taking a look at him at spring training, and we’ll see if he can make the team. ... “You can never have too many lefties, and especially guys that can really spin the ball. It’s a good trait to have in the bullpen.” ARIZONA UPGRADES Before Minasian came to Dallas, he stopped in Arizona to get a look at the upgraded spring training facilities. The Angels re-did their clubhouse, weight room and offices, and they added pitching and hitting labs. “It looks great,” Minasian said. “I had a chance to walk through. It’s not completely finished. Obviously, we still have time. It blew me away. It’s better than I even thought it would be. The labs are awesome.” The Angels have been behind other organizations in terms of their technology. This facility should help them catch up, and Minasian believes it will translate to improved performance of their players. “I think it’s going to be significant,” Minasian said. “I really do. I think it will be a significant upgrade from what we had.” Related Articles Los Angeles Angels | Angels win No. 2 pick in 2025 MLB draft lottery Los Angeles Angels | Nolan Arenado traded to the Dodgers or Angels? Not likely Los Angeles Angels | Angels open to adding a full-time third baseman, despite having oft-injured Anthony Rendon Los Angeles Angels | Angels look to continue upgrading as they head to winter meetings Los Angeles Angels | Alexander: Golden at-bat? It would only tarnish baseball KIKUCHI’S ROLE The Angels have made much of what they hope to gain by having veterans like Kyle Hendricks and Travis d’Arnaud around their young players, and that also applies to Yusei Kikuchi. Although it’s reasonable to think the language barrier might preclude Kikuchi from having the same type of influence, Minasian said he is “100%” certain that Kikuchi will help Angels young pitchers, both with his words and actions. “His English is pretty good,” Minasian said. “The work ethic and the the prep and the weight room stuff. People see him doing the work. If you ask people in Toronto and the short stay in Houston and even in Seattle, it’s real. It will be good for our guys.”
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Jimmy Carter: Many evolutions for a centenarian ‘citizen of the world’
By PETER SMITH A social-media tribute to Coptic Christians. A billboard in Amish country. A visit to a revered Jewish gravesite. While Donald Trump’s lock on the white evangelical vote is legendary, he and his campaign allies also wooed smaller religious groups, far from the mainstream. As it turned out, Trump won by decisive margins, but his campaign aggressively courted niche communities with the understanding that every vote could be critical, particularly in swing states. Voter surveys such as exit polls, which canvass broad swaths of the electorate, aren’t able to gauge the impact of such microtargeting, but some backers say the effort was worth it. Just one week before the election, Trump directed a post on the social-media platform X to Coptic Christians in the United States —- whose church has ancient roots in Egypt. He saluted their “Steadfast Faith in God, Perseverance through Centuries of Persecution and Love for this Great Country.” “This was the first time seeing a major U.S. presidential candidate address the community in this manner,” said Mariam Wahba, a Coptic Christian and research analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based research institute. “It was really a profound moment.” She said many Copts share the conservative social views of other Christian groups in the Republican constituency, and they may already have been Trump supporters. But the posting reinforced those bonds. Coptic bishops sent the president-elect congratulations after his victory and cited their “shared social and family values.” Some Assyrian Christians — another faith group with Middle Eastern roots — similarly bonded with Trump, whose mispronunciation of “Assyrian” at a rally created a viral video moment and drew attention to their support. Sam Darmo, a Phoenix real estate agent and co-founder of Assyrians for Trump, said many community members cited the economy, illegal immigration and other prominent voter issues. They echoed other conservative Christians’ concerns, he said, on issues such as abortion, gender identity and religious expression in public. But he said Trump supported various Middle Eastern Christians recovering from the Islamic State group’s oppressive rule. Darmo also credited Massad Boulos, father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, for mobilizing various Middle Eastern Christian groups, including Chaldean Catholics, and other voters, particularly in Michigan, such as Muslims. “He brought all these minority groups together,” he said. “We’re hoping to continue that relationship.” But members of Middle Eastern-rooted Christian groups, and their politics, are far from monolithic, said Marcus Zacharia, founder of Progressive Copts, a program of Informed Immigrants, an organization that promotes dialogue on sensitive topics among such groups in the United States and Canada. He said many younger community members question Trump’s stances on issues such as immigration, and sense that conservatives sometimes tokenize them by focusing on the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East while neglecting wider issues of repression in countries there that the U.S. supports. He said there needs to be more informed dialogue across the political divide in these communities. “There is no more high time than these next four years to have that way of conducting conversations,” he said. Republicans also made an aggressive push for Amish voters , particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where they are most numerous at about 92,000 (many below voting age). The GOP has made similar efforts in the past, even though researchers have found that less than 10% of them typically vote, due to their separatism from society. But Republicans used billboards, mailers, ads and door-to-door campaigner to drive turnout in Lancaster County, home base to the nation’s largest Amish settlement. On Election Day, Amish voters Samuel Stoltzfus and his wife Lillian Stoltzfus said they were supporting Trump, citing their anti-abortion beliefs. “We basically look at it as murder,” Stoltzfus, 31, said outside a polling center in the Lancaster County community of New Holland, where dozens of other members of the local Amish community voted. Trump has wavered on the issue, dismaying some abortion opponents, though many have said Republicans still align more closely to their views. Stolzfus added: “Make America great again and keep the moral values,” he said. “Let’s go back to the roots.” Steven Nolt, a history professor at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster College who studies the Amish and their voting patterns, said that while it’s too early to say definitively without further research, he doesn’t see evidence of a larger turnout this year. Lancaster County as a whole — most of which is not Amish — is a GOP stronghold that Trump won handily, though both parties’ votes edged up from 2020, according to unofficial results posted by the Pennsylvania Department of State. Trump’s biggest increases were in urban or suburban areas with few Amish, while some areas with larger Amish populations generally saw a modest increase in the Trump vote, said Nolt, director of the college’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. “Bottom line, percentage-wise, not much change in the parts of Lancaster County where the Amish live,” he said. Trump directly reached out to members of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, a prominent and highly observant branch of Orthodox Judaism. Related Articles National Politics | Attorneys want the US Supreme Court to say Mississippi’s felony voting ban is cruel and unusual National Politics | Trump convinced Republicans to overlook his misconduct. But can he do the same for his nominees? National Politics | Trump gave Interior nominee one directive for a half-billion acres of US land: ‘Drill.’ National Politics | Trump’s team is delaying transition agreements. What does it mean for security checks and governing? National Politics | Judge delays Trump hush money sentencing in order to decide where case should go now On Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, Trump made a symbolically resonant visit to the “Ohel,” the burial site of the movement’s revered late leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. Wearing a yarmulke, the traditional Jewish skullcap, Trump, who has Jewish family members, brought a written prayer to the Ohel and laid a small stone at the grave in keeping with tradition. The site in New York City, while particularly central to Chabad adherents, draws an array of Jewish and other visitors, including politicians. About two-thirds of Jewish voters overall supported Trump’s opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters. But the Trump campaign has made a particular outreach to Orthodox Jews, citing issues including his policies toward Israel in his first administration. Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowitz of Chabad Lubavitch of Southwest Florida said it was moving for him to see images of Trump’s visit. “The mere fact that he made a huge effort, obviously it was important to him,” he said. Associated Press journalist Luis Henao contributed. 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Jimmy Carter, the former U.S. president renowned for his role in the Camp David Accords, passed away peacefully at his home in Plains, Georgia, at age 100. Despite facing economic challenges and the Iran hostage crisis during his presidency, Carter's post-White House life was marked by significant humanitarian contributions that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Carter, whose moral fortitude and commitment to peace were hallmarks of his tenure, was honored by U.S. President Joe Biden, who declared January 9 a national day of mourning. Carter's legacy includes diplomatic successes in the Middle East and efforts to advance human rights and democracy worldwide. His contributions extended to election monitoring and crisis resolution in hotspots like Bosnia and Haiti. While Carter's presidency faced domestic hurdles, including inflation and interest rates, his diplomatic efforts left a lasting impact. He has been remembered as a principled leader who brought significant change through peaceful means. As the world reflects on his accomplishments, Carter's profound influence remains a testament to his belief in justice and equality. (With inputs from agencies.)