分类： society

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 terror attacks triggered sweeping overhauls of American airport security protocols, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is rolling back some of the most restrictive long-standing travel rules, enabled by advances in screening technology that have redefined what air travel safety can look like.

The first major change comes to gate access: for the first time in decades, non-ticketed individuals will be allowed to pass through TSA security checkpoints to accompany ticketed passengers to their departure gates or greet arriving loved ones. This new pilot program, tied to the TSA PreCheck trusted traveler network, will initially launch at 13 U.S. airports. Eligible participants — individuals who already hold TSA PreCheck approval or a known traveler number — can submit an online application 1 to 3 days ahead of their planned visit to gain access.

In a statement posted to its official website, TSA framed the policy as a step toward restoring small, meaningful moments that defined air travel for generations: “This new program makes it easier to return to the gate for welcomes and send-offs, meet friends during a layover, and enjoy dining and shopping along the way, bringing back the moments that once defined air travel.”

A second landmark policy shift is also under consideration, multiple U.S. media outlets have reported: the TSA is reviewing whether to reverse the 17-year ban on full water bottles passing through security checkpoints for PreCheck travelers. That restriction was implemented immediately after British authorities foiled a 2006 terror plot that planned to hide liquid explosive mixtures in disposable drink bottles. The BBC requested official confirmation of the proposed change, but the TSA has not yet issued a response.

Aviation security experts emphasize these changes are not a rollback of safety standards, but a response to dramatic improvements in screening technology. Jeff Price, an aviation security professor at Metro State University Denver, explained that post-9/11 restrictions on non-ticketed gate access were originally designed to reduce the volume of people requiring screening, allowing officers to focus their attention on ticketed passengers. Today, updated technology has eliminated the need for that trade-off.

“Newer security machines that TSA is installing to replace traditional X-ray machines have computed tomography capabilities, which can do a much better job of detecting liquid-based explosives,” Price told the BBC. These updates follow a 2025 TSA change that ended the 20-year requirement for all passengers to remove their shoes during screening, a policy that was widely unpopular with travelers for decades.

Public reaction to the announced changes has been split along generational lines on social media. Older travelers who remember air travel before the post-9/11 restrictions have praised the move as a return to normalcy and the personal connections that air travel once enabled. But many younger travelers, who have never known air travel without these strict security rules, have raised questions about whether the shifts could weaken overall safety.

Price pushed back on concerns about declining security, noting that the policy changes rely on upgraded technology and are limited to pre-vetted trusted travelers, so core safety standards remain intact. “People have a nostalgia for a pre 9/11, it’s a calling back to a normal world, and I can see that part of it. I can see people wanting to get back to something that they feel more comfortable with, which was a pre 9/11 world,” he said. “I don’t want to compromise valid security measures simply for a nostalgic feeling before 9/11. I don’t think we should make those types of decisions so that we feel better. We can make those types of decisions as long as the security measures are not compromised, and that’s always what I look for in these situations.”

On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, a new forensic technology is slowly bringing long-awaited answers to hundreds of families who have spent decades waiting for confirmation of their loved ones’ fates.

For Juliette Scauso, that wait has carried on since she was 4 years old, the youngest of four children growing up on Long Island without her father, Dennis Scauso, a 12-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department’s hazmat unit. Dennis was not scheduled to work on September 11, 2001, but he swapped shifts to pick up extra overtime pay. When the South Tower collapsed, he was inside, and only his dented, damaged firefighter helmet, emblazoned with his badge number, was recovered months after the attack.

A quarter of a century later, Dennis Scauso remains one of more than 1,000 unidentified 9/11 victims from New York, according to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). For decades, identifying fragmented remains recovered from Ground Zero has stood as one of the most complex forensic challenges in modern history. The jet-fueled fires that burned at the World Trade Center site destroyed most genetic material, leaving only small, fragmented portions of remains for testing. Complications were amplified by shift changes that left many first responders wearing borrowed gear marked with other firefighters’ names, and the sheer scale of the tragedy, which dwarfed the other 9/11 attack sites. While all 40 victims on United Airlines Flight 93 were identified, and only five remains from the Pentagon attack remain unaccounted for, more than a third of the 2,753 World Trade Center victims are still without formal identification.

But last month, OCME announced a breakthrough: using Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy (FIGG), investigators have identified a previously unknown victim, marking the 1,654th confirmed identification from the attacks. This new technology, which leverages whole genome sequencing to map a victim’s full genetic code, allows investigators to match partial DNA profiles to more distant relatives of victims than older DNA testing methods permitted. Once a distant match is found in genetic genealogy databases, the New York Police Department works to track down closer family members to confirm the match.

OCME has preserved all unidentified remains in sealed, temperature-controlled packaging for decades, allowing teams to retest samples as new technology emerges. Early identifications relied on fingerprints and dental records, before DNA testing became the standard, and successive generations of DNA technology have allowed teams to extract usable genetic material from samples that were untestable years earlier. This continuous re-evaluation is why new identifications are still being made 25 years after the attacks. Last year alone, three more victims were identified through advanced DNA testing: 26-year-old currency trader Ryan Fitzgerald, 72-year-old Barbara Keating who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and a third victim whose family chose to keep their identity private.

Angela Soler, director of forensic anthropology at OCME, says FIGG opens a new frontier of hope for families still waiting for answers. “There is real promise in using this approach,” she said. “There’s hope for more families to receive answers, and hopefully we’ll be able to test more remains in the future using this technology as well.” The work is deeply personal for Soler and many of her colleagues, who responded to Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. While they acknowledge it is unlikely every victim will ever be identified — in some cases, no recoverable remains exist at all — they have no plans to end their efforts. “As long as there’s families looking for answers, we’ll continue searching for them,” Soler said.

For families, the news of an identification brings a complex mix of emotions. For many, formal identification closes a lingering, unspoken question that has lingered for decades, bringing a sense of closure that allows them to lay their loved one to rest, either in a private burial or in the repository built into the bedrock of the World Trade Center memorial, where many families choose to leave remains close to where their loved ones died. But for others, the news reopens wounds that have taken decades to heal.

Juliette Scauso says she has made peace with never having her father’s remains, and has built her life around his memory — remembering him as a handyman with a love of jazz who left only his helmet behind. “I’ve spent essentially my entire life knowing my father died, and learning to live with the fact that we never recovered him,” she said. For her, an identification decades later would not bring her father back, but only reopen a grief she has learned to carry. “At this point, an identification wouldn’t change the reality of his death. It wouldn’t give me back my father, and I don’t necessarily want to reopen something that has become part of the way I’ve learned to live and grieve. Especially 25 years later, it’s going to open up the wounds again.” Even so, she acknowledges the profound importance of the new technology for other families still waiting.

Soler echoes that complexity, noting that for every family that longs for answers, some choose to opt out of notification, finding the confirmation of their loved one’s death too painful to revisit 25 years on. Still, she says, the work continues: every week, OCME receives calls from family members asking for updates, and investigators will keep testing, matching, and searching, as long as there are questions left to answer.

On a Sunday in Miami, Florida, a fatal crash involving an Amazon Prime Air cargo plane has yielded new critical details from recently released flight data, shedding light on the chaotic final moments before the aircraft overshot a runway and killed five people. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is leading the ongoing investigation into the incident that also left five others injured, published an update containing the aircraft’s flight data and a summary of cockpit communications between the two pilots.

According to the NTSB’s findings, one pilot repeatedly alerted the other that the Boeing 767-300 was traveling at excessive speed as it approached the runway for landing. Despite multiple warnings and the activation of an altitude alarm, investigators noted the second pilot did not provide consistent verbal responses to the cautions. Recorded data shows the jet touched down at 158 knots, equal to 292 kilometers per hour, a landing speed aviation experts have characterized as being at the high end of safe operating ranges.

In the final minutes of the flight, two automated safety alarms triggered in the cockpit: first, a repeated “sink rate, sink rate” callout that warns pilots of an unsafe rate of descent, followed by a “too low terrain” alert, which notifies the crew that the aircraft is flying dangerously close to the ground without proper landing configuration. The NTSB’s release also included data on wing flap deployment, a key system that helps reduce aircraft speed and enable a gentle, controlled landing.

Pablo Rojas, an aviation attorney speaking to CBS News, the BBC’s U.S. partner, noted that without access to the full unedited cockpit recording, it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions about what led to the inconsistent responses between the pilots. Even so, Rojas said the released details confirm the landing attempt was essentially doomed from an early stage. He added that the flap deployment data raises additional questions: the flaps were extended much later in the approach sequence than standard procedure, a delay Rojas suggested may have been a reaction to the crew already aware the plane was moving far too fast for a safe landing.

After overshooting the end of the runway, the aircraft, operating as Amazon Prime Air Flight 7598, crashed through ground support equipment on the airfield before striking a white Ford van carrying a five-person plane-cleaning crew. The jet continued off airport property, crashing through a perimeter fence and colliding with a Toyota Corolla before coming to a stop roughly 394 meters, or 1,300 feet, beyond the runway threshold. All five people in the van were killed in the crash and subsequent fire; Miami authorities released the victims’ identities earlier this week, naming them as 55-year-old Rolando Aleman Leon, 53-year-old Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 75-year-old Julio C Pineda, 53-year-old Carlos Acosta Fajardo, and 47-year-old Javierkys Reyes Quevedo. The NTSB’s investigation remains ongoing as investigators work to piece together the full sequence of events that led to the crash.

More than a month after 29-year-old Tasia Fortune’s body was discovered hanging from a tree on the property of an abandoned Jackson, Mississippi home, her grieving family and a restless local community are still pushing for transparent information from law enforcement and state officials.

Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, who resides in Kentucky, told the BBC she is consumed by frustration over repeated delays and a lack of communication from investigating officers. Spivey last saw her daughter alive at a family reunion in late July, when Fortune mentioned she was considering moving back home to be closer to her family. When Spivey was finally called to identify her daughter’s remains at a funeral home ahead of burial, she was too devastated to look directly at the body, only glancing at it from the corner of her eye. She ultimately chose burial over cremation, holding out faint hope that new investigation findings could one day require an exhumation for further testing.

For weeks after the 3 August discovery of Fortune’s body, police offered no public updates on the case, and Spivey says her repeated requests for information about the investigation’s progress went completely unanswered. That changed only this Tuesday, when Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney confirmed for the first time that the department has treated Fortune’s death as a potential homicide from the first day of the probe, as investigators wait for formal autopsy results from the state medical examiner’s office. Brackney explained to the BBC that labeling all pending death investigations as potential homicides is standard policy to preserve critical evidence before an official cause of death is confirmed; prior to Tuesday’s announcement, the department had only described the matter as a general death investigation. The medical examiner’s office has declined to comment on the active case.

Anxiety over the case has spread rapidly across majority-Black Jackson, amplified by Mississippi’s long, brutal history of racial terror lynchings against Black Americans. Fortune’s death marks the third incident in less than a year where a body was found hanging from a tree in the state. In September 2025, two bodies — one a Black man, the other a white man — were discovered on the same day. Both were officially ruled suicides, but the mother of the Black victim, Trey Reed, continues to dispute that finding.

The prolonged lack of clarity has fueled widespread distrust in local and state authorities. Two online petitions have gained tens of thousands of signatures: one calls for an independent investigation into the office of Mississippi’s chief medical examiner Dr. Staci Turner, who has overseen the recent string of cases involving Black decedents, while the other demands the FBI launch a federal probe into Fortune’s death. The BBC has requested comment from Dr. Turner but has not yet received a response.

Local leaders have echoed the community’s calls for urgent action. Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes told the BBC he has visited the neighborhood where Fortune reportedly lived multiple times and has never seen police officers conducting investigative work at the site. “All cases are important, but this one — a hanging in Mississippi — should rise to the top of the priority list,” Stokes said. He sent formal requests for assistance weeks ago to federal prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Mississippi and to the FBI, but has yet to receive any reply from either agency. “Nothing from nobody. It’s like nobody cares,” Stokes added. The BBC has also contacted both federal offices for comment with no response as of press time.

U.S. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett has formally requested federal intervention, sending a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice asking for a full investigation into the recent string of Mississippi deaths, including Fortune’s, labeling them potential “modern-day lynchings” and referencing the state’s well-documented history of anti-Black violent terrorism. The DOJ has not yet responded to requests for comment on the request. Notably, Mississippi is not alone: this year alone, four Black Americans have been found hanged from trees in North Carolina, three of which have been ruled suicides with an autopsy still pending for the fourth.

While Stokes stresses he has not concluded whether Fortune’s death was a racially motivated lynching, he says the only thing that matters to him and the community is getting clear, accurate answers. For young Black residents including Brandon King, president of the Jackson State University student chapter of the NAACP, the uncertainty has created a pervasive climate of fear. “This is supposed to be the state capital. This is where I’m supposed to feel the most safe,” King told the BBC. “Right now, the feeling is that you could be next. This is in your own backyard.”

For Spivey, the anger and grief remain raw. “What is the hold up?” she asked, echoing the question that has gone unanswered for more than a month for her family and thousands of others demanding accountability.

In a rare public comment following the high-profile proceedings in the Lindsay Clancy trial, one sitting juror has broken silence to shed new light on the closed-door deliberations that shaped the case’s outcome. The juror, who chose to speak on condition of anonymity to protect their privacy amid intense public scrutiny of the trial, opened up about the tense dynamics that unfolded inside the jury room during days of closed discussions.

According to the juror’s account, the 12-member panel included a handful of what they described as “big personalities” – individuals who were unafraid to voice strong, unwavering opinions and push back heavily against perspectives that clashed with their own. Despite the charged atmosphere and strong convictions held by most jurors, the panel ultimately maintained enough respect for differing views to avoid rushing a decision. Most notably, the juror confirmed that one panel member stood alone as a holdout on the verdict, refusing to align with the majority position even as discussions stretched on.

In a striking twist to the behind-the-scenes account, the speaking juror emphasized that the majority of the panel defended the lone holdout’s right to hold a dissenting opinion. Rather than pressuring the outlier to abandon their position or rush a compromise, jurors acknowledged the importance of allowing every panel member to weigh in fully and stand by their conclusions, even when that meant extended deliberations. The comments offer an unprecedented look into how jury dynamics function in high-emotion, publicized criminal cases, highlighting the tensions between majority consensus and individual conviction that are core to the U.S. jury trial system.