81–90 of 128 posts
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It would have been ironic if the flight was overbooked and they couldn't buy a ticket/board.
If you're associated with the Belarus KGB it's probably not too hard to have some passengers suddenly missing their flight for one or another reason. Probably they don't even need to buy a ticket, flash your badge at the airport and most guards/staff there lets you through.
No? Why would that be the case?
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I don't think it is. While a lot of folks don't use google, a lot of folks do , and have for a while. It isn't like it is the first time a brand became something more: Band-aid and Kleenex are items as well as brands, for example. You might Xerox that contract, too, even though you probably aren't using a Xerox brand machine to do so. Maybe you call all soda a "coke" - and asked someone, "What flavor of coke do you w…
While not completely alien here in the UK, using brand names for generic concepts is a bit of an Americanism (perhaps because of a cultural tendency to glorify private business?) "Band-aids" are plasters (short for sticking plasters) here, and "Kleenex" are tissues (even if they're actually kleenex branded). Having said that, to "google" something or to "photoshop" something are both in common usage here. I suspect t…
But other than these, I don't recall any popular examples of brands turning into generic nouns in Polish.
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I think it's cultural. We have some brand names where I believe Americans don't, for example. For example, we hoover where Americans vacuum.
Jeep is another example that got plenty of use outside America, only really falling out of use in the last while as casual use of that type of vehicle got replaced by SUVs.
It looks like the Belarus KGB was on the flight anyway - presumably the journalist was being followed/tracked: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/24/belarus-seizur...
It would have been ironic if the flight was overbooked and they couldn't buy a ticket/board.
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Not sure what country you're referring to but I highly doubt border control agents have access to parking tickets.
But they do? You have to pay any open fines before you leave the country. At least that's how it works here.
And then you have to go through the trouble of contacting them to figure out if it's a real claim, or just someone trying to scam you.
Edit: I've only heard a third party account on this, but I have no reason to doubt the validity.
Since they were interested in this specific person, the reports that they had someone following him at the airport are probably correct. That would be the easiest/cheapest way of being sure he's there and actually on the plane.
But it also risks the agents being arrested if something went wrong (especially since their behavior was outwardly suspicious) and could be seen as a much more serious aggression since it involved a physical intrusion into the country's territory. I don't get why they even needed agents on the plane at all.
They had to be sure he boarded that flight and didn't get off after he boarded.
> And could be seen as a much more serious aggression.
To me it looks like this was a deliberately not very aggressive way of snatching him. The alternative would be to snatch him of the street and smuggle him to Belarus. The logistics would be a lot harder and the diplomatic implications a lot more dire.
Yes, they do, in fact, almost everybody in the travel industry can get its hands on PNRs, and manifests. A travel history of almost everybody can be reconstructed fully for the last ~10 years from those databases. And of course that stuff went to .onion sites. That's just like almost everybody's financial information collected, and reported for the sake of "counterterrorism" (CRS,) and, soon, SIM card subscriber data…
https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
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Maybe that's how it works in America, but it doesn't mean it's the same everywhere. And given that the post was motivated by recent events in Europe it doesn't seem too relevant. In Europe when you go through security no one checks your id. In fact most of the time when you fly inside Schengen with hand luggage only no one checks your id at all. But there definitely isn't something comparable to TSA that would have t…
The last few years I have been flying, my ID has been checked before entering the security check. This was a recent change introduced a few years ago. I presume this is done everywhere in Europe.
I think maybe you’re confusing the checkin where you might show your passport with an ID check? You can completely bypass this by checking in online, and the airline doesn’t actually inspect your ID anyway.