Word: passport
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tiny Liechtenstein, bracing itself for its finest hour, is standing firm even as Germany threatens to stop the country from joining Europe's passport-free zone. "We will not cave in to German pressure. We will not disclose information about the owners of bank accounts," says government spokeswoman Gerlinde Manz-Christ. "The rogues are the ones who are evading their taxes, and that's not the people here in Liechtenstein," says Wendelin Schrädler, a rosy-cheeked butcher, as he hacks off a side of ham for a customer...
Best way for a guy to get your attention: Get a passport and pick up an accent...
...early January, two men checked in at Frankfurt Airport for a flight to New York City. They breezed through security after showing their Canadian passports, then settled in quietly for the eight-hour journey. As the plane lifted off, airline officials e-mailed all of the passengers' passport numbers to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport - a routine measure under U.S. security rules. The alert went out within minutes: the two men were Sri Lankans carrying stolen Canadian passports. When the plane landed in New York, police were waiting there to arrest them...
...power of this enormous cache of personal data is evident from some of Interpol's recent actions. In January last year, 11 people presented their Cypriot passports at Monterrey airport in Mexico. The numbers that flashed up on Interpol's database revealed that these documents came from a batch of 850 blank passports stolen in Cyprus; it turned out that the men were Iraqi citizens trying to slip into the U.S. Last April, masked gunmen executed a jewelry heist in Dubai. They left behind DNA samples, which matched those that Interpol had in its database for two Serbian armed robbers...
...nchez, an Interpol operational assistant from Barcelona, sat hunched over a computer in the Lyons office, attempting to find a man who had traveled across three continents on stolen documents, and then vanished in São Paolo. Two days earlier, Mexican officials had spotted his stolen Portuguese passport on Interpol's list when he flew into Mexico City from Frankfurt. They deported him back to Germany, where he presented a second stolen passport, this one Brazilian; German officials then deported him to São Paolo, where he disappeared. Interpol's databases had worked well - but not fast enough...