NEW YORK, Jan 31 — Rosanne Bloom and her family had just settled into their seats on a flight from Philadelphia to Turks and Caicos Islands on Christmas morning when two airline employees ordered Bloom, her husband and two boys off the plane. Their luggage had been removed.

The problem? Bloom had informed the crew that her teenage sons had severe nut allergies.

“I said, ‘We have our medicine. We brought our own food, and we’re comfortable staying on the plane.’ I offered to sign a waiver,” said Bloom, an orthodontist in Clarksville, Maryland. “We were off the plane in two minutes.”

Matt Miller, a spokesman for American Airlines, said such decisions are left to the pilot. “The pilot determined it would be best for the family not to travel based on the severity of the allergy and the need to divert the airline if anyone were eating nuts,” he said.

Airline carriers have a long tradition of serving peanuts on flights, and often serve little else. But the practice also presents a challenge to travellers with severe nut allergies, who can suffer a reaction simply by touching a surface that has been exposed to nuts.

But tensions between passengers with food allergies and airline staff members have risen in recent years, as airlines have begun to enforce stricter rules related to pre-boarding passengers. In the past, parents of young children could board the plane early, giving them a chance to wipe down seats, trays and armrests to reduce exposure to allergens. But today many airlines have stopped letting families with children board before other passengers.

When families request permission to pre-board — or pose another request, such as asking whether nuts will be served — they risk being taken off the flight or threatened with removal, said Mary Vargas, a lawyer whose family was almost kept off a plane from London back to the United States in December because of a nut allergy.

Families with nut allergies are waging a legal challenge against such policies. Two formal complaints filed with the Department of Transportation in the last month accuse American Airlines of discrimination against passengers with allergies. The complaints cite the airline’s pre-boarding policy, which prohibits pre-boarding specifically for people with allergies, and not for others.

“This is about being allowed to fly like everybody else in the United States,” said Vargas, the lawyer representing the families.

Although nobody tracks medical emergencies on airplanes, studies show that in-flight medical emergencies are relatively uncommon and affect only a fraction of the estimated 3.6 billion passengers who fly each year. Chest pain and cardiovascular events are the most common reason planes are diverted for a medical emergency. Allergic reactions make up fewer than 4 per cent of all in-flight medical emergencies, according to a 2013 study published in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine.

PHNOM PENH, June 12 — Unprecedented new details of medieval cities hidden under jungle in Cambodia near Angkor Wat have been revealed using lasers, archaeologists said today, shedding new light on the civilisation behind the world’s largest religious complex.

While the research has been going on for several years, the new findings uncover the sheer scale of the Khmer Empire’s urban sprawl and temple complexes to be significantly bigger than was previously thought.

The research, drawing on airborne laser scanning technology known as lidar, will be unveiled in full at the Royal Geographic Society in London tomorrow by Australian archaeologist Damian Evans.

“We always imagined that their great cities surrounded the monuments in antiquity,” Evans told AFP.

“But now we can see them with incredible precision and detail, in some places for the very first time, but in most places where we already had a vague idea that cities must be there,” he added.

Angkor Wat, a Unesco World Heritage site seen as among the most important in South-east Asia, is considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

It was constructed from the early to mid-1100s by King Suryavarman II at the height of the Khmer Empire’s political and military power and was among the largest pre-industrial cities in the world.

But scholars had long believed there was far more to the empire than just the Angkor complex.

‘Entire cityscape’

The huge tranche of new data builds on scans that were made in 2012 that confirmed the existence of Mahendraparvata, an ancient temple city near Angkor Wat.

But it was only when the results of a larger survey in 2015 were analysed that the sheer scale of the new settlements became apparent.

To create the maps, archaeologists mounted a special laser on the underneath of a helicopter which scans the area and is able to see through obstructions like trees and vegetation.

Much of the cities surrounding the famed stone temples of the Khmer Empire, Evans explained, were made of wood and thatch which has long rotted away.

“The lidar quite suddenly revealed an entire cityscape there with astonishing complexity,” he said.

“It turned out we’d been walking and flying right over the top of this stuff for ten years and not even noticing it because of the vegetation.”

Among the new scans already published are a detailed map of a huge city complex surrounding the stone temple known as Preah Khan of Kompong Svay, a series of iron smelting sites dating back to the Angkor era and new information on the complex system of waterways that kept the region running.

The new data also maps out the full extent of Mahendraparvata, information that will make future digs much more accurate and less time consuming.

“What we had was basically a scatter of disconnected points on the map denoting temple sites. Now it’s like having a detailed street map of the entire city,” Evans said.

Further maps will be published in the coming months, he added.

Long Kosal, a spokesman for the Apsara authority, the government body that manages the Angkor complex, said the lidar had uncovered “a lot of information from the past.”

“It shows the size and information about people living at those sites in the past,” he told AFP, adding further research was now needed to capitalise on the finds.

While the Khmer Empire was initially Hindu it increasingly adopted Buddhism and both religions can be seen on display at the complex.

Angkor is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors a year and remains Cambodia’s top tourist attraction. — AFP