The government of Albania has given preliminary approval to a plan proposed by Jared Kushner, Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, to build a $1.4 billion luxury hotel complex on a small abandoned military base off the coast of Albania.

The project is one of several involving Mr. Trump and his extended family that directly involve foreign government entities that will be moving ahead even while Mr. Trump will be in charge of foreign policy related to these same nations.

The approval by Albania’s Strategic Investment Committee — which is led by Prime Minister Edi Rama — gives Mr. Kushner and his business partners the right to move ahead with accelerated negotiations to build the luxury resort on a 111-acre section of the 2.2-square-mile island of Sazan that will be connected by ferry to the mainland.

Mr. Kushner and the Albanian government did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment. But when previously asked about this project, both have said that the evaluation is not being influenced by Mr. Kushner’s ties to Mr. Trump or any effort to try to seek favors from the U.S. government.

“The fact that such a renowned American entrepreneur shows his interest on investing in Albania makes us very proud and happy,” a spokesman for Mr. Rama said last year in a statement to The New York Times when asked about the projects.

Mr. Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity company backed with about $4.6 billion in money mostly from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East sovereign wealth funds, is pursuing the Albania project along with Asher Abehsera, a real-estate executive that Mr. Kushner has previously teamed up with to build projects in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Albanian government, according to an official document recently posted online, will now work with their American partners to clear the proposed hotel site of any potential buried munitions and to examine any other environmental or legal concerns that need to be resolved before the project can move ahead.

The document, dated Dec. 30, notes that the government “has the right to revoke the decision,” depending on the final project negotiations.

Mr. Kushner’s firm has said the plan is to build a five-star “eco-resort community” on the island by turning a “former military base into a vibrant international destination for hospitality and wellness.”

Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter, has said she is helping with the project as well. “We will execute on it,” she said about the project, during a podcast last year.

This project is just one of two major real-estate deals that Mr. Kushner is pursuing along with Mr. Abehsera that involve foreign governments.

Separately, the partnership received preliminary approval last year to build a luxury hotel complex in Belgrade, Serbia, in the former ministry of defense building, which has sat empty for decades after it was bombed by NATO in 1999 during a war there.

Serbia and Albania have foreign policy matters pending with the United States, as both countries seek continued U.S. support for their long-stalled efforts to join the European Union, and officials in Washington are trying to convince Serbia to tighten ties with the United States, instead of Russia.

Virginia Canter, who served as White House ethics lawyer during the Obama and Clinton administrations and also an ethics adviser to the International Monetary Fund, said even if there was no attempt to gain influence with Mr. Trump, any government deal involving his family creates that impression.

“It all looks like favoritism, like they are providing access to Kushner because they want to be on the good side of Trump,” Ms. Canter said, now with State Democracy Defenders Fund, a group that tracks federal government corruption and ethics issues.

The federal government sued Southwest Airlines on Wednesday, accusing the airline of harming passengers who flew on two routes that were plagued by consistent delays in 2022.

In a lawsuit, the Transportation Department said it was seeking more than $2.1 million in civil penalties over the flights between airports in Chicago and Oakland, Calif., as well as Baltimore and Cleveland, that were chronically delayed over five months that year.

“Airlines have a legal obligation to ensure that their flight schedules provide travelers with realistic departure and arrival times,” the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, said in a statement. “Today’s action sends a message to all airlines that the department is prepared to go to court in order to enforce passenger protections.”

Carriers are barred from operating unrealistic flight schedules, which the Transportation Department considers an unfair, deceptive and anticompetitive practice. A “chronically delayed” flight is defined as one that operates at least 10 times a month and is late by at least 30 minutes more than half the time.

In a statement, Southwest said it was “disappointed” that the department chose to sue over the flights that took place more than two years ago. The airline said it had operated 20 million flights since the Transportation Department enacted its policy against chronically delayed flights more than a decade ago, with no other violations.

“Any claim that these two flights represent an unrealistic schedule is simply not credible when compared with our performance over the past 15 years,” Southwest said.

Last year, Southwest canceled fewer than 1 percent of its flights, but more than 22 percent arrived at least 15 minutes later than scheduled, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider. Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and American Airlines all had fewer such delays.

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. In it, the government said that a Southwest flight from Chicago to Oakland arrived late 19 out of 25 trips in April 2022, with delays averaging more than an hour. The consistent delays continued through August of that year, averaging an hour or more. On another flight, between Baltimore and Cleveland, average delay times reached as high as 96 minutes per month during the same period. In a statement, the department said that Southwest, rather than poor weather or air traffic control, was responsible for more than 90 percent of the delays.

“Holding out these chronically delayed flights disregarded consumers’ need to have reliable information about the real arrival time of a flight and harmed thousands of passengers traveling on these Southwest flights by causing disruptions to travel plans or other plans,” the department said in the lawsuit.

The government said Southwest had violated federal rules 58 times in August 2022 after four months of consistent delays. Each violation faces a civil penalty of up to $37,377, or more than $2.1 million in total, according to the lawsuit.

The Transportation Department on Wednesday also said that it had penalized Frontier Airlines for chronically delayed flights, fining the airline $650,000. Half that amount was paid to the Treasury and the rest is slated to be forgiven if the airline has no more chronically delayed flights over the next three years.

This month, the department ordered JetBlue Airways to pay a $2 million fine for failing to address similarly delayed flights over a span of more than a year ending in November 2023, with half the money going to passengers affected by the delays.