News and notes from around the interweb:

• Singapore Airlines dropping the SilkAir brand, will get the planes lie flat business class seats

• Federal bribery investigation into contracting at the Atlanta airport tells us nothing we didn’t already know about corruption there.. remember a previous airport manager there was fired for being insufficiently corrupt. (HT: Joe Brancatelli)

  

• American Airlines credit cards in the UK are being shut down caught up in European limits on interchange rates.

• The White House had to walk back comments by nationalist economic adviser Peter Navarro as untrue that US airlines had based their claim of ‘victory’ over Gulf carriers on. So now we know which side was telling the truth..

  The latest statement appears to clarify remarks by White House assistant to the President and trade council director Peter Navarro to aviation industry stakeholders during a telephone briefing May 14 in which he spoke of a routes freeze.

  “There will be no additional routes into the United States until further notice,” Navarro said during that brief. “What we expect moving forward is transparency, full accounting, stopping of subsidies and a freeze on routes until further notice. So, there it is. And that’s strictly on the passenger side.”

  The Washington DC-based lobbying organization, Partnership for Fair & Open Skies, which was hired by American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and US airline unions to fight Gulf carrier expansion in the US, issued a release touting Navarro’s statements. It also posted a transcript of Navarro’s remarks. On May 16, however, the Partnership removed the transcript from its Twitter feed and website.

• Jet Airways miles can be extended with any activity in an account every 18 months instead of expiring, period.

• 50% rebate on Hyatt redemptions for stays at Miraval. That’s a great deal if you want a cleanse on vacation at this all-inclusive. Of course it’s available during the summer when no one is going, and it takes 6-8 weeks to get half your points returned. Here’s the regular price: