News and notes from around the interweb:

• The Inside Flyer 12 Days of Christmas Giveaways are underway. Sign up for a daily email reminder so you don’t miss out on any of the prizes – hotel points, airline miles, lounge passes, elite status, upgrades and more!
  

• Get a few bucks off an Amazon gift card

• Travel for Free: Secret Ways to Earn a Ton of Miles some suggested ways I offer to earn miles written up at Yahoo Travel. A snippet from this intro needs to be added to my bio.. 🙂

  Author of the extremely-popular-in-this-world View from the Wing blog, Leff is one of the best informed and most respected miles junkies around. In addition to reporting on the top deals and convoluted intricacies of loyalty programs, Leff also runs Book Your Award, a company you can hire to redeem the best possible business- or first-class award tickets for your miles. Short story: This guy knows points.

• The ‘No Fly List’ is Kafkaesque and it’s a bad idea to expands its use. It’s widely known that Senator Ted Kennedy was on the list. So was California Congressman Tom McClintock.

  [I]t ended up being a case of mistaken identity with an Irish Republican Army activist the “British government was mad at.”

  McClintock said he soon learned that a fellow state senator also had been placed on the list, as well as the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy. McClintock said he at least had the state Senate sergeant-at-arms to work through to clear up the confusion – “something an ordinary American would not.”

• There was a ground stop last night at New York JFK when someone breached the airport perimeter fence. (HT: @alexdiacre) The individual was described as a 5’8″ male. Someone’s headed to Guantanamo…
  
  Credit: Alex D.

• Suspect slashed a man in midtown Manhattan “because tourists are a pain in the ass.” (HT: Michael W Travels)