News and notes from around the interweb:

• Air France KLM Flying Blue, which partners with all the bank transfer currencies, already extended expiration of miles through December 2020. Now they’ve extended expiration through December 2021. Otherwise you normally need to credit a flight to your account every two years.

  I have 300,000 Flying Blue miles from cancelled awards during the pandemic (points I’d transferred into the program). I now just need to credit, say, a paid Delta flight to my account by the end of next year if I don’t use the miles first.

• What it’s like to holiday in the Maldives now Life is almost entirely outdoors, or at least open air, otherwise you’re secluded in your villa. Combined with testing that’s almost the perfect place to be in the Covid-era. Of course it takes a journey for most to get there.

  

• Civil liberties concerns about IATA’s proposed new ‘travel pass’

• The CARES Act carved out $17 billion for Boeing, but Boeing declined the funds. The government has been spending the money anyway.

  Instead, the 11 companies that have tapped the fund so far include a company that has pitched its products as an enabling technology for the facial recognition tracking of immigrants, a manufacturer of roadblock barriers and surveillance firms.

  One company that received a loan is an experimental spaceflight technology firm backed by deep-pocketed venture capital investors. Others have a history of financial losses. One manufacturer relies on minimum-wage prison labor to make wire harnesses for military and commercial customers.

• Another person firing a gun into an occupied hotel room I just wrote about another incident a week ago.