SAM653 USAF G5 nw from JBA depart
HAMMR11 USAF E-4B Nightwatch from Wright-Patterson AFB around dat weather to Lincoln Muni Airport, NE
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Toshiba CEO Tsunakawa replaces ousted board chairman
Outside director George Olcott declines reappointment after shareholders meeting.
Toshiba CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa will serve as interim chairman of the company's board after the ousting of Osamu Nagayama at the annual general meeting, the Japanese industrial group said Friday night.
George Olcott, whose nomination to the board as a new outside director was approved by shareholders, has declined the appointment. Toshiba said it had accepted his decision. The announcement comes after shareholders rejected proposals to reappoint Nagayama as well as outside director Nobuyuki Kobayashi, a member of Toshiba's audit committee, following an independent investigation into attempts by the company to influence activist investors last year. Olcott, a former UBS banker who also serves as an outside director at Japanese beer maker Kirin Holdings, said he had concluded he could not contribute to Toshiba in the way he had hoped and anticipated, according to Toshiba's statement.
Audit committee chair Junji Ota and another committee member, Takashi Yamauchi, were removed from the list of candidates this month after the probe found evidence that Toshiba colluded with the government in a pressure campaign. These developments mean that only eight of the original 13 candidates nominated by Toshiba in May will sit on the board. Toshiba's five-person nomination committee now includes three non-Japanese members, led by chair George Raymond Zage, a former Asia chief for shareholder Farallon Capital. The audit committee is chaired by Katsunori Hashimoto, a former DuPont executive in Japan. Jerry Black, formerly of Japanese retail group Aeon, will head the compensation committee.
A new strategic review committee, chaired by former KPMG Hong Kong senior partner Paul Brough, is tasked with providing independent advice to Toshiba's management and review business and financial plans. This committee will play a central role in repairing the damage from repeated governance scandals.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Toshiba-in-turmoil/Toshiba-CEO-Tsunakawa-replaces-ousted-board-chairman
>>65825 pb Investigators defend Toshiba report, say stonewalled by Japan official
morning w
Virgin Galactic says it has FAA license to fly tourists into space
Virgin Galactic announced on Friday that it's received approval from U.S. regulators to fly customers into space, taking another step toward realizing its goal of taking tourists hundreds of thousands of feet above the Earth.
Virgin said the Federal Aviation Administration has completed an "extensive review" of data from its last test flight in May and concluded that its spaceship performed well in all flight objectives. The May 22 test flight was the company's third crewed spaceflight and the first to be launched from Virgin's New Mexico spaceport. That flight reached a speed of Mach 3 and an altitude of 55 miles, or almost 300,000 feet. Normal commercial flights typically fly no higher than 35,000 feet. "We're incredibly pleased with the results of our most recent test flight, which achieved our stated flight test objectives, "Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement Friday. "The flight performed flawlessly, and the results demonstrate the safety and elegance of our flight system." Colglazier said the FAA license allows Virgin Galactic to move forward with its first fully-crewed test flight this summer. A date has not yet been announced.
The approval for Virgin Galactic came just two weeks after Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said he will be aboard his company's spaceflight on July 20. It will be Blue Origin's first passenger spaceflight.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/06/25/faa-approves-virgin-galactic-space/9091624625250/
Extra unemployment benefits ending for 2.5M Americans this weekend
10 states ending federal unemployment benefits for out-of-work Americans this weekend.
About 2.5 million out-of-work Americans are poised to lose their enhanced unemployment benefits this weekend as 10 states prematurely drop out of a pandemic relief program that boosted jobless aid by $300 a week.
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Utah will terminate the extra unemployment benefits this weekend, joining 12 other states that cut off the aid earlier this summer. About 2.5 million workers will lose their benefits, according to one analysis conducted by the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. In total, 26 states are ending the assistance this summer, a move they contend will help businesses that are struggling to find workers. Just one, Louisiana, is led by a Democratic governor. Critics argue that other factors, such as a lack of child care, are the reason for lackluster hiring and have said that opting out of the relief program before it's officially slated to end on Sept. 6 will hurt unemployed Americans, leaving them with no income as they search for a new job. "The reality is that the strength of the jobs market, not the size of unemployment benefits, will determine how fast Americans can return to where they want to be: a job," said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. "In the meantime, workers should not be forced to rely on unbelievably low unemployment pay."
The cuts will ultimately affect 4 million Americans who are currently receiving benefits, including 2 million who will lose assistance altogether. The unemployment programs were established in March 2020 – and renewed twice by Congress – as the pandemic forced an unprecedented shutdown of the nation's economy, pushing unemployment to the highest level since the Great Depression. In addition to providing an extra $300 a week, the programs provided aid to workers who were not typically eligible and extended state unemployment benefits once they had been exhausted. The average state unemployment benefit is about $330 per week. With the federal supplement, Americans are receiving about $630 in weekly unemployment benefits. (For comparison's sake, that's about $32,000 annually, or roughly double the nation's minimum wage.) But as the economy reopens, companies have complained about a lack of available workers. Labor Department data from April and May shows anemic job growth well below economists' expectations. There's some evidence that ending unemployment benefits led to an uptick in job searches; early data published by Indeed shows that job search activity rose by 5% the day each state announced its plan to cut off the sweetened aid.
The increase was temporary, disappearing by the eighth day after the announcement, Indeed found. By the second week following the announcement, job search activity in the states had returned to its April levels. Some experts say there are other returns for workers' reticence about returning to the labor force, including a lack of child care and continuing fears of contracting COVID-19. There remain about 7.4 million fewer jobs than there were in February 2020, before the pandemic shut down broad swaths of the nation's economy.
About 14.8 million workers are relying on some form of unemployment benefits as their main source of income, according to the Century Foundation.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/extra-unemployment-benefits-ending-10-states
>>65566 pb
Honduran AF FAH001 Embraer Legacy 135 nw from Tel Aviv depart
Honduran President and Foreign Minister back to Tegucigalpa-stops in Munich and Shannon and Boston on way back
Honduras moves its Israel embassy to Jerusalem
Honduras transferred its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Thursday as part of efforts to boost ties with the Jewish state, becoming the fourth country to do so. The central American nation has already opened a commercial office in Jerusalem, breaking a decades-long policy of neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez and Foreign Minister Lisandro Rosales were welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, at a reception in an office building in a technology park in southern Jerusalem.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/middle-east/20210624-honduras-moves-its-israel-embassy-to-jerusalem
kek
HAMMR11 USAF E-4B Nightwatch departed Lincoln Muni Airport after a ground stop-inbound from Wright-Patterson AFB earlier
Heading to Dyess AFB most likely
FBI requested warrant to seize gold ‘stolen during Civil War,’ hidden in Pennsylvania cave: affidavit
The FBI suspected a legislative staff member sneaking gold back in 2013
An FBI agent applied for a federal warrant in 2018 to seize a fabled cache of U.S. government gold he said was "stolen during the Civil War" and hidden in a Pennsylvania cave, saying the state might take the gold for itself if the feds asked for permission, according to court documents unsealed Thursday.
The newly unsealed affidavit confirms previous reporting by The Associated Press that the government had been looking for a legendary cache of gold at the site, which federal authorities had long refused to confirm. In any case, the FBI said, the dig came up empty. The AP and The Philadelphia Inquirer petitioned a federal judge to unseal the case. Federal prosecutors did not oppose the request, and the judge agreed, paving the way for Thursday’s release of documents. "I have probable cause to believe that a significant cache of gold is secreted in the underground cave" in Dent’s Run, holding "one or more tons" belonging to the U.S. government, wrote Jacob Archer of the FBI's art crime team in Philadelphia. Archer told the judge he needed a seizure warrant because he feared that if the federal government sought permission from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to excavate the site, the state would claim the gold for itself, setting up a costly legal battle.
"I am concerned that, even if DCNR gave initial consent for the FBI to excavate the cache of gold secreted at the Dent's Run Site, that consent could be revoked before the FBI recovered the United States property, with the result of DCNR unlawfully claiming that that cache of gold is abandoned property and, thus, belongs to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," the affidavit said. Archer also revealed allegations against a legislative staffer who, he wrote, tried to get some of the loot for himself.
In 2013, the affidavit said, the legislative staffer contacted a pair of treasure hunters who had identified the likely site of the gold. The staffer "corruptly" offered to get the treasure hunters a state permit to dig "in return for three bars of gold or ten percent" of whatever they recovered. The staffer said he was acting on behalf of others in state government, according to Archer, including "someone who controlled money going to DCNR and someone working in the Pennsylvania governor's office." No one has been charged in connection with the case, and federal prosecutors say they consider the matter closed. A spokesperson for the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources declined comment. The FBI had long refused to explain exactly why it went digging on state-owned land in Elk County in March 2018, saying only in written statements over the years that agents were there for a court-authorized excavation of "what evidence suggested may have been a cultural heritage site.
According to the affidavit, the FBI based its request for a seizure warrant partly on the work done by the treasure hunters, who had made hundreds of trips to the area. The father-son duo told authorities they believed they had found the location of the fabled Union gold, which, according to legend, was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in 1863. After meeting with the treasure hunters in early 2018, the FBI brought in a contractor with more sophisticated instruments. The contractor detected an underground mass that weighed up to nine tons and had the density of gold, the affidavit said.
That amount of gold would today be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Archer wrote that he also spoke with a journalist, identified as "Person 3," who had done extensive research on a Civil War-era group called the Knights of the Golden Circle. The KGC, Archer wrote, was a secret society of Confederate sympathizers that had purportedly "buried secret caches of weapons, coins, and gold and silver bullion, much of which was stolen from robberies of banks, trains carrying payroll of the Union Army during the Civil War and from northern army military posts, in southern, western and northern states." Archer said that a turtle carving found on a rock near the proposed dig site was "very likely ... a KGC marker for that site." Archer wasn’t able to confirm the U.S. Mint had actually missed any expected shipments of gold because the Mint did not have records for the Civil War period, the affidavit said.
moar
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/fbi-pennsylvania-gold-civil-war