News and notes from around the interweb:

• SoFi, which has been fantastic with signup and referral bonuses, gets preliminary approval for a bank charter so it can be a bank itself instead of partnering with banks.

• Starlux Airlines is offering to status match to its top elite tier valid for four years on the Taiwanese premium carrier. (HT: Loyalty Lobby)

• Delta reached a deal with its unionized pilots to avoid furloughs. So no furloughs this year at Delta or Southwest. United and American, of course, furloughed a combined 35,000 workers.

  And proposed government ‘payroll support’ would give billions to Delta and Southwest in addition to United and American to keep employees working, even though two of the four largest airlines are already keeping employees working (and at American and United it would effectively mean paying senior employees not to work).

  Meanwhile proposed payroll support costs 10 times as much as the actual cost of employment for people whose jobs have been temporarily lost, because it’s really a subsidy for airline investors and creditors, they just want to pretend that it isn’t.

• United and Amtrak ending their partnership

  

• Now that the strip search of female passengers in Doha – looking for who might have recently given birth and left a baby in an airport bathroom – has come under international fire, the country says the officials involved may be prosecuted. The crime I guess is showing the world the darker side of the regime?

• This would be a pretty good posting: the U.S. is opening an embassy in the Maldives instead of conducting relations via its diplomatic shop in Sri Lanka. Currently China and India vie for influence over the country.