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See inside the E-4B 'Nightwatch,' nicknamed the 'doomsday plane' for its ability to help US presidents survive nuclear war

An E-4B plane.
The E-4B "Nightwatch" is also known as the "doomsday plane."

Justin Oakes/US Air Force

  • The E-4B "Nightwatch" is nicknamed the "doomsday plane" because it can survive a nuclear attack.
  • In the event of nuclear war, it would serve as the US military's command and control center.
  • It is the US Air Force's most expensive plane to operate, at $159,529 per hour.

Air Force One is known as the "flying Oval Office," but there's another lesser-known presidential plane that can operate as a "flying war room": the E-4B "Nightwatch."

Nicknamed the "doomsday plane" for its ability to survive a nuclear blast, the E-4B is designed to protect the president and other senior officials and function as a military command center in worst-case scenarios. It also transports the Secretary of Defense on international trips.

Many of the E-4B's features are classified, but the US Air Force has shared some glimpses into its capabilities. Take a look inside the top-secret aircraft.

The E-4B "Nightwatch" is a militarized version of a Boeing 747-200.
An E-4B plane.
A US Air Force E-4B "Nightwatch" plane.

Fabrizio Gandolfo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The US Air Force's fleet of four E-4Bs comprises the National Airborne Operations Center at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.

It costs $159,529 per hour to operate, making it the Air Force's most expensive plane.
An E-4B plane takes off.
An E-4B at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jacob Skovo

Each E-4B costs $223.2 million to build, according to the US Air Force.

A standard crew consists of 60 people with 15 different specialties.
An E-4B flight simulator.
An E-4B simulator training mission.

US Strategic Command

In 2022, the Air Force debuted a $9.5 million E-4B simulator to train pilots, flight engineers, and other crew members to operate the aircraft, according to the US Strategic Command.

The E-4B can refuel while in flight, allowing it to fly for several days at a time.
An E-4B plane is refueled in flight.
An E-4B can refuel in flight.

US Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Codie Trimble

The E-4B can fly for 12 hours straight without refueling.

Its communications technology is kept in a bulge on top of the plane called the ray dome.
Air Force E-4B
An E-4B aircraft on the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base, California, September 11, 2017.

US Air Force/Louis Briscese

The E-4B possesses more communications capabilities than Air Force One with around 67 satellite dishes and antennas in the ray dome.

The plane's exterior also features thermal and nuclear shielding, and its electrical system can withstand electromagnetic pulses.

The plane's main deck features six functional areas.
Secretary of Defense Dr. Mark T. Esper speaks to reporters on board an E-4B plane.
Then-Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper met with reporters on board an E-4B in 2019.

DoD photo by US Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith

The layout includes a command room, conference room, briefing room, operations team work area, communications room, and a rest area, according to the US Air Force.

The plane can seat up to 112 people.

In the briefing room, officials update members of the press and conduct meetings with staff.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter speaks with members of the media on board an E-4B aircraft.
Then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter met with members of the press while traveling to Europe in 2015.

Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz/US Secretary of Defense

The E-4B isn't just a "doomsday plane." The Secretary of Defense occasionally uses it to travel overseas and hold press briefings.

Located in the center of the plane, the battle staff room is where officers would gather to strategize in a national emergency.
The battle staff room on board an E-4B.
The battle staff room on board an E-4B.

Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo/US Secretary of Defense

In the event of a nuclear attack or other apocalyptic scenario, the president, secretary of defense, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would use the plane as a secure command and control center similar to the Pentagon.

The rest area has 18 crew bunks, while the Secretary of Defense occupies private quarters on international trips.
A flight attendant on an E-4B plane wipes down a table.
The private quarters on the E-4B.

Lance Cheung/US Air Force photo

The Secretary of Defense's private quarters are furnished with a bunk and a desk with chairs.

The E-4B is staffed and on alert 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
A simulated alert mission on an E-4B Nightwatch plane.
E-4B crew members carry out simulated alert missions.

US Air Force photo by Lance Cheung

At least one E-4B has been on continuous alert since 1975, ready to deploy at a moment's notice.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Planned Parenthood to close 8 centers across Iowa, Minnesota amid federal funding cuts

Planned Parenthood North Central States said Friday that it plans to close over a third of its health centers across Minnesota and Iowa and lay off dozens of staff members in light of looming federal funding cuts and other budget constraints.

State of play: The announcement from Minnesota's largest abortion provider came just one day after the U.S. House passed a reconciliation bill that it says would "defund" Planned Parenthood and make deep cuts to Medicaid funding.


Driving the news: Leaders of the regional affiliate cited that move, along with the Trump administration's decision to freeze $2.8 million in Title X funds used for birth control and cancer screenings and a proposal to cut teen pregnancy prevention aid as key factors in the decision to consolidate its centers.

  • Shifting patient preferences and broader challenges facing the health care sector, including stagnant reimbursement rates and staff shortages, also contributed, it said in a release.

By the numbers: Planned Parenthood North Central States (PPNCS) says it provides sexual and reproductive health care, including abortions, to an estimated 93,000 people across Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota each year.

  • Over 30% of its patients rely on Medicaid, per a release.

Between the lines: While federal funds generally cannot be used for abortions, critics of abortion rights have long sought to prevent any taxpayer money from flowing to the organization.

What they're saying: PPNCS president Ruth Richardson said the "heart wrenching" decision to consolidate operations was meant to "ensure Planned Parenthood is here for years to come."

  • "We have been fighting to hold together an unsustainable infrastructure as the landscape shifts around us and an onslaught of attacks continues," she said in a statement.

Zoom in: The list of eight sites slated to close in the coming year includes several in the Twin Cities metro. Four Iowa health care centers β€” including its only facility that provides abortions in that state β€” and two in Greater Minnesota will also shutter:

  • Ames Health Center (Ames, Iowa)
  • Alexandria Health Center (Alexandria, Minnesota)
  • Apple Valley Health Center (Apple Valley, Minn.)
  • Bemidji Health Center (Bemidji, Minnesota)
  • Cedar Rapids Health Center (Cedar Rapids, Iowa)
  • Richfield Health Center (Richfield, Minnesota)
  • Sioux City Health Center (Sioux City, Iowa)
  • Urbandale Health Center (Urbandale, Iowa)

Plus: PPNCS will also lay off 66 staff members and offer 37 others the opportunity to be reassigned as part of the reorganization.

Zoom out: Minnesota has seen an increase in both abortions and out-of-state patients seeking abortion care in the wake of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

The bottom line: Planned Parenthood said its 15 remaining health centers across the chapter's region, including about a dozen in Minnesota and Iowa, will remain open.

  • Those sites, combined with virtual care, serve about 80% of its current patient population.
  • "Make no mistake: care may look different but Planned Parenthood North Central States is here to stay," Richardson said.

Video footage shows the moment OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush's wife heard the apparent sound of the Titan sub imploding

Screenshot from footage showing Stockton Rush's wife,  Wendy Rush.
Screenshot from footage shared by the US Coast Guard.

US Coast Guard

  • New video shows the moment the wife of the late OceanGate CEO heard the apparent sound of the Titan sub imploding.
  • "What was that bang?" Wendy Rush said after a slamming noise could be heard through a monitor on the sub's support ship.
  • All five passengers on the sub were killed as it descended to view the Titanic wreck in June 2023.

Video footage released by the US Coast Guard shows the moment the wife of the late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush heard the apparent sound of the Titan submersible imploding.

In the video, Wendy Rush, a director at the ocean tourism company β€” which has since suspended all operations β€” can be seen attempting to contact the sub from the Polar Prince support vessel when a loud slamming sound can be heard through her monitor.

"What was that bang?" she said, before receiving a message saying the sub had dropped two weights, seeming to give her the impression the trip was going to plan. Analysts say the message may have been sent shortly before the sub imploded but a delay may have caused it to come through later.

The Titan sub imploded while descending to view the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean in June 2023, killing all five people on board.

The Titan lost communication with the Polar Prince around one hour and 45 minutes into its dive, sparking a frantic search effort involving US, Canadian, and French rescuers.

The vessel's wreckage was discovered by a remotely operated vehicle four days after it went missing, around 500 meters (roughly 1,640 feet) from the bow of the Titanic, per the Coast Guard.

OceanGate cofounder Stockton Rush, pilot and adventurer Hamish Harding, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, and former French Navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet were the passengers in the vessel.

OceanGate charged up to $250,000 per ticket to see the Titanic, which lies at a depth of around 12,500 feet.

A passenger waiver form for the Titan viewed by Business Insider in 2023 said the sub had successfully completed "as few as 13" out of 90 dives to the depth of the Titanic.

A new Netflix documentary scheduled to be released in June will take a closer look at what caused the tragedy.

Read the original article on Business Insider

OpenAI's latest power move: Cast Sam Altman as a new Steve Jobs

OpenAI's latest power move in the AI race is to cast CEO Sam Altman as a Steve Jobs for the new era.

Why it matters: Jobs remains Silicon Valley's most revered founder, and since his 2011 death no industry figure has been able to match his success at product innovation, strategy and marketing.


Driving the news: This week OpenAI nabbed Jony Ive, the design guru who closely collaborated with Jobs to shape iconic devices like the iPhone and the iPod, to oversee a big new bet on AI hardware.

  • OpenAI's promotional materials paired Altman and Ive in a video that strongly implies Altman's team-up with the Apple veteran makes him Jobs' natural successor.
  • Altman has even invoked Jobs directly, saying the Apple founder would be "damn proud" of Ive's move, per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Reality check: It's never that smart to speculate about what a dead person would think, but Altman's suggestion sounds particularly wrongheaded.

  • Jobs devoted his life to Apple and was fiercely protective of the company. At the very least he would have regretted Ive's decision to pursue his next ambitious goal outside Apple. More likely, he'd have seen it as a betrayal.

Zoom out: Every Silicon Valley founder wants to be Steve Jobs at some point, and, for many industry insiders, Altman's success at bringing ChatGPT forth from OpenAI to spark the generative-AI wave qualifies as a Jobs-like leap.

  • Altman shares with Jobs a penchant for vast visionary schemes and a "reality distortion field" that persuades listeners those schemes could come true.
  • As Jobs did, Altman has also sometimes alienated collaborators and left them feeling deceived.

Altman and Jobs also both experienced getting booted from the companies they founded, but in different ways.

  • Jobs spent more than a decade in exile from 1985 to 1997, and many of his associates credit that period with strengthening his human skills for his second act at Apple.
  • Altman returned to his CEO post just a few days after OpenAI's board fired him in November 2023.

Yes, but: There are plenty of ways in which the Altman-Jobs comparison falls short.

  • Jobs was a control freak who obsessed over details and held projects back until they were well-tested.
  • Altman takes more of a Zuckerberg-style "move fast and break things" approach. OpenAI ships products to the public early so users can try them out and show developers what to fix.
  • Also, Jobs β€” who ruthlessly pruned sprawling product lines β€” might have found OpenAI's approach to naming and numbering product releases unwieldy.
  • On the other hand, there are no reports to date that Altman likes to park his car in the accessible parking space the way Jobs famously did.

The bottom line: Every industry has its cherished icons whose legacy is fought over by successive generations. While imitating them is common, displacing them is a greater win.

I make $3,000 a month by sports betting 2 hours a day — my arbitrage strategy has minimized risk

James Crosby sits at his desk with his sportsbook pages open.
James Crosby told Business Insider he spends about an hour or two a day placing arbitrage bets on sites like FanDuel and DraftKings and has earned about $8,500 in three months.

James Crosby

  • James Crosby got started in sports betting with an arbitrage strategy he learned from his roommate.
  • He exploits the odds when betting against himself on multiple platforms, so he always makes a profit.
  • Crosby is on track to bring in about $8,500 in just three months β€”Β but he's budgeting for taxes.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with James Crosby, a 26-year-old Deloitte consultant from Arlington, Virginia. It's been edited for length and clarity.

Online sports betting is legal in some states. Before participating, verify the legality in your specific state.

My first month doing arbitrage betting, I made a little over $2,000. The second month, I made about $2,500. This month, I'm on track to bring in more than $4,000 in pure profit.

The process is pretty straightforward: I've opened accounts on about 12 different sportsbook platforms, like FanDuel and DraftKings, and I pay to subscribe to a service call OddsJam, which helps me find the best bets. Once I've found them, I strategically bet against myself so I always turn a profit. I only use US sites.

Last week, I bet on Alex Ovechkin for the Capitals versus the Hurricanes playoff game in hockey. On one sports betting platform, I bet $100 to win $150 that Alex Ovechkin would get over three and a half shots on goal. That meant my total payout would be $250 because I would get my $100 back plus the $150 in profit.

During the same game, on another betting site, I had the exact opposite bet, where I bet Alex would get under three and a half shots on goal. The chances were betting $130 to win $119, so my total payout would be $249.

So, for both bets, I had a total wager of $230. But because one of the bets had to win and the other bet had to lose, my payout would either be $249 or $250, and I was guaranteed either $19 or $20 in profit, depending on the outcome.

Most of the time, I'm betting between $50 and $100 to win $3 to $4, but it all adds up.

For the returns I'm getting, I needed initial capital of about $20,000 and maybe one to two hours per day. But anyone can really be profitable with this.

The name of the game is maximizing your return on investment, so the more that you put in, the more profitable you will be. Each one of the bets you're making is going to have a profit margin between 3% and 4% β€” so if you have $1,000, you're going to make $30 or $40 bucks. If you only have $100, you're going to make $3 or $4. Even paying for the subscription to OddsJam, it really does pay for itself very quickly.

There's a bit of a catch

Online arbitrage betting is legal, depending on the state you're in, but of course, the sportsbook sites don't really like it because they're losing money. Each platform has different terms of service, but when they catch you β€”Β and they will because they have algorithms dedicated to detecting these kinds of bets β€” your account will probably get restricted so you can't bet as much money. That means you'll have to play more often or bet on more games to see the same returns.

If you're betting on very obscure sports that aren't usually bet on β€” like you're betting $2,000 that some cricket game in India is going to go a certain way β€”Β they're going to be able to figure out that you're probably arbitraging. So you can kind of mitigate the risk by not taking bets that are super obscure and just doing more main lines that are very, very common, which will help you remain undetected for a while.

I would say you could probably last a week or two on average before the casinos catch on. I lasted around two weeks on most of my sports books, but there were a couple that got me within three or four days, so I wasn't able to be super profitable on them, but it was still fun in the first couple of days to take advantage of the bigger bets.

You'd think it would probably be in the site's best interest to disband your account if you were just exploiting them and taking money from them. But, as arbitrage betters, we actually do provide a little bit of value to the sportsbook sites, because they can study an arbitrage player's activity for signals on where they can tighten up their odds.

It's actually kind of like a value feedback loop where we provide a service β€”Β almost like consulting β€”Β and help them make sure that other players aren't taking advantage of them and getting bets at a better value than they should be, which allows them to stay more profitable over time, and in return, they allow us to use their platform to place these bets, knowing that we'll probably squeeze out a little bit of profit.

I learned about arbitrage betting from my roommate, who has been doing it for years. He's been averaging between $30,000 and $40,000 a year with this side hustle and bought himself a Tesla with his winnings. I knew he was doing it, but I was always kind of skeptical of the time commitment that it would take, the amount of starting capital I would need, and the learning curve behind it, because it seemed kind of complex.

I finally started in March because I figured I would just give it a shot. I wanted an easy way to earn extra money because I've been worried about the job market. It ended up being really, really easy once I put a little bit of time into it, and it wasn't overly complicated, so my roommate and I started a blog and social media channels to teach other people our strategy.

One thing you have to keep in mind is taxes. Every state and player is different, but I know that I'll have to pay taxes of around 20% of my earnings. So I've accounted for that, and I put that portion in a fund that's allocated to low-risk stocks, so hopefully I don't lose any of that money. But even taking that money into account, it feels worthwhile.

I'm assuming I'll be able to keep this going because my roommate's been doing it for years, and he's been able to remain profitable. So there's no end in sight, hopefully. I'm hoping that in the future, my winnings could serve as a down payment on a house, a wedding ring for my girlfriend, a new car, or just, you know, a fallback fund if things go really south and I lose my job or something like that especially with the economy the way it is.

I have no idea exactly where I'll spend the money, but my plan is to save it and invest it wisely.

Do you have a unique side hustle, or has your side hustle replaced your full-time job? Email Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert at [email protected].

Read the original article on Business Insider
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