When there is a crisis anywhere in the world, the president’s
first question often is, “Where are the aircraft carriers?”
The
modern super carrier lies at the very center of American national
security strategy, and, at over a thousand feet in length and
approaching nearly 100,000 tons in water displacement, it is a
uniquely American weapon.
The U.S. Navy currently possesses 10 of these behemoths, and while
China, Russia, Brazil, India and France each claim a single carrier
in their naval inventory, none comes even close to matching the
capabilities of an American flattop.
When an iconic super carrier
comes within sight of a foreign shore, its citizens know that the
Americans have arrived.
But the Navy’s current carrier plan would squander this military
advantage, not by squeezing carriers out but by overbuilding them.
Right now, the Navy plans to modernize its carrier program by
launching a new wave of even larger and more expensive ships,
starting with the USS Gerald Ford, which cost $15 billion to build —
by far the most expensive vessel in naval history.
This is a mistake:
Because of changes in warfare and technology, in any future military
entanglement with a foe like China, current carriers and their air
wings will be almost useless and the next generation may fare even
worse.
As the Defense Department prepares to release its budget in
February, the military faces a critical decision over how to proceed
with the next generation of aircraft carriers.
If the Navy fails to
bring carrier costs under control and to modernize the air wing, it
will consign these iconic symbols of American power to irrelevance.
The era of the aircraft carrier dawned in 1912.
At first, it was
envisioned as a support ship for a fleet organized around the
battleship.
The carrier’s purpose was to launch airplanes to search
for the enemy fleet and then act as spotters, reporting and
correcting the gunnery fire of the battleships.
When the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor with carrier-based aircraft, naval strategists
began looking at carriers in an entirely new light.
Six months later,
the massive strategic victory at Midway permanently cemented the
carriers as the centerpiece of modern naval power.
During the 1950s,
the carrier evolved into the super carrier in order to carry aircraft
capable of striking deep into the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.
Ever since, it has remained at the fore of American foreign policy.
It is the ubiquitous symbol of American power. Read more:
Scientists at UCLA have discovered that Earth is made up of two
planets: Earth and Theia.
Theia, a Mars-sized protoplanet, crashed
into Earth 4.5 billion years ago when Earth was just 100 million
years old.
Previously, the giant impact hypothesis suggested that
Theia sideswiped Earth, knocking off a chunk.
That chunk, the theory
goes, became the moon. Theia then continued on its journey through
space.
However, this new research, published in the journal Science,
suggests that when Theia collided with Earth, it hit head on and
fused with Earth instead of continuing its trek through the stars.
That means that Theia is still here, under our feet. It's a part of
Earth.
The study, which was funded by NASA, the Deep Carbon Observatory
and a grant from the European Research Council, focused on comparing
moon rocks to Earth matter.
The findings led the research team to the
conclusion that Earth and the moon are so similar because the moon
was created at the same time that Theia impacted and altered Earth.
Richard Young, head researcher and professor of geochemistry and
cosmochemistry, says that after the impact, "Theia was
thoroughly mixed into both the Earth and the moon, and evenly
dispersed between them."
The identical nature of moon and Earth
matter has long confounded scientists in understanding the
relationship between the two planetary bodies.
To try and get a firm
grasp on the expected differences, Young and his team compared seven
moon rocks (brought back by the Apollo 12, 15 and 17 missions) to
five Earth rocks.
The terrestrial rocks were gathered from Earth's
mantle in Hawaii and Arizona. According to UCLA, "Young's
research team used state-of-the-art technology and techniques to make
extraordinarily precise and careful measurements, and verified them
with UCLA’s new mass spectrometer."
By studying the chemical signatures
of the rocks' oxygen atoms, Young and his team were able to determine
that the moon and Earth-as-we-now-know-it did, in fact, result from
the same event: Theia's collision and fusion with Earth.
Young
elaborates, "This explains why we don't see a different
signature of Theia in the moon versus Earth."
The head-on collision also raises questions about the origin of
water on Earth.
Young suggests that water could have been present
before Theia's impact, or it could have been brought to Earth by
water-rich asteroid impacts millions of years later.
Young notes
that, "Collisions of growing bodies occurred very frequently
back then."
Young points out that Mars seems to have escaped any
such impacts — as far as we know.
Young also offers insight into the planet that could have been.
Had Theia not collided and fused with Earth, it might have evolved
from a planetary embryo into a true planet.
However, we should be thankful that 4.5 billion years ago Theia undertook its crash
course.
Without it, we would not have the moon, and life as we know
it would not exist.
When you entrust your money to a fund supermarket, wealth manager
or another financial services firm, you hope for healthy returns and
minimal investment disasters.
But behind the scenes, the companies
that handle your money are fighting to keep your assets and data safe
from targeted hacks.
“It’s one of the things that keeps our members awake at
night,” says Liz Field, chief executive of the Wealth Management
Association.
As long as the internet has existed, companies have been subject
to a barrage of hack attempts, many of them indiscriminate: simple
malware, sometimes contained in “phishing” emails, seeks openings
wherever it can.
But the UK has undergone a rapid rise in targeted attacks, in
which criminals try — with a high degree of human involvement —
to access specific information or assets.
This can range from
customer details that will be sold on to enable fraud, to trading
information for use on the markets, or material that could embarrass
companies if published in a Sony-style hack.
Some 81 per cent of large organizations and 60 per cent of small
businesses found their digital defenses had been breached in the past
year, according to UK government data released in 2014.
Financial
companies are at the sharp end, not just because of the money they
manage but because of the sensitive personal data they hold.
The
risks have grown as services that initially lagged behind the digital
revolution, such as accounts held by fund and pension customers, move
fully online.
“The information that the firms we represent have is the
information that is of greatest interest to cyber criminals because
it’s where the money is.
They are a focus of attack,” says John
Barrass, deputy chief executive of the WMA.
Retail banks are among the most high-profile targets of hackers,
and face constant assaults, but specialist firms handling investments
can also be tempting to the discerning criminal, says Michael
Soppitt, a director at Parker Fitzgerald, a financial services
management consultancy.
“The average value of an account at an investment management
firm is significantly higher than at a retail bank, and high-value
customers’ information is more saleable,” he says.
A UN panel will conclude Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (above) is being
"arbitrarily detained" in the UK, the Swedish foreign
ministry has said.
Mr Assange, 44, claimed asylum in London's Ecuadorean embassy in
2012.
He wants to avoid extradition to Sweden over a rape claim,
which he denies.
The Met Police says Mr Assange will be arrested if he leaves the
embassy.
Swedish prosecutors said the UN panel's decision would have "no
formal impact" on its ongoing investigation.
Mr Assange earlier said his passport should be returned and his
arrest warrant dropped if the UN panel, due to deliver its findings
on Friday, ruled in his favor.
The Australian was originally arrested in London in 2010 under a
European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden over rape and sexual assault
claims.
In 2012, while on bail, he claimed asylum inside the Ecuadorean
embassy in Knightsbridge after the UK Supreme Court had ruled the
extradition against him could go ahead.
Swedish prosecutors dropped two sex assault claims against Mr
Assange last year. However, he still faces the more serious
accusation of rape.
In 2014, Mr Assange complained to the UN that he was being
"arbitrarily detained" as he could not leave the embassy
without being arrested.
The application claimed Mr Assange had been "deprived of his
liberty in an arbitrary manner for an unacceptable length of time".
The UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has been
investigating the issue.
Wikileaks earlier tweeted it was waiting for "official
confirmation" of the UN panel's decision.
Downing Street said the panel's ruling would not be legally
binding in the UK while a European Arrest Warrant remained in place.
"We have been consistently clear that Mr Assange has never
been arbitrarily detained by the UK but is, in fact, voluntarily
avoiding lawful arrest by choosing to remain in the Ecuadorean
embassy," a spokesman said.
"The UK continues to have a legal obligation to extradite Mr
Assange to Sweden."
The Swedish foreign ministry said in a statement that it noted the
UN panel's decision "differs from that of the Swedish
authorities".
The statement added the legal process for Mr Assange's case would
be handled in court by Swedish prosecutors.
Per Samuelsson, Mr Assange's lawyer, said Swedish authorities
would be "morally" wrong to continue the investigation if
the UN panel found in his favor.
"The ball is in Sweden's yard, in the prosecutor's yard. She
is not formally bound by the decision by the UN, but morally it is
very difficult to go against it."
The journalist John Pilger, who is a friend of Mr Assange, said
"the ball is now at the feet of the British government",
whose international legal "obligations" were represented by
the UN panel.
"They did something in terms of supporting the tribunal in
all the other celebrated cases, and Assange now joins them because
the UN jurists have clearly found this is a case of arbitrary
detention," he said.
Beneath the surface of the global financial system lurks a
multitrillion-dollar problem that could sap the strength of large
economies for years to come.
The problem is the giant, stagnant pool of loans that companies
and people around the world are struggling to pay back.
Bad debts
have been a drag on economic activity ever since the financial crisis
of 2008, but in recent months, the threat posed by an overhang of bad
loans appears to be rising.
China is the biggest source of worry.
Some analysts estimate that China’s troubled credit could exceed $5
trillion, a staggering number that is equivalent to half the size of
the country’s annual economic output.
Official figures show that Chinese banks pulled back on their
lending in December.
If such trends persist, China’s economy, the
second-largest in the world behind the United States’, may then
slow even more than it has, further harming the many countries that
have for years relied on China for their growth.
But it’s not just China.
Wherever governments and central banks
unleashed aggressive stimulus policies in recent years, a toxic debt
hangover has followed.
In the United States, it took many months for
mortgage defaults to fall after the most recent housing bust — and
energy companies are struggling to pay off the cheap money that they
borrowed to pile into the shale boom.
In Europe, analysts say bad loans total more than $1 trillion.
Many large European banks are still burdened with defaulted loans,
complicating policy makers’ efforts to revive the Continent’s
economy. Italy, for instance, announced a plan last week to clean out
bad loans from its plodding banking industry.
Elsewhere, bad loans are on the rise at Brazil’s biggest banks,
as the country grapples with the effects of an enormous credit binge.
“If you have a boom and then a bust, you create economic
losses,” said Alberto Gallo, head of global macro credit research
at the Royal Bank of Scotland in London. “You can hope the losses
one day turn into profits, but if they don’t, they are a drag on
the economy.”
In good times, companies and people take on new loans, often at
low interest rates, to buy goods and services.
When economies slow,
these debts become difficult to pay for many borrowers.
And the
bigger the boom, the more soured debt that is left behind for bankers
and policy makers to deal with.
In theory, it makes sense for banks to swiftly recognize the
losses embedded in bad loans — and then make up for those losses by
raising fresh capital.
The cleaned-up banks are more likely to start
lending again — and thus play their part in fueling the recovery.
But in reality, this approach can be difficult to carry out.
Recognizing losses on bad loans can mean pushing corporate borrowers
into bankruptcy and households into foreclosure.
Such disruption can
send a chill through the economy, require unpopular taxpayer bailouts
and have painful social consequences.
And in some cases, the banks
might find it extremely difficult to raise fresh capital in the
markets.
Montevideo (AFP) - South American health ministers held an
emergency meeting on slowing the spread of the Zika virus, dubbed a
"nightmare" by hard-hit Brazil, where it is blamed for
brain damage in babies.
With health authorities warning the disease could infect up to
four million people in the Americas, ministers from 14 countries held
talks in Uruguay to plot their response to the growing crisis, with
fears the virus could spread worldwide.
The meeting focused on ways to control the mosquito population
spreading the virus, though reports of a US patient catching the
disease by having sex fueled fears that it will not be easy to
contain.
Brazil said it was sending more than 500,000 personnel out to
clean up mosquito breeding grounds and advise people about the
disease.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said her government was
directing "all resources" available toward the crisis, and
vowed to do "absolutely everything" for the families of
babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads and brains.
The number of babies with the condition has surged since the Zika
outbreak sweeping Latin America was detected last year.
"This virus, which only recently arrived in Brazil and Latin
America, no longer is a distant nightmare but a real threat to all
Brazilians' homes," Rousseff said in a nationally televised
message.
Florida Governor Rick Scott meanwhile declared a health emergency
in four counties after six new Zika cases were detected in the US
state.
The new infections bring the number of Zika cases in Florida to
nine.
Authorities say all caught the virus while traveling abroad,
though there is concern it could spread locally because the Aedes
aegypti mosquito that transmits the virus is present in the southern
United States.
The fever starts with a mosquito bite and normally causes little
more than a fever and rash.
But since October, Brazil has reported 404 confirmed cases of
microcephaly -- up from 147 in 2014 -- plus 3,670 suspected cases.
The timing has fueled strong suspicions that Zika is causing the
birth defect.
The virus has also been linked to a potentially paralyzing nerve
disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome in some patients.
Layoffs surged in January to the highest levels since July as
employers in the retail and energy sectors pulled out the pink slips,
according to a private survey out Thursday.
U.S.-based companies announced 75,114 planned job cuts last month,
up more than 200 percent from a 15-year low in December, according to
global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
That
figure was also 42 percent higher from a year ago.
Retailers were the biggest job cutter, despite a nearly 8 percent
bump in U.S. holiday sales in 2015. The sector slashed 22,246
positions, a seven-year high.
Wal-Mart accounted for much of the payroll reductions. The
nation's largest retailer said it plans to close 269 stores and
expects to let go 16,000 workers.
Macy's said it will also shutter some locations this year, costing
4,820 employees their jobs.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas CEO John A.Challenger said the
shift from in-store selling to online transactions is playing a major
part in the scaling back of retail work forces.
Macy's "had a 25 percent jump in their online sales, but
their retail sales at bricks and mortars fell by 5 percent, so they
are cutting stores," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on
Thursday.
January delivered a fresh round of energy sector layoffs, as well.
Announced payroll reductions of 20,246 marked the highest monthly
total since the start of the oil price rout in mid-2014 that has sent
crude prices spiraling about 70 percent and led to massive
cost-cutting in the U.S. oil patch.
"Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger — all the big oil
producers of equipment — are continuing to cut jobs. That suggests
that the big … oil and gas companies are cutting production and
exploration," Challenger said.
The report was released a day before the Labor Department releases
its jobs data for January.
On Wednesday, ADP and Moody's Analytics
reported that that job growth in the private sector slowed in
January.
Challenger said the United States has not yet reached the point at
which employers can no longer find skilled workers to expand their
business, a condition that could contribute to a recession.
However,
he said that possibility is now visible on the horizon.
WASHINGTON -- In a
scorching speech from the Senate floor on recently, Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Mass.) said the American criminal justice system is rigged
in favor of the wealthy, and condemned new legislation that would
make it harder to prosecute bank fraud.
"There are two legal systems," Warren said. "One
for the rich and powerful, and one for everyone else."
Warren's office issued a report earlier this week documenting 20
cases in which federal officials had enough evidence against corporate
malfeasance to issue fines.
In most of the cases, companies were not
even required to admit guilt. In only one case did a corporate
offender go to jail -- Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who
received a 3-month sentence over a mine disaster that killed 29
people.
"It's not equal justice when a kid gets thrown in jail for
stealing a car, while a CEO gets a huge raise when his company steals
billions," Warren said. "It's not equal justice when
someone hooked on opioids gets locked up for buying pills on the
street, but bank executives get off scot-free for laundering nearly a
billion dollars of drug cartel money."
Multiple banks have been busted for laundering drug money, though
none of their executives have been charged with crimes.
"One legal system is for big companies, for the wealthy and
the powerful. In this legal system, government officials fret about
unintended consequences if they are too tough." But in the
second legal system, Warren said, "government enforcement isn't
timid."
"Just ask the families of Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and
Michael Brown about how aggressive [police and prosecutors] are,"
Warren said.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the intellectual cornerstone
of the court’s modern conservative wing, whose elegant and acidic
opinions inspired a movement of legal thinkers and ignited liberal
critics, died Feb. 13 on a ranch near Marfa, Tex. He was 79.
The cause of death was not immediately known.
In a statement Saturday, Chief Justice John G. Roberts said: “On
behalf of the Court and retired Justices, I am saddened to report
that our colleague Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away.
He was an
extraordinary individual and jurist, admired and treasured by his
colleagues.
His passing is a great loss to the Court and the country
he so loyally served. We extend our deepest condolences to his wife
Maureen and his family.”
Justice Scalia, the first Italian American to serve on the court,
was nominated by President Ronald Reagan. He took his seat Sept. 26,
1986, and quickly became the kind of champion to the conservative
legal world that his benefactor was in the political realm.
So, will he be replaced by a LIBERAL?
