Navy Frees Captive U.S. Cargo Ship Captain Phillips
pril 12 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Navy forces freed Richard Phillips, the American cargo-ship captain held by pirates off the coast of Somalia, killing three of his captors and taking one into custody, the Navy said.
The Navy acted today because Phillips’s life appeared to be threatened by pirates who were pointing weapons at him, Vice Admiral Bill Gortney, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said during a teleconference with reporters from Bahrain.
“His life was in danger because the pirates were armed with AK-47s and had smaller-caliber pistols, and they were pointing the AK-47s at the captain,” Gortney said.
The pirates were shot by snipers aboard the destroyer USS Bainbridge, which was 25 to 30 meters away from the lifeboat where Phillips was being held, Gortney said. Phillips was tied up in the lifeboat, he said.
“We pay a lot for their training,” Gortney said of the snipers. “We got a good return on their investment tonight.”
President Barack Obama had given standing orders for a rescue effort if Phillips’s life was in danger, Gortney said.
Obama said in a statement that “I share the country’s admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew. His courage is a model for all Americans.”
After being rescued unharmed, Phillips was first taken to the Bainbridge, then flown to the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, where the Navy said he contacted his family and was resting.
Protecting His Crew
Phillips was taken hostage on April 8 after brigands attempted to seize his ship, the Maersk Alabama, and its American crew.
While the crew managed to retake the ship, the pirates spirited the captain away onto the lifeboat. Phillips jumped overboard yesterday in an effort to escape, only to be recaptured after being shot at, Gortney said.
The Maersk Alabama is operated by the Maersk Line, a Norfolk, Virginia-based U.S. unit of A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, which is based in Copenhagen.
The Maersk Alabama docked in Mombasa, Kenya, yesterday, and the crew is safe.
After hearing of their captain’s release, some of the Maersk Alabama’s crew came out on the ship’s deck in Mombasa cheering, pumping fists into the air and waving American flags.
‘A Big Relief’
“It’s a big relief,” William Rios, a crew member from New York City, said as he spoke with his wife by cell phone.
Maersk Chief Executive Officer John Reinhart called the rescue a “good moment.” He said he’s spoken with Phillips, who told him to say that “John, I’m just a byline. The real heroes are the Navy, the SEALs who have brought me home.” SEALs are the Navy’s special warfare commandos.
Reinhart also spoke earlier with the captain’s wife, Andrea, and he said she was relieved and thankful for her husband’s safe return. Reinhart made the comments in a televised press conference from Norfolk, Virginia.
Phillips, 53, lives with his family in Underhill, Vermont. He graduated from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in 1979.
In a separate incident yesterday, an Italian tugboat was hijacked by pirates in the Gulf of Aden. The Buccaneer, a tugboat with a crew of 16, was seized as it was towing two barges, said Shona Lowe, a spokeswoman for NATO’s Northwood Maritime Command Center near London. Ten of the crew are Italian nationals, she said.
First Incident
The Alabama is the first U.S.-flagged vessel hijacked since a maritime protection corridor was set up in the region in August, according to the U.S. Navy.
Pirates have taken more ships this past week than in the first three months of the year, according to U.S. and French navy data. They’re operating outside their usual hunting grounds in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s most-traveled trade routes, to avoid naval patrols.
“We remain resolved to halt the rise of piracy in this region,” Obama said in today’s statement. “To achieve that goal, we must continue to work with our partners to prevent future attacks, be prepared to interdict acts of piracy and ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aj.7xFLvuiA0&refer=worldwide
Social Security Bomb About To Explode
Remember how we didn't have to worry about Social Security now because payments from the program wouldn't exceed revenue for another decade or more? Well, the CBO has revised its estimates. It's still projecting a tiny surplus for next year--tiny--but Chris Martenson thinks those estimates will quickly be revised down:
socialsecurityforecasts.jpg[I]t was only last year that I was writing about the impeding fiscal calamity that was awaiting us all in 2017 when the outlays for Social Security were slated to exactly match receipts. Now that date could be as early as 2010, apparently.
In the chart above (source), I want you to note the extreme deterioration in surplus funds between the 2008 and 2009 forecasts. Can you spot the trend?
Here’s a prediction – these too will be revised to the worse in about 6 months. I base this prediction on my belief that more people will opt for retirement than are currently projected and that entitlement program tax receipts will be below current projections. Also, nearly every prediction by the CBO has been revised to the worse over the past year so I am “riding the trend” with this prediction.
In the projections for the table above, the CBO has assumed no cost of living adjustments (COLAs) in 2010, 2011, or 2012 and a return to economic growth next year. If either of those assumptions proves wrong, the table above gets smoked to the downside. I give that a better than 90% chance of happening.
This, of course, will have implications far beyond the Social Security system.
The Social Security "trust fund," you'll recall, isn't a trust fund at all. It's just another source of annual government financing and a future liability. Today's receipts are used to pay current payments to retirees and, in the case of a surplus, whatever else the government is spending money on. As the Social Security surplus shrinks, therefore, the government loses a source of funding. If it wants to keep spending at its planned rate, it therefore has to borrow the difference.
When Social Security goes into deficit, meanwhile, the government will have to borrow even more money to pay current SS recipients. Chris Martenson:
From a budget-busting perspective, last year where the US government had a $73 billion Social Security surplus to spend, this year it will be a paltry $16 billion and next year it will be a number indistinguishable from zero. It is hard to overstate the importance of this shift.
This means several things. Instead of $703 billion coming in over the next 10 years, the current (overly optimistic) projection calls for only $83 billion. This means at least another $620 billion in fresh borrowing will have to occur.
More importantly, this means that the United States eventual date with bankruptcy has been moved forward by about 8 years or so. It also means that instead of being some future problem, a few administrations down the road, it is a near certainty that the current administration will have to confront some very difficult funding decisions that will be forced by the inability to borrow enough to pay for everything.
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-the-social-security-bomb-2009-4
Grog at FRC posted this today
Dry Taps in Mexico City: A Water Crisis Gets Worse Saturday, Apr. 11, 2009
By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City
The reek of unwashed toilets spilled into the street in the neighborhood of unpainted cinder block houses. Out on the main road, hundreds of residents banged plastic buckets and blocked the path of irate drivers while children scoured the surrounding area for government trucks. Finally, the impatient crowd launched into a high-pitched chant, repeating one word at fever pitch: "Water, Water, Water!"
About five million people, or a quarter of the population of Mexico City's urban sprawl, woke up Thursday with dry taps. The drought was caused by the biggest stoppage in the city's main reservoir system in recent years to ration its depleting supplies. Government officials hope this and four other stoppages will keep water flowing until the summer rainy season fills the basins back up. But they warn that the Mexican capital needs to seriously overhaul its water system to stop an unfathomable disaster in the future. (See pictures of the world water crisis.)
It is perhaps unsurprising that the biggest metropolis in the Western hemisphere is confronting problems with its water supply — and becoming an alarming cautionary tale for other megacities. Scientists have been talking for years about how humans are pumping up too much water while ripping apart too many forests, and warning that the vital liquid could become the next commodity nations are fighting over with tanks and bombers. But it is hard for most people to appreciate quite how valuable a simple thing like water is — until the taps turn off. (See pictures of the contentious politics of water in Central Asia.)
Housewife Graciela Martinez, 44, complains that the smell of her bathroom — used by her family of eight — had forced them all outside. "We have got no toilets, I can't wash my children, I can't cook, I can't clean the mess off the floor," Martinez says, trying to find shade from the sweltering sun. "And the worst thing is, we have got almost nothing to drink."
Paradoxically, the thirsty city was once a great lake, where the Aztecs founded their island citadel Tenochtitlan in 1325. When the Spanish conquerors took control they drained much of the water, laying the basis for the vast expansion of the metropolis across the entire Valley of Mexico. However, as the growing population continues to suck water out in wells, Mexico City is sinking down into the old lake bed at a rate of about three inches a year. This downward plunge puts extra pressure on water distribution pipes, which are now so leaky they lose about 40% of liquid before it even reaches homes.
With its own supplies evaporating, Mexico City relies on the Cutzamala system, a network of reservoirs and treatment plants that pump in water from hundreds of miles around. However, this year Cutzamala itself is running dry amid low levels of rainfall in the area. Its main basin is only 47% full, compared to an annual average of 70% for early April. "This could be caused by climate change and deforestation. These are difficult factors to understand and predict," says Felipe Arreguin, under director of the National Water Commission. "We had to have the stoppages now to make sure that some supply can continue until the rain in June." The first two partial stoppages in February and March cut off water to hundreds of thousands. In the April action, the entire Cutzamala system will be shut down for 36 hours, before gradually resuming water pumping over several days.
Martinez is particularly anxious because this means there will be no water in her taps this entire weekend. She is also enraged that the blight is mostly hitting poor neighborhoods like hers. "The rich are still swimming in their pools while we are dying of thirst," she says. Playing up to the class war theme, Mexican newspaper Reforma showed a photo of a woman using a public tap in a poor area next to another woman hosing down her lawn in a rich suburb. (See pictures of crime fighting in Mexico City.)
Ramon Aguirre, director of Mexico City's water department, says the government has tried to distribute supplies as fairly as possible but the Cutzamala system is hooked up to many of the unplanned communities on the city outskirts. The city has, however, sent out of fleets of water trucks, and Mayor Marcelo Ebrard — who built urban beaches and a winter ice rink for the poor — is personally handing out free bottled water. Aguirre says the long-term solution involves teaching people to ration their water much better. "We need to educate people from when they are children that water is valuable and needs to be used wisely," he says.
Few Mexico City residents currently heed such advice. Keen on long showers and washing their cars, homes and clothes well, the average Mexico City resident uses 300 liters of waters per day compared to 180 per day in some European cities, says Arreguin. Furthermore, on Easter Saturdays, residents traditionally have huge water fights, in which everyone from grandparents to young children join in hurling bucket loads over each other. Piet Klop, an investigator at the Washington-based environmental think tank World Resources Institute, says that people will not learn to ration water unless it hits their pockets. "We need to understand that it is a more valuable commodity than oil and prices must reflect that better," Klop says. "Cheap subsidized water is not helping people. It is giving them a bad service." However, radically hiking the prices of any basic commodity would be a tough sell for any politician, especially in a turbulent democracy such as Mexico.
http://frc4u.org/phpbb/index.php?topic=867.0;topicseen
Walker's World: New food crisis looms
WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- We tend to forget that the worldwide plunge into recession last year was the result of three separate phenomena that combined to breed disaster. The financial crisis was joined by a food crisis and a fuel crisis as the prices of food and energy soared, triggering food riots across the world.
And now there are ominous signs of another food crisis in the making this year, spurred in part by the ongoing credit crunch that has made it difficult for farmers to get loans.
"I think the world would like to focus on one crisis at a time, but we really can't afford to," warned Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program. Food supplies are tight and prices still high, she said, and more people in poor countries are unable to afford what they need because of the recession.
"These are not separate crises. The food crisis and the financial one are linking and compounding," she noted, adding that food shortages often trigger political instability. "I'm really putting out the warning that we're in an era now where supplies are still very tight, very low and very expensive."
Alarm bells are starting to ring about another food crisis this summer. Last week's acreage report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 7 million fewer acres were being planted for all crops. This came after the USDA's January report that noted that winter wheat acreage was down 7 percent.
This means lower output from the United States, the world's top food producer, at a time when world stocks are already low, and farmers are blaming the difficulty in getting credit and the high costs of key inputs like fertilizer.
Mother Nature is making things worse, with the worst drought in almost 70 years hitting northern China and devastating the winter wheat crop. More than 200 million acres in China's top six grain-producing provinces have been hit, and yields are down by as much as 40 percent.
The problem is not just hitting grains. With world soybean stocks 9 percent lower than they were this time last year, a further drought in Latin America is a new concern. Yields in southern Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina are also running at 40 percent of last year's levels. All this is triggering concern in the markets, where analysts are warning that price hikes are looming, and the speculators coming into the market could drive prices even higher.
"It's my opinion that producers feeding livestock need to protect against a possible sharp rise in corn prices," said Dennis Smith, a food-price specialist at Archer Financial Services. "This trade idea would also apply to a speculator looking to profit from a sharp move upward in the corn prices as well."
Smith also factors in the prospect of biofuels distorting the markets again, as they did last year when high oil prices triggered a demand for biofuels like ethanol, which sent crop prices higher. "What happens if crude oil prices continue to move higher and ethanol margins expand?" Smith asked.
Sheeran, whose World Food Program stands between the world's poor and starvation, said she will need about $6 billion this year for food aid, which feeds about 100 million of the world's poorest people in 77 countries. That is slightly more than she raised last year, when food riots erupted across Asia and the Middle East. As of March, donor countries had pledged less than 10 percent of the sums required, or $453 million, mostly thanks to $172 million from the United States and $129 million from Japan.
The one relatively bright spot is in rice, where stocks are relatively high. But concern is rising across Asia. Arthur Yap, agriculture secretary for the Philippines, has warned the United Nations that he fears his country will not be able to secure enough food this year. And Ralph Hautman, the Asia Pacific marketing and global finance officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization, warned last week that the credit crunch is pressuring farmers to reduce the amount of land they cultivate.
"If farmers or agriculture producers have less access to credit, they are less likely to buy a lot of new seeds and fertilizers, and they're also less likely to expand their production areas," Hautman said. "Then there would be less agriculture production. This is the concern. The lower production of food crops caused by the lower availability of credit may lead to lower food stocks and shortages."
This is precisely what has happened in Brazil, where farmers encouraged by last year's high food prices borrowed money to put more acreage under cultivation and buy new farming equipment, only to face bankruptcy when the squeezed banks called in the loans and foreclosed on their farms and tractors.
Part of the problem is underproduction in some parts of the world, where for various reasons of national planning and priorities, farmers are not free to respond to market signals. This is particularly acute in Russia; analysts at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development noted that 16 percent of the world's arable land is in Russia, but it produces only 6 percent of the world's food because of a shortage of both public and private investment.
http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2009/04/06/Walkers-World-New-food-crisis-looms/UPI-79101239032507/
Microchip that tells the GP if you’ve taken your pills
Microchips in pills could soon allow doctors to find out whether a patient has taken their medication.
The digestible sensors, just 1mm wide, would mean GPs and surgeons could monitor patients outside the hospital or surgery.
Developers say the technology could be particularly useful for psychiatric or elderly patients who rely on a complicated regime of drugs – and are at risk if they miss a dose or take it at the wrong time.
It could also be used for the chronically ill, such as people with heart disease, to establish whether costly drugs are working or whether they are causing potentially dangerous side effects.
The sensors could even remind women to take the Pill if they forget.
The ‘intelligent’ medicine works by activating a harmless electric charge when drugs are digested by the stomach.
This charge is picked up by a sensing patch on the patients’ stomach or back, which records the time and date that the pill is digested. It also measures heart rate, motion and breathing patterns.
The information is transmitted to a patient’s mobile phone and then to the internet using wireless technology, to give a complete picture of their health and the impact of their drugs.
Doctors and carers can view this information on secure web pages or have the information sent to their mobile phones.
The silicon microchips are invisible to patients and can be added to any standard drug during the manufacturing process.
Two major drugs companies are investigating the technology, developed by US-based Proteus Biomedical. Trials are to begin in the UK within 12 months.
Professor Nick Peters, a cardiologist at Imperial College London, who is co-ordinating
trials, said the technology was ‘transformative’.
‘This is all about empowering patients and their families because it measures wellness, and people can actually be tracked getting better,’ he said.
‘Psychologically speaking, that’s hugely helpful for patients and enormously reassuring for carers.
‘Normally patients would have to be in hospital to get this level of feedback, so the hope is that it frees up beds and saves the NHS money.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1169305/Microchip-tells-GP-8217-ve-taken-pills.html
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