The active duty Air Force is 520 pilots short of its total manning requirement, with that projection expected to get worse in the near future due to an increase in private airline hiring luring the pilots away and continued cuts to the service's fleet, according to joint testimony to the Senate Armed Services committee by William LaPlante, the assistant secretary for acquisition; Lieutenant General James Holmes, the deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements; and Lieutenant General Tod Wolters, the deputy chief of staff for operations.

"The shortfall evolved from force structure reductions that cut active duty fighter squadrons and fighter training squadrons to a number that cannot sustain billet requirements," the testimony states. "As a result, the Air Force is currently unable to produce and experience the required number of fighter pilots across the total force. Without these fighter pilots, the Air Force will be very challenged to continue to provide the air supremacy upon which all our forces depend," the testimony states.

It was a 24-day ordeal, and the ship returned to its home port in Wisconsin without picking up the cargo. A deep freeze this winter left much of the Great Lakes blanketed in thick ice, sidelining the ship lines and companies that move vast amounts of grain, cement and other commodities through this system of waterways. And now the spring thaw, which creates piles of impassable ice, will most likely create new delays.

Cold spells and snowstorms have taken a bite out of businesses across the Northeast and Midwest of the United States, as well as in Canada. Car manufacturers have blamed the weather for weak sales. Housing starts, too, have slumped. And blizzards in places like Boston have been brutal for many local businesses. “Two especially severe winters back to back — we haven’t seen that in a long time,” said George A Leshkevich, who tracks the ice for the research laboratory. “All the lakes seem pretty brutal.”

On Wednesday Greek banks saw deposit outflows of €300 million, the highest in a single day since a February deal with the euro zone that staved off a banking collapse. But it’s not just on Europe’s periphery that banks are experiencing problems. At the beginning of this month, Austria sent shockwaves throughout the old continent’s financial markets when the Austrian government refused to grant the scandal-tarnished, “bottomless pit” bank Hypo Alde another taxpayer-funded bailout.

Instead, bondholders, even those with bonds guaranteed by the Austrian state of Carinthia, were made to eat the losses in one of the first cases of bank bail-ins since sweeping changes to EU-wide legislation last year.

In recent days the mayhem has spread to Spain’s capital, Madrid, and Andorra, a tiny mountain-ringed tax-haven perched between France and Spain. The initial trigger of the panic was an accusation from the US government of money laundering and a host of other unsavoury practices taking place at Andorra’s third largest bank, Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA).

Fears quickly escalated that the bank would be unable to pay the sort of fine that the US treasury might impose, setting off a mini-bank run that culminated in the imposition of capital controls at Andorran branches of BPA as well as the seizure of deposits of 15,000 account holders of the bank’s Banco de Madrid subsidiary.

Because the AIIB effectively represents the beginning of the end for US hegemony, the White House has demeaned the effort from its inception questioning the ability of non-G-7 nations to create an institution that can be trusted to operate in accordance with the proper “standards.” Now, with 35 nations set to join as founders, it appears Washington may be set to concede defeat.

Here’s more, via WSJ [the Wall Street Journal]: “The Obama administration, facing defiance by allies that have signed up to support a new Chinese-led infrastructure fund, is proposing the bank work in a partnership with Washington-backed development institutions such as the World Bank.

The collaborative approach is designed to steer the new bank toward economic aims of the world’s leading economies and away from becoming an instrument of Beijing’s foreign policy. The bank’s potential to promote new alliances and sidestep existing institutions has been one of the Obama administration’s chief concerns as key allies including the UK, Germany and France lined up in recent days to become founding members of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.”

And with that, one more leap towards de-dollarization is now on the books.

The amateur video, hosted and translated by the Arabic media watchdog MEMRI, shows a preacher conducting a sermon at the Houthi al-Hashoosh Mosque, leading the crowd in an impassioned cry against Israel, the United States and Jews.

“Our belief in Allah will increase after today. We will triumph over their deceit and their arrogance. Allah is with us,” the preacher said. “Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam. Allahu Akbar,” the worshipers recited en masse. Then a terrorist roaming among the mosque’s patrons detonated himself, causing a scene of mass panic.

In an online statement, the previously unknown Sana’a branch of the jihadist group [ISIS] warned that the bombings were “just the tip of the iceberg.”

The prayer book features the voices of female writers and language more reflective of the LGBT experience. But the volume also signals a return to gendered language for God in Reform liturgy, including a version of the iconic High Holidays prayer Avinu Malkeinu that refers to God as both “Loving Father” and “Compassionate Mother.”

Its title, roughly translated as “sanctuary of the soul,” also refers to the portable sanctuary, or mishkan, that the ancient Israelites carried with them during their desert wanderings. As of last week, 127,000 copies had been preordered by approximately 180 congregations. The first edition of 250,000 copies will be available in June.

“It is spiritual, it weaves the voices of both men and women and contemporary language along with the traditional prayers,” Rabbi Denise Eger, the CCAR’s newly installed president, told JTA. “But it also gives voice and framework to our anxieties and our deep questions about God and meaning and the world in language that the contemporary ear and heart and mind understand.”

Rabbi Hara Person, the publisher of CCAR Press and executive editor of the new machzor, says worshippers should feel free to explore the new volume to find what speaks to them. “We’re saying, yes, absolutely you don’t need to be on the same page as everyone else,” she said. “You don’t need to be on the same page as the rabbi and the cantor. If you find something that inspires you, that moves you, that speaks to you, go for it. That’s fine, especially on the High Holidays, when we’re supposed to be reflecting, meditating.”

Speaking to The Independent, the chief executive of Monsanto conceded that the company had failed to appreciate public concerns over GM technology when it was introduced nearly 20 years ago. And he also said that the company had suffered by making “the wrong call” when it failed to rebrand itself in the aftermath of the botched launch of GM in Europe.

But Hugh Grant claimed that unless public attitudes towards biotechnology changed it would be impossible to feed the world’s growing population and called for a more nuanced debate on the potential uses for GM technology in the developing world. “There never had been a lot of trust in companies, particularly not big companies and certainly not big American companies,” he said.

“We were so far removed from that supermarket shelf, that was never something we gave a lot of thought to. We never thought about our place in the food chain. I think as an agricultural community in general – and Monsanto in particular – there is so much more to do to explain where food comes from and how it is produced and how much more we’re going to have to make.”

Mr Grant added that he was also frustrated that the anti-GM lobby had failed to adequately answer the question of how to feed more people with finite land without using new technology. “The thing that often frustrates me in the debate is that there is never an alternative... The other side of this is still pretty empty.”

“I’m not allowed to use the word ‘progress’,” he said. “I’d be sacked if I called it ‘progress’.”

“Why?”

“Because it would imply that the culture that was there already needed improvement.”

“But it does. If you keep a girl in education, she won’t be married off at 12, which means her chances of getting Aids and dying young are reduced. Her country will become more civilised once it has more educated women. That’s what I call progress.”

“Obviously, that’s true,” winced the professor, “it’s just not OK to say so.”

To find inconvenient facts suppressed in one leading university may be regarded as censorship. To have an entire society silenced looks like something worse, and far more sinister.

You have to hand it to the former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. It takes guts to tell a story in which your own side, who fancy themselves supremely virtuous, emerge as the baddies. The trouble is that, even as the Equalities Commission worked hard to prevent racial stereotypes, a troubling proportion of them, as Phillips concedes ruefully, turn out to be accurate.

These are statistics laid out by his programme: a third of London pickpockets are Romanian (how Fagin would have loved them!); black people are six times as likely to be jailed for robbery; the Chinese are tops at people-trafficking; when it comes to drug dealing, Afro-Caribbeans are pathetic amateurs compared to the Colombians; meanwhile, white idiots are the national champs of alcohol-fuelled crime. Phillips and a Muslim former senior Met officer agreed that the police’s reluctance to use racial profiling arose from an attitude which was basically: “OK, maybe you’d catch more criminals, but they might think we’re a bit racist.”

Tragically and unforgivably, that same attitude led to the death of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie. Multiple explanations were offered by experts for the child’s 128 separate injuries. Any explanation would do, except the real one, which is that her Ivory Coast guardians were cruel, superstitious brutes. As Phillips admits, pretty much everyone who could have saved Victoria “was walking on eggshells”. Thus, the creed of multiculturalism, which was designed to promote racial equality, caused a little girl to be murdered because white people were too embarrassed to accuse her black torturers. Marvellous, eh?

Back then, Glezos was a resistance fighter. Today, the soon-to-be 93-year-old is a member of the European Parliament for the Greek governing party Syriza. Sitting in his Brussels office on the third floor of the Willy Brandt Building, he is telling the story of his fight against the Nazis of old and about his current fight against the Germans of today.

Glezos knows what it can mean when Germans strive for predominance in Europe and says that's what is happening again now. This time, though, it isn't soldiers who have a chokehold on Greece, he says, but business leaders and politicians. "German capital dominates Europe and it profits from the misery in Greece," Glezos says. "But we don't need your money." In his eyes, the German present is directly connected to its horrible past, though he emphasizes that he doesn't mean the German people but the country's ruling classes. Germany for him is once again an aggressor today: "Its relationship with Greece is comparable to that between a tyrant and his slaves."

Glezos says that he is reminded of a text written by Joseph Goebbels in which the Nazi propaganda minister reflects about a future Europe under German leadership. It's called "The Year 2000." "Goebbels was only wrong by 10 years," Glezos says, adding that in 2010, in the financial crisis, German dominance began. For a long time, it was primarily the Germans who obsessed about their country's Nazi past, but recently, other countries in Europe have joined them. Chancellor Angela Merkel with a Hitler moustache, German tanks heading south: There has been a flood of such caricatures in Greece, Spain, Britain, Poland, Italy and Portugal in recent weeks and years. And Nazi symbols have become de rigueur at anti-austerity demonstrations.

People have even begun talking about the "Fourth Reich," a reference to the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. That may sound absurd given that today's Germany is a successful democracy without a trace of national-socialism - and that no one would actually associate Merkel with Nazism. But further reflection on the word "Reich," or empire, may not be entirely out of place. The term refers to a dominion, with a central power exerting control over many different peoples. According to this definition, would it be wrong to speak of a German Reich in the economic realm?

Sending weapons to the Kiev government would not mean involvement in a new war for America, claimed US Representative Eliot Engel (Democrat for New York), a Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who sponsored the document. “The people of Ukraine are not looking for American troops," Engel said. "They are just looking for the weapons.”

According to Engel, “this war poses the greatest threat to European security since World War II, and we shouldn’t take it lightly, and we shouldn’t be idle, and we shouldn’t sit back, and we shouldn’t let other countries tell us what to do.” It comes as the White House is unwilling to make any radical moves on Ukraine, and follows German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s efforts to persuade Obama to commit to Ukraine’s truce plan during her February visit to the US.

Back in September, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko requested Congress to authorize a delivery of US military equipment to the Ukrainian government. So far, Obama has only signed off on non-lethal aid and sanctions against Russia – which Kiev and Washington claim is involved in the conflict, despite giving no evidence to support the notion.

The Nestlé Water Bottling Plant in Sacramento is the target of a major press conference on Tuesday, March 17, by a water coalition that claims the company is draining up to 80 million gallons of water a year from Sacramento aquifers during the drought. The coalition, the ‘crunch nestle alliance’, says that City Hall has made this use of the water supply possible through a “corporate welfare giveaway,” according to a press advisory. A coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and other concerned people announced the press conference will take place at March 17 at 5 pm at new Sacramento City Hall, 915 I Street, Sacramento.

The coalition will release details of a protest on Friday, March 20, at the South Sacramento Nestlé plant designed to “shut down” the facility. The coalition is calling on Nestlé to pay rates commensurate with their enormous profit, or voluntarily close down. “The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water used in the State of California, have had severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,” according to the coalition.

"Today more than ever, Nasrallah is willing to take risks with Israel that could get out of hand, instead of being perceived by Israel as weak," a senior defense official told the daily. As such, Hezbollah has become more brazen in its open readiness to attack Israel, military sources stated. According to several IDF reports, Hezbollah terrorists have begun openly patrolling up and down the border - sometimes in civilian clothing, sometimes wearing Lebanese Army uniforms - and documenting on camera what happens each day on the border fence and documenting "engineering work."

Foreign sources have stated that Hezbollah terrorists have begun openly walking through Shi'ite villages in Lebanon as well - despite the patrol of Lebanese Army soldiers and UNIFIL peacekeepers. The organization has become involved in a drug smuggling trade between Lebanon and Israel as well, in order to perform useful reconnaissance for future battles with Israel. "Nothing has been done in southern Lebanon, and probably on the Gaza border, without the organization knowing it," a senior military source in the Northern Command told Walla!.

The IDF is preparing for the possibility of another war, attempting to match the IDF's strength to intel gathered on Hezbollah's firepower. But it is also prepared for specific scenarios - including the likelihood of Hezbollah's special forces, consisting of 100-200 terrorists, raiding communities near the Lebanese border fence and occupying them for short periods. The group has changed tactics to be more on the offensive, the source added.

If necessary, a war against Hezbollah will be costly - to the tune of 1.5 billion shekels ($378 million) per day of fighting, security forces say. Thus, Israel's political system will be forced to decide - and soon - whether to choose increased deterrence or wait until war along the borders to prevent the most casualties and crippling economic damage.

Earlier that day he was praised as “the greatest” in a letter from the Bluegrass state’s most famous resident, boxer Muhammad Ali, read by Louisville’s Mayor Greg Fischer as Mr Ali was too ill to attend. The Prince of Wales told the invited audience: "We are standing at a moment of substantial transition where we face the dual challenges of a world view and an economic system that seem to have enormous shortcomings, together with an environmental crisis - including that of climate change - which threatens to engulf us all."

The royal tour comes amid news that Britain’s Supreme Court will rule next week on whether a number of the Prince’s letters to several governmental department officials should be made public. There has been a long-running legal dispute over the publication of the “black spider memos,” taking their name from the Prince’s distinctive handwriting, following a number of Freedom of Information Requests to view the correspondence.

The particle accelerator, which will be restarted this week, has already found the Higgs boson – the God Particle – which is thought to give mass to other particles. Now scientists at Cern in Switzerland believe they might find miniature black holes which would reveal the existence of a parallel universe.

And if the holes are found at a certain energy, it could prove the controversial theory of ‘rainbow gravity’ which suggests that the universe stretches back into time infinitely with no singular point where it started, and no Big Bang. The theory was postulated to reconcile Einstein’s theory of general relativity – which deals with very large objects, and quantum mechanics – which looks at the tiniest building blocks of the universe. It takes its name from a suggestion that gravity's effect on the cosmos is felt differently by varying wavelengths of light.

“These sinkholes are a direct result of the inappropriate mismanagement of water resources in the region,” said Bromberg, who believes that the total number of sinkholes has grown to over 3,000. Just ten years ago roughly 1,000 sinkholes had been reported, according to Smithsonian magazine. Since the 1950s Israel and Jordan have diverted the flow of the Jordan River, turning a once powerful flow into a trickle, full of sediment.

As a result, the Dead Sea is 800 million cubic meters short of water each year, and its level has fallen 40 meters. As it recedes, it leaves behind salty deposits. While initially, these are firm, over the following years, the salt is dissolved, by rain, groundwater and river flows, creating a cavity underneath the ground. These cavities can collapse any time, creating deadly sinkholes. Several sinkholes can merge together, producing giant, gaping craters.