USA - The nation’s top military commander painted a dark picture Tuesday of future US defense capabilities clouded by shrinking Pentagon budgets and adversaries’ technological advances that he said would erode American battlefield superiority. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided his sobering views as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated evaluation of US military strength issued every four years. Dempsey predicted that it would become increasingly difficult to balance the competing demands of protecting allies abroad, securing Americans at home and deterring future wars.

USA - By a more than three-to-one margin on Tuesday, communities voting on whether to support the creation of a public bank in Vermont approved the idea, calling for the state legislature to establish such a bank and urging passage of legislation designed to begin its implementation. The specific proposal under consideration, Senate Bill 204, would turn an existing agency, the Vermont Economic Development Authority, into a public bank that would accept deposits and issue loans for in-state projects. Currently, the only state in the US to maintain a public state bank is North Dakota. However, since the financial downturn of 2008, other states have looked into replicating the North Dakota model as a way to buck Wall Street while taking more control of state and local finances.

USA - Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded Chicago’s credit rating, citing the city’s unfunded pension liabilities. The agency announced Tuesday it’s lowering the rating on $8.3 billion in debt from A3 to Baa1, putting it only three notches above junk-bond status. Moody’s gave Chicago a negative outlook indicating another downgrade could occur if there’s no pension fix. Moody’s says the rating “reflects the city’s massive and growing unfunded pension liabilities.” Moody’s says those liabilities “threaten the city’s fiscal solvency” unless major revenue and other budgetary adjustments are adopted soon and are sustained for years to come.

UK - Sixteen people have died in Manchester in the past four years from a highly resistant superbug spreading across North West England, figures show. Klebsiella Pneumoniae Carbapenemase (KPC) is causing more concern and far more cases than better known superbugs. Some 1,241 patients were affected within the Central Manchester University Hospitals trust area from 2009 to 2013, the figures show. Despite infection control, the numbers have increased year on year.

EUROPE - Sensitive information should not be sent over public wi-fi hotspots, to avoid hackers stealing it, Europe's top cybercrime police officer has warned. Troels Oerting, head of Europol's cybercrime centre, told BBC Click people should send personal data only across networks they trusted. He said the warning was motivated by the growing number of attacks being carried out via public wi-fi. The attacks meant that data swapped when people communicate with a bank, shop via the web or log in to social media sites could be captured by attackers. "Everything that you send through the wi-fi is potentially at risk, and this is something that we need to be very concerned about both as individual users but also as police," he told Click.

USA - According to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest, the US ranks a shocking 31st in the world in terms of average download speeds. The leaders in the world are Hong Kong at 72.49 Mbps and Singapore on 58.84 Mbps. And America? Averaging speeds of 20.77 Mbps, it falls behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay. Its upload speeds are even worse. Globally, the US ranks 42nd with an average upload speed of 6.31 Mbps, behind Lesotho, Belarus, Slovenia, and other countries you only hear mentioned on Jeopardy. So how did America fall behind? Susan Crawford argues that "huge telecommunication companies" such as Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have "divided up markets and put themselves in a position where they're subject to no competition."

USA - Like a simple parlour trick, the networks are able to make skeptical scientists vanish, at least from the eyes of their viewers. In some cases, the broadcast networks have failed to include such scientists for years, while including alarmist scientists within the past six months. ABC, CBS and NBC's lengthy omission of scientists critical of global warming alarmism propped up the myth of a scientific consensus, despite the fact that many scientists and thousands of peer-reviewed studies disagree. Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientist in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days - CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as "out of the scientific mainstream" or backed by "oil and coal companies."

USA - Relief may be on the way for a weather-weary United States with the predicted warming of the central Pacific Ocean brewing this year that will likely change weather worldwide. But it won't be for the better everywhere. The warming, called an El Nino, is expected to lead to fewer Atlantic hurricanes and more rain next winter for drought-stricken California and southern states, and even a milder winter for the nation's frigid northern tier next year, meteorologists say. While it could be good news to lessen the southwestern US drought and shrink heating bills next winter in the far north, "worldwide it can be quite a different story," said North Carolina State University atmospheric sciences professor Ken Kunkel. "Some areas benefit. Some don't." Globally, it can mean an even hotter year coming up and billions of dollars in losses for food crops.

USA - Overall, winters may become milder as the planet warms, but this season has been a stunningly cold outlier for eastern North America. Case in point? The frozen Great Lakes. Yesterday (March 4), the Great Lakes hit 91 percent ice cover, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. That's the most ice since the record of 94.7 percent was set in 1973, the lab said in a statement. Except for Lake Ontario, nearly all the Great Lakes are frozen stiff, just like everyone on the East Coast. In fact, if the months of below-normal temperatures and freezing winds persist, the Great Lakes could meet or break their 1973 record, the lab said. The ice hasn't been this widespread since 1994, when 90.4 percent of the Great Lakes were under ice. The average ice cover is usually just above 50 percent, and only occasionally passes 80 percent, according to the lab.

UK - Guidelines out for consultation this month are calling for millions more people to be put on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. But some fear such a move would do more harm than good. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence says the scope for offering statin treatment should be widened to save more lives. The pills protect against heart attacks and strokes.

USA - Accounting for 6.5 percent of the total market share, Statin drugs are the most widely sold pharmaceutical drugs in history. To date, Forbes Magazine tells us that Statins are earning drug companies $26 billion in annual sales. Pfizer spends over $3 billion each year to convince us that we need more and more drugs to be healthy. The public and the medical profession have been bamboozled by the legions of drug reps, billion dollar ad campaigns, and creative statistics.

EUROPE - Thousands of ECB auditors have begun examining the balance sheets of euro-zone banks. Stress tests are coming soon. With the European Central Bank in charge of oversight, many hope the EU's financial industry will return to health. But there are risks.

GERMANY - Across Germany, right-wing organizations are using anti-Islam rhetoric to further their ideas - and finding a receptive audience. Now legal experts are debating whether it's time for a new kind of hate-crime legislation. Anti-Islamists generally don't differentiate between Sunnis, Shiites and Alevi, or between militant Islamists and peaceful believers. In their imagination, Islam isn't a religion but a political ideology that must be fought. Muslims are accused of trying to take over the world, undermining the sovereignty of democratic states, infiltrating their legal systems. The Politically Incorrect internet platform reads: "The spread of Islam means that our descendants - and probably us too - will live in an Islam-dominated social order oriented towards the Sharia and the Koran and no longer towards the constitution and human rights."

AUSTRALIA - Emergency relief is on its way to drought-hit farmers in eastern Australia as many are forced to sell or slaughter their cattle. However the drought is not only inflicting a financial toll - there's a mounting psychological cost on communities where once fertile land has turned to dust.

CHINA - China announced its biggest rise in military spending in three years on Wednesday, a strong signal from President Xi Jinping that Beijing is not about to back away from its growing assertiveness in Asia, especially in disputed waters. The government said it would increase the defense budget by 12.2 percent this year to 808.23 billion yuan ($131.57 billion), as China seeks to develop more high-tech weapons and to beef up coastal and air defences. The increase follows a nearly unbroken run of double-digit hikes in the Chinese defense budget, second only to the United States in size, for the past two decades. "This is worrying news for China's neighbors, particularly for Japan," said Rory Medcalf, a regional security analyst at the independent Lowy Institute in Sydney.