U.S. Coast Guard welcomes new commandant

Adm. Karl Schultz relieved Adm. Paul F. Zukunft commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard during a military change of command ceremony held Friday, June 1, 2018, at U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Zukunft also retired from the Coast Guard after 41 years of service to the nation as part of the same ceremony and received the Homeland Security Distinguished Service Medal from President Donald J. Trump.

“Truly, Mr. President, you honor the men and women of the United States Coast Guard serving around the world today as 2018 was the largest appropriation ever for the Coast Guard,” said Zukunft. “But it’s not about the money or the platforms, it’s the people who serve in them. The work they do could not be more relevant. We couldn’t do our job without them.”

Zukunft became the 25th commandant, May 30, 2014. He led the largest component of the Department of Homeland Security, comprised of 56,000 active duty, Reserve and civilian Coast Guardsmen and more than 24,000 volunteer Coast Guard auxiliarists. Zukunft’s leadership and vision were instrumental in increasing the pace of the Coast Guard’s recapitalization efforts. He worked with Congress and the administration to achieve funding for completion of the national security cutter program of record, the acquisition of new fast response cutters, funding for the waterways commerce cutter, and funding for the offshore patrol cutter.

He also ensured the Coast Guard began receiving necessary funding to commence acquisition of the nation’s first new polar icebreaker in more than 50 years. As commandant, Zukunft led the service’s efforts to respond to the unprecedented 2017 hurricane season, where Coast Guard personnel saved or assisted nearly 12,000 victims from flooded communities in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. It was also under his leadership that the Coast Guard received a clean financial audit for a fifth consecutive year.

Schultz, now the service’s 26th commandant, reports to Coast Guard headquarters from Portsmouth, Virginia, where he served as the Coast Guard Atlantic Area commander since August 2016. In this capacity, he was the operational commander for all Coast Guard missions from the Rocky Mountains to the Arabian Gulf, spanning across five Coast Guard districts and 40 states.

“The Coast Guard remains a service that is trusted, respected, and valued by our citizens because of the tremendous leadership of Admiral Zukunft,” said Schultz. “To Admiral Zukunft and Mrs. Fran DeNinno-Zukunft, we salute and congratulate them on a remarkably successful tour as our 25th commandant.”

A change of command is a time-honored ceremony that signifies the absolute transfer of responsibility, authority and accountability from one person to another.

The change of command ceremony was live broadcast. Click here to watch the ceremony in its entirety.

http:// coastguard.dodlive.mil/2018/06/u-s-coast-guard-welcomes-new-commandant/

>>1612191

Since Potus tweeted about this twice, I think maybe he was trying to get us to watch the video, message there maybe?

It is viewable in the link provided from the Coast Guard.

>>1612339

That could very well be the message that the President wanted us to hear.

Pope summons oil execs to Vatican to talk climate change

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis will meet with some of the world’s oil executives next week, likely to give them another moral nudge to clean up their act on global warming.

Climate change policy and science experts are cautiously hopeful but aren’t expecting any miracles or even noticeable changes.

The conference will be a follow-up to the pope’s encyclical three years ago calling on people to save the planet from climate change and other environmental ills, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke confirmed Friday. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who spearheaded the encyclical, set up the June 8-9 conference with the executives. The pope himself will speak to the leaders on the second day of the summit, organized with the University of Notre Dame, Burke said.

Officials at the Vatican and Notre Dame would not disclose who is coming, but Axios, the news site that first reported the summit, said executives from BP and ExxonMobil would attend. Messages left for representatives of the energy companies weren’t immediately returned.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said he doubts anything “measurable” will come out of the conference but he was nevertheless hopeful.

Oil companies have talked about fighting climate change, but they haven’t done much beyond talk, said MIT management professor John Sterman.

The pope offers “moral persuasion,” but if it is just a photo opportunity for oil executives to show off “it doesn’t mean anything and in fact it’s just PR to help oil companies burnish up their image while they continue to delay actions,” Sterman said.

Jerry Taylor, president of the Washington libertarian-oriented think-tank Niskanen Center, said he figures the oil executives will tell the pope they’re willing to accept action, such as a tax on heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions.

“But what is needed is for these oil majors to tell Republican lawmakers of their concern and support for action, not the pope. And this they have not done in any focused, sustained, or meaningful way,” Taylor said in an email. That’s where, he said, the pontiff needs to push them farther on the morality of what they’re doing, he said.

Dana Fisher, a sociologist who studies environmentalism at the University of Maryland, said the pope is cementing his leadership on climate.

“He certainly is trying to lead for the planet and lord knows we need it,” she said.

Gary Yohe, an economics and environment professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said the executives might feel compelled to listen to the spiritual leader of nearly 1.3 billion Catholics.

“This is not somebody you can ignore,” Yohe said. “It might be a come to Jesus moment for them.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/1/pope-summons-oil-execs-to-vatican-to-talk-climate-/

>>1612472

No question about that.

EU in flux as US alliance creaks, populists rise in Italy

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - Certainties Europe has relied on for decades seem to be crumbling: that the U.S. is a reliable trade partner, and that the founding members of the EU all remain committed to the bloc.

On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminum, dismissing Europe’s pleas, and an anti-EU populist government took office in Italy. Added to Britain’s expected departure next year from the European Union, the milestones show a region entering a new state of flux, with potential implications for the prosperity of its people and global relations.

“Germany and France should very quickly show joint political leadership now,” said Daniela Schwarzer, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

That role would belong in large part to Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron when it comes to strengthening Europe’s currency union. Collectively, the EU could seek to ease worries about trade by strengthening commercial ties with other partners like Japan, China and countries in South America.

But the trade relationship with the U.S. is the biggest in the world, and will be hard to make up for, if the U.S. and EU escalate their spat by imposing counter-tariffs on each other. U.S. trade helped Europe recover from the devastation of World War II and enriched U.S. companies that sold consumer goods to the continent. A souring in relations could also have implications for cooperation in other spheres, like security.

“The situation is worrying, it could escalate,” said the EU’s trade chief, Cecilia Malmstrom, adding that the tariffs could hurt global economic growth. “The United States is playing a dangerous game.”

The EU officials were far more cautious in their reaction to the political situation in Italy, for fear of further provoking supporters of the new government led by the anti-establishment 5 Star Movement and the anti-immigration the League. But they were likely not less worried, having seen European financial markets plunge this week on Italy’s political chaos.

Law professor and political neophyte Giuseppe Conte was sworn in Friday as the head of Italy’s populist government. The two parties plan tax cuts and more spending, including a basic income for the poor, that would likely clash with EU limits on deficits. An initial failure to agree with President Sergio Mattarella on a government led to a sharp sell-off in Italian markets Monday and Tuesday.

Italy, one of the original signers of the 1957 Treaty of Rome that created a common market and paved the way for today’s European Union, has the second heaviest debt load in Europe after Greece, at 132 percent of annual economic output, and the market tremors underlined the currency union’s ongoing vulnerability after a 2010-2012 debt crisis.

The parties’ rise to power in Italy will be a blow to supporters of the EU, as it could embolden anti-EU parties, which have won elections in some countries in Eastern Europe, like Hungary and Poland. And it comes just as the EU enters a key six months of negotiations with Britain on the country’s exit from the bloc.

To stir things up a bit more, Spain’s government lost a no-confidence vote Friday and conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was replaced by socialist Pedro Sanchez.

The developments leave other EU leaders looking for a strategy ahead of a summit on June 28-29. The meeting was originally supposed to agree on how to strengthen the EU and the euro based on proposals from Macron, whose election victory in May 2017 over nationalist euroskeptic opponent Marine Le Pen gave a temporary sense that the tide of populist discontent had been turned back.

Hopes for an agreement at the summit have narrowed to a few issues, such as upgrading the eurozone’s bailout fund for troubled countries. Others have been rejected or kicked into the long weeds because countries like Germany fear of sharing financial risk with shakier members. The European Commission has proposed a 30 billion euro fund to help troubled eurozone countries with investment spending over a seven-year period.

And the disputes with the U.S. go far beyond trade. Europeans disagree with Trumps’ decision to abandon a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program and to withdraw from a global climate change pact. The U.S. president has also criticized European countries, particularly Germany, for not fulfilling their commitment to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense.

Not everything is falling apart. Europe’s economy is growing at a healthy pace. Italy’s populists might not carry through on all their spending plans to avoid a crisis in financial markets. How far the trade conflict will escalate isn’t clear yet either.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/1/eu-in-flux-as-us-alliance-creaks-populists-rise-in/

APNewsBreak: Pentagon to take over security clearance checks

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Defense Department is poised to take over background investigations for the federal government, using increased automation and high-tech analysis to tighten controls and tackle an enormous backlog of workers waiting for security clearances, according to U.S. officials.

The change aims to fix a system whose weaknesses were exposed by the case of a Navy contractor who gunned down a dozen people at Washington’s Navy Yard in 2013. He was able to maintain a security clearance despite concerns about his mental health and an arrest that investigators never reviewed.

Problems had earlier surfaced with former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who now lives in Russia to avoid charges for disclosing classified material, and Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who went to prison for leaking classified documents, triggering calls to update the antiquated system to include more frequent criminal and financial checks of workers who have security clearances.

Another problem has been delays: a backlog of about 700,000 people, including high-ranking federal officials waiting as much as a year to get clearances. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, for example, received his permanent clearance just a few weeks ago, more than 16 months after Trump took office. The delay, his lawyer said, was caused by the backlog in the new administration and Kushner’s extensive financial wealth, which required lengthy review.

Pentagon officials said that over the next three years, the Defense Department will take responsibility for all background investigations involving its military and civilian employees and contractors. But according to a U.S. official, the White House is expected to soon give the department authority to conduct security reviews for nearly all other government agencies as well. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the decision before it was publicly announced.

Plans to transfer responsibility from the Office of Personnel Management to the Pentagon for all of the roughly 3.6 million Pentagon employees, directed by defense legislation for fiscal 2017, are already in the works. The new program will involve a system of continuous checks that will automatically pull and analyze workers’ criminal, financial, substance abuse and eventually social media data on a more regular basis, rather than only every five or 10 years as it is done now.

Garry Reid, director for defense intelligence, said the shift of responsibility to the Pentagon will allow OPM officials to begin eating away at the current backlog of about 700,000, of which roughly 500,000 are Defense Department workers. The Pentagon won’t take over any of the backlogged cases because they are already underway in OPM.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the executive agent for the program, and sets the guidelines for the security requirements based on federal investigative guidelines. OPM and the Pentagon carry out the vetting process, working with the DNI.

Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said at his confirmation hearing last month that by mid-June the national intelligence director would issue guidance to departments and agencies to update 2012 federal investigative standards used to vet for security clearances. He said the government also was working on ways to allow contractors and federal workers to move more seamlessly between the private sector and government without having to get new clearances.

Evanina said changes could result in a 20 percent reduction in the backlog within six months.

In the first year, the Pentagon will take over investigations for those seeking a renewal of their secret clearance, then over the next two years will take on those seeking their initial secret clearance and then move to employees seeking top secret renewals and initial clearances, said Reid, in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

According to Reid, about 20 people are already on board setting up the program and 350 more will be hired in the coming months.

It will cost an additional $40 million for fiscal year 2019. But over time, he said, the department expects to spend “significantly less” than the current $1.3 billion price tag for the program because of the increased automation and other savings.

A key problem contributing to the backlog is that field investigations into workers seeking security clearances can take up to 500 days, as investigators scour records and conduct interviews with neighbors and other acquaintances of the employee.

https:// www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/1/apnewsbreak-pentagon-to-take-over-security-clearan/

>>1612548 I believe Spain has been a lost cause for quite sometime, not sure if it will ever change.

>>1612587

They are fooling themselves, they know, that he has it all, which is why they work so hard to discredit him, with the general population.

>>1612628

The rest of the story I forgot to add, here.

>>1612669

>>1612687

I think Jared Kushner, having his removed only to have it replaced again, was a big part of the precursor to this story, along with a few Potus had early in his admin, who couldn't get one at all.

Guys How do I post a PDF File?

>>1612744

I completely agree, I see this an excellent solution! Wasn't there a time when it was done this way?