President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey released an unclassified version of the defense strategic guidance Jan. 5 at a Pentagon press conference. The document, entitled "Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense" (PDF), calls for $487 billion in proposed defense budget cuts over the next 10 years, amounting to some 8% of the Pentagon's base budget. The defense budget planned for next year is $662 billion, $43 billion less than this year. If automatic "sequestration" cuts mandated by last year's budget deal take effect, the Pentagon could lose some $500 billion more. "The US joint force will be smaller and it will be leaner," Panetta said. "The Army and Marine Corps will no longer need to be sized to support the kind of large-scale, long-term stability operations that dominated military priorities...over the past decade." The army is slated to cut back to 520,000 active duty troops from 565,000 after 2014. The Marine Corps, which has swelled to 202,000, plans to drop to 186,000. This will place US troop strength essentially at the pre-9-11 level. US troop strength grew by some 100,000 after the attacks, and now stands at 1.4 million.

In the fifth YouTube edition of the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade, World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg interviews Andrew Kliman of the Marxist-Humanist Initiative, author (most recently) of The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, who argues for Marx's law of the Long-Term Falling Rate of Profit, and analyzes both the potentials and limitations of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

After an all-night overtime session, negotiators at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) climate summit in Durban on the morning of Dec. 11 issued a formal agreement to work towards a new legally-binding treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions and applying to all 194 member governments of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The "Durban Platform for Enhanced Action" pledges a new "agreed outcome with legal force" to be negotiated by 2015 and to take effect by 2020. In principle, the treaty is to ensure that Framework Convention member states take measures to meet the goal agreed to at last year's climate conference of keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

The usually cautious International Energy Agency (IEA) warned last week that without far-reaching action in the next five years, the world will lock itself into high-emissions energy sources that will push climate change beyond the 2 degrees Celsius considered relatively "safe" by many scientists and officials. "As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the 'lock-in' of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals," said IEA chief economist Fatih Birol. The IEA predicts that coal consumption could jump 65% by 2035, and that oil prices are likely to hit $150 a barrel. Subsidies of renewable energy are predicted to jump by four times, hitting $250 billion annually—but this is still well below current fossil fuel subsidies of $409 billion.

The Climate Change Vulnerability Index, published by UK-based risk analysis and mapping company Maplecroft, was released last week, examining the climate risks and adaptive capacity of 193 nations. A total of 30 countries were classified as being at "extreme risk," with Haiti, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Madagascar making up the top five most in peril, while India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Thailand all ranked in the top 30. (ENS, Oct. 28; CNN, Oct. 26; Maplecroft, Oct. 21)

Under the slogan "From Tahrir Square to Times Square," the Occupy Wall Street movement reports demonstrations in over 1,500 cities across the globe Oct. 15, including over 100 US cities from coast to coast. In New York, 74 were arrested as police attempted to block thousands of marchers behind barricades in the Times Square area, where the protesters had marched from the Financial District. In the evening, hundreds of protesters converged on Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, staying until police arrested 14 for violating the park's curfew after midnight. Another 24 were arrested after they entered a nearby Citibank, with the aim of closing their accounts en masse. Management said they called police after the protesters did not respond to a request to leave. (Fox News, Oct. 14; Daily News, New York Post, WSJ, Oct. 15)

Earth's protective ozone layer above the Arctic was pierced by a hole of unprecedented size last winter and spring caused by a long cold period in the stratosphere, according to new research led by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and published Oct. 3 in the journal Nature. The hole covered 772,204 square miles (two million square kilometers)—about the size of Mexico—and allowed high levels of harmful ultraviolet radiation to strike northern Canada, Europe and Russia this spring, the report finds. The stratospheric ozone layer, extending from about 10 to 20 miles (15 to 35 kilometers) above the surface, protects life on Earth from the Sun's ultraviolet rays. Intense cold in the upper atmosphere of the Arctic last winter activated ozone-depleting chemicals and produced the first significant ozone hole ever recorded over the high northern regions.

A nuclear power plant that was shut down after an earthquake struck central Virginia Aug. 23 had seismographs removed in the 1990s to save money. Officials said that the North Anna Power Station, which has two reactors, lost offsite power and switched to diesel generators to maintain cooling operations after the 5.9 quake. The North Anna plant, which was near the epicenter of the quake, is reportedly located on a fault line. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rates the plant as the seventh most likely to receive core damage from a quake, although it says the odds are very low. According to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (DMME), the Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory (VTSO) removed all seismographs from around the plant in the 1990s due to budget cuts. In February, Dominion Virginia Power announced plans to add a third reactor at the plant. (Raw Story, Aug. 23)