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Jewish World Review July 25, 2011 / 23 Tamuz, 5771 Navy officers beached . . . Savings bonds . . . Cleaning house By Lisa Hoffman
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
WASHINGTON --- The roster of U.S. Navy commanding officers who have been relieved of duty this year has reached 15, with alleged drinking incidents, lewd videos, "inappropriate" relationships, mishandled classified materials and assorted other failings given as causes.
That number, which is on pace to pass the tally of 17 commanders removed in 2010, spurred Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead to order the service's 1,500 commanders to acknowledge by Aug. 1 that they have read a toughly worded memo spelling out the high personal and professional standards they are required to uphold.
So far in July alone, three of the Navy's brass have gotten the boot: Cmdr. Jason Strength, commander of the Navy Recruiting District in Nashville, Tenn., was relieved this past Wednesday for acting "in an unprofessional manner" while in uniform and on liberty. The day before, Cmdr. Karl Pugh was fired for an "alcohol-related" incident during a port visit to Bahrain by his Electronic Attack Squadron 141, which is attached to the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier. And Capt. Eric Merrill was removed July 15 after his sub tender USS Emory S. Land struck a channel buoy, also in Bahrain.
The record number of firings in the past decade was 23 in 2003.
For the past 76 years, Americans have bought U.S. Savings Bonds at banks and tucked the grayish-green certificates into safe-deposit boxes or safes, secure in the promise that the U.S. Treasury would, in perpetuity, honor their value.
No more. Treasury will still stand behind the bonds, but soon you will be able to buy them only online. As of Jan. 1, 2012, no more paper savings bonds will be sold at banks or anywhere else, a budget-trimming measure that the Bureau of the Public Debt says will save $70 million over five years.
But what are savers who have no Internet access to do? The bureau well knows that some of its best customers are grandparents who bestow the bonds as gifts, and are, as a whole, less likely to be online.
A bureau spokeswoman says the best advice for them and others is to ask a trusted friend or relative to help them set up a TreasuryDirect account; they should not do so at a library, an Internet cafe or any other public port because of the sensitive personal information that must be entered. For help, call Treasury's Savings Bond Processing Site at 1-866-388-1776.
Not only has the White House embarked on the online equivalent of cleaning out the basement AND the attic of the government's cyber structure, it also now is taking a hatchet to as many as 800 of the 2,000 federal data centers that have popped up in 30 states since 1998.
A week after unveiling plans to cull the 24,000 individual websites operated by the executive branch, the Obama administration's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, announced this past week that 373 of the data centers will be shut by the end of 2012. Another 500 are to be closed by the end of 2015. In all, the dismantling will save taxpayers more than $3 billion, the White House says.
Data centers are essentially information warehouses where computer systems are employed to securely store the galaxies of data used and produced by the federal government. They can be as small as a closet or as large as 13,000 square feet. A Department of Homeland Security facility in Alabama is about as big as three football fields, the White House says.
While private industry has taken advantage of cloud computing and other advances to shrink their information-storage needs, the executive branch has not. The White House says all agencies are now preparing plans for what they will consolidate, and will announce their decisions in early October.
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© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
