ShareThisDefense industry CEOs may want to duck and cover: their pay-and-bonus packages are coming into the sights of Capitol Hill lawmakers looking for their next populist prey.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., mused to reporters this past week that he's contemplating targeting the compensation defense contractors pocket as another example of taxpayers' money enriching corporate moguls.
Anticipating the coming pitchforks, Robert Stevens, CEO of No. 1 defense contractor Lockheed Martin, has already asked that he receive no hike this year in his 2008 salary of $26.5 million. But Stevens remains eligible this year for a bonus worth 293 percent of that sum.
Then there's General Dynamics chief Nicholas Chabraja, whose 2008 compensation was -- in comparison -- a paltry $18 million. But Chabraja is slated to retire this year, after 12 at the helm, with about $48 million in stock options, pension and other benefits.
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The District of Columbia has emerged as the capital of a new breed of nefarious activity: Internet crime. A newly released report by the Internet Crime Complaint Center says D.C. edges out Nevada as the source of the highest proportion of Internet criminals in the nation.
D.C. had about 81.32 online crime perpetrators per 100,000 population last year, according to the center, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center. Nevada had about 80.84 perps per.
The study, based on complaints to the crime center's Web site (www.ic3.gov) also found that men lost more money to Internet fraud and other crimes than women, and that most victims were between the ages of 30 and 50. The total loss from all cases of fraud: $265 million -- up from $239 million in 2007.
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We already know what happens to lobsters in boiling water. But both marine scientists and lobster fishermen have considerable interest in the more frigid temperatures to be found near the bottom of ocean waters off Maine.
That mutual interest has created a partnership between lobstermen and government fishery scientists at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center at Woods Hole, Mass. The watermen attach temperature measuring-recording devices to the side of their traps and leave them in place through the season, providing hundreds of data points on bottom temperatures that are collected each winter and analyzed by computers.
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First we worry about space junk. Now concern grows that too many rocket launches may damage a realm of the upper Earth much closer and dearer -- the stratosphere's ozone layer.
Researchers in California and Colorado warn that unless some restrictions are imposed, rocket launches may one day cause more ozone losses than now-banned aerosols ever did. Rockets are less than 1 percent of the problem now, but future demand for more satellite launches are expected to increase that share dramatically, while other ozone killers' impact declines.
Already, a few space shuttle launches a year release more ozone-depleting substances than the entire release from chlorofluorocarbon-based medical inhalers -- just recently phased out.
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A new set of data has revealed that Asian Americans are victims of violent and property crimes far less often than other racial groups.
Looking at crime reports between 2002 and 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice found that Asian Americans -- who make up about 4 percent of the nation's population -- were victims in 2 percent of non-fatal violent crimes and 3 percent of property crimes.
The study ventured no explanation, but other experts say Asian Americans' generally high levels of education and income may help insulate them from those categories of crime.
(Scripps Howard News Service correspondent Lee Bowman contributed to this column. E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Washington Calling
