The appearance of an Apple CEO in front of a bank of cameras is enough to get the company’s diehard fans worked up into a frothy lather over a new iPhone or an even thinner MacBook Air.

It was with a heavy heart that all of us here at the American Security Project watched news of the devastating tornado in Oklahoma. We are encouraged by news reports revising down the death tolls, and we hope that more lives are saved.
Yet again, we are reminded that weather is an issue of national security. Six months ago, the Marines deployed to Staten Island and the New York area in response to Hurricane Sandy. In every major disaster, America’s armed forces are called to assist in disaster relief. That is appropriate because of the expertise and organization that these units can bring. Today, the Oklahoma National Guard is providing critical assistance in relief and recovery efforts. We hope their presence saves lives.

On May 20, the Boston Globe wrote an article, “Fusion program at MIT is ending, Layoffs predicted; federal funds cut.” The article was about the slated closure of MIT’s fusion facility, the Alcator C-Mod. This is a demonstration of the tangible impacts of the Obama Administration’s decision to pair back fusion funding.

In a report this month, the GAO found that while the DoD is working to implement its plans to organize and streamline the very systems it uses to run the defense bureaucracy, it’s falling short. While the GAO report is focused on the business systems used by the Pentagon, it is an important subject because these are the very tools used to make decisions involving more than half a trillion dollars a year in taxpayer money. If the IT systems themselves are not up to snuff, it will be hard to enact the kind of oversight and management that is expected today.

As summer approaches, many families are beginning to plan where they will travel and in which hotels they will stay while on holiday. For some 900 people in the New York City area displaced by Hurricane Sandy, hotels have been their only home for more than half a year. That aid program looks to continue, according to The New York Times, by the order of a judge. That is just one way to count the toll that extreme weather events are taking on the U.S.

Out today is a new study from the Consensus Project that shows the overwhelming scientific consensus is that climate change is real and is caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.