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...horrors of Nixon's Vietnam War strategy hit Hanks while he was working as a bellman for the Oakland Hilton in the mid-'70s. He was often tasked with shuttling guests to and from the nearby airport. Back then he saw the charter planes that periodically arrived filled with frightened Vietnamese orphans escaping totalitarianism. Once Hanks' movie career took off with Big (1988), he desperately wanted to make a first-class Vietnam War film. But by then, a second wave of Vietnam movies was in full swing (Full Metal Jacket and Good Morning, Vietnam came...
Still, recent reports demonstrate that bank secrecy is still very important for Switzerland and suggest how Swiss banks intend to maintain that secrecy for years to come. Credit Suisse, which took a net capital outflow hit of $5.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, reported it had about $100 billion of private, cross-border assets from politically sensitive or tax-sensitive countries. But when stress tested in simulations of widespread tax amnesties, it showed that $25 billion to $35 billion might flee. That sounds huge, but with some $800 billion under management, it's just a couple of quarters...
...night, for example, a brigade of troops was delayed three hours so that President Michelle Bachelet could arrive to see them off. The troops themselves were rather green, according to Peter Murphy Lewis, an American professor of political science at the University of Chile, who flew to the badly hit city of Concepción in a Chilean air force Boeing 707 with 340 of the troops. "Many of the soldiers," he says, "were saying stuff like, 'Wow, we are so high! We are in the clouds!' They had never flown on a plane before ... It was a slightly surreal...
Concepción, which is adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, seems to have dodged the tsunami, but Lewis says that small towns north and south were badly hit by it. He says he was told by authorities that 350 deaths of the total death toll were the result of the tsunami in these small villages. Generally, the navy would have been the first to respond, but, says Lewis, "their base on the water was destroyed by the quake and tsunami, leaving them helpless." (See "Chile's President: Why Did Tsunami Warnings Fail...
...management at the U.N. Development Program in Hanoi. The drought was predicted, he says, referring to last year's projections that El Niño would bring an unusually warm and dry winter. Yet Vietnam traditionally prepares for floods and typhoons, which are more dramatic and devastating when they hit. "Drought is a slow, silent disaster, which in the long run will have a more profound impact on peoples' livelihoods," he says...