Wednesday, March 12, 2014


News Clips For The Day


NATO sends AWACS to monitor Ukraine borders with Poland, Romania as tension with Russia mounts over Crimea invasion – CBS
CBS/AP March 12, 2014

BERLIN -- NATO deployed two surveillance planes to fly over Poland and Romania on Wednesday to monitor the crisis in neighboring Ukraine.

The military alliance said two AWACS, or Airborne Warning And Control System, reconnaissance planes took off from bases in Germany and Britain.

The surveillance flights won't leave the airspace of its member nations - thus not crossing either into Ukrainian or Russian airspace, a spokesman for NATO's operational headquarters said in Belgium.

"The planes can observe over 300,000 square kilometers (115,000 square miles) and will primarily be looking on air activity and the sea," Lt. Col. Jay Janzen said, adding that one AWACS aircraft already went on a surveillance mission to Romania on Tuesday and that more missions were being planned.

"Our flights will not leave NATO airspace," Janzen said. "Regardless, we can observe, we can look a very long way."

NATO's 28 member states decided Monday to intensify the assessment of the possible threat the Ukrainian crisis poses to the alliance by sending AWACS planes. The decision comes after deployments of U.S. fighter planes to eastern European nations bordering Russia, such as Poland and Lithuania.

Janzen said the flights had already been planned as training missions before NATO's decision, but more planes will be added to the exercises in the coming days.
The plane flying out of the German base to Romania was an E-3A AWACS and the plane leaving Britain for Poland was an E-3B AWACS, Janzen said.

NATO and the U.S. have sought to increase pressure on Russia for what the Western nations consider its illegal invasion of Crimea.

The news from NATO of the surveillance flights comes as Crimea readies for a referendum Sunday to determine its future. Voters in the Crimean Peninsula will be given two options: becoming part of Russia or remaining a republic of Ukraine, with increased autonomy. Crimea already functions as a semi-independent region, under Ukrainian law, but with its own parliament.

President Obama was to host new Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk at the White House Wednesday, meanwhile, in a high-profile gesture aimed at cementing the West's allegiance to Ukraine's fledgling government.

The U.S. and Europe have declared the referendum illegitimate, saying Ukraine's central government must be involved in decisions about its territory. The dispute over the future of the former Soviet republic has conjured up echoes of the Cold War tensions between East and West.

The Group of Seven highly industrialized nations (G7), which includes the U.S., was to release a statement later Wednesday calling for Russia to "cease all efforts to annex Ukraine's autonomous republic of Crimea," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told the EU parliament, according to Reuters.




NATO consists of 28 member states – I didn't know there were so many members. The list of them includes many former Soviet countries, but not Russia itself nor its satellite nations. This website gives an overview of NATO – http://geography.about.com/cs/politicalgeog/a/nato.htm. NATO is a military organization rather than economic. “The U.S.-led military alliance was created in 1949 as a result of the Soviet blockade of Berlin.”

The EU – see website http://europa.eu/about-eu/countries/member-countries/ – began in 1951 with only Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands united in economic cooperation. The latest additional member is Croatia, and the group now numbers 28. The lists of NATO and EU members are similar, but not identical.

The Group of Seven highly industrialized nations (G7), from Wikipedia, consists of France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. “The organization was originally founded to facilitate shared initiatives by its members in response to the collapse of the exchange rate 1971, during the time of the Nixon Shock, the 1970s energy crisis and the ensuing recession.” “

“In March 2014, the G7 condemned "the Russian Federation's violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine".[11] The G7 stated "that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) remains the institution best prepared to help Ukraine address its immediate economic challenges....”

I feel better about this crisis with NATO and EU involvement. It will not be merely a conflict between the US and Russia, and it will have the promise of military support of Ukraine. We are on the right track, I feel. Russia can be isolated effectively and therefore more subject to free world pressure.




Obama set to change rules for overtime pay for "executive," "managerial" employees – CBS
By Amanda Cochran CBS News March 12, 2014

The White House is rolling out a new project to overhaul the rules for paying overtime - changes that will affect millions of households.

The change won't happen immediately, but on Thursday, President Obama will order the Labor Department to require businesses to pay more in overtime wages to certain kinds of workers -- workers currently classified as executive or managerial employees. In some cases, CBS News' Major Garrett reported, these managers or executives could be shift supervisors at a fast food restaurant, or an overnight manager at a convenience store -- clearly not ones who earn traditional white-collar wages.

"Due to years of neglect, one of the linchpins of the middle class, the overtime rules that establish the 40-hour workweek, have been eroded," a White House official said. "As a result, millions of salaried workers have been left without the protections of overtime or sometimes even the minimum wage. ... It's even possible that some of these workers make less than the minimum wage per hour."

The Labor Department sets the requirements for overtime pay to these so-called executive or managerial workers. Right now, if you make $455 per week -- or roughly $24,000 a year -- you don't have to receive overtime pay over that threshold.
According to a White House official: "In 1975, the Department of Labor set the salary threshold below which all white collar workers are covered by overtime protection at $250 per week (the equivalent of $970 in today's dollars). In 2004, the Bush Administration raised that threshold to where it is today, to $455 per week (the equivalent of $553 in today's dollars), a level that has eroded even further because of inflation. Some employers classify workers as 'white collar' workers, even though the overwhelming majority of their duties are not white collar exempting from these protections."

The president intends to use an executive order the Labor Department to raise that threshold -- a regulatory process that could take many months to finalize.

The White House will not say how much the president wants to raise that threshold. California recently set its threshold at $640 a week and New York $600 a week. Former White House economists have publicly lobbied Mr. Obama to raise the threshold to nearly $1,000 a week.

All this is designed to combat what the White House calls income inequality across the country. The move, Garrett added, would give Democrats in the mid-term elections another economic bread basket issue to run on.





I'm glad to see this move. My father worked most of his life as a lumber inspector and as such he was a supervisor of a crew of laborers, and from the look of this article, he would have been exempt from overtime pay. We managed to have a house, but we had to have scholarship funds to go to college, and our clothes and car were inexpensive. That's okay. We had food and medical attention as needed.

The number of people who are given short shrift on wages is high. A recent article was on a bill to reform the way restaurant managers essentially ripped their wait staff off in several ways, even taking part of their tips. Big business is a dirty business in many ways. So far I still haven't seen anything about limiting the very high salaries of the CEOs, which can go into the millions. That is truly a scandal. As one commentator said recently, “nobody is worth $2,000 an hour.” That is the amazing amount that he computed $2,000,000 a year to be.




Why the U.S. gets no medals for retirement – CBS
By Steve Vernon MoneyWatch March 12, 2014

American exceptionalism -- the concept that we're qualitatively different from other nations -- certainly doesn't hold up in the area of retirement, according to two recent studies that compare the U.S. retirement system to those of other countries.

The Melbourne Mercer Global 2013 Pension Index ranks the U.S. 11th out of 20 countries, while the Natixis 2014 Global Retirement Index ranks the U.S. 19th among 150 nations. In both studies, America ranked behind most Western European nations, Australia and Canada. Prior surveys have produced a similar result.

The Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index uses three sub-indices to measure a country's retirement system: adequacy, sustainability and integrity.

The adequacy sub-index measures how well a system can meet the population's retirement living needs. The sustainability sub-index measures the various indicators that will influence the likelihood that the current system will be able to continue providing the current level of benefits into the future. The integrity sub-index measures items that influence the overall governance and operations of the system, which in turn affect the level of confidence that citizens have in their system.

According to Melbourne Mercer, these are the top 10 countries:
1. Denmark
2. Netherlands
3. Australia
4. Switzerland
5. Sweden
6. Canada
7. Singapore
8. Chile
9. U.K.
10. Germany

The U.S. retirement system landed a C grade overall, defined as a "system that has some good features but also has major risks and/or shortcomings that should be addressed. Without these improvements, its efficacy and/or long-term sustainability can be questioned."

The U.S. ranked below average in all three sub-indices. The report notes that America could increase its ranking by improving its Social Security benefits for low-income retirees, increasing mandatory contributions for median-wage earners, reducing preretirement leakage due to loans and early distributions, and requiring that part of its citizens' work-related retirement benefits be taken as an income stream instead of a lump sum.

The Natixis Global Retirement Index examines 20 key trends across four broad categories: health and health care quality, personal income and finances, quality of life and socio-economic factors. Together these factors provide a measure of the life conditions and well-being expected by retirees and near-retirees.

According to Natixis, these are the top 10 countries:
1. Switzerland
2. Norway
3. Austria
4. Sweden
5. Australia
6. Denmark
7. Germany
8. Finland
9. New Zealand
10. Luxembourg

Factors that kept the U.S. out of this group included the high cost of health care, life expectancy that's lower than that of other developed nations, a high degree of income inequality, the level of government debt and the fact that only about half of all U.S. workers are covered by any retirement plan at work.

These two studies reinforce themes that I often write about: If you want to live a long, healthy, prosperous life, you won't get much help from our society or from your employer. In fact, you'll need to overcome some distinct negative influences, such as a complex and expensive medical system, a complicated financial system that, at times, preys on ordinary citizens, and the barrage of advertising that tells you to spend all your money on consumer goods, go into debt and eat unhealthy foods.

If you want to enjoy your retirement years, you'll need to figure out how to take care of your own health and finances, navigate the health care and financial systems and build your own community of supportive, like-minded friends and family. A good place to start is my online retirement planning guide, which organizes some of my posts into a week-by-week program of learning and action steps.




“American exceptionalism -- the concept that we're qualitatively different from other nations” – I have never seen this defined before, but it is one of the things that separates many Republicans from Democrats philosophically. There is an exaggerated sense of our success and superior value as a nation, and such a strong level of patriotism among the population here that America could become the biggest national bully, though second to Russia perhaps. In other words it amounts to national arrogance. When other nations exceed us in educational performance by our students, or as described in this article, our overall quality of life issues, it is humbling, at least to me. Our Democrats, thank goodness, usually try to improve overall conditions at home and walk with a smaller footprint in the world of nations. This creates a more virtuous nation which I can view with more pride and wholehearted support .




Why Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared war on the CIA – CBS
By John Dickerson CBS News March 12, 2014
This article originally appeared on Slate.

How do you spy on a spy? In the case of Senate investigators, you do it by adopting some of their methods.

During the five year investigation into the CIA interrogation and detention program, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in a windowless room at the spy agency's headquarters, suspected that key documents had been removed from their computer network. Luckily, they had a hard copy. To keep it from being destroyed, Senate sleuths spirited the document from the CIA and put it in a safe in the Hart Senate Office Building. The move set off a chain of events that broke open on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the intelligence committee, accused the CIA of spying on her investigators.

CIA Director John Brennan insists the CIA isn't trying to thwart her investigations. The Justice Department is now conducting two inquiries: one looking into whether the CIA illegally snooped on congressional investigators and another looking into whether those investigators broke the law. The accusations include lying to Congress and to the Justice Department, and spying on congressional investigators to hide what the CIA was doing. Frank Underwood will no doubt be weighing in soon.

Since the rolling revelations from Edward Snowden began last year, members of Congress tasked with overseeing the government's sprawling spy network have been trying to find a new balance between security and civil liberties. The president says there have been no abuses but admits that some changes must be made. This public struggle between Feinstein and the CIA illustrates just how hard it is to keep an eye on people who are paid to go undetected. Even if Feinstein's accusations aren't true, the painstaking process of cat and mouse that is revealed in this story suggests that the oversight process is so time-consuming, frustrating, and opaque that it's almost impossible to apply the necessary scrutiny to the numerous programs that make up the government's intelligence system.

It's hardly news that the intelligence community resists congressional oversight, but it usually appears to be part of the predictable tussle--resistance based on a desire to maintain the secrecy of security techniques that keep everyone safe. Feinstein's accusations have nothing to do with that. She is claiming that the CIA engaged in a prolonged effort to cover its tracks and that this deception now includes a trumped-up Justice Department criminal report alleging that Senate investigators broke the law.

We are no longer in a predictable fight between two branches of government anticipated by the framers. These are public accusations of criminal activity and a cover-up. It's a class of warfare that people have been craving since Snowden started leaking secrets about the U.S. surveillance state. Whether you think the intelligence agencies have gone too far or not, it's important to have the people's representatives battling for their right to do the job the Constitution puts before them. Otherwise the system gets out of whack. That was one of the lessons of Snowden's revelations and it's also the point of the story Feinstein took to the Senate floor to tell.

The saga starts in 2006, when members of the intelligence committee were first briefed about a CIA interrogation program that had been in place since 2002. This briefing initiated an investigation by Senate staffers who by 2009 offered a preliminary report on the program that Feinstein described as "chilling" and far different and harsher than the way the CIA had described it in the past.

The first level of oversight had failed massively. The findings from the first review initiated another one by the committee--a second attempt at oversight--which the CIA fought at every turn, according to Feinstein. They dumped an un-indexed 6.2 million documents on the Senate committee and requested that each document go through a multilevel review process before handing it over, making the investigation tedious and protracted.

As investigators waded though the documents, some of the information that had been initially provided by the CIA started to disappear from the computer network. When asked about the unauthorized removal, the CIA blamed contractors, and then said the order had come from the White House. In 2010, Feinstein had to get the White House counsel to resolve the matter and order the CIA to return the missing documents, which it did.

Not long after, documents started going missing again. This batch of ghost papers would come to be known as the "Panetta review," referring to Leon Panetta, the former CIA director. They represented an internal summary of what had been provided to the intelligence committee. "What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was not their classification level, but rather their analysis and acknowledgment of significant CIA wrongdoing," said Feinstein.

The power of these Panetta documents and the fact that they had gone missing didn't become apparent until the Senate put together its final report in 2012, six years after first learning about the program and 10 years after the program had started. The CIA responded to the 6,300-page Senate report with a 122-page rebuttal in June 2013. What surprised investigators was that the agency's rebuttal contradicted the conclusions that had been in the Panetta documents. "Some of these important parts [of the Senate report] that the CIA now dispute ... are clearly acknowledged in the CIA's own internal Panetta review," said Feinstein. "How can the CIA's official response to our study stand factually in conflict with its own internal review?"

The contradiction suggests that the CIA was trying to conceal its wrongdoing when it removed the Panetta documents from the network investigators were using. Fortunately for Senate investigators they had printed out the Panetta review before it disappeared. When they saw the discrepancy between what had been written internally and what was being said in public, they decided to remove the physical copies from the CIA in case someone there tried to destroy them as they had previous evidence.
The only problem is that the Senate team had agreed to clear anything it took from the building with the CIA first so that any sensitive information could be redacted. Senate investigators skipped this step with the Panetta documents. Feinstein is unrepentant on this point. "Our staff did just what CIA personnel would have done had they reviewed the document," says Feinstein.

The purloined Panetta review now sits in a Senate safe. Members of the Senate intelligence committee tried to get a full copy from the agency, but in January the CIA refused. By asking for the official version, they spooked CIA personnel, who then secretly searched the computers the Senate committee had been using to prepare the report. The CIA rationalizes that search on the grounds that the committee had somehow obtained the Panetta report by unauthorized means, which Feinstein denies.
Feinstein issued a series of letters to the CIA director asking for some answers and an apology. She's gotten neither.

The CIA inspector general has asked the Justice Department to look into the CIA's Senate snooping. Weeks later, the CIA general counsel filed a crimes report to look into the actions of the Senate investigators. Feinstein claims the agency is trying to intimidate and stonewall. In fact, according to Feinstein, the general counsel is a star of the Senate report, mentioned 1,600 times. It is not likely that he is mentioned as an awesome guy.

The last time the CIA got into a big public fight like this it was with George W. Bush's administration over claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. Ultimately, CIA Director George Tenet had to take the fall for the faulty information that made it into President Bush's State of the Union speech. Before Tenet's resignation, the agency and the White House traded several rounds of damaging accusations. Referring to their fight with the CIA, a White House official at the time said, "We brought a knife to a gun fight." Feinstein has started a public confrontation with those same forces for which she will have to be well armed.

This story has a simple message: The system that is supposed to maintain the balance between secrets and civil liberties has broken down. Many believed that it already had, but Feinstein, for good reason, had argued that even if changes needed to be made, the essential relationship between her committee and the agencies it oversees was operating within bounds. What she described Tuesday was a total lack of trust on both sides. The level of trust was so low that people may have felt it was necessary to break the law to fulfill their obligations. That's not just bad for this particular relationship; it throws the balance between the two branches into even greater turmoil than it was already in.




“As investigators waded though the documents, some of the information that had been initially provided by the CIA started to disappear from the computer network.” The White House stepped in and resolved the issue and the documents were returned to the Senate committee. Then more documents referred to as “the "Panetta review," in which he stated that there had been “significant CIA wrongdoing.” A member of the Senate committee had already printed the “Panetta review” and therefore had proof of the CIA attempt to rebut the committee's findings by denying the content of the Panetta comments.

The Senate committee then removed the documents from the CIA headquarters secretly and put them in a Senate safe. The CIA is accusing them of operating illegally, and Feinstein is defending their action. I don't see any information here about the White House wading into the waters, and I think they should. Obama, after all, doesn't support the waterboarding and such techniques that occurred. He should publicly defend the Senate investigation.

Structurally, the Senate is empowered to oversee the CIA, so they have the authority to conduct the investigation without the attempts of the CIA to subvert the proceedings. There is no doubt that the CIA overstepped its powers when it used such harsh techniques in interrogating suspects, though with the approval of the Bush administration. The atmosphere in the Executive at that time was hard-line in placing “the national interests” firmly above human rights. Many Republicans feel that this state of things is proper. I think it's how a government becomes a tyrannical body and not one that can be trusted.




­Ukraine Won't Fight Russia In Crimea, Acting President Says – NPR
by Mark Memmott
March 12, 2014

­Conceding that "we cannot launch a military operation in Crimea, as we would expose the eastern border and Ukraine would not be protected," Ukraine's acting president has told Agence France-Presse that his nation won't use force in a bid to keep Crimea from breaking off and joining the Russian Federation.

Oleksandr Turchynov also writes on the op-ed pages of The New York Times on Wednesday that "no one should doubt that Ukrainians are prepared to defend their country." But, he says, "the memory of our people's terrible losses during the [recent] protests in Kiev is still fresh; we cannot permit more bloodshed."

"We are fully aware that," Turchynov adds, that "should force be used, containing the situation would be impossible."

Turchynov's words come as Ukraine's interim prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk prepares to meet with President Obama this afternoon at the White House. The Obama administration is trying to signal its continuing support for Ukraine's new leadership. The U.S. has condemned Russia's actions in Ukraine, where Russian and local self-defense forces have seized strategic locations and surrounded Ukrainian military bases.

Turchynov's words also come as the pro-Russia leaders in Crimea — an autonomous region of Ukraine that has historically long ties to Russia and where Russia maintains a naval base — prepare for a public referendum on Sunday. The question they're putting before Crimeans: Should the region break away and join the Russian Federation. That referendum is expected to pass.

As we've previously said, Crimea has been the focus of attention as the ripple effects of the protests that led to last month's ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych have spread.

Summing up the history and importance of Crimea to Russia and Ukraine isn't possible in just a few sentences, of course. The Parallels blog, though, has published several posts that contain considerable context:
— Crimea: 3 Things To Know About Ukraine's Latest Hot Spot
— Crimea: A Gift To Ukraine Becomes A Political Flash Point
— Why Ukraine Is Such A Big Deal For Russia

We've recapped what set off months of protest in Kiev and ultimately led to Yanukovych's dismissal by his nation's parliament last month this way:
"The protests were sparked in part by the president's rejection of a pending trade treaty with the European Union and his embrace of more aid from Russia. Protesters were also drawn into the streets to demonstrate against government corruption."
It was after Yanukovych left Kiev and headed for the Russian border that troops moved to take control of strategic locations in Crimea.




The key element in this article is that Ukraine will not fight to keep Crimea under its influence. It doesn't say what it would do if Russia invaded other parts of the Ukraine. Hopefully if that happened NATO and maybe the UN would intervene. I hope that sanctions would stop Russia from doing that. It seems to me, at this point, that Russia doesn't really intend to go to war over the other parts of Ukrainian territory. Every day brings new developments, though, so I will keep tracking events there.




A Plan To Eliminate Wild Mute Swans Draws Vocal Opposition – NPR
by Margot Adler
March 11, 2014
­
A plan in New York state to eliminate all wild mute swans there by 2025 has drawn protests and petitions on all sides. While some see elegant white birds gliding across the water, others see a dangerous aggressor destroying the local ecosystem.
According to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the swans — which don't honk but make hoarse, froglike grunts — are not native, and they destroy and attack native species. Amanda Rodewald, director of conservation science at Cornell University, says they've threatened loons in Michigan and least terns in Maryland.
"We are worried about them in New York because of the black tern population that we have," Rodewald says. Black terns there, she says, have only a few nesting colonies remaining.

The swans eat and pull out large amounts of submerged aquatic vegetation, destroying food sources for other birds. But what makes a nonnative species invasive?
Adam Welz, an ornithologist and filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn, says that when European songbirds were introduced in America, they failed to take. But in 1890, when a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts released 60 European starlings in Central Park, they multiplied into the millions.

"Most invasions, once they reached an explosive stage, are actually out of control," Welz says. "There is no way you can deal with them."

Stopping population growth before it explodes, he says, is "a prudent strategy to follow in general with invasive species."

Debating The Science
Mute swans were likely brought over in the late 1800s from Europe or Asia. In the 1970s, there were about 1,000 in New York; now there are 2,200. When the DEC studied the three places in New York where the swans are currently abundant, they found only one location, near Lake Ontario, where the species was growing rapidly.

David Karopkin, a defender of the swans and the founder of GooseWatch in Brooklyn, wonders how anyone can call that invasive. "The science is faulty," Karopkin says. "It's weak at best."

Looking at the DEC proposal, Welz says he wishes the DEC had brought "a little more science to the party." Its approach has been tone deaf and legalistic, he says. Still, he is no defender of the swans. Just the other day, he says, he saw one knock over a toddler.

"No real harm done. He was a little dusty and upset, but we know that swans can be very dangerous," Welz says. "A man was drowned two years ago in Illinois by a swan — killed by a swan, a full-grown man."

Other critics of the DEC's plan wonder why it's focusing on 2,200 swans when there is so much natural habitat being destroyed by development. Rodewald agrees that ecosystems are facing huge problems — but, she says, we should act now before the swans are widespread.

"This is a situation where we can remove one of the threats, one of the stresses on these native ecosystems," Rodewald says.

There's another problem. If you go into a New York City park in May without a pair of binoculars, you may not see any of the more than 150 species of birds all around you. But a family taking a child to the park will see the swans and connect with them. They're big, they're visible, and they're full of romantic associations. They're important in people's lives, Karopkin says, "not just because they are beautiful; it is because people value and respect life."

Rodewald thinks it's just difficult for most people to think about large ecosystems, populations and habitats.

"The submerged aquatic vegetation," she says, "is inherently less charismatic than this beautiful swan."

Noting the thousands of comments and signatures on petitions, the DEC is revising its plan. It may decide to treat each area where the swans live differently, which may include nonlethal means of control.




“A dangerous aggressor destroying the local ecosystem” – that is the charge against the birds. It seems they pull up the underwater plants as they eat them, thus killing them. DEC New York's Department of Environmental Conservation has been influenced by public protests against their plan to kill the swans, however. “...the DEC is revising its plan. It may decide to treat each area where the swans live differently, which may include nonlethal means of control.”

I would hate to see something as beautiful as swans killed. As far as I know people don't even eat swans. The story that a swan was seen to drown a man sounds suspect. Why was the man in the water with the swan? Was he molesting its nest? Maybe it considered him to be attacking and reacted in self-defense.

http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-24008,00.html – This article on swans attacking humans does list about twenty-five reported incidents, with the swans even breaking bones. The stories were recounted by people in several countries who had reportedly experienced close encounters. Some of them don't sound likely, particularly that they can break an adult's leg. The following is from Wikipedia about trumpeter swans. They are definitely very large birds. “The Trumpeter Swan (Cygnus buccinator) is the heaviest bird native to North America and is, on average, the largest extant waterfowl species on Earth.”

“Adults usually measure 138–165 cm (54–65 in) long, though large males can range up to 180 cm (71 in) or more.[2][4][5][6] The weight of adult birds is typically 7–13.6 kg (15–30 lb), with an average weight in males of 11.9 kg (26 lb) and 9.4 kg (21 lb) in females.[2][7] The wingspan ranges from 185 to 250 cm (73 to 98 in).”

“When their eggs and young are threatened, the parents can be quite aggressive, initially displaying with head bobbing and hissing. If this is not sufficient, the adults will physically combat the predator, battering with their powerful wings and chomping down with their large bills, and have managed to kill predators equal to their own weight in confrontations.” So feeding swans or trying to pet or otherwise mollest them is not advisable. They are one of those bird species, such as the ostrich or the cassowary, that remind me that birds are probably correctly considered to be the direct descendants of dinosaurs.