The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm Rosie Bloor.

And I'm Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The birth of the Clean Tech revolution has long been foretold and failed to deliver.

But though the US administration isn't exactly keen on tackling climate change,

our correspondent reckons that the future may actually be green.

And few brands are so globally present as Hello Kitty,

but her parent company Sanrio is expanding the Hello Kitty universe at a prodigious rate.

Brace yourself for the IP licensing onslaught of Hello Kitty and Friends' Super Cute Adventures.

But first...

If you draw a curve connecting the American territory of Guam and the rest of the Mariana Islands,

they form an arc that points towards Japan.

They're not really in the middle of the Pacific.

They're pretty far west, straight north of Melbourne, Australia, which makes them strategically really very useful to America.

On one of those islands, Tinian, the world's first nuclear weapons were loaded onto the bombers that would drop them on Japan.

At Tinian 100 miles north, two more B-29 wings prepare for takeoff.

Then the war over, American forces left and let the airfield of Tinian be retaken by the jungle.

Fast forward 80 years and the threat of conflict in the Western Pacific is back.

That same arc of islands also points at China.

That sound was the roar of an F-22 fighter jet taking off from the runway of Tinian in the Pacific.

...