The Circus

North Korea issued an ominous new threat Monday in its campaign against South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, vowing to carry out a special military attack that would reduce parts of Seoul to ash “in three or four minutes ... by unprecedented peculiar means and methods of our own style.”

Agni-V missile, which could reach Beijing, marks a major advance in India’s nuclear weapons armory.

GlobalFoundries is building a $4.6 billion 2m square foot campus in Saratoga.

SW: Some great news for Upstate New York.

"Rockets: They’ve been around for, oh, 70 years. But just because they’re senior citizens doesn’t mean they’re technologically decrepit. As North Korea’s latest failed rocket test shows, launching a rocket into space is still, well, rocket science."

Apr 14th 2012

EVERYONE knows why oil prices, at around $125 for a barrel of Brent crude, are so high. The long-term trends are meagre supply growth and soaring demand from China and other emerging economies.

North Korea appears to be ramping up preparations for its internationally-condemned mid-April rocket launch, new satellite images have revea...

"AS AFTERNOON TURNS to evening in Máximo Gómez Park, named for a hero of the independence war against Spain, some three dozen mainly elderly men and a scattering of women play dominoes, banging the tiles down on the ceramic table tops. This timeless scene could be anywhere in Cuba."

Let's be blunt. What does a left-wing cable TV news show host know about war? Rachel Maddow is up front that she's a novice.

"Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure is growing so fast that it’s silently becoming a core piece of the internet.

That’s according to an analysis done by DeepField Networks, a start-up that number-crunched several weeks’ worth of anonymous network traffic provided by internet service providers, mainly in North America."

ALL in all, this is a pretty good time to be an American. Think about it. The middle class is expanding and growing richer. Once-stark inequalities are shrinking.

For Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s failure to put a satellite into orbit, after drawing international condemnation over the attempt, was a $1 billion humiliation.

“China is a big country,” he pointed out, “and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact.” Indeed it is, and China is big not merely in terms of territory and population, but also military might. Its Communist Party is presiding over the world’s largest military build-up. And that is just a fact, too—one which the rest of the world is having to come to terms with.

Apr 7th 2012

"Syria's rebels have to bear hours of negotiations for every box of bullets that they haul across the border for their war against Bashar al-Assad. And their frustration is starting to show."

As fewer Americans serve in the armed forces, the difficulty of translating the experience of military service to a wider public becomes increasingly challenging. But sometimes a picture tells a thousand words, as in this selection of winners from the 2011 Military Photographer of the Year competition, which was recently judged at the Defense Information School at Ft. George G. Meade, Maryland. Combat photography began in earnest during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln commissioned Mathew Brady to document the war, eventually leading to an invaluable trove of photographs used by generations of historians. Today, hundreds of U.S. military photographers, videographers, and artists continue to document armed services activities around the world. These photos were chosen from thousands of entries and adhere to the same standards as photojournalism (meaning no posed or electronically manipulated images).

The Afghanistan war might look like it's jumped the rails. But its commander says that by the fall of next year, one major development will ...

THE tiny island-state of Singapore, home to just over 5m people, has a well-deserved reputation as a quiet, clean-cut hub for banking, lawyering and golf.