Obsessing over strategic geography has a rather… twentieth century feel to it. Few now worry about the control of the Suez Canal, or the rights of warships to traverse the Bosphorus; far-flung scraps of land once valued as coaling stations and choke points are now important chiefly as tax havens and political distractions, and the [...]

The EU Health Commissioner recommends avoiding non-essential travel to Mexico, and the first case of this variant of swine flu in Europe has been reported in Spain. The WHO has already got its Emergency Committee working; they had their first meeting on Saturday. And the Organization’s web site has an admirably complete set of links [...]

An unexpected consequence of the North Korean attempted satellite launch was that it has demonstrated that Russian early-warning radar coverage is poor. Specifically, the Russians didn’t detect the North Korean launch at all; they picked up the object during its suborbital flight, but not during its ascent. This is worrying, because it suggests two things [...]

On the topic of European innovation, this demo application from the Nokia Forum rocks. Basically, it uses the Sensor API in the latest version of Symbian S60 and the phone camera to detect what you’re pointing the cam at, and show information related to it.
Tagging Barcelona
Naturally this information could be sucked in from the Web, [...]

Last week, some US-based bloggers were talking about their dissatisfaction with the term, “soft power.”
Matthew Yglesias:
[C]an we retire the term “soft power” already? I always feel that it’s been popularized not so much by Professor Nye as by deranged warmongers who like the idea of terming every alternative to militarism as somehow “soft,” fluffy, [...]

To be fair, Paul Krugman was a pretty darn good economist even before he took up blogging…

Do you all think I should tell David about this?

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In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane [...]

Dutch military analyst Ingo Piepers is doing some extremely interesting research on the dynamics of international systems and… war. If his theories are correct, then another world conflagration at some point in the future may well be more or less inevitable. I am going to let Piepers explain and point our readers to [...]