At the foot of Mount Fuji on Tuesday, Japan’s military held annual exercises with dozens of aircraft, 80 tanks, and 2,400 troops, the AP reports. Designed more as a spectacle than a training opportunity, the exercises focus on a scenario in which Japan is attacked from the sea. As a narrator explained the attack to […]

Is seven years old too early to start teaching computer science? Vietnam doesn’t think so.Google software engineer Neil Fraser visited a school in Vietnam where computer science classes begin in the second grade and continue right up to graduation. By fourth grade, students were already writing programs using loops, and by “grade 5 they are […]

There’s a fight going on in the tiny village of Balcombe that could have large implications for Britain’s energy security. The village has just a couple thousand residents, but it’s what lies underground that is causing the controversy. Cuadrilla, an oil and gas exploration firm, is drilling a well there to determine if the region’s […]

When Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto unveiled a proposal to reform his country’s state-owned and grossly mismanaged oil and gas monopoly Pemex last week, he was careful to reassure the public that “all hydrocarbons will remain the property of the Mexican people.” Peña Nieto promised to open up Mexico’s oil and gas reserves to foreign companies via […]

A group of Japanese nationalists who belong to a group called Ganbare Nippon (“Stand Firm, Japan”) has returned to port after sailing around the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. The five ships were surrounded by Japanese coast guard ships and urged to leave the area. NBC News reports: Members of the…group did not […]

The colossal scope of student debt in America is no longer a secret, but the federal government has yet to take its proper share of the blame for the crisis. In an excellent piece at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi homes in on how government lending practices have inflated the bubble, and documents many abuses of federal […]

Americans may misunderstand how Egyptians see the struggle between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood, but according to Mahmoud Salem, an Egyptian blogger who came to worldwide prominence after the initial Arab Spring uprisings, the misunderstandings run deep in both directions. He offers corrections to what he says are Egyptians’ top-three misconceptions: The US is […]

Scientists are “95 percent” sure that humans are the main cause of recent global warming (up from 90 percent in 2007), but they’re much less confident about what the effects of that warming will be. That’s according to information leaked to Reuters from an upcoming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).The IPCC’s […]

India’s economic difficulties have dominated MSM headlines over the past couple of weeks, along with tragedies like a submarine explosion that likely killed more than a dozen navy men and the worst fighting along the border with Pakistan in decades. The New York Times calls it India’s “summer of difficulties.”“India is now the sick man […]

In the first half of 2012, US manufacturing posted some of the best numbers we’ve seen in years, suggesting that a broader revival may be underway. Our trade deficit has grown noticeably smaller in the past six months, driven in large part by energy exports, the “reshoring” of factories to America, and the cooling off […]