The would-be “Twitter revolution” in Moldova is already showing signs of fizzling, with no new reports of protests, the original organizers of the anti-government gathering of 15,000 distancing themselves from the violence of a few, and the leader of the Communist government attempting to spin the protests as a coup plot by neighbor Romania rather than as a spontaneous outpouring of anger against his feckless government. Yesterday, however, the Internet was, yes, atwitter with news of this Twitter Revolution. Almost as soon as this New York Times story was posted on the Times’ Web site yesterday (and on the front [...]
The Obama administration’s emphasis on “smart power” is by now well known. To most observers, that has meant the need to “balance and integrate all elements of our national power” in order to deter and defeat emerging threats, as President Barack Obama himself put it in a speech at National Defense University in Washington on March 12. Many have focused on Obama’s insistence, in the same speech, that “we cannot continue to push the burden on to our military alone” and his commitment to “comprehensive engagement with the world.” What has gotten less attention is the central role Obama foresees [...]
NEW DELHI — Two weeks ago, a ballistic missile blasted off from a warship sailing in the Bay of Bengal. Its target was Wheeler Island, a small enclave of land off the coast of India and home to one of India’s most important missile testing facilities. Within seconds of the launch, the Indian military’s radars and computer banks began tracking the supersonic rocket. Several computations later, an alarm triggered another “hot” missile on the island that, once launched, began pursuing the aggressor warhead. Some 70 kilometers above the earth’s surface, the two collided. The rocket’s debris fell through the sky, [...]
