North Korea has increased its missile arsenal by 25 percent in the past two years to about 1,000, expanding the threat the state poses to the region, the South’s defense chief said Wednesday.
Pyongyang’s arsenal includes intermediate-range missiles that can hit targets at up to 3,000 km (1,860 miles) away, Yonhap news agency quoted Kim Tae-young [...]

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When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.
Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, [...]

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Many experts say the decline began with the end of the Soviet Union. When Russia became capitalist, they say, so did its military industry. Like much of Russian industry, it was privatized haphazardly. For example, factories and the engineering departments that designed what these factories made were sold separately.
Over time, this had a deleterious effect [...]

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In the Iranian desert, at a sprawling industrial site ringed by barbed wire and antiaircraft guns, a shift in the enrichment of uranium is producing global jitters because it could shorten Iran’s path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
The Diminishing Difficulty of Enriching Uranium – NYTimes.com

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Individuals, as always, may be tempted to make their own financial bets, too. Last time, they bought overpriced homes with too much borrowed money. Next time, who knows what the bubble will be? And that’s the problem, as it always is. How do you identify the next thing that will pop? Is it China? Or [...]

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Conventional for conventional, and nonconventional for nonconventional – as in bombs. A country attacked with chemical weapons may respond with nuclear weapons – nonconventional for nonconventional.
Mr. Obama’s decisions on nuclear weapons come as conflicting pressures in his defense policy are intensifying. His critics argue that his embrace of a new movement to eliminate nuclear weapons [...]

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Goldman Sachs’ VaR models and risk models started to show little cracks or discrepancies. They were small, but they shouldn’t have been there. Rather than ignore these discrepancies, Goldman Sachs tried to understand what was going on. When it couldn’t figure out what was going on they bailed out of mortgage-backed securities.
How then do we [...]

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Congressional “reform” plans for credit default swaps are full of loopholes, guaranteeing that another derivatives-fueled financial crisis awaits us. According to the Bank for International Settlements, credit default swaps with a face value of $36 trillion were outstanding in the second quarter of 2009, the most recent figures available.
Fair Game – Who Will Rein [...]

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A deadly 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck central Chile early Saturday, ripping apart buildings, highways and bridges and leaving a path of smoky rubble across a long swath of this earthquake-tested country before sending waves rumbling across the Pacific Basin.
‘State of Catastrophe’ After Chile Quake – NYTimes.com

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Without vastly expanded efforts to change construction practices and educate people, from mayors to masons, on simple ways to bolster structures, he said, Haiti’s tragedy is almost certain to be surpassed sometime this century when a major quake hits Karachi, Pakistan, Katmandu, Nepal, Lima, Peru, or one of a long list of big poor cities [...]

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