Delivering drugs by UAV

cnet: Matternet delivers drugs by robocopter

Economist: UAVs will be smaller, lighter, cheaper

The Economist: Joining the drone club: The future of air power is likely to be unmanned. It may also be surprisingly small. Reapers and Predators grab the headlines, but these big, high-profile drones are already outnumbered by small and cheap but capable craft.

Drones, and the future of war

Link: The DIY Terminator: Private Robot Armies And The Algorithm-Run Future Of War

[...] as the tech becomes more democratized and more deadly, what happens when anyone can assemble an army of killing machines?

Pentagon looks to double drone air force

Via Wired Magazine: Pentagon Looks to Double Its Unmanned Air Force

Tunisia: the first Wikileaks revolution?

Posted over at my other blog: Tunisia: the first Wikileaks revolution?

Chavez given decree powers

Reuters: Venezuela assembly gives Chavez decree powers

Venezuela's parliament gave President Hugo Chavez decree powers for 18 months on Friday, outraging opposition parties that accused him of turning South America's biggest oil producer into a dictatorship.

FT: A new global balance

FT columnist Philip Stephens writes:

We are living through one of history’s swerves. A multipolar world has been long predicted, but has always seemed to be perched safely on the horizon. Now it has rushed quite suddenly into the present. Two centuries of western hegemony are coming to a close rather earlier than many had imagined.

US embassy cables: China 'would accept' Korean reunification

Guardian reposts a wikileaked cable.

[Vice Foreign Minister Chun Yung-woo] commented that China had far less influence on North Korea "than most people believe." Beijing had "no will" to use its economic leverage to force a change in Pyongyang's policies and the DPRK leadership "knows it." Chun acknowledged that the Chinese genuinely wanted a denuclearized North Korea, but the PRC was also content with the status quo. Unless China pushed North Korea to the "brink of collapse," the DPRK would likely continue to refuse to take meaningful steps on denuclearization. [...]

[...] Chun claimed XXXXXXXXXX believed Korea should be unified under ROK control.XXXXXXXXXXXX, Chun said, were ready to "face the new reality" that the DPRK now had little value to China as a buffer state -- a view that since North Korea's 2006 nuclear test had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC leaders.

Read the whole thing.

Planning for North Korean collapse

strategypage writes: U.S. military planners have discovered that China's current arsenal of non-nuclear ballistic and cruise missiles could probably knock out five of six major American air bases in Japanese and South Korea. Oops. To make matters worse, this has become an issue as North Korea stumbles towards political collapse, and China indicates that it will assume control in the north if that happens. South Korea believes it should move north to deal with a collapse, and this plan is becoming a contentious issue with China.

Bush: Mubarak wanted me to invade Iraq

From Foreign Policy's blog: Bush writes [in his new book] that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt "told Tommy Franks that Iraq had biological weapons and was certain to use them on [American] troops," a VOA article highlights. Bush goes on to say that Mubarak "refused to make the allegation in public for fear of inciting the Arab street."