Even though on January 17, 2011 China denied plans to send troops into North Korea, yesterday on January 18, 2011 China sent troops into North Korea. A contingent of Chinese troops has reportedly been stationed for a month in the economic zone of Rajin-Sonbong in northeast North Korea. South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported a South Korean official as saying the People’s Liberation Army... 

A woolly mammoth skeleton is seen on display at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas in September 2009. Instead of Jurassic Park, try Pleistocene Park. A team of scientists from Japan, Russia and the United States hopes to clone a mammoth, a symbol of Earth’s ice age that ended 12,000 years ago, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun. The researchers say they hope to produce... 

Lucrative contracts threatened as agent languishes in Wandsworth prison. Britain is embroiled in a damaging diplomatic row with Mongolia over the arrest of its most senior spy which is threatening to derail relations between the two countries and freeze British companies out of contracts worth millions of pounds. Bat Khurts, who was the head of Mongolia’s counter-terrorism agency, has languished... 

Security personnel walk on the site of a military operation in the village of Besh-Kungei outside Bishkek. The new government of Kyrgyzstan has launched a crackdown on militants it claims are linked to extreme Islamic groups. Two suspected terrorists were killed and another was captured in a gunfight in Bishkek, the capital of the former Soviet Republic. “This is a religious extremist group whose... 

The government has so far refused to vaccinate pigs against the disease. South Korea has been heavily criticised for burying up to one million pigs alive as it grapples with a foot and mouth disease outbreak. Since the first case of the disease was confirmed in November the country has embarked on a mass cull. Foot and mouth disease affects all cloven hoofed animals such as pigs, cattle and goats,... 

China will eventually have a military powerful enough to compete with the United States, state media said ahead of the visit of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates. The claim in a newspaper editorial on Friday followed reports that China had completed a prototype of a stealth fighter and after a top US military official said Beijing was stepping up efforts to deploy a “carrier-killer” missile... 

The governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province was assassinated by his own security guard Tuesday, according to Interior Minister Rehman Malik, apparently because he spoke out against the country’s controversial blasphemy law. The security guard was arrested, Malik said. The shooting occurred at Islamabad’s Kohsar Market, which is frequented by foreigners. The guard, Malik Mumtaz Hussain... 

Australian anti-whaling activists Japanese and American officials discussed taking action to weaken a prominent anti-whaling group, with Tokyo insisting that Sea Shepherd’s confrontations on the high seas actually hurt efforts to reduce whaling, U.S. diplomatic cables show. The U.S. representative to the International Whaling Commission, Monica Medina, discussed revoking the U.S.-based conservation... 

China is preparing for conflict ‘in every direction’, the defence minister said on Wednesday in remarks that threaten to overshadow a visit to Beijing by his US counterpart next month. “In the coming five years, our military will push forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction,” said Liang Guanglie in an interview published by several state-backed... 

India and Russia have decided to work together in the field of nuclear commerce. The two countries will help set up smaller nuclear power plants in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, sources said. This, according to South Block sources, is a key outcome of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to India. China is active in most South Asian countries, building infrastructure... 

North Korea said the U.S. and South Korea are “inviting a nuclear war” by conducting military drills, even as a Seoul-based think tank predicted that Kim Jong Il’s regime may hold another atomic test next year. South Korea’s Dec. 20 artillery drill on Yeonpyeong Island near the disputed sea border was an intentional provocation, and North Korea is closely watching “the reckless behavior... 

Washington transferred more than 600 million dollars to the Pakistani government this week to pay for its efforts in the fight against violent extremists, the US embassy in Islamabad said Thursday. The 633 million dollar payment under the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) programme came on Wednesday, amid reports that top US military commanders in Afghanistan were pushing to expand special forces ground... 

South Korean soldiers patrol near Dangjin, South Korea, on Tuesday. South Korea announced new land and sea military exercises on Wednesday, including its largest-ever live-fire drill near North Korea, just as tension on the peninsula was beginning to ease after Pyongyang’s attack on a southern island. The firing drills planned for Thursday near the Koreas’ heavily armed land border signaled... 

South Korean Ahyeon Middle School students take shelter from a simulated North Korea’s attack during a civil defense drill at a subway station in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2010. South Koreans stooped work, donned gas masks and headed to underground shelters Wednesday in the country’s biggest-ever civil evacuation drill staged amid tension over North Korea’s artillery... 

China is shifting its space program into high gear, with recently announced goals to build a manned space station by 2020 and send a spacecraft to Mars by 2013 — all on the heels of its second robotic moon mission this year. Yet some space analysts worry that China’s ascendancy in space means the waning of American superiority in spaceflight. The United States is retiring its storied space...