I'm not sure the market is particularly big for this, but if I had a spare $1.5 billion, I'd definitely be up for this: A team of former Nasa executives is launching a private venture to send people to the moon. For $1.5bn (£940m), the newly formed Golden Spike is offering ...read more

North Korea acknowledged in a noon announcement broadcast on state TV that a satellite launched hours earlier from the west coast failed to enter into orbit. The U.S. and South Korea also declared the launch a failure. World leaders were swift to denounce the launch, calling ...read more

A fasacinating article in the Atlantic looks at the wildly successful cooperative Finnish education model and concludes that the excessive competitiveness of the American model is actually counterproductive: Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the ...read more

Some surreal footage released by state television in North Korea after the death of Kim Jong-Il: It's hard to tell how much of this is put on, how much of it is down to real reverence for the psychotic dictator and how much of it is down to fear. My guess is its some sort of ...read more

Under normal circumstances, death is rarely an event to be celebrated. But in the case of a tyranical dictator responsible for millions of deaths, mass starvation and cruelty beyond imagination, exceptions can be made. From the NYTimes: SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-il, the ...read more