iran

The Pentagon is trying to speed up the deployment of an ultra-large bunker-busting bomb, which would constitute the largest non-nuclear bomb the U.S. has ever used. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, is a 30,000-pound bomb that would dive deeper than any previous bomb, and could be strapped to B-2 or B-52 bombers by July of 2010.

So all that importance-of-social-media business you keep hearing about Iran? This should tell you something about the underlying truth, no matter how numbing the barrage from the media can be: When the U.S. State Department heard of Twitter's plans for an hour-long regularly-scheduled maintenance outage that would have denied daytime Twitter service to Iran, they stepped in and "urged" them to reschedule.

As you have heard (by now, ad nauseum), the protests surrounding Iran’s troubled and disputed presidential election this past Friday have highlighted how technology and social media are redefining the way moments of mass political unrest are reported, live. Instead of watching CNN, you can observe the same on-the-ground reporting--all in real time--that the CNN folks are watching and then passing on to you. Here's where to find it.

The U.S. State Department is not happy about yesterdays celebratory announcement and rocket launch in Iran. Revealing the opening of a new space center, Iran also launched a rocket, the Explorer-1, towards the heavensalthough whether it actually got to space is up for debate, since Irans first domestically built rocket, sent skyward last year, may have failed to reach orbit. Iran says this effort is all about scientific and technological development, but the international community is clearly concerned that the country isnt just envisioning using these rockets to launch satellites.