History, Politics And Current Affairs

South China Morning Post says the death toll has reached 75 by now, 70 in hospital, and many missing - one article spoke of 279 missing people. There are also mentions of the contractor having prior safety violations. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3334292/44-dead-279-missing-ho...

Just yesterday (Tuesday), in the throne speech debate in Norwegian parliament Stortinget, the leader of one of the opposition parties put forward a proposal to buy back Olavsvern for the Norwegian armed forces. The proposal failed at 38 vs 63 votes, but he indicated that the matter would be raised a...

Might an explanation be a use/borrowing of the Scandinavian word for modern barley, which is "korn"? In Swedish, maybe, but in Norwegian and Icelandic, barley is called "bygg", and in Danish "byg" or "almineligt byg", and in all three languages "korn&quo...

They've been having quite a lot of issues lately with site lag and intermittent failures to load pages. From a discussion in the support section recently, it seems that lately they've had a very large number of bot visits, possibly scraping the site for text for AI uses.

(only in Norwegian I’m afraid:) Translation of spoken lines and interspersed text cards, with time stamps: 00:01: "Gun One!" 00:03: "Fire!" 00:06: "Eriksen: You may perhaps start by telling about conditions at Oscarsborg and what happened there." Text card : "Osca...

They were hoping for at least 30 seconds of flight, and from what I read got between 25 and 30, and a good deal of telemetry readings. No damage to the pad, and the rocket landed in the sea, in the middle of the designated safety area. The Greens and the Reds in the local council were still unhappy,...

Uncle Blue looks like he's feeling miffed at being upstaged by another Christmas goat.

Try this link:
https://x.com/Heroiam_Slava/status/1845100789351559345

If you scroll down to the fifth reply in Micael's link, there's another video taken from a higher vantage point and further back, showing a few more seconds of the tank's progress. The tank hits the wall at a shallow angle, bounces back and twirls c. 180 degrees before coming to a rest.

KDA now wants to further develop NASAMS with anti-TBM capabilities, too, by integratign existing missiles and sensors into the NASAMS architecture. The government is considering this as one avenue to met the requirement for long-range air-defence stipulated in the Norwegian defence plans.

In the promo material (pdf) and articles announcing the Arrowhead 120, it looks like it's designed with a sort of cutaway ram, akin to the pre-WW1 light and scout cruisers of the Royal Navy and the Hochseeflotte.

I don't think it's straight-up CAMM, it's called AV-MMA, and (since 2014) is being jointly developed from CAMM by MBDA and Avibras, with a view to make it compatible with the Astros II multiple rocket launcher. The 40/15 km range/ceiling comes from a Brazilian Army requirement for new medium range S...

Is there any reason not to evaluate an updated version of the existing Lvkv 90 (SPAAG version of CV9040) for the VSHORAD mission?

Is gate assignment the airline's decision or the airport's decision?

I first switched onto Norwegian TV, which did a live broadcast, but quickly became frustrated with a commenter that talked and talked without being all that knowledgeable about things. Then I remembered that I have access to SVT as well, and switched over - the commenters there also talked a lot, bu...

To quote Wikipedia: "In modern heraldry, a royal cypher is a monogram or monogram-like device of a country's reigning sovereign, typically consisting of the initials of the monarch's name and title, sometimes interwoven and often surmounted by a crown". The cypher thus functions as a perso...

Anything wrong with the current USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG-81)?

Each post/reply has a little icon of a page/piece of paper (red for new posts/replies, grey for ones you've read before) just below its title and next to the "by [username] » Day Date Time" string, and that has the direct link to same post/reply, which one can use to create a direct link -...

So it is practical to combine ordnance and ordinance.

In Swedish Wikipedia, using a blog entry from the new ordenshärold (Swedish only) as source, it says that while the heralds for the other three orders were vacant since the 19th century and abolished in 1952, the office of herald for the Order of the Seraphim remained in use until the 1974 reforms (...