South Korea's government said Sunday it believes North Korea may test a missile around April 10, citing as an indicator Pyongyang's push for workers to leave the Kaesong Industrial Complex by then.
Seoul "is on military readiness posture," said South Korea's Blue House spokeswoman Kim Haeng in a briefing. She said national security chief Kim Jang-soo also based the assessment on North Korea's hint to foreign diplomats in Pyongyang to send personnel out of the country.
FULL STORYNorth Korea has entered a "state of war" with neighboring South Korea, according to a report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
North and South Korea technically remain at war since their conflict between 1950 and 1953 ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty. On March 11, the North Korean army declared the armistice agreement invalid.
FULL STORY
An al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility Wednesday for a chain of 24 bombings and two gun attacks in Iraq a day earlier, as the death toll rose to 61.
A statement attributed to the Islamic State of Iraq appeared on extremist websites, calling Tuesday's carnage "retaliation" against Shiite members in government.
Though Iraq has grown safer in the last six years, sectarian violence and instability still grip the country 10 years after the start of the U.S.-led war.
FULL STORYMore civilians in Syria are dying because government forces are using increasing numbers of cluster bombs in residential areas, a rights group said Saturday.
Human Rights Watch says its researchers have identified 119 locations across Syria, where at least 156 cluster bombs have been used from August to mid-February.
The result is "mounting civilian casualties," the rights group said.
Human Rights Watch said it has investigated two cluster bomb attacks in the past two weeks - in Deir Jamal, near Aleppo, and Talbiseh, near Homs.
These attacks killed 11 civilians, including two women and five children, and injured 27 others, the rights group said.
"Syria is expanding its relentless use of cluster munitions, a banned weapon, and civilians are paying the price with their lives and limbs," said Steve Goose, director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch.
FULL STORYFive coalition service members died after a helicopter crash in southern Afghanistan on Monday, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said.
The chopper went down in the Daman district of southern Kandahar during a rain storm, said Jawid Faisal, a government spokesman for the province.
There was no enemy activity in the area at the time of the incident, ISAF said. It has not released the nationalities of the service members.
FULL STORY
A policeman sacrificed his life for the sake of others, embracing a suicide bomber in southeast Afghanistan on Saturday morning to dull the blast as it detonated, eyewitnesses said.
The bomb killed the officer, Murad Khan, and eight minors between the ages of 7 and 17.
FULL STORY[Updated at 6:22 a.m. ET] A car bomb near the Syrian ruling party's headquarters killed 31 people on Thursday, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
[Posted at 5:56 a.m. ET] A car bomb targeting the headquarters of Syria's ruling party killed eight people in central Damascus on Thursday, according to state media and opposition activists.
The explosion burned 17 cars and damaged 40 more, Syrian state TV said.
Eight body bags were brought for charred remains of passengers who were in a taxi, according to state television.
FULL STORY[Update 12:44 p.m.] The Israeli military says more than 85 rockets from Gaza have hit Israel since yesterday. "In the past two days, Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip have dramatically escalated their attacks against Israel — firing an anti-tank missile at an IDF jeep as well as launching barrages of rockets at Israeli civilians," the Israel Defense Forces says.
The Palestinian official news agency WAFA posted this photo, saying it was taken in Gaza today after an Israeli strike. WAFA did not give an exact location. Israel has said it targeted a rocket-launching squad in Gaza.
This photo shows Israelis running for cover as a siren wailed in the city of Ashkelon in southern Israel, warning people of more rocket attacks coming in from Gaza, on Saturday night.
Reeling from his doomed cease-fire plan that disintegrated in hours, international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi met Monday with Russia's foreign minister on what to do about the Syrian civil war.
It was Brahimi's first meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, a position he inherited after other world diplomats also failed to stop more than a year of relentless bloodshed. Brahimi said neither side of the crisis is showing signs of backing down.
FULL STORYSomeone in an Afghan police uniform killed two U.S. troops today - the latest in a string of insider attacks this year.
The attack in Uruzgan Province is being investigated, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan said. More than 50 people have been killed in these so-called "green-on-blue" incidents this year. The Afghan government calls the attacks terrorism.
It’s already No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
Like little kids with the latest Harry Potter sequel, Washington and the rest of the world will be eagerly thumbing through “No Easy Day” when it hits bookshelves Tuesday. The memoir of a Navy SEAL who helped kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011 purports to tell the full story of how the globe’s most-wanted terrorist met his end.
Mentions of the book's author spiked on Twitter on Thursday morning, as did the term "Navy SEAL book." About 4,500 mentions were made by mid-morning. The book was mentioned more than 8,000 times on August 22, when news broke of its release.
Carl Carver tweeted, "This sort of thing is NOT healing relations in Middle East, predicted as the starting point of WWIII !"
"It seems like once a year since I graduated college I get super excited for a book release, this year No Easy Day by Mark Owen is that book," Drake Stahr tweeted.
The RangerUp fan page on Facebook, a popular spot for military folks, had a range of comments.
A U.S. Air Force officer hopes to soon release a database of bombs dropped from American military aircraft since World War I – a tool he says can be used to shed new light on old conflicts and perhaps even help locate unexploded ordnance.
Lt. Col. Jenns Robertson says he began working on THOR, or Theater History of Operations Reports, in his spare time in 2006. It combines information from numerous sources – thousands of paper reports, punch cards and magnetic tape records for older conflicts, and digital databases for others – across nearly 100 years.
The database, already being used by the Defense Department and other government agencies, for the first time allows users to search and find on a map nine decades of U.S. bombings. THOR was first reported on this week by The Boston Globe.
Robertson started the database when he was part of a briefing team for the Air Force’s chief of staff at the Pentagon.
“What drove the development of THOR was ... the data may have been out there, but it was a pain in the rear end to find it and make it useful,” Robertson said by phone Tuesday.
A bar patron's toast to a fallen sailor has become a phenomenon on Facebook.
On March 28, Hannah Hobbs, a waitress at a Bennigan's restaurant near Borger in the Texas Panhandle, posted a photo of a glass of beer, with a handwritten note from the customer that read:
In memory of Lt. j.g. Francis Toner, USN.
Killed in action 27 March 2009,
Baikh Province, Afghanistan
"Non Sibi Sed Patriae"
NOT FORGOTTEN!
In her photo caption Hobbs explained:
"This guy came in today and asked if it was ok if he left this on the bar.. I cried 
I left it there until like 1130 tonight.... I didn't want to pour it out but I had to. So I'm posting this pic so it can stay forever!! So can I get some likes people??"
Yes, yes she could get some likes. As of 10 p.m. ET Monday, Memorial Day, 1,239,045 people had clicked the "Like" button, and the numbers were continuing to skyrocket as the image was shared more than 117,000 times. FULL POST
Editor's Note: This post is a recap of the top five videos on CNN.com from the past week. So in case you didn't catch our best videos during the week, here is your chance to see what you missed.
The most watched video on CNN.com this week was the surveillance video of George Zimmerman in handcuffs after the Trayvon Martin shooting. Following as the second most popular video was a firsthand account of the erratic Jet Blue pilot who was subdued by passengers. Rounding out the top five are a heart-warming reunion between a soldier and an excited dog, a teen signing sensation, and finally, an open mic mishap from President Obama. Check out the videos below and see what everyone else was watching this week on CNN.com.
Police surveillance video shows George Zimmerman arriving at the police department in handcuffs the night of shooting.
A JetBlue passenger describes the incident that caused a flight to be diverted.
A dog can't contain himself after seeing his owner come home from Afghanistan.
Jonathan Antoine's booming opera voice leaves judges on "Britain's Got Talent" pronouncing him the next Pavarotti.
An open mic catches President Obama seeking help from Russia's outgoing president for NATO's missile defense.
Follow us on Twitter: @CNNVideo
Reporter Yalda Hakim of Australia’s SBS network has become the first western journalist to visit the villages where a U.S. soldier allegedly killed 17 people.
In a remarkable report she talks with some of the survivors and some Afghan guards on duty at the military camp from where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales left on his alleged killing spree.
The video at the top of this story is Hakim’s account of her journey to the remote villages near Kandahar and what she was told.
Editor's Note: This post is a recap of the top five videos on CNN.com from the past week. So in case you didn't catch our best videos during the week, here is your chance to see what you missed.
The top videos on CNN.com this week featured a jaws-like shark swarm, a new high-tech Dreamliner, the story of a mother's dramatic reunion and some horrifying video of torture and death in Syria as the uprising there reaches the one year mark. Click below to see the videos that impacted so many others this week.
Sharks off the coast of Australia go on a feeding frenzy. Australia's Network Ten reports.
CNN's Arwa Damon reports on torture captured on video carried out allegedly by Syrian soldiers.
In Syria, a rescue operation to retrieve bodies of a massacred family turns up a child who lived. Arwa Damon reports.
Dr. Drew talks to Auboni Champion-Morin, whose son was found after being kidnapped 8 years ago.
Lizzie O'Leary reports on whether the new Boeing 787 is everything it's cracked up to be.
The Afghan government will investigate reports of civilian casualties in a recent NATO bombing, the office of President Hamid Karzai said Thursday.
Karzai has appointed a delegation to investigate the bombing in Kunar province.
According to reports, four children, a woman and a man were killed in the incident, the president's office said.
FULL STORYMilitary officials have interviewed two of four Marines in a video that shows them urinating on dead bodies sprawled out on the ground, a Marine Corps official told CNN Friday.
The Marines were not detained after the interview, the official said.
The names are not being made public, said the official, who did not want to be identified because the investigation is ongoing.
The identities were determined as officials in the United States and Afghanistan expressed shock and outrage regarding the video, which was posted Wednesday on a number of websites.
FULL STORY
David Hickman was a star football player in McLeansville, North Carolina. He was a quiet man with a larger-than-life presence. He also holds the distinction of being the last soldier to die before the official announcement of the end of the Iraq war. That fact has made him a part of history, CNN affiliate WGHP reports.
Hickman, an Army specialist, was remembered Thursday by friends as the U.S. marked the official end of the war.
President Obama commemorated the milestone with an appearance at Fort Bragg, where Hickman was stationed before being deployed in September.
Obama, Panetta honor Iraq war troops
"As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm proud to finally say these two words, and I know your families agree - welcome home. Welcome home,” he told cheering troops.
The coincidence did not go unnoticed by Hickman’s friends, who spoke to WGHP.
"That is so like David. He wasn't going to go out quietly. He's going to go down with a place in history," said his friend Logan Trainum. "He wasn't the loudest one in the room, but he was the most noticed one in the room. He just had that presence about him."
Home and Away: Share your tributes to fallen troops
Even in death, Hickman was making his presence known, his friends said.
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