Word: billion
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...organization with a website. An entire industry, awkwardly known as search-engine optimization (SEO), has grown up around getting prominent placement on Google, Yahoo!, Bing or one of the other search engines. This jostling for ranking will only get more intense: in October 2008, there were 7.8 billion Internet searches, according to Nielsen; in October 2009, the number had risen to 10.2 billion. And 66% of all those were Google searches, which is to say that two-thirds of all the information supplied to Internet users goes through the same door. (See the 50 best websites...
Mexico is in the throes of its bloodiest drug war ever. There have been almost 11,000 narco-related slayings in the past two years. Because the nation's police forces are so corrupt - many cops moonlight for Mexico's $25 billion drug-trafficking industry - informants are especially important to interdiction efforts. (They helped cops last week locate a sophisticated, 260-yard narco-tunnel beneath Tijuana that almost reached the U.S. border.) Despite that, Mexican officials concede they have an utterly inadequate witness-protection system in place. "There is a vacuum regarding the rules and how to operate a witness...
True, but given the epic levels that Mexican drug-trafficking and violence have reached today, the government needs every intelligence resource it can get. The U.S. has pledged almost $1.5 billion for Mexico's war against the cartels, and critics say more of it should be directed to software like police-modernization programs instead of hardware like Blackhawk helicopters. A reliable witness-protection program should be on that list before more soplones get whacked...
...true test of India's new strategic importance is still to come. The Indian Defense Ministry has announced a massive modernization program estimated to cost as much as $100 billion over the next decade. Russia has long been India's biggest defense supplier, but the civilian nuclear deals and safeguards agreement that India has signed with several countries opens the doors for U.S. and European companies to win some of that massive spending...
...most closely watched deal will be the Indian Air Force's planned purchase of 126 multirole combat aircraft, a contract worth about $10 billion. The IAF has recently begun its field tests of the six finalists, who represent India's old and new allies. In the running are Russia's MiG35, Boeing's FA-18, Lockheed's F-16 and fighter jets from EADS, Dassault and Saab. This is the biggest single tender ever floated by the Indian military, and the decision will be influenced as much by geopolitics as by technical superiority. "Strategic weapons are not only about technology...