C. African Republic: March in favor of new leader

BANGUI, Central African Republic (AP) ? A demonstration in support of Central African Republic's new leader Michel Djotodia was held in the capital, Bangui.

Several hundred residents marched through the city of 700,000 Saturday, carrying banners endorsing Djotodia, who came to power last week when the Seleka rebel coalition advanced from the north to seize the capital city.

Djotodia met the press Friday and said that he will lead the country through a transitional period to elections in 2016, and he pledged he would not be a candidate in those polls. He vowed to strengthen the rule of law and freedom of expression in the country.

In Johannesburg, South African President Jacob Zuma announced he will visit Central African Republic on April 3 to attend a summit of the Economic Community of Central African States.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/c-african-republic-march-favor-leader-191150998.html

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Strategies For VCs To Increase Startup Success Odds | TechCrunch

Editor?s note:?David Teten is a partner with?ff Venture Capital?and founder and chairman of?Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York. Follow him on his blog or on Twitter?@dteten.

Lots of venture capitalists claim to add value to the companies in which they invest. But how do they do it?? And does it really produce better?returns?for their investors??We recently wrapped up a?study?on best practices of venture capitalists in creating portfolio company value through operational support, exploring exactly these questions.

We found that certain VCs are aggressively building out a focused portfolio operations skill set and recruiting more people with operational backgrounds. Based on a range of sources, we believe that most funds with well-developed portfolio operator models have top-quartile returns (typically above 20 percent IRR in the relevant time periods).

Given the mediocre median?returns?of the VC industry and the high?failure rate?of the typical entrepreneur, techniques to improve the odds of success are highly needed.

?Adding Value

VCs can add more value to their portfolios through team building, operations, perspective, skill building, customer development, analysis, and the network (the ?TOPSCAN? framework):

Team Building:?Designing and?recruiting?for a startup?s most important asset, its human capital base.

Operations:?Enhancing administrative, accounting, legal, and technological capabilities.

Perspective:?Strategy, competitive positioning, defining the target market, and scoping the product.

Skill Building:?Building the right skills, especially for senior management.

Customer Development:?Identifying and gaining access to the right customers.

Analysis:?How entrepreneurs measure, understand, and report the performance of their early-stage companies.

Network:?The cheapest and sometimes most value-added service that an investor can provide is access to his/her network, particularly to?potential investors?and acquirers.

The portfolio operator strategy has potential to boost returns.

A company?s need for these services is greatest in its earlier life. However, even among private-equity funds that invest in late-stage, stable, established companies, we see many such funds?building portfolio operations groups.?Later-stage, private-equity firms clearly believe that their portfolio companies benefit from a similar pool of operational talent, despite the fact that their companies are far more complete in their management and developed in their strategy than the companies backed by VCs.

The portfolio operator strategy has potential to boost returns. Our thesis that greater participation correlates with higher returns is consistent with two other formal studies: ?Returns to Angel Investors in Groups?, and ?Prediction and Control Under Uncertainty: Outcomes in Angel Investing.? Both studies found that higher levels of angel participation in investments, as measured by number of hours per week interacting with a portfolio company, correlates with higher returns.

In addition, VCs (particularly those focused on Internet investments) live in a social-media-enabled world where almost every investor has a very visible public resume on LinkedIn; many have a public blog; and blogs and sites such as?TheFunded.com?closely track their behavior. Social media footprints make it exceptionally easy for entrepreneurs to assess precisely how much value a potential investor can add and reach out to those investors specifically.?Deal origination?becomes very easy for firms with a strong reputation for adding value.

Current Practices

VCs have five main resources with which to increase portfolio company value: cash, brand, industry network, funding network and in-house expertise.

1. Cash.?A significant operational toolkit is expensive. Given the?low average returns of the VC industry, and the modest assets under management of VCs relative to the assets under management of a typical private-equity fund, many VCs simply cannot afford to invest meaningful dollars in a large portfolio acceleration infrastructure.
2. Brand.?The fact that a company has been funded by a well-respected fund/partner alone can increase a company?s odds of success, because that brand makes it easier for the company to attract talented employees and follow-on investors. By definition, startups have no brand at launch.
3. Industry network.?One entrepreneur observed about one of the most prominent VCs in America: ?[X]?s default response to all problems is to email introduce you to 3-10 people in his network who can help.?
4. Funding network.?Later-stage VCs pay careful?attention?to the earlier funders in a company, using the reputations of the funders as a proxy for their own diligence. The next-best asset to a large pool of capital in-house is the ability to easily help raise more capital in later rounds from past syndicate partners.
5. In-house expertise.?VCs can provide consulting, accounting, or operational resources, both directly from their own staff and from preferred service providers.

All of the resources above are synergistic, i.e. more success creates more cash, which strengthens the brand, which increases the industry and VC network, which strengthens the in-house expertise. This is one of the key reasons that venture capital is one of the few asset classes in which?past performance is predictive of future results.

There are three common categories of VCs in terms of attitude and practices toward investing and portfolio company support: financiers, mentors, and portfolio operators, ranked in order of increasing level of operational involvement.

1. Financiers: ?I?m a banker, not an operator.?

The financiers are the most traditional group of VC investors; one said he views venture capitalists as ?glorified commercial bankers.? Financiers believe that the most value added by a VC comes from carefully scrutinizing early-stage companies, generating leads, conducting a thorough due diligence process, and eventually investing the right amount of capital at the right valuation and structure. The relationship to their portfolio after making the investments primarily consists of monitoring.

Of course, the financiers are not completely detached from what is going on in their portfolio companies, but they tend to focus more on formal interaction. Examples include VCs taking board seats, suggesting structures for board meetings, and providing monthly reporting templates.

The most perfect example of a financier is?Correlation Ventures, which some have called the ?Moneyball? of venture capital. Even though the firm?s two managing partners are both former startup entrepreneurs, Correlation never takes board seats and has only modest operational involvement. They gain access to investment opportunities by offering a very rapid?investment decision (two weeks or less), with a very low hassle process, leveraging their large investment in predictive analytics. They have $165 million in assets under management. Other examples are?Right Side Capital Management?and?i2x.

2. Mentors: ?I try to be the CEO?s consigliere.?

Most VCs can be classed as mentors. Mentors believe their fund and personal assets can improve the performance of the ventures they invest in. The most important asset they bring to the table is their personal and professional network, which they leverage to strengthen portfolio companies. Throughout our research, we observed many examples of this: introductions to potential customers, suppliers, partners, and executive-level employees.

What distinguishes the mentors from the portfolio operators, however, is that they deliberately choose not to institutionalize the support they give to their portfolio companies. Support is almost always initiated by the entrepreneur and does not involve preset systems or processes. As one mentor said, ?My entrepreneurs have my cell and email address ? and I always answer them.? As a result, mentors assessing a new investment need to be comfortable that their input will be heard by the companies ? that the CEO is coachable.

In the past few years, there has been a?surge?of small, solo-GP funds, typically with under $40 million in assets. Although in many cases, these solo GPs have strong operational track records, they typically have limited resources to engage in-depth with their portfolio, and so would normally be classified as mentors.

3. Portfolio Operators: ?We have a structured, standard process for adding value.?

Portfolio operators agree with mentors that their unique personal and fund assets can be used to develop their portfolio companies. However, unlike mentors, portfolio operators do this in an institutionalized and structured way. Whereas mentors tend to be reactive in their support, portfolio operators pro-actively look for ways to improve the performance of their investments through systems and processes. We know of numerous instances in which companies took lower valuations to win portfolio operator VCs as investors versus other categories of VCs, because the entrepreneurs so valued the resources a portfolio operator could bring to bear. In other cases, entrepreneurs have offered board options or other sweeteners to highly attractive portfolio operator VCs.

The most common service portfolio operators offer their portfolio companies is recruiting assistance. Most of the VCs in this category not only provide personal references to interesting candidates, but also use their own websites as job boards for portfolio companies. First Round Capital takes this a step further by running a program in which they recruit MBAs for internships and full-time positions with their portfolio companies.

We find that portfolio operator VCs are building teams of employees that are unusually large for the VC industry and include many people with strong?operational backgrounds. These larger teams tend to be accompanied by a transition toward pyramidal organizations, which are increasingly becoming the norm in portfolio operator funds.

As Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman discusses in his?paper??Upside-down Venture Capitalists and the Transition Toward Pyramidal Firms: Inevitable Progression, or Failed Experiment?? ?VCs have long been structured as ?upside-down pyramids? in which general partners outnumber more junior employees. This phenomenon is attributable to the fact that VCs are ?knowledge intensive firms in which esoteric expertise predominates over standard knowledge.?

Moving Toward The Pyramid

The need to exchange rich information in the course of pre-investment activities (e.g. due diligence) serves as a dis-incentive to expand the firm beyond a certain size or adopt formal, pyramidal structures. Those structures are, to a certain extent, an emergent property of large and/or complex organizations, in which workers become specialized and need to structure their interactions more. Although later-stage VCs have the luxury of concrete quantitative data, early-stage VCs rely on more tentative information for which analysis cannot be easily delegated.

Post-investment activities such as operational support for portfolio companies, however, can be delegated and benefit from economies of scale. Pyramidal structures are the most efficient means of systematizing and delivering this support due to the benefits of leverage, delegation and specialization.

Three trends are accelerating the transition to pyramidal models and operational focus. First, the cost of starting a company has come down dramatically, and as a result young entrepreneurs with modest capital and only angel/Series A investors can find themselves leading significant businesses beyond their management capacity.

Second, the rate at which startups can scale has increased dramatically, so the judicious application of VC resources can have an exponential impact.

The pyramidal model ultimately won out in more mature knowledge-intensive industries.

Finally, we have moved to a more transparent world in which both VCs and entrepreneurs find it easier to conduct due diligence. This puts pressure on VCs to differentiate themselves substantively. The pyramidal model ultimately won out in more mature knowledge-intensive industries, such as law and investment banking, and the same may occur in venture capital.

Snapshots: Portfolio Operators

An example of a portfolio operator VC is?Andreessen Horowitz, which has raised $2.7 billion since it was founded in 2009 and has made investments in Airbnb, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Instagram and many other highly successful startups. They give their portfolio companies structured support through one of their four operational support teams, focused on executive recruiting, marketing/PR, technology, and business development. The fund has seven partners and employs?more than 40 operational staff, helping portfolio companies with preparing negotiations, making client introductions and providing preferred suppliers.

My firm,?ff Venture Capital, has a similar strategy; it?has made more than 160 investments in more than 60 companies since 1999. As of October 2011, the firm had $38 million in assets under management and today has 16 full-time employees (including three general partners). We offer our portfolio companies resources,?including a?job board,?recruiting assistance,?strategy consulting, a?mentor network, a pool of service providers, a portfolio?executive community and?accounting services.

First Round Capital?is another example, with seven partners with more than $400 million in assets under management and 22 full-time employees. FRC has a wide range of initiatives to support portfolio companies. For example, they organize yearly CEO, CFO and CTO summits in which executives of all portfolio companies in certain roles come together, as well as a related online community. Because of the internal, closed nature of the platform, it has become a trusted source for advice (e.g. ?Our finances are out of control and we need a CFO yesterday; what should we do??). They offer the portfolio free access to a ?venture concierge,? a lightweight consulting and research service that helps their entrepreneurs save time on research-related tasks.

Google Ventures?has over 115 portfolio companies, makes 60-80 investments per year, and is investing north of $100 million per year. They leverage both Google?s vast resources and a dedicated?54-person?team, including 10 partners. Joe Kraus, partner,?observed, ?We believe helping companies plays more of a role than most people give it credit for.?

Given the economic constraints of the industry, how else can VCs systematically increase the odds that their portfolio companies will be successful?

This is a summary of the full original study, which was co-authored with Adham AbdelFattah, founder and CEO of CircleVibe and a consultant on leave from McKinsey & Co.;?Koen Bremer,?a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in Amsterdam, Holland; and?Gyorgy Buslig, a consultant with McKinsey & Co. in Budapest, Hungary.??

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Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/30/the-lower-risk-startup-how-venture-capitalists-increase-the-odds-of-startup-success/

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Egyptian TV satirist appears before prosecutors

CAIRO (AP) ? A popular television satirist known as Egypt's Jon Stewart has appeared before prosecutors after an arrest warrant was issued against him for allegedly insulting Islam and the country's leader.

Several dozen supporters gathered outside the public prosecutor's office Sunday as Bassem Youssef, the host of the weekly show "ElBernameg" or "The Program," arrived a day after the warrant was first reported in the media.

Government opponents said the warrant against such a high profile figure, known for lampooning President Mohammed Morsi and the new Islamist political class, was an escalation in a campaign to intimidate critics. It followed warrants for five prominent anti-government activists accused of instigating violence.

Youssef tweeted a series of quips from the prosecutor's office. "They asked me the color of my eyes. Really," one read.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egyptian-tv-satirist-appears-prosecutors-101256553.html

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Doctor Who, Season 7, Part 2

Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman in Doctor Who.

Adrian Rogers/BBC

In Slate?s Doctor Who TV Club, Mac Rogers discusses the Doctor?s travels via IM every week with the show?s bloggers and fans. This week he?s chatting with Teresa Jusino, Chick who Unravels Time, who writes the Teresa Jusino Experience.

Mac Rogers: I've watched ?The Bells of Saint John? twice now, and my take is that while it is definitely Steven-Moffat-Who-by-the-numbers, it's very?good?Moffat-Who-by-the-numbers. We've got the "Are you my mummy"-style catchphrase in "I don't know where I am!" We've got the Teselecta-style machines-in-creepily-emotionless-human-shape (with swiveling heads right out of "The Beast Below"). We've got the Doctor interacting with the new companion as both a child and as an adult (symbolically through Clara's 101 Places to See book, and literally through this web-only prequel). And we?ve got a ?Blink?-like ending with the Doctor turning the villains? qualities against them. But if ?Bells? is boilerplate Moffat, I still found it exciting and suspenseful throughout. How do you rate it?

Teresa Jusino: It's funny that you mention all those other episodes of Moffat's, because the one this made me think of was "Silence in the Library." Moffat seems fascinated by the idea of human souls/personalities/essences/whatever and where they go (or where they could go). Can people be captured electronically? What good would that do, and what purpose would this serve? Are people really people if they don't have a physical form? I loved the fact that "The Bells of Saint John" allows us to really see a through-line in Moffat's Doctor Who work. That said, I have a bit of trouble with Clara being quite such a puzzle. Don't get me wrong, she's charming, and smart, and I, like the Doctor, am very curious about who/what she is. But I don't necessarily care about her. And I'm not so sure the Doctor does either, except to appease his own curiosity, and that bothers me.

Mac: I can see that. How well do we know Clara so far? We do learn that she feels a responsibility to care for Angie and her grieving family, but we don't have a strong sense of why she would stay with them for a whole year. What was her relationship to the mother, to Angie, that she would make that kind of commitment? And if her defining quality is that she cares for people who need her, why does the Doctor say more than once, "You don't seem like a nanny"? There's always the chance for the show to dig deeper into Clara over the next several episodes, but I agree, I'd like to be more into her as a character than into her mystery.

Teresa: Well, yes, I'd hope so!

Mac: I did appreciate that Miss Kizlet (a brilliant guest turn from Celia Imrie) and her fellow "hacked humans" presented more of a genuine threat than I've felt like the villains have in recent stories. The idea that clicking on the wrong wifi connection could suck you into a horrible everlasting purgatory is a terrific Doctor Who notion, and shows Moffat's Stephen King-like love of making objects and places ordinary life frightening. The gradual buildup to the airplane attack - first we see the "Spoonhead," then we see the lights come on in all the nearby houses, then we see all the lights in the rest of London switch off, and then we see the airplane bearing down on them - that's a real showcase of Moffat's gift for building menace gradually before unleashing peril.

Teresa: Actually what I thought ?Bells? did well was the other thing that sci-fi does best, which is comment on society. The line where the Doctor is describing the situation as ?human souls trapped like flies in the world wide web, stuck forever, crying out for help," and Clara responds with "Isn't that basically Twitter?" was great! And the whole concept that this is such an easy way to trap humanity - through tech - because we've all become so dependent on it, is one that can stand to be explored over and over again.?

Mac: I found myself wondering how much of the inspiration for "Bells" came from Moffat's own experience on Twitter, one I have to assume was unhappy because he decided to leave. I found Clara's initial cluelessness about the internet hard to believe, given that she's an apparently sophisticated cosmopolitan 24-year-old. But I liked the way she outwitted Miss Kizlet and her underlings with the new computer-savvy she brought back with her from Wifi Purgatory. When she used a combination of webcams and facial recognition software to track down where the bad guys worked - because they'd all put their workplace in their Facebook profiles! - I had to cheer. That said, at some point I'd like to see her be heroic in a way that isn't derived from a quality that was forcibly inserted into her.

Teresa: Agreed. Also, since there are things that we're already starting to see in common between the Claras (like being a governess who wants to travel), I do have hope that we will get to know "Clara Prime" - whoever original Clara is/was.

Mac: I love ?Clara Prime?! This season will be the Search for Clara Prime.

Teresa: Yay! I'm coining a fandom phrase!

Mac: In your essay for the Doctor Who anthology Chicks Unravel Time (freshly nominated for a Hugo Award; congrats to all involved!), you make the case for the William Hartnell Doctor of the 1960s as the adolescent version of the character, regardless of his elderly appearance. I'm torn about how to interpret Matt Smith?s Eleventh Doctor in terms of where he is on the maturity scale. Given his gawkiness with women and his enthusiasm for motorcycles, cookies, and fun outfits, do you think the Doctor is entering a second adolescence or is he an older guy having a millennium-life crisis and trying to look cool in front of young people?

Teresa: I'm definitely more on the side of millennium-life crisis. Any awkwardness with women strikes me as that of an older man who's been "out of the game" for a while. He's only actually awkward around younger women, which makes complete sense for an older man: "You're hot. At the same time, you're young enough to be my child, and I am not a creepy pervert. ACK!" And yes, he still has a child-like sense of wonder, but that seems to signify an older man who's sure of himself and his interests and doesn't feel the need to apologize for them.

Mac: Let's get into the deep-geek stuff. First of all, who was "the woman in the shop" who gave Clara the number to call the TARDIS? Almost certainly River Song, but since that's so obvious I feel like I have to consider other options. Any chance it's Sally Sparrow? We did see her working in a shop at the end of ?Blink.? Or Kate Stewart, working undercover? And whoever it was, how would they know to give the Doctor's contact info to Clara?

Teresa: I would say it's probably River. It's always River. And as Alex Kingston is scheduled to return this season...

Mac: I definitely got a thrill when the children's book the younger brother was reading was written by "Amelia Williams." Amy Pond's still out there! But we're also seeing that something's going on with numbers. In Clara's "101 Places To See Book," we see on the page where she's written down her age each year that she hasn't written down 16 or 23. What happened during those missing years? Also, when she's trying to type in the password for the wifi - RYCBAR123 - she can't quite make herself type the "23" at the end. Cue Jim Carrey? But more seriously, I thought that must have something to do with the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary being on Nov. 23.

Teresa: I also want to talk a bit about the prequel you mentioned, because I did see it, and I immediately resented it after I watched it. It's a bit annoying to me that important story information be put in a random webisode. My feeling is, if it's important to the story, it should be contained within the story - I shouldn't have to go searching for extra bits. When Lost was on, I was obsessed with the supplementary online material. I visited the fake websites, I tried to solve the associated mystery, I read that really bad book, Bad Twin? and yet, none of it was needed to enjoy the show I was watching. Had I not seen any of it, Lost would've still been Lost. But having actual, important pieces of story that can only be found by searching other videos and stuff online? If it turns out that that little girl is more important than that, and that something she said in her conversation with the Doctor is key to understanding the mystery? Yes, I did watch it, but I shouldn't have been expected to.

Mac: Fortunately the revelation of the identity of Miss Kizlet?s mysterious ?client? was well within the episode proper. And how cool was it that the client was unveiled as the Great Intelligence, now having permanently assumed the always welcome appearance of Richard E. Grant? When it comes to recurring villains from the classic series, it's hard to think of a deeper cut than the Great Intelligence, which menaced the Doctor in 1967's "The Abominable Snowmen" and 1968's "The Web of Fear" and made a surprise return in the this past December's Christmas special "The Snowmen." It?s interesting, between Doctor Simeon in "The Snowmen" and now Miss Kizlet in "Saint John," we're seeing the Great Intelligence as an evil mirror of the Doctor, first visiting people in childhood and profoundly influencing the rest of their lives. What do you make of the often nostalgia-averse Moffat bringing back such an obscure villain? And do you think we'll get to see some Yeti?

Teresa: I have to admit -- I rolled my eyes. Sorry! You say Moffat?s nostalgia-averse, and I'm like, "What?" All current Doctor Who seems to do (not just the Moffat era, but Davies, too) is rehash old villains from Classic Who: Daleks, Silurians, Sontarans, Cybermen. Moffat's definitely been better about creating new threats: the Weeping Angels, the Vashta Nerada, the Silence, all genius and horribly frightening. But then he insists on going back to old stuff. For what? To appease the fans of Classic Who? It's a huge universe. The Doctor could swing fifty cats and never hit another Cyberman again if he really didn't want to. I long for one, just one season of Doctor Who with completely new aliens and monsters.

Mac: Speaking of nostalgia, any thoughts about Saturday's news that 10th Doctor David Tennant and Billie "Rose" Piper will be back for the 50th Anniversary special in November?

Teresa: I'm very happy about it! What I'd really love is if Christopher Eccleston would get involved. I know it's never going to happen, but Nine was my first Doctor, and to have him not be a part of things when I loved him so much? Argh.

Mac: The thing I idiotically want to happen - even though there no chance - is a 50th anniversary confrontation between Paul McGann's 8th Doctor and Richard E. Grant's Great Intelligence: Weirdest Withnail and I reunion ever.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=dd0726b8ac23c7a98363048435d69543

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How would you change Samsung's Series 9?

It's not that many devices that we ever really go to bat for, but Samsung's Series 9 Ultrabook has a small place in our heart. When we reviewed the mid-2012 refresh, we could only find a few problems -- the flaky trackpad, the limited storage options and the fact it was a bit on the pricey side. We've known for a while that Samsung's product engineers scour your comments for useful suggestions, so if you bought one of these, why not share your experiences with 'em?

Filed under: Laptops, Samsung

Comments

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/10GMm7WhmV8/

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FireWife: Guest Post: What You'll Need for that Adorable Baby Shower

As you know, I'm fairly excited about the prospect of possibly having baby #2. Whether you're having a little one yourself, or are planning a shower for a friend, I hope you enjoy this guest post by Rachael McAdams. Happy reading!
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Baby showers are full of absolutely adorable things for both mom and baby. Keeping track of everything however, can be tough. Here are a few lists to help stay organized. Themes, Decorations, and Invitations Baby shower decorations should reflect the overall theme of the event. Is mommy planning a ?Noah?s Ark? room? Get pairs of small stuffed animals to put on every table. Does she like to garden? Get small potted plants and packages for seeds for each guest to take home with them as favors, such as these Peter Rabbit personalized seed packets from Esty. Find out what mom and dad are planning for their new addition and try to implement it into the shower?s theme and decorations. Consider asking other family members to join in on the planning and for shower ideas. They may be able to provide that one little bit of information that could make the shower extra special! Once you decide on a theme and what type of decorations you would like to have, you need to order invitations. There are plenty of great options for every budget. For example, Tiny Prints has baby shower invitations to match any theme you can dream up and they usually have a coupon code running. Invitations should go out three to four weeks before the shower so everyone has time to respond and find that perfect gift. Also make sure to include if it the shower is a surprise so no one slips about the plans in front of mommy. Once the theme is picked and the invitations have gone out, it is time to plan a menu, Woman?s Day Magazine has a great list of tasty ideas! First it is important to consider any dietary restrictions mommy may be under. For example, many women need to be extra careful of their sodium intake during pregnancy, so make sure to avoid serving nothing but salty snacks. On the flip side, make sure to include food items mommy will enjoy. Does she love chocolate cake? Or a special recipe of her grandma?s? These are the things that will help make the day extra special with that touch of home. Ultimately, a baby shower is all about having fun and celebrating a wonderful event. Make sure your plans include a fun theme and great food, and everyone will have wonderful memories.

Source: http://kyfirewife.blogspot.com/2013/03/guest-post-what-youll-need-for-that.html

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North Korea says it is entering 'state of war' with South - World News

Baengnyeong Island, which is home to 5,000 South Korean civilians and many soldiers, sits just ten miles from the North Korean border. Despite escalating tensions, most islanders seem determined to stay put while keeping an eye on their neighbors. NBC's Ian Williams reports

By Marian Smith, Staff Writer, NBC News

North Korea said on Saturday that it was entering a "state of war" with South Korea, following a call to arms by the country's young leader Kim Jong Un and days of increasingly belligerent rhetoric from the isolated state.

The North's official news agency KCNA published the joint statement issued by the government, political parties and other organizations.

"From this time on, the North-South relations will be entering a state of war and all issues raised between the North and the South will be handled accordingly," it said.?

The statement also warned that if the U.S. and South Korea carried out a pre-emptive attack, the conflict "will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war."

Analysts have said the North's threats have followed a similar pattern but that the country's 30-year-old leader is unpredictable and potentially dangerous.

The White House responded on Saturday by reiterating that "North Korea has a long history of bellicose rhetoric and threats," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement. However, she said the U.S. "takes these threats seriously".

"We continue to take additional measures against the North Korean threat, including our plan to increase the U.S. ground-based interceptors and early warning and tracking radar, and the signing of the ROK-U.S. counter-provocation plan," she said.

David Guttenfelder / AP

As chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press, David Guttenfelder has had unprecedented access to communist North Korea. Here's a rare look at daily life in the secretive country.

On Thursday the U.S. sent two nuclear-capable bombers to South Korea, where they dropped inert munitions in a military exercise. The flight sparked an angry response from the North, which declared on Friday that it was preparing rockets aimed at American bases in South Korea and the Pacific.

"We take these threats seriously and remain in close contact with our allies in South Korea," said Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council. The response comes as leader Kim Jong Un declared a "state of war" on South Korea. NBC's Kristen Welker reports.

A South Korean defense ministry official said there were no early signs that the North was mobilizing, Reuters reported.

The two nations have technically been at war since a truce ended their 1950-53 conflict, but tensions have been increasing since the North carried out its third nuclear weapons test in February.

NBC News' Kristen Welker and Reuters contributed to this report.

Related:

Analysis: North Korea's threats predictable but Kim Jong Un is not

North Korea's Internet? For most, online access doesn't exist

PhotoBlog: Pyongyang marchers: 'Rip the puppet traitors to death!'

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/30/17527380-north-korea-says-it-is-entering-state-of-war-with-south?lite

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