The United States and China are coordinating their response to North Korea’s vow to launch a satellite next month, a move that many analysts argue is simply cover for the testing of a long-range missile.

In a press briefing early this morning, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes said that President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao had “agreed to coordinate closely in responding to this potential provocation and registering our serious concern to the North Koreans and of course to, if necessary, consider what steps need to be taken following a potential satellite launch.”

“I think the bottom line that the president had in his meeting with President Hu is a message that he’s been delivering over the course of the last two days, which is that North Korea’s new leadership has to understand that they’re not going to be rewarded for provocation,” Rhodes said. “That, in fact, they’re only going to suffer from engaging in provocative acts, and that they need to understand that a better future for North Korea is only going to come if they move in the direction of living up to their obligations, and again, meeting their responsibilities to the international community.”

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Just back from a “town hall” meeting held by Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, at Tulane University in New Orleans.

These kinds of events are difficult for candidates’ advance teams to plan sometimes. Candidates don’t want to be turning too many people away (especially when those same people have been lining up for a long time in the baking sun). But they also don’t want to be speaking to half-empty rooms (or stadiums, as was the case for Mitt Romney’s big economic policy address last month), lest that become the story for the gathered media. Still, judging by the line outside when I entered, many of the students wouldn’t have made it into a venue that at a quick count looked like it would only have held about 260 people.

There was a quick introduction by the Louisiana Republican Party chair, Roger Villere, who echoed what Tulane University Prof. Brian Brox suggested to me yesterday when he said that the prospects for Barack Obama in the state were bleak (Louisiana hasn’t gone Democrat in the presidential election since Bill Clinton was running for re-election in 1996).

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Tomorrow sees Republican voters in Louisiana heading to the polls in the latest primary contest, but as Howard Kurtz has noted today over at The Daily Beast, the media may now be losing interest in this stage of the presidential race. And that’s not particularly good news for anyone except frontrunner Mitt Romney.

One of those still hoping for a change in the Romney-as-the-inevitable-nominee narrative forming once again is Newt Gingrich, who has spent time campaigning on what should be friendly southern territory. I’ll be at a town hall-style meeting he’ll be speaking at today at Tulane University in New Orleans. But in the meantime, I thought I’d get a take on tomorrow’s contest from Brian Brox, an assistant professor of political science at Tulane and a specialist in U.S. campaigns and elections.

Rick Santorum has been riding high in the polls here, with the latest Public Policy Polling numbers showing him at 42 percent, compared with Romney’s 28 percent. Newt Gingrich is in third place, with 18 percent.

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Fresh from creating headlines around the world with rumors of the demise of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month, Chinese microblog users have been at it again, with the Internet in China lighting up yesterday with rumors of a coup.

The Kim rumors proved unfounded (he has since been photographed alive and well at military exercises), and the chatter on the Weibo microblog that tanks were rolling through Beijing was almost certainly nonsense. (Indeed, images of the military that appeared in the Epoch Times that were purportedly taken this week were later found to have been taken from a military website, and dated back to 2010, when parade preparations were taking place.)

But in both cases, there were understandable reasons why the rumors took off. In North Korea, with talk of Kim Jong-un struggling to assert his authority following his father’s death (which itself was only discovered by the outside world when it was announced on an official news bulletin), the idea that Kim Jong-il’s son had been assassinated didn’t sound so outrageous to many.

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Last night saw Republican presidential primary voters take to the polls in Illinois, the second biggest state to vote so far in terms of delegates.

Perhaps the media is tiring of finding new ways to spin the possibility of a brokered convention, or perhaps Romney just did pretty much what polls suggested he would in the state, but there’s a definite sense of, dare I say it, inevitability in the coverage today following the former Massachusetts governor’s healthy win. Romney picked up 47 percent of the vote, compared with 35 percent for Rick Santorum. Ron Paul came in a distant third, with 9 percent of the vote.

Senior Romney advisor Robert O’Brien gave me his take late last night on the race and what it means. “Gov. Romney won a convincing victory tonight in Illinois, capturing voters across the ideological spectrum who believe he best understands Americans’ problems. As he’s done in previous contests, he also won among voters who are most concerned about economic issues and who believe he has the right experience to beat Obama in the fall,” he told me.

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India’s overall economic growth may be sputtering, but the rate of growth for the so-called Internet economy is soaring, according to a new report from Boston Consulting Group.

By 2016, there will be 3 billion Internet users globally, says the report, which forms part of the group’s “The Connected World” series says. “The Internet economy will reach $4.2 trillion in the G-20 economies. If it were a national economy, the Internet economy would rank in the world’s top five, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, and India, and ahead of Germany.”

And India is demonstrating particularly fast growth, outpacing all but one of its G-20 peers with a rate of 23 percent, just behind Argentina at 24.3 percent, but well ahead of Russia (18.3 percent) and Mexico (15.6 percent). As a result, India is expected to see its internet economy grow from about $64 billion in 2010, to $215 billion by 2016.

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Just following up on the news I mentioned earlier today that the Taliban is suspending preliminary talks with the U.S.

Robert Dreyfuss, a regular The Diplomat contributor and long-time Afghanistan watcher, shared his thoughts with me on the implications of that announcement, as well as Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s call for U.S. troops to withdraw from its military outposts.

“I’ve long believed that Afghanistan was never going to be easy. And it’s getting a lot harder. It’s no real surprise that Karzai would take a hard line, since he’s been building toward that for a long time, on night raids, on contractors, on the handover of prisoners, and on talks with the Taliban,” Dreyfuss told me. Like many of those issues – but not night raids, so far – the differences have been solved or papered over, and that’s likely to be the case here, too. But Karzai is following the Iraq model that Maliki used, first pushing U.S. forces out of cities and back into bases. I don’t think his idea is likely to be carried out, but it’s another important signpost toward the inevitable exit.”

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Yesterday it was reports of Pakistan making demands of U.S. forces fighting militants, today it’s Afghanistan. In a further blow to faltering efforts to stabilize the country, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has asked the United States to confine troop activities to U.S. bases, and to pull them back from combat outposts.

The same day, the Taliban announced that it was halting preliminary talks with the United States over its “alternating and ever-changing position,” the Washington Post reports.

Karzai’s announcement is likely a response to the shooting rampage allegedly committed by a U.S. soldier at the weekend that claimed 16 lives, including several children. The killings were condemned in the strongest terms by Karzai, who said they were “unforgiveable.”

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China’s leadership succession might not be an exercise in democracy, but the system has demonstrated it can still be ruthless, with the firing of Bo Xilai as Communist Party chief of Chongqing in southwest China.

 “Zhang Dejiang has been appointed Party chief of Chongqing, replacing Bo Xilai, according to a decision of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee announced Thursday,” the official Xinhua News Agency wrote in a brief note on its website.

This is remarkable news. Bo is about as close to a political rock star as China gets, and was seen as doing something quite unusual in China – effectively openly running for office (in this case a place on the Standing Committee of the Politburo). However, there has been much speculation about Bo’s prospects of reaching China’s top political body since Vice Mayor Wang Lijun, his longtime police chief and partner in Bo’s high-profile and populist campaign against corruption, went to ground last month “in the U.S. consulate in nearby Chengdu until he was coaxed out and placed under investigation.”

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Drone strikes have been one of the most controversial aspects of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan, praised by Barack Obama as “precise, precision strikes,” but dismissed by Pakistan as unlawful.

Ties between the U.S. and Pakistan seemed to reach a nadir last year, with the killing of 24 Pakistani troops by NATO forces in a strike on two military border posts in November. But Pakistan appears to have upped the ante a little further, with the PakTribune reporting that Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has called for the strikes to stop, describing them as attacks against the country’s sovereignty.

“The prime minister said that Pakistan considered these attacks against its sovereignty and pointed that the people also saw it as an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty and against the people. He said the matter had been raised with the U.S. authorities,” PakTribune reported. “When questioned about the success of the drone attacks in decapitating al-Qaeda leaders, he said it was beside the point, the matter was of the sovereignty of the country.”

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