Second Afghan security handover starts (Reuters)

CHARIKAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) ? Foreign troops began the second stage of a security handover that aims to put Afghans in charge of the whole country by the end of 2014 with a ceremony on Thursday in a small town on the plains north of Kabul.

This new phase of a years-long transfer program will extend Afghan security coverage to half the population, and move beyond the largely showpiece areas chosen for the first stage.

Being able to say 50 percent of Afghans rely on their own police and army for security is a key milestone for the government's Western backers, who will attend a major conference on Afghanistan's future in Germany next week.

With an economic crisis gripping Europe, smaller budgets in the U.S. and electorates weary of a decade-long war, politicians are keen to show progress in leaving Afghanistan -- without letting the country descend into civil war.

All foreign combat troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, with the rapidly expanding Afghan police and army assuming full security responsibility in their place.

At a handover event in Charikar in Parwan province, little over an hour's drive from the capital Kabul, U.S. troops ceremonially folded the American flag before passing control to their darker-uniformed Afghan counterparts.

"We have been monitoring areas in the first tranche (of transition) and note that violence has decreased, and in some areas has decreased significantly," said the commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General John Allen.

He was speaking in the grounds of the Parwan provincial governor's bombed-out compound, where a suicide attack in August killed a dozen people. All but two districts of Parwan will be handed over in this tranche.

Entire provinces where the handover formally begins this week are Balkh, Takhar and Samangan in the north, central province Daikondi, Nimroz in the south, and Kabul.

Districts within Helmand, Herat, Ghazni and other provinces will also be passed into Afghan control, ISAF said.

"For these areas and all the others in the second tranche, we will see the patchwork become whole ... as pieces of Afghanistan are knitted together again by Afghan hands," Allen said.

On December 5, representatives of 85 countries will meet in the former German capital of Bonn to discuss Afghanistan's future.

Not present, however, will be Pakistan, neighbor of Afghanistan and key to regional stability, which pulled out in response to a NATO cross-border attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday Pakistan's decision to boycott the conference was "regrettable," but she hoped to secure Islamabad's cooperation in the future.

The U.S. Senate voted on Wednesday to require President Barack Obama to devise a plan for accelerating the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, signaling growing impatience in Congress with American involvement.

"Transition does not mean the international community is walking away from Afghanistan," U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker said at the event in Parwan.

Despite the presence of tens of thousands of Western forces in Afghanistan, the United Nations and other groups say violence is at its worst since U.S.-led Afghan forces toppled the Taliban from power in late 2001.

NATO-led forces say they have seen a decline over recent months in attacks launched by insurgents against their troops.

(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Emma Graham-Harrison)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111201/wl_nm/us_afghanistan_security_transition

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Adjust your screen?s brightness with Dimmer for iPhone and iPad

Dimmer is an iPhone and iPad application that allows you to quickly adjust your screen’s brightness level without having to navigate through the Settings app. Just launch Dimmer and slide the lightswitch up or down and you’re good to go! It also comes with preset options so that you...

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Toads could be used to forecast earthquakes days before they happen (Yahoo! News)

Study says the pond-dwelling animals can sense a change in groundwater before an earthquake

Aside from ionosphere disturbances, nature has a number of ways that signify an earthquake's arrival far earlier than an iPhone can. Animals, for instance, are known to leave their homes and head to safety anywhere from a few seconds to weeks before humans can feel quakes. It was easy enough for researchers to determine the science behind the behavior seconds before ground tremors are felt, but the explanation behind instances of animal exodus days or weeks prior to any seismic activity has eluded them ? until now, that is. Rachel Grant from the U.K. Open University and Friedemann Freund from NASA?believe they may have figured it all out, thanks to a colony of toads.

Grant monitored a toad colony in L'Aquila, Italy for her PhD project, when she noticed the population number dropped from 96 to almost zero at least three days before an earthquake hit. After forming a team with Freund, they studied how and why that event happened. The results ? which were recently published in a research paper ? showed that stress in the surrounding rocks released charged particles that contaminated the groundwater. The toads, of course, sought refuge away from their environment which had suddenly become toxic.

According to the study, rocks under very high levels of stress due to tectonic forces emit particles that react with air to form positively charged ions. These particles are known to cause health problems in humans like headaches, nausea, and increased levels of the stress hormone serotonin. The positive ions then dissolve in the water, making it lethal not just to toads but other aquatic, semi-aquatic, and even burrowing animals.

The scientists admit their findings need to be tested and studied more. But even now they believe it can be used as one of the early indicators of an earthquake. "Once we understand how all of these signals are connected, if we see four of five signals all pointing in [the same] direction, we can say, 'ok, something is about to happen'," Freund says.

[Image credit: Wikimedia]

[via BBC, Telegraph]

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

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Pakistan to boycott meeting over deadly NATO raid

Pakistani lawyers burn an effigy of U. S. President Obama to condemn NATO strikes on Pakistani posts, in Peshawar, Pakistan on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. The NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers went on for almost two hours and continued even after Pakistani commanders had pleaded with coalition forces to stop, the army claimed Monday in charges that could further inflame anger in Pakistan. A placard reads "NATO is responsible for the loss of Pakistani soldiers." (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

Pakistani lawyers burn an effigy of U. S. President Obama to condemn NATO strikes on Pakistani posts, in Peshawar, Pakistan on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. The NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers went on for almost two hours and continued even after Pakistani commanders had pleaded with coalition forces to stop, the army claimed Monday in charges that could further inflame anger in Pakistan. A placard reads "NATO is responsible for the loss of Pakistani soldiers." (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

Pakistani lawyers get ready to burn an effigy of U. S. President Obama to condemn NATO strikes on Pakistani posts, in Peshawar, Pakistan on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. The NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers went on for almost two hours and continued even after Pakistani commanders had pleaded with coalition forces to stop, the army claimed Monday in charges that could further inflame anger in Pakistan. A placard reads "NATO is responsible for the loss of Pakistani soldiers." (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

Supporters of Pakistani religious party Jamaat-ud-Dawa burn Indian flag during a protest against the Pakistan government decision to accord Most Favored Nation, MFN, status to India, in Karachi, Pakistan Monday, Nov 28, 2011. The MFN status will help both countries to break trade barriers. They also condemn NATO forces strikes on Pakistani posts killing 24 troops. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil)

People condemn NATO strikes on Pakistani posts, in Lahore, Pakistan on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. The NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers went on for almost two hours and continued even after Pakistani commanders had pleaded with coalition forces to stop, the army claimed Monday in charges that could further inflame anger in Pakistan. (AP Photo/K.M.Chaudary)

Pakistani lawyers condemn NATO strikes on Pakistani posts, in Lahore, Pakistan on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. The NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers went on for almost two hours and continued even after Pakistani commanders had pleaded with coalition forces to stop, the army claimed Monday in charges that could further inflame anger in Pakistan. (AP Photo/K.M.Chaudary)

ISLAMABAD (AP) ? Pakistan pulled out of an upcoming meeting in Germany on the future of Afghanistan to protest the deadly attack by U.S.-led forces on its troops, widening the fallout on Tuesday from an incident that has sent ties between Washington and Islamabad into a tailspin.

Meanwhile, a top Pakistani army general called the incident Saturday that killed 24 troops on the Afghan-Pakistan border a "deliberate act of aggression" by NATO forces and said the military had not decided whether to take part in an American investigation into it.

Both developments bode ill for future Pakistani cooperation with U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and reflect the hardline being taken by the army, which is under pressure by an anti-American public to respond forcefully. NATO has described the incident as "tragic and unintended", and U.S. officials have expressed their sympathies with the families of those who died.

The decision to skip the conference in Bonn, Germany, which has been a year in the planning, will trigger concerns in Washington and Kabul that Pakistan is withdrawing from international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan before and after the withdrawal of foreign combat forces in 2014.

It was taken during a Pakistani Cabinet meeting in the city of Lahore, said three officials who attended the meeting. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media ahead of an official announcement.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she understood Pakistan's reason for not attending, but that she hoped it would reconsider its decision. "They should still understand that the Afghanistan conference is a very important one. It's a very good opportunity to bring forward the political process," she said.

Pakistan, which has long had a troubled relationship with Washington, has already closed its two crossings on the western border to trucks delivering supplies to NATO troops in landlocked Afghanistan and said it will review all cooperation with NATO and the United States.

The Dec. 5 Bonn meeting was to bring together Western and regional leaders to forge a strategy to stabilize Afghanistan and smooth the planned American withdrawal from the country in 2014. Pakistan is perhaps the most important regional country because of it influence on Afghan Taliban factions on its soil, and U.S. and Pakistani officials had been urging Islamabad to attend.

Given the general pessimism about the future of Afghanistan, few had high expectations the conference would result in significant progress. But the absence of Pakistan will make even minor achievements much more difficult.

There have been conflicting versions of what led to the attack by NATO aircraft on Saturday, though most Afghan and Western accounts say it was likely a case of friendly fire, launched after a joint Afghan and U.S. special forces team received fire from the Pakistan side of the border.

But Pakistan army Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem on Tuesday called the incident a "deliberate act of aggression" and said it was "next to impossible that NATO" did not know they were attacking Pakistani forces. Nadeem made the remarks to a briefing of Pakistani news anchors, senior journalists and defense analysts at army headquarters.

Foreign media were not invited, but two attendees relayed to The Associated Press what Nadeem said.

One was analyst and retired Gen. Talat Masood; the other didn't give his name because he feared his employers might not approve.

Nadeem said the army had little faith that any investigation will get to the bottom of the incident and may not cooperate with it. He said other joint inquiries into at least two other similar, if less deadly, incidents over the last three years had "come to nothing."

A NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss an incident still being investigated, said between 50 and 150 Afghan commandoes and U.S. Special Forces participated in what the official described as a "normal operation." The joint force was targeting Afghan insurgents in Kunar province, not a high-value individual, such as Taliban leader Mullah Omar, the official said.

Pakistan is angry over the death of its soldiers, but its leaders appear to be playing up their outrage, in part to seek fresh leverage in Islamabad's relationship with Washington. Despite the mistrust, neither side wants to break ties entirely.

Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it's likely that this crisis "will get papered over" with some sort of U.S. or NATO apology and a "bribe in the form of better aid flows."

"In the process, however, the U.S. will face even less prospect that Pakistan will really crack down on insurgent groups in the border area, or stop seeing Afghanistan as an area where it competes with India and which is useful for strategic depth in some future war with India," said Cordesman.

Last year, Pakistan closed one of the border crossings for 10 days after a U.S. chopper killed two Pakistani soldiers on the border in a friendly fire incident. Militants then attacked dozens of the stranded supply trucks that were lined up by the side of the road. After 10 days, the U.S. apologized and it reopened the border.

German Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a coalition spokesman in Afghanistan, told reporters at a regular briefing in Kabul said the NATO coalition has stopped dispatching convoys from Karachi, the sea port in southern Pakistan where the supplies are unloaded, to stop trucks massing at the two closed border crossings.

_____

Associated Press writers Zarar Khan and Asif Shahzad in Islamabad, and Deb Reichmann in Kabul, contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-11-29-AS-Pakistan/id-07ceaf72d8da43a2a825d0170004d3c0

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