As coalition and Afghan forces entered the second week of a major offensive against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, the head of U.S. Central Command warned that the potential loss of lives among U.S. forces in the operation “will be tough.”
Gen. David Petraeus said the losses could be comparable to those seen after the 2007 [...]

Apple has begun removing risque iPhone and iPod Touch applications from its online App Store, including some which had previously been approved for sale, according to reports.
Technology blog TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal said the new policy towards adult-themed contents had resulted, for example, in the deletion of applications featuring bikini models.
TechCrunch said Apple [...]

Police in northwest Pakistan arrested Mulvi Kabir, one of the top 10 most wanted Taliban leaders and a former Taliban governor of Afghanistan’s Nangahar Province, Fox News reported on its website Sunday.
The network, citing two unnamed senior US officials, said that Pakistani police captured Kabir in the Naw Shera district of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province.
The [...]

Natural progesterone, the sex hormone used in the first contraceptive pills, is to be tested on patients with severe head injuries.
Scientists will begin a phase III clinical trial in March and say the drug could save patients’ lives and reduce damage to their brains.
They announced the trial at the annual meeting of the American Association [...]

Stephen Hester, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, has decided to turn down his bonus for 2009 amid a growing public outcry over the scale of rewards, piling further pressure on rivals at Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC to do the same.
Hester’s attempt to defuse the row brewing around the bank, stoked yesterday [...]

A top leader of Niger’s new military junta defended last week’s coup, saying Sunday the army overthrew the uranium-rich nation’s dictatorial president to restore democracy after he refused to step down when his mandate expired.
Col. Djibrilla Hima Hamidou spoke after talks with a delegation of senior diplomats from the United Nations, the African Union and [...]

 Israel’s air force on Sunday introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day and fly as far as the Persian Gulf, putting rival Iran within its range.
The Heron TP drones have a wingspan of 86 feet (26 meters), making them the size of Boeing 737 passenger [...]

Teaching stroke patients to sing “rewires” their brains, helping them recover their speech, say scientists.
By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech.
If a person’s “speech centre” is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their “singing centre” instead.
Researchers presented these findings at the annual meeting [...]

The death of originality in modern video games has, it seems, been greatly exaggerated. Heavy Rain almost instantly telegraphs its differentiation from its gun-obsessed peers by encouraging you to brush your just-awoken character’s teeth and shave him, using right-analogue-stick gestures, prescribed button-presses and shakes of the motion-sensing PS3 controller, which (very vaguely) correspond to their [...]

A statue of Barack Obama as a boy was placed late Sunday night at the Jakarta elementary school the U.S. president once attended, after its display in a public park prompted backlash in the Indonesia capital.
The re-placement of the bronze statue a week after it disappeared from public view was a low-key event officiated by [...]