Black Friday is done but Cyber Monday is only a couple of days away. Yes, there was some gaming news to report on even on the day after Thanksgiving:
Rumor suggests new Call of Juarez game in the works - A survey of Ubisoft gamers about Call of Juarez: The Cartel suggests that a new game in the Western-themed first person shooter series from developer Techland might be in the works.
2K Australia now working on BioShock Infinite - The developer behind the upcoming XCOM revivial is also helping Irrational Games (its former sister studio) to help complete the highly anticipated BioShock Infinite.
Satire group behind fake attempt to ban Skyrim in the US - The satirical group Christwire started a fake petition to the White House asking the Obama administration to ban the recent fantasy RPG game as well as the creation of "national database of videogame avatars and 'screen names' so that teenagers can be better monitored."
Future to merge UK and US operations - Future Publishing, which operates a number of gaming print magazines here in the US as well as the UK, have announced plans to merge both of its operations to "create a single global product line." There's no word on exactly how the merge will take place nor if there will be any layoffs as a result.

John began his journalism career writing for print newspapers but 11 years ago moved on to write mostly for online outlets, particularly PC gaming sites. He has worked for a variety of sites including Firing Squad and most recently AOL's Big Download web site.
Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/gaming-news-round-up-november-25
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MIAMI (AP) ? No, the NBA lockout is not over. Not yet, but soon ? once owners and players approve the deal that would have NBA games resume on Christmas Day. Here's a look at some of the most prevalent questions about the state of things in the league right now.
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Q: What happened to get this deal done?
A: As one person involved in the talks told The Associated Press, "sanity prevailed." Neither side was winning. Owners were losing money. Players were losing money. Fans were getting angry. Because Christmas is traditionally the day when the public really start watching NBA games, there was a late push to try and to salvage the Dec. 25 schedule.
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Q: So it's done?
A: Well, no. There's still a slew of issues to work through, and then there's the not-so-small matter of having owners and players actually vote on the deal. Though the deal's expected to be approved, it won't be unanimous as there are factions of hard-liners in both camps who will be unhappy with substantive portions of the deal.
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Q: How could union chief Billy Hunter and president Derek Fisher "negotiate" with the NBA if the players' union had been disbanded?
A: When players dissolved the union that meant Hunter and Fisher no longer had the power to negotiate and agree to terms for the players. What could happen and what did happen with the NBA, as it did with the NFL this summer, is that lawyers and representatives for both sides can hold discussions under the guise of antitrust settlement talks. Hunter is an attorney. He knew the rules and the risks. Certainly, this could have blown up for the players and risked their antitrust lawsuit in Minnesota.
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Q: What happens to that lawsuit?
A: Barring something crazy, the players will ask that it be dismissed. The league also must dismiss its New York lawsuit about the legality of the lockout.
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Q: When will training camp start?
A: Dec. 9. Free agency is expected to begin then, too, meaning some locker rooms may as well start installing revolving doors now.
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Q: And the first games?
A: The league wants three games on Christmas Day, and it's a safe bet the previously scheduled matchups ? Boston at New York, Miami at Dallas in a finals rematch, and Chicago at the Los Angeles Lakers ? will go on as planned. The Dec. 26 schedule and beyond? Get out your erasers. A lot will be changing.
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Q: I don't understand. If there's a deal, why is nothing happening for two weeks?
A: Only the framework of a deal is in place. Now the rules, the language, the nuances, they all must be put to paper by the lawyers who will be charged with actually writing the new collective bargaining agreement. Until that's done, no players can be signed, traded, etc., since there are still no real operating rules by which teams would have to abide.
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Q: How will the schedule work?
A: Still unclear. The easiest way to fill a 66-game schedule would be for teams to play four games against each divisional opponent (16 games) and two games against every other team in the league (50 games). It would also ensure that every team makes at least one appearance in every league arena, which is what fans would want anyway. A season without Kobe Bryant going to Madison Square Garden? Not happening.
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Q: Will there be preseason games?
A: A person involved with the process tells The AP there will be, but details are still pending. (A good guess: Teams would play two games, probably against a nearby rival.) It's a strong possibility that those games will have reams of low-priced tickets, a gesture of apologizing to fans for the delay in getting basketball going again.
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Q: What about the players who signed overseas? Can they come home?
A: In most cases, yes. New Jersey guard Deron Williams said on Twitter early Saturday that he would soon be leaving his Turkish club, Besiktas. That team will not be thrilled to see him leave ? Williams had a 50-point game a few days ago. Some players who signed deals with Chinese clubs may have to work a bit harder (or, well, pay) to escape those contracts.
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Q: What happens to these scheduled charity games, like the "Homecoming Tour" featuring LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony, or Mario Chalmers' game in Alaska on Dec. 1?
A: Organizers were working Saturday to salvage at least some of them. Wade said he wanted to use the planned four-game tour he's involved with as a way to play competitive basketball before the season, even though he didn't know at the time when the season would begin. Although most players are in great shape, there's a big difference between that and "game shape." A two-week training camp might not be enough time to get them there, either.
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Follow Tim Reynolds on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ByTimReynolds
Associated Pressricin in god we trust ben gibbard zooey deschanel damian mcginty tj houshmandzadeh tj houshmandzadeh
BARABANKI, India ? Out on the edge of town, a few steps from the railroad tracks and across the street from an emerald-green field that stinks of sewage, Sanjeev Saxena sits inside a signpost of a new Indian era. Occasionally, he glances up from his desk to see if anyone is coming through the door.
He's waiting to sell you a dream.
It's a dream about small-town prestige, and air conditioning in the brutal north Indian summer. It's a dream they never thought they'd see in India's millions of villages, and of people who once couldn't imagine clawing their way into the middle class.
It's a dream that comes in 15 models and 35 colors. Financing is easily available.
"I remember when cars were for rich people," said Dharmendra Srivastava, 32, one of Saxena's seven salesmen at the brightly lit dealership with the unwieldy name Bright4Wheel. "Today, everyone in India wants to have a car: the city people, farmers, everyone."
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Little is changing modern India more than the spread of cars, a four-wheeled reflection of its economic transformation and a window into the aspirations of the new Indian middle class.
The automotive metamorphosis has spread from the upper-class enclaves of India's biggest cities to its countless Barabankis: once-quiet towns now spilling over with concrete buildings, crowded streets and clattering vehicles.
Farmers and schoolteachers now buy cars. The Barabanki shopkeeper selling fluorescent tubes for 150 rupees ($3) apiece has one. The farmer-businessman with the one-room tire store has two.
Saxena, with his smoker's growl and graying comb-over, often tells his team that what they do is about sales technique: about confidence, about treating customers right, about knowing the latest offers.
"You need to learn how to convince people to buy. If you can't do that, you need to ask why," he told them during a recent sales meeting, his voice somewhere between an angry father's and an encouraging teacher's.
It was the first day of a string of autumn Hindu festivals marking the year's biggest shopping season, and an hour before the arrival of the day's first customers. It was three days before the Maruti-Suzuki dealership's monthly sales deadline. Everyone felt the pressure. "We can't lose a customer, no matter what happens," Saxena said.
But behind the technique is something else.
Maruti sells its cars with ads showing an idealized India that barely exists, even in the country's wealthiest enclaves: sprawling houses with white picket fences, highways with no traffic, friendly towns without a hint of litter. Everywhere, there are joyful Indians driving Marutis.
That's the Indian dream they're selling.
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The fantasy began taking shape in 1991, when the government was facing crushing debt payments and dangerously low foreign exchange reserves. Desperate to save itself, India abandoned socialism and embraced globalization to become one of the world's fastest-growing economies.
Per capita income 20 years ago was $350, one-quarter of what it is today. The literacy rate was 42 percent. Cars were an unimaginable extravagance.
The small middle-class spent years on waiting lists for cars. Then, for the most part, they had two choices: the Ambassador, a ridiculously outdated bubble-topped sedan whose design was borrowed from 1950s Britain; and the Maruti 800, a stripped-down economy model that resembled a metal box with wheels.
What began in 1991, though, has turned India into an economic juggernaut, with a middle class now estimated at more than 250 million people. The country has paved more than 500,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) of roads in the past two decades, and car production and sales have skyrocketed. Maruti sells more cars than anyone else, but automakers from Mahindra to Ford to Hyundai have factories here. Customers can now buy anything from a $2,700 Tata Nano ? the dirt-cheap everyman's car that became a sales flop ? to a $712,000 Ferrari FF.
Indians bought 2.5 million cars last year, 25 percent more than the year before.
When sales here do suffer, as they have recently amid rising inflation and spiking interest rates, the results would still leave many Detroit auto executives sick with envy.
In the U.S., a bad year can mean car sales plummeting by more than 15 percent. In India, a bad year means growth of 2-4 percent.
Everywhere, cars are bringing change.
Mohammad Ismail came to Bright4Wheel on a recent afternoon from Kurkhila, his hometown about 20 miles (30 kilometers) away, for a minor repair.
"Five years ago, my village had just one car," he said. Then the first paved roads came, setting off a cascade of car-buying and more road-building, of friends buying cars to keep up socially with friends.
Ismail, a middle-school teacher who earns $600 a month, had never driven a car before last year. His elderly father, a retired government health worker, had never owned anything bigger than a motorcycle.
But six months ago, after a co-worker bought a car, Ismail decided it was time. His father gave $1,900 for the down payment, and Ismail arranged loan payments of $87 a month.
He brought home an $8,000 Maruti WagonR, a four-door hatchback.
"When I was a little kid, I dreamed that one day I would get to sit in a car," said Ismail, smiling broadly. "Even that seemed like a far-off dream."
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The new India was made for Saxena's salesmen, connoisseurs of automotive consumerism.
There's Srivastava, who sells cars in his dreams, and Rohan, a quiet man with only one name who comes to life on the sales floor, shyness crumbling as he greets customers. There's Ashwini Gupta, who is saving up for his daughter's education, and Haris Rehman, a strutting 24-year-old with gel-spiked hair hoping to move to America.
There's Dinesh Kumar, a rail-thin 28-year-old who could pass for a teenager. Kumar was born in a nearby farming village, moved to Mumbai to sell ads for an Internet company, ran out of money, came home, and finally moved into a $20-a-month rented room. After three weeks at Bright4Wheel, he hasn't sold a car. He can spend an hour staring at his cellphone, hoping for a miracle buyer to call. Saxena has warned him: Make a sale or you'll be fired.
Misery engulfs him.
"There's a lot of pressure on me," he said, dazed. "I've been unlucky,"
Behind his back, the others suspect he won't make it.
"It's a pressure cooker, what we do," said Gupta, a friendly, twitchy man who seems incapable of sitting still. "Maybe if he had one sale he'd get some confidence. But he's too nervous."
To watch these men sell cars is to see a performance that combines a fierce faith in Maruti with a near-religious belief in the transforming power of cars. Mixed into that are the sales tactics you could find in most any American car lot.
At the Barabanki dealership they'll greet you with a firm, well-practiced handshake, look you in the eye and laugh at your jokes. There will be no talk of uncertain interest rates or market downturns as you look over the cars ? the paradise blue A-star, the beige Estilo ? and are eventually escorted to a faux-leather sofa for the final sales pitch.
It normally focuses on one issue: status.
"A man who sees his neighbor going out every night in his car gets frustrated. He says 'Dammit, I need a car too.'" said Gupta. "In villages, people used to buy land when they had money. But now, if you want to show you're successful you buy a sparkling new car and everyone comes to admire it."
These salesmen have helped transform India.
The cars they have sold have helped link thousands of long-isolated villages to cities and towns. Their cars have given people better access to jobs, schools and medical care. There are customers who talk about the schools their children can now attend and customers like Ismail, the teacher so proud of his WagonR, who says it saved his father's life.
When his father had a heart attack a few months ago, it was Ismail who rushed him to the nearest hospital. Kurkhila, like much of India, has no reliable emergency ambulance service.
"My father would have died without that car," he said.
But for every story like Ismail's, there is the other side of India's automotive miracle, from an explosion of traffic jams to choking pollution to ? by far ? the world's highest number of road fatalities - more than 200,000 a year.
This is a country where horn-honking is ubiquitous and turn signals are disdained. In most cities, someone with no driving experience can get a license with a $10 bribe.
By the middle of the 21st century, India is expected to have the world's largest population, and one of its largest economies. So what happens when hundreds of millions of Indians have cars?
Don't ask.
"I don't worry about traffic and such things," snorted Vikas Singh, a fast-talking finance broker who works down the street from Bright4Wheel, and who regularly arranges loans for its customers. "This is all money for me."
Then he laughed.
"At least two or three times a month someone comes to me and says 'I want a car ? today,'" he said, holding up his hands as if he was holding a bag of money. "And we get them a car that day."
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Two decades of economic growth are rewriting India's cliches, with snake charmers and destitute holy men giving way to software millionaires and rich housewives trawling through air-conditioned malls.
In truth, both reflect the twin realities of modern India.
This is a country where Rolls Royce is expanding its presence, but where more than 400 million people still live without regular electricity.
It's a country where cars remain out of reach for most car salesmen, struggling near the bottom of India's middle class on salaries that seldom hit $500 a month, and are often much lower.
That's enough for schools for a salesman's children, and a new TV every few years. It's enough for a motorcycle. But it's not enough for a new car.
It's an irony that isn't lost in the Bright4Wheels showroom.
When would Srivastava buy a car? He looked down at the white tile floor.
"I'll get one in two years, maybe. Or four years, or five years," he said. But he needs money for schools, and is hoping to move his extended family ? nine people crowded into three rented rooms ? into a new house. His salary, normally about 10,000 rupees ($200) a month, is far more than his father earned as a lineman for the state electricity company.
But, he added: "There is just so much to buy today."
In many ways, the car salesmen of Barabanki are like the town itself.
For generations, Barabanki has been a hub for hundreds of nearby farming villages. Money came from trading agriculture produce, often menthol oil used in traditional medicines, or in selling cheap household goods to poor farming families.
Today, the choices for its residents have expanded immensely. Its outskirts now reach nearly to the suburbs of Lucknow, the ever-growing state capital about 30 kilometers (20 miles) away, and many townspeople commute to offices there. People who didn't finish high school insist their children go to college. People who speak no English make sure their children are fluent.
Meanwhile, some of those once-poor farmers have stumbled directly into the middle class, with incomes fed by rising food prices and skyrocketing land values. Today, lucky farmers can earn tens of thousands of dollars selling slivers of their fields to developers.
But while farmers can now walk into dealerships with sacks full of cash, this is still a town where bicycles far outnumber cars. And where successful car salesmen ride motorcycles home in the twilight.
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When it becomes clear that a shopper is about to become a buyer, the salesmen say he is a "murga katega" ? a chicken about to be slaughtered. It's not meant as unkindly as it sounds.
Much to his own surprise, it's a phrase that Dinesh Kumar learned.
With the threat of dismissal looming, Kumar closed his first sale on Sept. 30. He did it by telling the customer his job was on the line, and that the customer would be revered in his neighborhood if he brought home a car.
The buyer signed.
Kumar has sold 10 cars since then.
In Barabanki, the chickens are no longer safe.
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Associated Press Writer Biswajeet Banerjee contributed to this report.
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New fingerprint- and DNA-identification techniques solve a mystery from a 60-year-old plane crash
?| November 25, 2011
TRAGEDY: It took nine years to identify the arm recovered from the wreckage of Northwest Flight 4422. No one knows what caused the crash. The plane was off course before it slammed into the mountain.
Image: Lines History Department (airplane); Courtesy of Kevin A. McGregor, ? 1999 (man with camera); Courtesy of Roy Wittock (arm); Alaska State Troopers/AP Photo (van Zandt); Courtesy of Mike Grimm, Jr. (fingerprint)
On March 12, 1948, at 9:14 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, Northwest Airlines Flight 4422 crashed into Mount Sanford, a peak in the remote Wrangell Mountains in eastern Alaska. All 24 passengers?merchant mariners returning to the U.S. from Shanghai, China?along with six Northwest crew members, probably died on impact. The debris, too difficult to reach, was quickly covered by snow and eventually entombed by ice.
A Black Friday shopper takes a rest with purchases at Northpark Mall in Ridgeland, Miss., on Friday, Nov. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/The Clarion-Ledger, Vickie D. King) NO SALES
A Black Friday shopper takes a rest with purchases at Northpark Mall in Ridgeland, Miss., on Friday, Nov. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/The Clarion-Ledger, Vickie D. King) NO SALES
A consumer rests herself and her bags in Herald Square during the busiest shopping day of the year, Friday, Nov. 25, 2011, in New York. Some of the nation's major chain stores opened late Thursday, competing for holiday shoppers on the notoriously busy Black Friday to kick off a period that is crucial for the retail industry. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Black Friday shoppers line up outside of a Kmart store in Salem, Ore., early Friday, Nov. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/Statesman-Journal, Timothy J. Gonzalez)
This photo provided by the Maricopa County Sheriff?s Office, shows Jerald Allen Newman, 54, after his arrest Thursday, Nov. 24, 2011, at a Walmart store in Buckeye, Ariz. Buckeye police are coming under fire for a video posted online Friday that shows Newman on the floor of the store with a bloody face after police took him to the ground. Police say he was resisting arrest but his wife and witnesses say he was just trying to protect his grandson during a chaotic rush for discounted video games. (AP Photo/Maricopa County Sheriff's Office)
Black Friday shoppers take a rest at Westfield Galleria at Roseville in Sacramento, Calif., on Friday, Nov. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/The Sacramento Bee, Hector Amezcua) MAGS OUT; TV OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
NEW YORK (AP) ? Pepper-sprayed customers, smash-and-grab looters and bloody scenes in the shopping aisles. How did Black Friday devolve into this?
As reports of shopping-related violence rolled in this week from Los Angeles to New York, experts say a volatile mix of desperate retailers and cutthroat marketing has hyped the traditional post-Thanksgiving sales to increasingly frenzied levels. With stores opening earlier, bargain-obsessed shoppers often are sleep-deprived and short-tempered. Arriving in darkness, they also find themselves vulnerable to savvy parking-lot muggers.
Add in the online-coupon phenomenon, which feeds the psychological hunger for finding impossible bargains, and you've got a recipe for trouble, said Theresa Williams, a marketing professor at Indiana University.
"These are people who should know better and have enough stuff already," Williams said. "What's going to be next year, everybody getting Tasered?"
Across the country on Thursday and Friday, there were signs that tensions had ratcheted up a notch or two, with violence resulting in several instances.
A woman turned herself in to police after allegedly pepper-spraying 20 other customers at a Los Angeles-area Walmart on Thursday in what investigators said was an attempt to get at a crate of Xbox video game consoles. In Kinston, N.C., a security guard also pepper-sprayed customers seeking electronics before the start of a midnight sale.
In New York, crowds reportedly looted a clothing store in Soho. At a Walmart near Phoenix, a man was bloodied while being subdued by police officer on suspicion of shoplifting a video game. There was a shooting outside a store in San Leandro, Calif., shots fired at a mall in Fayetteville, N.C. and a stabbing outside a store in Sacramento, N.Y.
"The difference this year is that instead of a nice sweater you need a bullet proof vest and goggles," said Betty Thomas, 52, who was shopping Saturday with her sisters and a niece at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, N.C.
The wave of violence revived memories of the 2008 Black Friday stampede that killed an employee and put a pregnant woman in the hospital at a Walmart on New York's Long Island. Walmart spokesman Greg Rossiter said Black Friday 2011 was safe at most of its nearly 4,000 U.S. stores despite "a few unfortunate incidents."
Black Friday ? named that because it puts retailers "in the black" ? has become more intense as companies compete for customers in a weak economy, said Jacob Jacoby, an expert on consumer behavior at New York University.
The idea of luring in customers with a few "doorbuster" deals has long been a staple of the post-Thanksgiving sales. But now stores are opening earlier, and those deals are getting more extreme, he said.
"There's an awful lot of psychology going on here," Jacoby said. "There's the notion of scarcity ? when something's scarce it's more valued. And a resource that can be very scarce is time: If you don't get there in time, it's going to be gone."
There's also a new factor, Williams said: the rise of coupon websites like Groupon and LivingSocial, the online equivalents of doorbusters that usually deliver a single, one-day offer with savings of up to 80 percent on museum tickets, photo portraits, yoga classes and the like.
The services encourage impulse buying and an obsession with bargains, Williams said, while also getting businesses hooked on quick infusions of customers.
"The whole notion of getting a deal, that's all we've seen for the last two years," Williams said. "It's about stimulating consumers' quick reactions. How do we get their attention quickly? How do we create cash flow for today?"
To grab customers first, some stores are opening late on Thanksgiving Day, turning bargain-hunting from an early-morning activity into an all-night slog, said Ed Fox, a marketing professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Midnight shopping puts everyone on edge and also makes shoppers targets for muggers, he said.
In fact, robbery appeared to be the motive behind the shooting in San Leandro, about 15 miles east of San Francisco. Police said robbers shot a victim as he was walking to a car with his purchases around 1:45 a.m. on Friday.
"There are so many hours now where people are shopping in the darkness that it provides cover for people who are going to try to steal or rob those who are out in numbers," Fox said.
The violence has prompted some analysts to wonder if the sales are worth it, and what solutions might work.
In a New York Times column this week, economist Robert Frank proposed slapping a 6 percent sales tax on purchases between 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving and 6 a.m. on Friday in an attempt to stop the "arms race" of earlier and earlier sales.
Small retailers, meanwhile, are pushing so-called Small Business Saturday to woo customers who are turned off by the Black Friday crush. President Barack Obama even joined in, going book shopping on Saturday at a small bookstore a few blocks from the White House.
"A lot of retailers, independent retailers, are making the conscious decision to not work those crazy hours," said Patricia Norins, a retail consultant for American Express.
Next up is Cyber Monday, when online retailers put their wares on sale. But on Saturday many shoppers said they still prefer buying at the big stores, despite the frenzy.
Thomas said she likes the time with her sisters and the hustle of the mall too much to stay home and just shop online.
To her, the more pressing problem was that the Thanksgiving weekend sales didn't seem very good.
"If I'm going to get shot, at least let me get a good deal," Thomas said.
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Associated Press Writers Julie Walker in New York, Christina Rexrode in Raleigh, N.C., John C. Rogers in Los Angeles and Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed to this report
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CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan ? U.S. Marines will march out of Afghanistan by the thousands next year, winding down combat in the Taliban heartland and testing the U.S. view that Afghan forces are capable of leading the fight against a battered but not yet beaten insurgency in the country's southwestern reaches, American military officers say.
At the same time, U.S. reinforcements will go to eastern Afghanistan in a bid to reverse recent gains by insurgents targeting Kabul, the capital.
Gen. James F. Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, said in an Associated Press interview that the number of Marines in Helmand province will drop "markedly" in 2012, and the role of those who stay will shift from countering the insurgency to training and advising Afghan security forces.
The change suggests an early exit from Afghanistan for the Marine Corps even as the prospects for solidifying their recent successes are uncertain.
"Am I OK with that? The answer is `yes,'" Amos said. "We can't stay in Afghanistan forever."
"Will it work? I don't know. But I know we'll do our part."
At stake is President Barack Obama's pledge to win in Afghanistan. He said during his 2008 campaign that the war was worth fighting and that he would get U.S. forces out of Iraq.
Facing a stalemate in Afghanistan in 2009, Obama ordered an extra 30,000 U.S. troops to the country, including about 10,000 Marines to Helmand province, in the belief that if the Taliban were to retake the government, al-Qaida soon would return to the land from which it plotted the Sept. 11 attacks.
Also at stake are the sacrifices of the nearly 300 Marines killed in Afghanistan over the past three years.
Weighing against prolonging the conflict is its unsustainable cost and what author and former Defense Department official Bing West has called its "grinding inconclusiveness."
In a series of pep talks to Marines in Helmand this past week, Amos said the Marine mission in Afghanistan would end in the next 12 months to 18 months. That is as much as two years before the December 2014 deadline, announced a year ago, for all U.S. and other foreign troops to leave the country.
"Savor being out here together," Amos told Marines on Thanksgiving at an outpost along the Helmand River called Fiddler's Green, "because it's going to be over" soon.
He was referring only to the Marines' role, which is limited mainly to Helmand, although there also are Marine special operations forces in western Afghanistan. The U.S. military efforts in Kandahar province and throughout the volatile eastern region are led by the Army, along with allied forces.
Amos stressed in his visits with groups of Marines that he is optimistic that Helmand's improved security will hold. On Saturday, he said "there is every reason to be optimistic" at this stage of the 10-year-old war.
For the past two years, Helmand and neighboring Kandahar have been the main focus of the U.S.-led effort to turn the tide against a resilient Taliban. In that period, the Taliban and other insurgent networks have grown bolder and more violent in the eastern provinces where they have the advantage of sanctuary across the border in Pakistan and where U.S. and NATO forces are spread more thinly than in the south.
During two days of visiting Marine outposts throughout Helmand this past week, Amos cited progress against the Taliban and was told by Marine commanders that plans are well under way to close U.S. bases, ship war equipment home and prepare for a major drawdown of Marines beginning next summer.
Amos declined to discuss the number of Marines expected to leave in 2012, but indications are that 10,000 or more may depart.
There are now about 19,400 Marines in Helmand, and that is due to fall to about 18,500 by the end of this year.
On Saturday, he told Marines on board the amphibious warship USS Bataan in the Gulf of Aden that Marines in Helmand now "smell success" and that their numbers in Helmand will drop "pretty dramatically" next year.
Marine Gen. John Allen, the top overall commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was ordered by Obama last summer to pull out 10,000 U.S. forces by the end of this year and 23,000 more by the end of September 2012. That has driven the move to accelerate a transition to Afghan control.
Allen said in an interview Thursday that winding down the Marine combat mission in Helmand makes sense because security "has gotten so much better now." He said the pullout of 23,000 U.S. forces in 2012, including an unspecified number of Marines, probably will begin in the summer, which historically is the height of the fighting season in Afghanistan.
Allen said Afghan security forces, often criticized for weak battlefield performance, desertion and a lack of will, are closer to being ready to assume lead responsibility for their nation's defense than many people believe.
"The Afghan national security forces are better than they thought they were, and they're better than we thought they were," Allen said.
That is why he thinks it's safe to lessen the Marine's combat role in Helmand, reduce their numbers and put the Afghans in charge.
That approach also allows Allen to build up elsewhere. He said that in 2012 he will put more U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, increase the number of U.S. special operations forces who are playing an important role in developing Afghan forces, and add intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance resources. He said he plans to add "several battalions" of U.S. forces in the east. He gave no specific troop number, but a battalion usually totals about 750.
"I'm going to put a lot more forces and capabilities into the east," he said. "The east is going to need some additional forces because our intent is to expand the security zone around Kabul."
The top Marine in Helmand, Maj. Gen. John Toolan, said he is not convinced that 2012 is the best time to shift the focus to eastern Afghanistan, where the Haqqani network has taken credit for a series of spectacular attacks recently, including suicide bombings inside Kabul, the heavily secured capital.
He said he believes the Taliban movement in southern Afghanistan is still the biggest threat to the viability of the central government.
Toolan said the Marines continue to make important progress against a Taliban whose leaders are showing signs of frustration and division.
"They're starting to break up," Toolan said. "There's still a lot to be done to see that these insurgents stay on their backs."
Stephen Biddle, a defense analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations who recently visited U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said there is a risk to putting the Afghans in the lead role in Helmand as early as 2012.
"If you throw them into the deep end and put them in the lead in really tough neighborhoods you run the risk that they get their noses bloodied early in ways that could make it hard for them to recover because they lose confidence," Biddle said in an interview in Washington. On the other hand, if the U.S. and its allies wait until 2013 or 2014 to hand off to the Afghans in the most challenging areas, there would be less chance to bail them out.
"It's a dilemma with no obvious solution to it," he said.
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Robert Burns can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/robertburnsAP
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NEW DELHI (Reuters) ? India's food price index rose 9.01 percent and the fuel price index climbed 15.49 percent in the year to Nov. 12, government data on Thursday showed.
In the previous week, annual food and fuel inflation stood at 10.63 percent and 15.49 percent, respectively.
The primary articles price index was up 9.08 percent, compared with an annual rise of 10.39 percent a week earlier.
India's inflation in October hovered above 9 percent for the 11th month, in further evidence of the central bank's inability to achieve a breakthrough in its fight against price rises.
India's central bank raised interest rates last month for the 13th and possibly the final time in a tightening cycle that began 18 months ago, on hopes that persistently high inflation will finally begin to ease from December.
(Reporting by Matthias Williams and Abhijit Neogy; editing by Malini Menon)
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