Obama to detail big troop increase in Afghanistan
Nov/09BC
Source: Yahoo!
Yahoo! - WASHINGTON – After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas.
Obama has said that he prefers “not to hand off anything to the next president” and that his strategy will “put us on a path toward ending the war.” But he doesn’t plan to give any more exact timetable than that Tuesday night.
The president will end his 92-day review of the war with a nationally broadcast address in which he will lay out his revamped strategy from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He spent part of Monday briefing foreign allies in a series of private meetings and phone calls.
Before Obama’s call to Britain’s Gordon Brown, the prime minister announced that 500 more U.K. troops would arrive in southern Afghanistan next month — making a British total of about 10,000 in the country. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose nation has more than 3,000 in Afghanistan, said French troops would stay “as long as necessary” to stabilize the country.
Obama’s war escalation includes sending 30,000 to 35,000 more American forces into Afghanistan in a graduated deployment over the next year, on top of the 71,000 already there. There also will be a fresh focus on training Afghan forces to take over the fight and allow the Americans to leave.
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US dollar falls to 14-year low against the yen
Nov/09BC
Source: BBC News
BBC - The US dollar has hit a 14-year low against the Japanese yen with low interest rates in the US making the greenback less attractive to investors.
The dollar fell to 86.28 yen in early Thursday trading, it’s lowest level since 1995, before recovering to 86.61. The US has indicated it is unconcerned about the dollar’s slide, and will not intervene to strengthen it.
Many traders are swapping dollar holdings for gold as a safer investment in the current economic climate. The price of gold hit a fresh record high of $1,194.9 per ounce on Thursday, before falling back slightly to $1,182.4.
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Spin-based electronics gets boost
Nov/09BC
Source: BBC News
BBC - The next generation of computers may make use of the “spin” of electrons instead of their charge. Spintronics relies on manipulating these spins to make them capable of carrying data. The technique has been shown in a number of materials at low temperatures before.
But researchers writing in Nature have made use of these “spin-polarised” electrons in silicon at room temperature for the first time. The result could lead to computers that require far less power than conventional ones.
The fact that the effect has been demonstrated in silicon - the material that already underpins the computer industry - means that devices exploiting it could be made on a commercial scale more easily.
The problem with silicon is that, as the individual features on silicon chips get smaller and smaller, they require more and more power to move the charged electrons around to represent 0s and 1s of binary code.
That rise in power also means that future chips will run into problems with heating.
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