Washington, Feb 11 : If you feel that you don''t have enough time to finish a task in hand, then chances are your finished work won''t be up to the mark, says a new study, which claims that it''s the perception of time pressure that impairs performance.

In a first of its kind study, Michael DeDonno, a doctoral student in psychology at Case Western Reserve University looked at how perceived time pressure affected the performance of 163 subjects in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT).

IGT is a popular psychological assessment tool that is used to investigate the effect of perceived time pressure on a learning-based task.

Washington  - North Korea may be preparing for another missile test, the CNN news channel reported late Tuesday, citing an unnamed senior US official.

Photographs taken by a US spy satellite showed activity at a site used previously for testing Taepodong-2 long-range ballistic missiles, the Pentagon official was quoted as saying.

While there was so far no evidence of a missile being transported to the site by the communist country, the preparations were similar to those preceding a test in 2006.

Washington -  expects that President Barack Obama will decide in the coming days over the final number of troop reinforcements for Afghanistan.

There will probably be a decision "in the course of the next few days," Gates told journalists Tuesday.

There were various options before Obama, and Gates said he has given the president his recommendations.

Washington  - US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested Tuesday the United States could "reconsider" placing a missile-defence system in Eastern Europe if Iran dropped its pursuit of nuclear weapons, but cautioned that the Islamic state is a "long way" from showing a desire to change.

Clinton met with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, whose country has agreed to host the radar site for the system.

Washington  - The most important points of the US plan announced Tuesday to inject up to 2 trillion dollars into the US finance and banking system:

- Government and private investors are to provide 500 billion dollars for a start fund which could grow to 1 trillion dollars, to absorb bad mortgage assets. This so-called "bad bank" would serve to relieve the banks of the liabilities so that they can begin lending money again.