Washington, Sept 25 : In the wake of the recent surge in tensions with Pakistan over unilateral strikes by US-led forces from across the Afghan border, the US administration has reportedly called for a review of US strategy in Afghanistan.

A senior Pentagon official said that US President George Bush has ordered a review of US strategy in Afghanistan, amid rising insurgent violence and tensions with Pakistan.

The review is being led by Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, a deputy national security adviser, with the participation of senior representatives from the Pentagon and other departments, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Washington, September 25 : Automakers’ rising interest in making noiseless cars may leave all road safety measure futile, as a new study suggests that vehicles designed to be quieter may trick drivers into thinking they are driving slower than they actually are.

"The main design principle of making cars these days to be as quiet as you possibly can, is actually a real problem for road safety," Discovery News quoted said University of Queensland researcher Mark Horswill as saying.

While automakers reduce the level of noise inside cars fearing that it distracts the driver or interferes with the car''s entertainment system, the new findings suggest this is a "questionable" aim.

Washington, September 25 : Children who find it difficult to solve mathematical questions may be suffering from developmental dyscalculia, a syndrome that is similar to the reading disorder dyslexia, according to Canadian researchers.

Daniel Ansari, an assistant professor at The University of Western Ontario in London, says that kids with dyscalculia often have difficulty understanding numerical quantity.

Such children find it difficult to connect abstract symbols, such as a number, to the numerical magnitude it represents, he says.

According to him, kids with dyscalculia can''t see the connection between five fingers and the number ''5'', in the same way as children with dyslexia have difficulty connecting sounds with letters.

Washington, Sept. 25 : Republican presidential candidate John McCain will suspend his presidential campaign Thursday and has asked to postpone his debate Friday with Barack Obama so that the two senators can return to Washington to help negotiate a Wall Street bailout, an approach that Obama promptly rejected.

“America this week faces an historic crisis in our financial system. If we do not act, every corner of our country will be impacted. We cannot allow this to happen,” McCain said in mid-afternoon remarks to reporters in New York.

Washington, Sept. 25: North Korea is reported to be planning to resume the reprocessing of plutonium, perhaps as soon as next week, raising concerns in Washington.

According to the New York Times, the country is on the verge of restarting a nuclear weapons program whose shutdown had earlier been portrayed by the White House as a significant diplomatic achievement.

U. S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that the United States still hoped to preserve a hard-won agreement that called for the North to dismantle its nuclear reactor.

But North Korea has refused to resume talks, and no new ones are planned.

Washington, September 25 : New estimates have suggested that India is poised to become the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year.

These are the findings of an analysis completed by the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US.

Despite widespread concern about climate change, annual carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and manufacturing cement have grown 38 percent since 
1992, from 6.1 billion tons of carbon to 8.5 billion tons in 2007.