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UK ends Afghan combat role, last US Marines hand over base

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan--British troops ended their combat operations in Afghanistan on Sunday as they and U.S. Marines handed over two huge adjacent bases to the Afghan military, 13 years after a U.S.-led invasion launched the long and costly war against the Taliban.

Their coming departure leaves Afghanistan and its newly installed president, Ashraf Ghani, to deal almost unaided with an emboldened Taliban insurgency after the last foreign combat troops withdraw by year-end.

At the U.S Read more

Population Ageing Trends High on the Agenda for Social Development.

>PHILIPSBURG:--- The Symposium on Ageing held last week Wednesday acted as the first step in spreading the awareness about the challenges of an ageing population and letting the public know that this issue is high on the agenda of the Ministry of Public Health, Social Development, and Labour (VSA). Based on the feedback from the audience at the symposium, Social Development is headed in the right direction when it comes to identifying the key priority areas St. Maarten is dealing with due to an increase in the ageing population Read more

Global seafloor map reveals details of Earth's depths

WASHINGTON-- Scientists have devised a new map of the Earth's seafloor using satellite data, revealing massive underwater scars and thousands of previously uncharted sea mountains residing in some of the deepest, most remote reaches of the world's oceans.

The researchers said on Thursday they used gravity measurements of the seafloor from radar equipment aboard the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 satellite and NASA's Jason-1 satellite to capture underwater geological features in unprecedented detail.

"The pull of gravity reflects the topography and tectonics of the seafloor," said David Sandwell, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego who led the study.

University of Sydney geophysicist Dietmar Müller, another of the researchers, said about 71 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water and roughly 90 percent of the seafloor is uncharted by survey ships that employ acoustic beams to map the depths.

"We know much more about the topography of Mars than we know about Earth's seafloor," Müller said Read more