It also comes less than a week since a major international conference in Kabul agreed that the Afghan government should aim to take responsibility for security in all parts of the country by 2014.
Elsewhere, Taliban guerrillas captured a remote district from the Afghan government after days of clashes in eastern Nuristan province, officials said on Sunday.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said police were working to recapture Barg-i-Matal, a district that has changed hands several times in recent months. U.S. troops pulled out of the remote and mountainous region in line with Washington's strategy of giving priority to protecting population centers.
"Forces on the ground in Afghanistan are doing everything they can to locate and safely return our missing shipmates," Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, said in a statement.
A spokesman for the NATO-led force declined to comment on the Taliban's announcement it was holding one of the men.
Violence in Afghanistan is at its highest of the 9-year war as thousands of extra U.S. troops, dispatched by President Barack Obama in December, step up their campaign to drive insurgents out of their traditional heartland in the south.
Last month was the deadliest for foreign troops since 2001, with more than 100 killed, and civilian deaths have also risen as ordinary Afghans are increasingly caught in the crossfire.
"No one is declaring victory but there is progress," said Mullen. "I believe that goal is still achievable and certainly the proof of that will be what happens over these next many months in what is a very challenging period."
Mullen, who called the troops' disappearance an "unusual circumstance," said there would be more violent incidents to come,Abercrombie t-shirts, but the U.S. military was doing everything possible to find the missing men, who were both from the Navy.
The remarks by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, on a visit to the country, came as the Taliban said they were holding captive one of two U.S. servicemen who strayed into insurgent territory, and that the other had been killed.
KABUL (Reuters) – More NATO troops will die in Afghanistan as violence mounts over the summer, but Washington's goal of turning the tide against the insurgency by year's end is within reach, the top U.S. military officer said on Sunday.
"As we continue our force levels and our operations over the summer … we will likely see further tough casualties and levels of violence," Mullen told a news conference in Kabul.
The NATO-led force said it was aware of reports of the incident and was investigating, but would not comment further until further details were available. Such incidents have triggered outrage in the past among the population against the international troops whose mission is to protect them.
The Navy described both men as still missing.
The Afghan government said on Sunday it was checking reports from villagers that civilians had been killed in a raid by foreign forces in Sangin, in southern Helmand province, on Friday.
The two U.S. servicemen were reported missing on Friday after failing to return in a vehicle they had taken from their compound in Kabul, the NATO-led force said.
Rumors circulated in local and international media about the fate of the missing men and how they had managed to stray into an insurgent-controlled area in Logar province, a short but dangerous 100 km (60 miles) drive south of the capital. One provincial official said alcohol was found in their vehicle.
A spokesman for the Taliban said the militant group's leadership would decide the fate of the surviving captive.
"We have the body of the dead soldier and the other one who is alive. We have taken them to a safe place," said Zabihullah Mujahid by telephone from an undisclosed location.
The Taliban frequently play down their losses and hype their successes, and independent verification of their reports is usually impossible.
Apart from confirming two servicemen had gone missing, the military has provided very little information to media. Leaflets depicting photos of the pair were distributed in Logar on Sunday and announcements on local radio stations offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to a rescue.
The only other foreign soldier believed held by the Taliban is Idaho National Guardsman Bowe Bergdahl, whose capture in June last year triggered a massive manhunt. His captors have issued videos of him denouncing the war, in what the U.S. military has called illegal propaganda.
(Additional reporting by Phil Stewart in Washington; Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by David Fox, Peter Graff and Eric Walsh)
TALIBAN SAY HOLDING AMERICAN
Despite the rise in casualties,Giorgio Armani, Mullen said "slow but steady" progress was being made and that Washington's strategy of reversing the insurgency's momentum was still obtainable by the end of the year. The next months would be crucial, he added.
iPhone jailbreaking (and all cell phone unl - Monc
While technically illegal,Moncler, no one has been sued or prosecuted for the practice. (Apple does seriously frown on the practice, and jailbreaking your phone will still void your warranty.) It’s estimated that more than a million iPhone owners have jailbroken their handsets.
Apple fought hard against the legalization, arguing that jailbreaking was a form of copyright violation. The FCC disagreed, saying that jailbreaking merely enhanced the inter-operability of the phone, and was thus legitimate under fair-use rules.
The upshot is that now anyone can jailbreak or otherwise unlock any cell phone without fear of legal penalties, whether you want to install unsupported applications or switch to another cellular carrier. Cell phone companies are of course still free to make it difficult for you to do this — and your warranty will probably still be voided if you do — but at least you won’t be fined or imprisoned if you jailbreak a handset.
In addition to the jailbreaking exemption, the FCC announced a few other rules that have less sweeping applicability but are still significant:
• Professors, students and documentary filmmakers are now allowed, for “noncommercial” purposes, to break the copy protection measures on DVDs to be used in classroom or other not-for-profit environments. This doesn’t quite go so far as to grant you and me the right to copy a DVD so we can watch it in two rooms of the house,Ed hardy underwear, but it’s now only one step away.
• As was the topic in the GE ruling I wrote about, the FCC allows computer owners to bypass dongles (hardware devices used in conjunction with software to guarantee the correct owner is behind the keyboard) if they are no longer in operation and can’t be replaced. Dongles are rarities in consumer technology products now, but industrial users are probably thrilled about this, as many go missing and are now impossible to obtain.
• Finally, people are now free to circumvent protection measures on video games — but, strangely, only to investigate and correct security flaws in those games. (Another oddity: Other computer software is not part of this ruling, just video games.)
— Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
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This weekend has seen a flurry of activity about digital rights, but the biggest news dropped Monday morning, when the Library of Congress announced that it had made the controversial practice of “jailbreaking” your iPhone — or any other cell phone — legal.
Owners of iPhones and other smartphones are one step closer toward taking complete control of their gadgets, thanks to a new government ruling Monday on the practice of “jailbreaking.”
Jailbreaking — the practice of unlocking a phone (and particularly an iPhone) so it can be used on another network and/or run other applications than those approved by Apple — has technically been illegal for years. Most jailbroken phones are used on the U.S. T-Mobile network or on overseas carriers, or are used to run applications that Apple refuses to sell, such as Safari ad-blocking apps, alternate keyboard layouts, or programs that change the interface to the iPhone’s SMS system and the way its icons are laid out.