WASHINGTON (AFP) –
US President Barack Obama Tuesday warned America could not fight the battle in Afghanistan alone, as he met NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen and began deliberations on whether to escalate the war.

"This is not a American battle, this is a NATO mission as well," Obama said as he welcomed the alliance's secretary general to the Oval Office, at a time of mounting political pressure over future war strategy.

"We both agree that it is absolutely critical that we are successful in dismantling, disrupting, destroying the Al-Qaeda network," he said, also citing the need to work with the Afghan government to provide security.

"We are working actively and diligently to consult with NATO at every step of the way."

Obama is facing fateful decisions on Afghan strategy as he digests a report by US commander General Stanley McChrystal which warned the war could be lost within a year without more troops.

McChrystal has reportedly requested up to 40,000 more US soldiers to fight the strengthening Taliban insurgency, but Obama is considering whether current tactics are the best way to defeat Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A US official said that McChrystal and General David Petraeus, head of US central command, had both been invited to attend a meeting on Afghanistan at the White House Tuesday among top officials, in person or by video link.

Obama was not at those talks, but was scheduled to take part in another top-level meeting -- to which both generals were also invited, on Wednesday, another official said.

The high-powered meeting was also to include Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Some Republican critics have accused Obama of undue delay on framing a new Afghan strategy and called for him to approve any request for more troops submitted by the Pentagon.

Rasmussen said Obama was right to establish a new plan before making far-reaching decisions about the possible dispatch of tens of thousands of extra US troops to Afghanistan.

"Don't make any mistake: the normal discussion on the right approach should not be misinterpreted as lack of resolve," Rasmussen said.

"This alliance will stand united and we will stay in Afghanistan as long as it takes to finish our job."

European officials signaled before Rasmussen's arrival at the White House that they would await the result of the Afghan elections and Obama's decision before mulling their own troop reinforcements.

And in a speech in Washington on Monday, Rasmussen acknowledged that US leaders sometimes were frustrated by restrictions NATO partners put on where their forces could fight and how long it takes to make decisions.

But he pointed out that there are 35,000 non-US troops in Afghanistan, or about 40 percent of the total, and denied US allies were running from the fight.

"I will not accept from anyone the argument that the Europeans and the Canadians are not paying the price for success in Afghanistan. They are."

The White House has cautioned it will be "weeks" before the president makes up his mind on a new Afghan strategy.

"This isn't going to be finished in one meeting, it's not going to be finished in several meetings," said Gibbs.

Obama's task in building political support for any troop increase is being complicated by the fraud-tainted Afghan presidential election and widespread mistrust in Washington over the government of President Hamid Karzai.

His critical decisions on Afghanistan coincide with an increasingly strong Taliban, mounting US and allied casualties, and American public opinion that is souring on the war.

A CNN Opinion Research poll this month showed record levels of opposition to the eight-year-old conflict, with 58 percent of respondents saying they opposed it, while 39 percent were in favor.

Other recent polls have shown public opinion more evenly split on the war.

The US military has declined to reveal the details of McChrystal's troop request but Republican Senator John McCain said in a weekend television interview that the commander had appealed for 30,000-40,000 forces.

Gates has said he will only formally convey McChrystal's troop request to Obama once the policy review is complete -- and denied any rifts between the Pentagon and some skeptics of troop increases in the White House.

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call 'The Twilight Zone.'" — Rod Serling
SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — On a Friday night in October 1959, Americans began slipping into a dimension of imagination as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. They've really never returned.
"The Twilight Zone," first submitted for the public's approval by a reluctant CBS, has resonated with viewers from generation to generation with memorable stories carrying universal messages about society's ills and the human condition.
Like the time-space warps that anchored so many of the show's plots, Rod Serling's veiled commentary remains as soul-baring today as it did a half-century ago, and the show's popularity endures in multiple facets of American pop culture.
"I'm interested in the escapist ideas, the psychological nature of the stories," said Lauren Chizinski of Houston, a first-year graduate student in sculpting at Syracuse University who is among two dozen students taking a class on show and its 50th anniversary.
"The Twilight Zone" has been exulted in mediums such as pinball and video games and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride at Disney theme parks.
The original show — which ran just five seasons, 1959-1964 — led to a feature film by Steven Spielberg and John Landis in 1983, and is reportedly soon to appear again on the silver screen from Leonardo DiCaprio's production company.
It's also resulted in short-lived television series in the 1980s and in 2002, and has been the subject of scores of books, Web sites, blogs, comic books and magazines and a radio series. It's even inspired music from the Grateful Dead, Rush, Golden Earring and Michael Jackson.
"Even people who have never seen 'The Twilight Zone' know about it," said Doug Brode, who is teaching the Serling class at Syracuse and teamed with Serling's widow to write "Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone: The 50th Anniversary Tribute."
With quality writing, acting and production, "The Twilight Zone" pioneered a genre, said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.
"The whole idea of 'The Twilight Zone' jumped off the television screen and became a catchphrase, a buzzword for something much beyond the TV show itself," Thompson added. "When you say Twilight Zone, it's its own genre. The X-Files was working in 'The Twilight Zone' genre."
Its signature theme song even became part of popular language, allowing people to describe unusual or inexplicable moments with a simple "doo-doo doo-doo," Thompson said.
CBS has no plans to observe the show's 50th anniversary, said spokesman Chris Ender. The show has enjoyed nearly uninterrupted popularity through television, syndication and DVD releases and is under license to air in 30 countries, he said.
The Syfy Channel regularly broadcasts The Twilight Zone and plans a 15-show marathon Oct. 2.
Anniversary observances are planned in Binghamton, N.Y., where Serling grew up and went to high school; at Ithaca College in New York, where Serling taught from 1967 until his death in 1975, and which keeps Serling's archives; and at Antioch College in Ohio, where Serling was a student — met his wife, Carol — and later taught.
"I don't think he would have thought in a million years that Twilight Zone would be having an important 50th birthday or that it would still be on," said Carol Serling, who will attend the celebrations in Ithaca and Binghamton.
"Through parable and suggestion, he could make points that he couldn't make on straight television because there were too many sacred cows and sponsors and people who said you couldn't do that," she said, referring to the networks' reluctance to deal with contemporary issues in its prime-time programming.
There were 156 episodes filmed for the original series; Serling wrote 92 of them and other contributors included Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury, two of the deans of science fiction writing.

In a time on television when suburbia was idealized in popular shows such as "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Make Room for Daddy," Serling offered a mixture of fantasy, science fiction, suspense, horror — and the show's trademark macabre or unexpected twist.

Serling had already earned acclaim for his television writing ("Requiem for a Heavyweight," "Patterns,") but found himself fighting CBS to get "The Twilight Zone" on the air. Serling would have repeated conflicts with network censors throughout his career.

In 1958, CBS bought Serling's teleplay, "The Time Element," which he hoped would be the pilot to his weekly series. The story was about a bartender who keeps waking up in Pearl Harbor knowing the Japanese will be attacking the next day but unable to convince anyone he's telling the truth.

But CBS shelved the series after buying it because the studio didn't think there was much commercial value in science fiction. Bert Granet, producer of the weekly CBS anthology series "Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse," stumbled on the script and wanted it. He bought it for $10,000.

The story aired on Nov. 24, 1958, and became the Westinghouse series' biggest hit, garnering more audience reaction than any previous episodes. CBS finally decided to take a chance on Serling's series.

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On the Web:

Rod Serling Memorial Foundation: http://www.rodserling.com

Doug Brode: http://www.TwilightZone50th.com

Ithaca College: http://www.ithaca.edu/rhp/serling

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) –
Google Inc's (GOOG.O) highly anticipated real-time communications service is not "ready for prime time," but the company said on Tuesday it was on track to begin the biggest field test yet of the potentially groundbreaking Google Wave.

The Internet search leader intends to launch a limited preview of the service, already tested by developers and considered one of the company's most promising innovations as it seeks to widen its footprint among corporate clients.

Experts say the project has the potential to advance Google's plans to provide software to corporations, as well as giving Google a bigger role in a social networking space now dominated by companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Wave, first announced in May, aims to combine instant messaging, email, document handling and social networking features in one package.

In a pair of posts on the official Google blog on Tuesday, it also said it was exploring plans for a "monetizable wave extension store" that would allow developers to sell software that enhances the service's capabilities.

The comments come a day before Google is due to send invitations to access Wave to more than 100,000 developers, individual testers and "select" corporate users of Google Apps -- a suite of office-oriented applications from email to word processing -- in the biggest field test of the new service to date.

Wave was developed by a small team in Australia, led by brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen.

"Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway," wrote Lars Rasmussen in Tuesday's post. He noted that Wave still experiences occasional downtime, crashes and sluggishness.

He said that Google will allow some of the new Wave preview users to nominate friends, family and colleagues to use Wave, and it will soon invite many more people to try the service if all goes well during the preview.

In a separate blog post on Tuesday, Wave Product Manager Stephanie Hannon cited efforts by companies like SAP (SAPG.DE) and Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) to develop software prototypes that extend the capabilities of Wave, as well as products that add video conferencing, trip planning tools and games like Sudoku puzzles to Wave.

"To help foster a strong developer ecosystem, we're exploring plans for a monetizable wave extension store," wrote Hannon.

Google has not given a public timeframe for Wave's general availability, though the home page of the official Wave Web site says the service is "coming later this year."

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

A look at economic developments and activity in major stock markets around the world Monday:
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LONDON — German stocks led the advance in Europe after voters gave Chancellor Angela Merkel's new pro-business coalition a majority in parliament, while takeover fever helped U.S. markets to early week gains. In Europe, Britain's FTSE 100 index of leading British shares closed up 83.5 points, or 1.6 percent, at 5,165.70 while France's CAC-40 rose 85.86 points, or 2.3 percent, to 3,825. However, those gains were dwarfed by the DAX's performance, which ended 154.90 points, or 2.8 percent, higher at 5,736.31.
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BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a mandate to govern Europe's biggest economy with a new, pro-business coalition partner — but burdensome government debt from the financial crisis may put limits on proposals to cut taxes. Voters ended the conservative Merkel's unwieldy right-left "grand coalition" in Sunday's election and gave her a comfortable center-right majority — thanks to a strong performance by the business-oriented Free Democrats. Merkel now has a partner that fought for hefty income tax cuts in a bid to spur economic growth and would like to loosen laws protecting workers from dismissal. The Free Democrats also share her opposition to a national minimum wage and her desire to extend the life of some of Germany's nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, German consumer prices were down 0.3 percent on the year in September, dropping into negative territory for the second time in 2009, according to an official estimate. The annual inflation rate in the country, which has Europe's biggest economy, stood at zero in August after declining by 0.5 percent in July. That was the first annual decline in 22 years.
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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia will further liberalize its services sectors to woo foreign investors and speed up economic recovery after a recession this year, a Cabinet minister said. Trade Minister Mustapa Mohamed said the government is undertaking a comprehensive study to cut the cost of doing business and make the economy more competitive. Prime Minister Najib Razak has relaxed a host of restrictions on foreign investment in the financial services sector as part of his first major policy reforms soon after taking power early April.
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BEIJING — Chinese shares extended their slide ahead of this week's National Day holiday amid concern that a spate of new issues might flood the market. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index fell 75.32 points, or 2.7 percent, to close at 2,763.52. The Shenzhen Composite Index for China's smaller second market fell 25.53, or 2.6 percent, to 951.27. Investors worry that a spate of planned initial public offerings and the launch of the small-companies board might push down prices by flooding the market with shares, said Mao Nan, a strategist for Oriental Securities. The new board is due to start trading as early as next month, though no date has been announced.