Avigdor Lieberman of Israel Charged With Breach of Trust

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's powerful foreign minister was charged Thursday with breach of trust for actions that allegedly compromised a criminal investigation into his business dealings, throwing the country's election campaign into disarray just weeks before the vote.

While Avigdor Lieberman was cleared of more serious allegations against him, the indictment sparked immediate calls for the controversial politician to step down. He declined to do so at a news conference but said he would consult with his lawyers on what to do next. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also rallied behind his close ally.

Lieberman denied any wrongdoing, calling the investigation against him a witch hunt.

"According to my legal counsel, I do not have to resign," Lieberman told cheering supporters at a campaign rally. "At the end of the day I will make a final decision together with my lawyers."

Lieberman, a native of Moldova, is head of Yisrael Beitenu, an ultranationalist party that is especially popular with fellow immigrants from the former Soviet Union. With a tough-talking message that has questioned the loyalty of Israel's Arab minority, criticized the Palestinians and confronted Israel's foreign critics, he has become an influential voice in Israeli politics even while sometimes alienating Israel's allies.

Yisrael Beitenu and Netanyahu's Likud Party recently joined forces and are running together on a joint list in the Jan. 22 parliamentary elections. Opinion polls have predicted they would form the largest bloc in parliament and lead a new coalition government.

But Thursday's decision threatened to become a distraction during the campaign. Three leading opposition politicians all called for his dismissal.

Lieberman gave no timeframe for deciding on his political future but said he would consider whether the indictment was harming support for his party in the election.

Lieberman's departure could have negative consequences for Netanyahu. Lieberman is Yisrael Beitenu's founder and main attraction to voters. If he were forced to step aside, Netanyahu would be stuck with a list of leftovers with little appeal to the general public.

Perhaps with this in mind, Netanyahu appeared to come to Lieberman's defense. In a statement, Netanyahu congratulated Lieberman for fending off the "main accusations" and said he was entitled to his day in court.

"I believe in the Israeli justice system and I respect it. The right it gives every citizen in Israel to defend himself is extended to Minister Lieberman and I hope he proves his innocence in the one issue remaining," Netanyahu said.

Thursday's decision was a reversal for Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, who last year notified Lieberman that he intended to indict him on charges that included fraud and money laundering.

Prosecutors have long suspected that Lieberman illicitly received millions of dollars from businessmen and laundered the cash through straw companies in eastern Europe while he was a lawmaker and Cabinet minister. In his decision Thursday, Weinstein said the case was not strong enough.

"I am convinced that there is no reasonable chance of a conviction in the offenses Lieberman is suspected of and that the case should be closed," Weinstein wrote.

Instead, Lieberman was charged with the lesser offense of receiving official material from the investigation against him from the former Israeli ambassador to Belarus, Zeev Ben-Aryeh, who reached a plea bargain in the case earlier this year.

The envoy had received the documents from the foreign ministry, which sought additional information on Lieberman from Belarus authorities.

At his news conference, Lieberman described the investigation as a witch hunt that stretched back as far as 1996, when he worked as an aide to Netanyahu.

He denied all the allegations, and said that when he received information about the investigation from his ambassador, he immediately ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet because he knew it was wrong.

Lieberman has said in the past that he would resign if indicted. But he told his supporters that he was only referring to the more serious case against him.

Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said Lieberman would have to determine whether the indictment is hurting his party's electoral chances before deciding his future.

"He'll make a calculation. But every move will be coordinated with Bibi. We can be sure of that," he said, using Netanyahu's nickname.

Israeli law is unclear about whether Lieberman must resign. There is a legal precedent for politicians to step down when they face charges that compromise public trust in them.

Analysts said the pressure for him to step down will be great and Weinstein, or even the Supreme Court, could become involved if he refuses.

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Selling flak jackets in the cyberwars

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When the Israeli army and Hamas trade virtual blows in cyberspace, or when hacker groups like Anonymous rise from the digital ether, or when WikiLeaks dumps a trove of classified documents, some see a lawless Internet.

But Matthew Prince, chief executive at CloudFlare, a little-known Internet start-up that serves some of the Web’s most controversial characters, sees a business opportunity.

Founded in 2010, CloudFlare markets itself as an Internet intermediary that shields websites from distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks, the crude but effective weapon that hackers use to bludgeon websites until they go dark. The 40-person company claims to route up to 5 percent of all Internet traffic through its global network.

Prince calls his company the “Switzerland” of cyberspace – assiduously neutral and open to all comers. But just as companies like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have faced profound questions about the balance between free speech and openness on the Internet and national security and law enforcement concerns, CloudFlare‘s business has posed another thorny question: what kinds of services, if any, should an American company be allowed to offer designated terrorists and cyber criminals?

CloudFlare’s unusual position at the heart of this debate came to the fore last month, when the Israel Defense Forces sought help from CloudFlare after its website was struck by attackers based in Gaza. The IDF was turning to the same company that provides those services to Hamas and the al-Quds Brigades, according to publicly searchable domain information. Both Hamas and al-Quds, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are designated by the United States as terrorist groups.

Under the USA Patriot Act, U.S. firms are forbidden from providing “material support” to groups deemed foreign terrorist organizations. But what constitutes material support – like many other facets of the law itself – has been subject to intense debate.

CloudFlare’s dealings have attracted heated criticism in the blogosphere from both Israelis and Palestinians, but Prince defended his company as a champion of free speech.

“Both sides have an absolute right to tell their story,” said Prince, a 38-year old former lawyer. “We’re not providing material support for anybody. We’re not sending money, or helping people arm themselves.”

Prince noted that his company only provides defensive capabilities that enable websites to stay online.

“We can’t be sitting in a role where we decide what is good or what is bad based on our own personal biases,” he said. “That’s a huge slippery slope.”

Many U.S. agencies are customers, but so is WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization. CloudFlare has consulted for many Wall Street institutions, yet also protects Anonymous, the “hacktivist” group associated with the Occupy movement.

Prince‘s stance could be tested at a time when some lawmakers in the United States and Europe, armed with evidence that militant groups rely on the Web for critical operations and recruitment purposes, have pressured Internet companies to censor content or cut off customers.

Last month, conservative political lobbies, as well as seven lawmakers led by Ted Poe, a Republican from Texas, urged the FBI to shut down the Hamas Twitter account. The account remains active; Twitter declined to comment.

MATERIAL SUPPORT

Although it has never prosecuted an Internet company under the Patriot Act, the government’s use of the material support argument has steadily risen since 2006. Since September 11, 2001, more than 260 cases have been charged under the provision, according to Fordham Law School’s Terrorism Trends database.

Catherine Lotrionte, the director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Law, Science and Global Security and a former Central Intelligence Agency lawyer, argued that Internet companies should be more closely regulated.

“Material support includes web services,” Lotrionte said. “Denying them services makes it more costly for the terrorists. You’re cornering them.”

But others have warned that an aggressive government approach would have a chilling effect on free speech.

“We’re resurrecting the kind of broad-brush approaches we used in the McCarthy era,” said David Cole, who represented the Humanitarian Law Project, a non-profit organization that was charged by the Justice Department for teaching law to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is designated by the United States as a terrorist group. The group took its case to the Supreme Court but lost in 2010.

The material support law is vague and ill-crafted, to the point where basic telecom providers, for instance, could be found guilty by association if a terrorist logs onto the Web to plot an attack, Cole said.

In that case, he asked, “Do we really think that AT&T or Google should be held accountable?”

CloudFlare said it has not been contacted about its services by the U.S. government. Spokespeople for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, told Reuters they contracted a cyber-security company in Gaza that out-sources work to foreign companies, but declined to comment further. The IDF confirmed it had hired CloudFlare, but declined to discuss “internal security” matters.

CloudFlare offers many of its services for free, but the company says websites seeking advanced protection and features can see their bill rise to more than $ 3,000 a month. Prince declined to discuss the business arrangements with specific customers.

While not yet profitable, CloudFlare has more than doubled its revenue in the past four months, according to Prince, and is picking up 3,000 new customers a month. The company has raked in more than $ 22 million from venture capital firms including New Enterprise Associates, Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.

Prince, a Midwestern native with mussed brown hair who holds a law degree from the University of Chicago, said he has a track record of working on the right side of the law.

A decade ago, Prince provided free legal aid to Spamhaus, an international group that tracked email spammers and identity thieves. He went on to create Project Honey Pot, an open source spam-tracking endeavor that turned over findings to police.

Prince’s latest company, CloudFlare, has been hailed by groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists for protecting speech. Another client, the World Economic Forum, named CloudFlare among its 2012 “technology pioneers” for its work. But it also owes its profile to its most controversial customers.

CloudFlare has hosted 4Chan, the online messaging community that spawned Anonymous. LulzSec, the hacker group best known for targeting Sony Corp, is another customer. And since last May, the company has propped up WikiLeaks after a vigilante hacker group crashed the document repository.

Last year, members of the hacker collective UgNazi, whose exploits include pilfering user account information from eBay and crashing the CIA.gov website, broke into Prince’s cell phone and email accounts.

“It was a personal affront,” Prince said. “But we never kicked them off either.”

Prince said CloudFlare would comply with a valid court order to remove a customer, but that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has never requested a takedown. The company has agreed to turn over information to authorities on “exceedingly rare” occasions, he acknowledged, declining to elaborate.

“Any company that doesn’t do that won’t be in business long,” Prince said. But in an email, he added: “We have a deep and abiding respect for our users’ privacy, disclose to our users whenever possible if we are ordered to turn over information and would fight an order that we believed was not proper.”

Juliannne Sohn, an FBI spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted computer crimes, said U.S. law enforcement agencies may in fact prefer that the Web’s most wanted are parked behind CloudFlare rather than a foreign service over which they have no jurisdiction.

Federal investigators “want to gather information from as many sources as they can, and they’re happy to get it,” Sussmann said.

In an era of rampant cyber warfare, Prince acknowledged he is something of a war profiteer, but with a wrinkle.

“We’re not selling bullets,” he said. “We’re selling flak jackets.”

(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; editing by Jonathan Weber and Claudia Parsons)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The X Factor: Who Stole the Show at the Semi-Finals?

TV Watch

The X Factor

By Tim Nudd

12/13/2012 at 03:30 PM EST

Carly Rose Sonenclar, Emblem3, Tate Stevens and Fifth Harmony

Ray Mickshaw/FOX (4)

There may not be a front-runner following Wednesday's semi-finals on The X Factor, but there does seem to be a weakest link.

Most of the judges seemed down on girl group Fifth Harmony, whose rendition of Shontelle's "Impossible" left them wanting more, following a better performance of Ellie Goulding's "Anything Could Happen."

Britney Spears, Demi Lovato and L.A. Reid were all doubtful of Fifth Harmony's chances to be one of the three acts in the finals, with only Simon Cowell defending them, saying, "You've been one of the strongest acts tonight."

Not that the other performers were slouches.

Tate Stevens tackled Craig Morgan's "Bonfire" and Clay Walker's "Fall" with confidence and poise. Carly Rose Sonenclar took some risks with Elton John's "Your Song" and John Lennon's "Imagine" but won mostly praise. And boy band Emblem3 put their own spin on Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way" and the Beatles' "Hey Jude," again to mostly positive reactions from the panel.

Thursday's results show will send one act home and three to the finale.

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Study: People worldwide living longer, but sicker

LONDON (AP) — Nearly everywhere around the world, people are living longer and fewer children are dying. But increasingly, people are grappling with the diseases and disabilities of modern life, according to the most expansive global look so far at life expectancy and the biggest health threats.

The last comprehensive study was in 1990 and the top health problem then was the death of children under 5 — more than 10 million each year. Since then, campaigns to vaccinate kids against diseases like polio and measles have reduced the number of children dying to about 7 million.

Malnutrition was once the main health threat for children. Now, everywhere except Africa, they are much more likely to overeat than to starve.

With more children surviving, chronic illnesses and disabilities that strike later in life are taking a bigger toll, the research said. High blood pressure has become the leading health risk worldwide, followed by smoking and alcohol.

"The biggest contributor to the global health burden isn't premature (deaths), but chronic diseases, injuries, mental health conditions and all the bone and joint diseases," said one of the study leaders, Christopher Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

In developed countries, such conditions now account for more than half of the health problems, fueled by an aging population. While life expectancy is climbing nearly everywhere, so too are the number of years people will live with things like vision or hearing loss and mental health issues like depression.

The research appears in seven papers published online Thursday by the journal Lancet. More than 480 researchers in 50 countries gathered data up to 2010 from surveys, censuses and past studies. They used statistical modeling to fill in the gaps for countries with little information. The series was mainly paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

As in 1990, Japan topped the life expectancy list in 2010, with 79 for men and 86 for women. In the U.S. that year, life expectancy for men was 76 and for women, 81.

The research found wide variations in what's killing people around the world. Some of the most striking findings highlighted by the researchers: — Homicide is the No. 3 killer of men in Latin America; it ranks 20th worldwide. In the U.S., it is the 21st cause of death in men, and in Western Europe, 57th.

— While suicide ranks globally as the 21st leading killer, it is as high as the ninth top cause of death in women across Asia's "suicide belt," from India to China. Suicide ranks 14th in North America and 15th in Western Europe.

— In people aged 15-49, diabetes is a bigger killer in Africa than in Western Europe (8.8 deaths versus 1 death per 100,000).

— Central and Southeast Asia have the highest rates of fatal stroke in young adults at about 15 cases per 100,000 deaths. In North America, the rate is about 3 per 100,000.

Globally, heart disease and stroke remain the top killers. Reflecting an older population, lung cancer moved to the 5th cause of death globally, while other cancers including those of the liver, stomach and colon are also in the top 20. AIDS jumped from the 35th cause of death in 1990 to the sixth leading cause two decades later.

While chronic diseases are killing more people nearly everywhere, the overall trend is the opposite in Africa, where illnesses like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are still major threats. And experts warn again shifting too much of the focus away from those ailments.

"It's the nature of infectious disease epidemics that if you turn away from them, they will crop right back up," said Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders.

Still, she acknowledged the need to address the surge of other health problems across Africa. Cohn said the agency was considering ways to treat things like heart disease and diabetes. "The way we treat HIV could be a good model for chronic care," she said.

Others said more concrete information is needed before making any big changes to public health policies.

"We have to take this data with some grains of salt," said Sandy Cairncross, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

He said the information in some of the Lancet research was too thin and didn't fully consider all the relevant health risk factors.

"We're getting a better picture, but it's still incomplete," he said.

___

Online:

www.lancet.com

http://healthmetricsandevaluation.org

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Wall Street falls on cliff woes after six days of S&P gains

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks slid after the S&P's six days of gains on Thursday as uncertainty about Washington's "fiscal cliff" negotiations offset encouraging data on retail sales and jobless claims.

Energy and information technology sectors were the S&P 500's weakest performers, with the S&P energy index <.gspe> down 0.9 percent.

Drawn-out fiscal negotiations between Democrats and Republicans have constrained trading. There is concern that tax hikes and spending cuts, set to begin in 2013 if a deal is not reached in Washington, will hurt growth. The stock market overall, though, has taken it in stride.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday accused President Barack Obama of "slow walking" the economy off the fiscal cliff.

"There is no conviction here and Boehner's comments - as harsh as they were - were realistic," said Jason Weisberg, managing director at Seaport Securities Corp., in New York.

"The fiscal cliff is already built in. That being said, people don't like to be told the apocalypse is coming over and over and over again. The real players in this market have already closed their books."

The S&P 500 had ended higher for six straight sessions through Wednesday's close, when it touched its highest level since October 22.

Apple's stock , down 2 percent at $527.69, was among the biggest drags on the Nasdaq in Thursday's session, while International Business Machines , down 0.6 percent at $192.95, was the biggest weight on the Dow.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> slid 92.50 points, or 0.70 percent, to 13,152.95. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> dropped 11.09 points, or 0.78 percent, to 1,417.39. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> fell 25.47 points, or 0.85 percent, to 2,988.34.

The latest data sent some positive signals on the economy, with weekly claims for jobless benefits dropping to nearly the lowest level since February 2008 and retail sales rising in November after an October decline, improving the picture for consumer spending.

A day after the Federal Reserve announced a new round of stimulus for the economy, markets focused on Chairman Ben Bernanke's reiteration that monetary policy would not be sufficient to offset the impact of going over the fiscal cliff.

In the energy sector, shares of Nabors Industries Ltd dropped 4.6 percent to $13.86 after Jefferies cut the drilling company's stock to "underperform" from "hold," and shares of U.S. refining company Phillips 66 lost 2.5 percent to $51.74.

European Union finance ministers reached agreement to make the European Central Bank the bloc's top banking supervisor, which could boost confidence in EU leaders' ability to confront the euro zone's sovereign debt crisis.

Best Buy Co shares shot up 15.3 percent to $14.04 after a report that the company's founder is expected to offer to buy the consumer electronics retailer by the end of the week. The shares hit an intraday high at $14.48 - up 18.8 percent.

CVS Caremark Corp shares gained 2 percent to $48.49 after saying it expects higher earnings in 2013.

(Reporting by Gabriel Debenedetti and Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Jan Paschal)

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Most Googled in 2012: Whitney, PSY, Sandy

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The world’s attention wavered between the tragic and the silly in 2012, and along the way, millions of people searched the Web to find out about a royal princess, the latest iPad, and a record-breaking skydiver.

Whitney Houston was the “top trending” search of the year, according to Google Inc.’s year-end “zeitgeist” report. Google‘s 12th annual roundup is “an in-depth look at the spirit of the times as seen through the billions of searches on Google over the past year,” the company said in a blog post Wednesday.

People around the globe searched en masse for news about Houston‘s accidental drowning in a bathtub just before she was to perform at a pre-Grammy Awards party in February.

Google defines topics as “trending” when they garner a high amount of traffic over a sustained period of time.

Korean rapper PSY’s “Gangnam Style” music video trotted into second spot, a testament to his self-deprecating giddy-up dance move. The video is approaching a billion views on YouTube.

Superstorm Sandy, the damaging storm that knocked out power and flooded parts of the East Coast in the midst of a U.S. presidential campaign, was third.

The next biggest trending searches globally were a pair of threes: the iPad 3 tablet from Apple Inc. and Diablo 3, a popular video game.

Rounding out the Top 10 were Kate Middleton, who made news with scandalous photos and a royal pregnancy; the 2012 Olympics in London; Amanda Todd, a Canadian teen who was found dead of an apparent suicide in October after being bullied online; Michael Clarke Duncan, the “Green Mile” actor who died of a heart attack in September at age 54; and “BBB12,” the 12th edition of “Big Brother Brasil,” a reality show featuring scantily clad men and women living together.

Some trending people, according to Google, were:

— Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver who became the first to break the sound barrier without a vehicle with a 24-mile plummet from Earth’s stratosphere;

— Jeremy Lin, the undrafted NBA star who exploded off the New York Knicks bench and sparked a wave of “Linsanity”;

— Morgan Freeman, the actor whose untimely death turned out not to be true.

The Internet also continued its rise as a popular tool for spreading addictive ideas and phrases known as “memes.” Remember LOL? If you don’t know what it means by now, someone may “Laugh Out Loud” at you.

This year, Facebook said its top memes included “TBH (To Be Honest),” ”YOLO (You Only Live Once),” ”SMH (Shake My Head).” Thanks to an endlessly fascinating U.S. presidential campaign, “Big Bird” made the list after Republican candidate Mitt Romney said he might consider cutting some funds for public broadcasting.

Yahoo said its own top-searched memes for the year included “Kony 2012,” a reference to the short film and campaign against Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony; “stingray photobomb” for an unusual vacation snapshot that went viral; and “binders full of women,” another nod to Romney for his awkward description of his search for women cabinet members as Massachusetts’ governor.

And people were happy to pass on popular Twitter posts by retweeting them. According to Twitter, the year’s most popular retweets were President Barack Obama‘s “Four more years,” and Justin Bieber’s farewell to six-year-old fan Avalanna Routh, who died of a rare form of brain cancer: “RIP Avalanna. i love you”.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Prince William Attends The Hobbit Premiere Without Kate

By Simon Perry

12/12/2012 at 03:40 PM EST

With wife Kate resting as she copes with her pregnancy illness, Prince William stepped out solo on Wednesday evening for the premiere of The Hobbit in London.

The dashing young royal told guests at the special screening of the tale from Middle Earth that Kate would have "loved" to have attended the event. But the expectant mom has had to cancel a number of appearances while she battles severe morning sickness caused by hyperemesis gravidarum.

Tuxedoed William, 30, was the guest of honor at the royal premiere at the Odeon in London's Leicester Square, where he met filmmakers and some of the movie's stars, including Sir Ian McKellen and Cate Blanchett.

The cinema's general manager Tessa Street met William in the welcome line and asked about Kate. "I passed on my best wishes to Kate and he said, 'She would have loved to have been here if she could,' " Street told reporters.

The evening raised money for the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund, and one of the fund's trustees Debbie Chalet also met the prince. "I said to William 'Thank you for taking the time to come and be here tonight,' because I'm sure he wants to be at home making sure Kate's okay."

Blanchett, who stars as Galadriel in The Hobbit, braved the chilly temperatures in a backless white Givenchy gown. Asked on the carpet how she was doing, she said, "I'm cold, but very excited."

Inside, just before the movie started, McKellen, who plays Gandalf in the movie, led the audience in sending best wishes to Kate.

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Congress examines science behind HGH test for NFL

WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressional committee has opened a hearing to examine the science behind a human growth hormone test the NFL wants to start using on its players.

Nearly two full seasons have passed since the league and the players' union signed a labor deal that set the stage for HGH testing.

The NFL Players Association won't concede the validity of a test that's used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball, and the sides haven't been able to agree on a scientist to help resolve that impasse.

Among the witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday is Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dick Butkus. In his prepared statement, Butkus writes: "Now, let's get on with it. The HGH testing process is proven to be reliable."

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Dow briefly negative; S&P 500 pares gain

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Peter Jackson's landmark, blockbuster Lord of the Rings films was that they made fans, through a combination of stunning landscapes and intricate special effects and soaring music and dramatic spectacle, feel as though we were seeing an almost impossible elevation of the potential size and scope of movies. Here was a rich, dense, sprawling series of films that thundered like myths, that were breathtaking in their realization of some pretty huge ambitions. ...

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Afghan Army Still Needs Support, Pentagon Says

WASHINGTON — As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan and turn over the war to Afghan security forces, a bleak new Pentagon report has found that only one of the Afghan National Army’s 23 brigades is able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States and NATO partners.

The report, released Monday, also found that violence in Afghanistan is higher than it was before the surge of American forces into the country two years ago, although it is down from a high in the summer of 2010.

The assessment found that the Taliban remain resilient, that widespread corruption continues to weaken the central Afghan government and that Pakistan persists in providing critical support to the insurgency. Insider attacks by Afghan security forces on their NATO coalition partners, while still small, are up significantly: there have been 37 so far in 2012, compared with 2 in 2007.

As bright spots the report identified the continued transition by Afghan security forces into taking the lead on most routine patrols throughout the country and a decline in violence in populated areas like Kabul, the Afghan capital, and Kandahar, the largest city in the south.

The assessment, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” is required twice a year by Congress and covers the six-month period from April 1 through the end of September. Although the problems in the report have been familiar for years to national security officials in Washington, the report’s publication comes at an important juncture in the war.

American officials say that Gen. John R. Allen, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, wants to keep a large majority of the 68,000 troops in Afghanistan through the fighting season next fall so that Afghan forces have as much support as possible as they move out on their own by 2014. But military officials anticipate that the White House may push for a more rapid withdrawal to cut losses in an increasingly unpopular war.

More than 2,000 American service members have died in the war, which has cost the United States more than $500 billion since 2001. More than 1,200 American service members have died in Afghanistan from the beginning of 2010 to the present, which is roughly the period of the surge.

Obama administration officials have said that progress in the war in large part depends on whether the Taliban could rebuild after the hammering it took during the surge, when American forces, with 33,000 additional troops, aggressively pursued insurgents and drove them from critical territory in the south.

But the report was blunt in its assessment of the Taliban’s current strength. “The Taliban-led insurgency remains adaptive and determined, and retains the capability to emplace substantial numbers of I.E.D.s and to conduct isolated high-profile attacks,” the report said, using the term for homemade bombs. “The insurgency also retains a significant regenerative capacity.”

The report said that although the insurgents had less capability to directly attack American and Afghan forces, they had increasingly resorted to “assassinations, kidnappings, intimidation tactics, encouraging insider attacks and strategic messaging campaigns.”

A defense official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon sought to offer a more positive picture of the Afghan security forces’ abilities than the report would suggest. Acknowledging that the progress of the security forces had been “incremental,” the official said that many of the forces patrol and carry out some operations independently, without help from NATO. “They often don’t rely on any assistance from us at all,” said the official, who declined to be named under ground rules imposed by the Pentagon.

But the official said there were nonetheless broad problems with the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, which together number 350,000 personnel. The security forces still depend over all on American air power, communications, intelligence gathering, logistics and leadership. That is true especially at the level of a brigade, which typically is composed of 3, 000 to 5,000 troops.

The official acknowledged that it would be a “challenge” to have the security forces ready to defend their own country by the end of 2014, when most American troops are to be out of Afghanistan. The White House is debating how many American forces should be left in the country after 2014 and it has opened negotiations with the Afghans on what their mission should be.

The defense official said that the rise in violence in Afghanistan — measured by what the report termed “enemy initiated attacks” — was a result of Afghan security forces pushing into Taliban-dominated areas, forcing the Taliban to fight back. The official cited three volatile districts in Kandahar Province — Maiwand, Panjwai and Zhari — as highly contested, violent areas.

Although the report did not provide month-by-month specific numbers of enemy-initiated attacks, it plotted them on a bar graph that showed, for example, that in July 2012 there were slightly more than 3,000 enemy-initiated attacks. In July 2009, before the surge began, the graph showed some 2,000 enemy-initiated attacks.

The official said it was a sign of progress that the report found that enemy-initiated attacks had declined in the city of Kandahar by 62 percent from a year ago.

The report found many problems with the Afghan government that American security officials have been aware of for years. The government, the report said, suffers from “widespread corruption, limited human capacity, lack of access to rural areas due to a lack of security, a lack of coordination between the central government and the Afghan provinces and districts, and an uneven distribution of power among the judicial, legislative and executive branches.”

One area of improvement, the report said, was the American relationship with Pakistan, which has been acrimonious in recent years. The report noted that the Pakistanis had agreed to reopen their country to trucks transporting matériel for the war in Afghanistan. However, the report said that “tensions remain” over insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan and cross-border attacks.

The report had been due to be released in early November, before the presidential election, but was delayed. The Pentagon did not give a reason for the delay.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.

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