NEW YORK (AP) -- ConocoPhillips, as part of its massive downsizing effort, has agreed to sell its business in Algeria to Indonesia's state-owned oil and gas company Pertamina for $1.75 billion.

ConocoPhillips has sold more than $20 billion in refineries, pipelines and other assets since 2010 to remake itself as an independent oil and gas producer. It's shedding those assets that it considers least productive or valuable.

The Algeria business holds stakes in three major oil fields. The fields produced an average 11,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day for the year through October. The Houston company overall produced about 1.57 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the nine months through September.

The deal is expected to close by the middle of 2013.

ConocoPhillips spun off its refineries and pipelines earlier this year. They're now a publicly traded company called Phillips 66.

During the first nine months of the year, the company got $2.1 billion from asset sales. Including the Algerian deal, the company has announced additional sales that are expected to generate proceeds of about $7 billion. It intends to sell $8 to $10 billion in assets in 2012 and 2013.

Landing on his feet in the New Mexico desert, the man known as "Fearless Felix" lifted his arms in victory to the cheers of onlookers and friends.

"When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about breaking records anymore, you do not think about gaining scientific data," he said after the jump. "The only thing you want is to come back alive."

"Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are," an exuberant Baumgartner told reporters outside mission control after safely returning to Earth.

Here's a gallery of photos from Baumgartner's leap into the record books.

The bomb went off next to the women's waiting area of a bus stop, which is located near the office of one of the top political officials in the Khyber tribal area, said Hidayat Khan, a local government official. But it's unclear if the office was the target.

The 17 dead included five boys and two women, said Abdul Qudoos, a doctor at a local hospital in Jamrud town, where the attack occurred. At least 44 people were wounded, he said.

Local TV footage showed several cars and shops in the market that were badly damaged. Residents threw buckets of water on burning vehicles as rescue workers transported the wounded to the hospital.

The market was located close to the office of the assistant political agent for Khyber, said Khan, who works in the office. Initial reports wrongly indicated the women's waiting area was for the political office, not the bus stop.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Khyber is home to various Islamist militant groups, including the Pakistani Taliban, which have waged a bloody insurgency against the government for the past few years.

The army has carried out offensives against the Taliban in most parts of the tribal region, including Khyber, but militants continue to carry out regular attacks in the country.

Ten Taliban militants attacked the military side of an international airport in Peshawar on Saturday night with rockets and car bombs, killing four people and wounding over 40 others. Five of the militants were killed during the attack, and five others died the next day in a gunbattle with security forces.

Also Monday, gunmen killed a provincial government spokesman in the southwest Pakistan in an apparent sectarian attack, and then shot to death two nearby policemen, police said.

The attackers shot dead Khadim Hussain Noori in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, said local police official Hamid Shakeel. Noori was the provincial spokesman and also a Shiite Muslim.

As the gunmen were speeding away on a motorcycle, they killed two policemen and wounded a third, said Shakeel.

Baluchistan has experienced a spike in sectarian killings in the past year as radical Sunni Muslims have targeted Shiites, who they consider heretics.

The province is also the scene of a decades-long insurgency by Baluch nationalists who demand greater autonomy and a larger share of the province's natural resources.

____

Associated Press writer Abdul Sattar contributed to this report from Quetta, Pakistan.

EL PASO, Texas (AP) -- The Public Utility Commission has decided to develop a set of rules so consumers can opt out of the smart meters installed in millions of Texas homes and businesses.

Consumers have opposed the new meters, citing possible health hazards and privacy concerns. Some have installed steel cages around their analog meters to prevent utility workers from replacing them with the new digital units and one Houston woman held a gun to impede a utility worker from replacing her meter.

PUC spokesman Terry Hadley said Friday that an opt-out would leave already-installed smart meters in place but disable the devices' radio frequency capabilities.

A draft of the new rules will be written and submitted for public comment, Hadley said. After that, the PUC will vote again on whether to adopt them, which means there's still a chance the opt-out will fail. But, he said, "at this point the Commission is leaning toward an opt-out."

It will take several months until the new proposal is drafted and voted, Hadley said.

Smart meters allow for remote metering via radio frequency and are make the billing process cheaper since there is no need to send utility workers to read them. The meters also provide real-time information on energy consumption and help utilities prevent grid overloads during peak times. They also report to the utility when there is a power outage, making reconnection faster.

In websites and meetings organized by PUC, those against smart meters have spoken of possible government snooping and violations of the Fourth Amendment unreasonable search and seizure as well as the chance that hackers could access people's information from the meters.

On a petition template that's posted on www.bantexassmartmeters.com , meters are called "surveillance devices" because they record the household occupants' activities and can be used to "gain a highly invasive and detailed view" of their lives. Smart meters record consumption in 15-minute intervals.

Health hazards from the radio frequencies emitted by the meters have also been cited. The Public Utilities Commission says the meters have a lower impact than cellphones and microwave ovens and are well within Federal Communications Commission's standards for radio frequency devices.

It's likely that consumers who opt out will have to pay to have their meters read. As part of the rule-writing process, the Commission will gather information on how much it costs to send employees to read the meters and what disabling the radio frequency device would cost.

Users in California and Nevada pay between $75 and $107 to have the devices replaced along with monthly fees ranging from $8 to $10 to have the meters read. Meanwhile, Vermont legislators decided in May that utilities cannot charge users that opt out.

About 93 percent of the nearly 7 million smart meters in Texas' competitive markets for electricity, mainly in Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, have been deployed, Hadley said.

In the past, researchers believed that the , which occurred around 65 million years ago, wiped out dinosaurs, but mostly spared lizards and snakes. But the new findings, published today (Dec. 10) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that about 83 percent of these reptiles went extinct.

"I think it is a pretty important piece of work," said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist from Columbia University who was not involved in the study. "It does a nice job of showing that extinction at the end of the Cretaceous really hit lizards and snakes hard."

The findings actually make the story of the end Cretaceous Era mass die-off more consistent, because it's hard to imagine a catastrophe capable of destroying thewould spare lizards and snakes, said study co-author Nicholas Longrich, a paleontologist at Yale University. []

"You can't wipe out the dominant carnivores and dominant herbivores on the planet without causing devastation of the ecosystem on a massive scale," Longrich told LiveScience.

Mass die-off

Most researchers think a giant meteor crashing to Earth at the Yucatan peninsula caused the mass extinction that . The impact likely released a sun-blocking cloud of dust into the atmosphere, preventing plants from making food and causing dinosaurs to die as a result.

To see if lizards and snakes were somehow shielded from the doom, Longrich and his colleagues collected fossil records from the reptiles across North America. Before the extinction, snakes and lizards were flourishing, with 27 lizard species and three snake species documented in the fossil record. In the years immediately afterward, only five species remained, with most disappearing from the fossil record quite abruptly, Longrich said.

If most plants died, then plant eaters and their predators would have died off too, he added. It's likely that only scavengers and animals that preyed on them came out of the Cretaceous period relatively unscathed.

"When everything starts dropping dead, and everything dies, there's probably bugs and grubs and worms eating them and that's probably what the survivors were eating," Longrich said.

Global death?

The findings are consistent with anand leading to the dino demise, Longrich said. (Just last week at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union, researchers presented an argument for volcanoes, not a space rock, .)

The new fossil analysis convincingly shows that reptiles faced a severe extinction in North America, wrote Richard Cowen, a geoscientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, in an email. Because the meteorite hit Chicxulub in Mexico, you would expect the greatest death toll within North America, but the researchers' case for a worldwide die-off from the space rock is much shakier, he said.

"In order to justify a global discussion of the K-T, the authors try to persuade us that the same effect that they document for North America happened worldwide, but they only mention a few data points from Asia," Cowen wrote.

Unfortunately, that may be the best evidence scientists have, because there aren't many fossils from before, during and after the extinction anywhere but North America, Brusatte told LiveScience.

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