NATO: Obama warns of "hard days" ahead in Afghanistan

(AP) CHICAGO - President Barack Obama warned of "hard days" ahead in Afghanistan as world leaders Sunday opened a NATO summit confronted by questions about the country's post-conflict future.

Meeting in Mr. Obama's home city of Chicago, the leaders discussed their next steps in Afghanistan: preparing for elections and finding money to support Afghan security forces at a time when member nations are dealing with tight budgets and waning public support for the war.

They insisted the fighting coalition will remain effective despite the plans of newly elected French President Francois Hollande to yank combat troops out early.

"There will be no rush for the exits," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. "Our goal, our strategy, our timetable remain unchanged."

Rasmussen denied there were fresh cracks in the alliance. He suggested a deal will emerge for France to move into a noncombat role but continue to support the international mission.

NATO chief: "No rush for the exits" in Afghanistan

After meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, President Obama said that the end of the war is in sight. The military alliance is pledged to remain in Afghanistan into 2014, but will seal plans Sunday and Monday to shift foreign forces off the front lines a year faster than once planned.

"We still have a lot of work to do and there will be great challenges ahead," Mr. Obama said. "The loss of life continues in Afghanistan and there will be hard days ahead."

Afghan forces will take the lead throughout the nation next year, instead of in 2014, despite uneven performance under U.S. and other outside tutelage so far. The shift is in large part a response to plummeting public support for the war in Europe and the United States, contributors of most of the 130,000 foreign troops now fighting the Taliban-led insurgency. A majority of Americans now say the war is unwinnable or not worth continuing.

Karzai said his nation is looking forward to the end of war, "so that Afghanistan is no longer a burden on the shoulder of our friends in the international community, on the shoulders of the United States and our other allies."

Hollande, the new French president, has said he will withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by year's end - a full two years before the timeline agreed to by nations in the U.S.-led NATO coalition.

Before the one-hour meeting with Karzai, a senior U.S. official said President Obama would focus on planning for Afghanistan's 2014 elections, as well as the prospect of a political settlement with the Taliban.

Karzai has said repeatedly he will step down from power when his term ends in 2014, opening the way for new elections. NATO's scheduled end of the war was built around those plans, with foreign forces staying until the 2014 election but exiting the country by 2015.

Past Afghan elections were riddled with irregularities, and the U.S. applied heavy pressure to Karzai to schedule a second round of voting during the last presidential contest in 2009. The runoff was never held because Karzai's challenger pulled out, protesting what he said was an impossible level of corruption.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57437923/nato-obama-warns-of-hard-days-ahead-in-afghanistan/

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Police, protesters clash outside NATO summit

Chicago (CNN) -- Protesters and police clashed outside the NATO summit in Chicago, where world leaders met to discuss the way forward in Afghanistan.

Police hit protesters with batons as they pushed against a line of officers, video from CNN affiliate WLS showed. The clashes came toward the end of a day of peaceful protests.

At least 45 people were arrested Sunday and four officers were taken to the hospital with injuries, said Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. One officer had been stabbed in the leg, he said.

"They rallied. They charged the cops and they assaulted the officers," McCarthy said. "The finger should be pointed at the people who assaulted the cops."

Occupy Chicago, one of the groups that helped organize the demonstrations, similarly reported that some people were injured.

"The police have several demonstrators detained behind their lines, calling for medics. Bloodied protesters being dragged out of sight now," the group wrote on its Twitter page earlier in the day.

A city official, who was not authorized to talk to the media on police matters, told CNN that between 75-100 protesters had refused to leave the area after being told to disperse.

They threw bottles and other objects at police, the official said.

"Quite frankly, I think it's been an incredibly successful event in spite of some of these issues," said McCarthy, who offered high praise for his officers. "We're not here to get battered."

He accused some protesters of splashing red paint on themselves to make it look like they had been wounded.

The clashes took place just blocks from the NATO summit. Inside that meeting, U.S. President Barack Obama met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and hosted other world leaders. He stressed that more work must be done before NATO troops pull out of Afghanistan.

"There will be great challenges ahead. The loss of life continues in Afghanistan. There will be hard days," Obama said at the summit. "But we are confident we are on the right track and (what) this NATO summit reflects is that the world is behind the strategy we've laid out. Now it's our task to implement it effectively and I believe we can do so in part because of the tremendous strength and resilience of the Afghan people."

Obama and other world leaders were expected to draw up a road map out of the war in Afghanistan. The summit comes at a key time for NATO countries, who are trying to figure out how to meet a 2014 deadline to withdraw from an unpopular war in Afghanistan while shoring up that nation's security forces.

"There will be no rush for the exits. We will stay committed to our operations in Afghanistan and see it through to a successful end. Our goal, our strategy, our timetable remains unchanged," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Sunday.

"Once the Afghans have full responsibility by the end of 2014, our combat mission will come to an end. But we will not walk away," he added later in the day.

Also Sunday, NATO leaders inked a deal to acquire five unarmed drones as part of "smart defense," a term used to describe efforts to do more with less at a time when many nations' defense budgets are being slashed, Rasmussen said. More than a dozen countries will help to buy the drones.

"NATO in itself is smart defense because it is about helping each other instead of re-nationalizing defense," said the secretary general.

Security was tight at the summit following Saturday's arrest of three men, described by authorities as anarchists who plotted to attack Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters and lob Molotov cocktails at police during the summit.

Two other men, not believed to be part of the alleged plot, appeared in court Sunday to face charges from "related investigations," authorities said.

Police insist there were no imminent threats to the leaders of more than 50 nations gathering at the summit.

The leaders are expected to formally adopt a timetable to transition security from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force to Afghan forces, senior administration officials told CNN.

Source : http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/20/us/us-nato-summit/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

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Kelly Clarkson, Cover Drive announce UK arena tour

Kelly Clarkson has announced details of a UK arena tour later this year, where she'll be joined by special guests Cover Drive.

The US singer, who released her fifth album Stronger last year, will play five shows in October.
The gigs start at Manchester Arena on Friday 12 October, before heading to Birmingham, Glasgow, Sheffield and London.
Tickets go on general sale on Friday 18 May.
She'll be supported at the gigs by Barbadian pop act Cover Drive, who recently scored a UK number one with their single Twilight.
Kelly Clarkson, known for tracks like What Doesn't Kill You and Since U Been Gone, won the first series of American Idol in 2002.
The tour dates are:
Manchester Arena - 12 October
Birmingham LG Arena - 14
Glasgow Braehead Arena - 16
Sheffield Motorpoint Arena - 18
London Wembley Arena - 20

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/18087463

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England v West Indies: Andrew Strauss not thinking of quitting

Andrew Strauss says he has not thought of giving up the England captaincy, ahead of the first Test against West Indies at Lord's on Thursday.
Strauss has made one century in his last 49 Test innings, while his side, though top of the world rankings, have won once in their last five matches.
Asked if he has ever felt fed-up of the job, he replied: "Not even close.
"There may be a situation where that has happened to England captains in the past but I'm not there at the moment."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/18094940

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Mladic trial focuses on Srebrenica massacre

The war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic has resumed, with the prosecution focusing on the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.
Gen Mladic is accused of orchestrating the killings of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men in the town.
The 70-year-old faces 11 charges, including genocide, in connection with the brutal 1992-95 Bosnian war.
He calls the claims "monstrous", and the court in The Hague has entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
Prosecuting counsel Peter McCloskey said that the crimes at Srebrenica had never been in dispute so the prosecution's focus would be on individual criminal responsibility.
He said that the Bosnian Serb Army was not an "army out of control" and that Gen Mladic had been on the ground and in command.
The Srebrenica massacre was the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II.
Serb fighters overran the enclave in eastern Bosnia - supposedly under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers. Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were separated off, shot dead and bulldozed into mass graves - later to be dug up and reburied in more remote spots.
Gen Mladic is also charged in connection with the 44-month siege of Sarajevo during which more than 10,000 people died.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18099008

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The Pirate Bay hit by DDoS attack

File-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has been hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
The site has been largely inaccessible for the last 24 hours, and the service is intermittent in the UK.
The Pirate Bay has confirmed the attack on its Facebook page, saying that it did not know who was behind it, although it "had its suspicions".
A provider of DDoS defence systems said that it was unlikely that the attack came from hacking group Anonymous.
"There will be further attacks, but what's significant about this whole story is that people think that it is the Anonymous attacking a site which is typically a type of site that they defend," said Andre Stewart of Corero Network Security.
"It could be the record labels, or a government somewhere that has had enough of not being able to catch The Pirate Bay, it could be just one person who had rented some cloud power from Amazon and is sitting in a cafe, and is able to launch an attack."
Although some users may have attempted to access the site using proxies, TPB itself warned them against doing so.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18095370

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Facebook boosts number of shares on offer by 25%

Facebook says it will sell 25% more shares than first planned in its flotation in response to strong demand.
The move comes one day after the social networking giant said it would raise the price of the shares by 21% to between $34-$38 a share.
It also comes despite doubts about the profitability of the site, which is largely used for social updates.
Car giant General Motors added to those doubts by saying on Tuesday it would no longer pay to advertise on the site.
However, rival Ford said it would continue its social media strategy. A spokesman said: "You just can't buy your way into Facebook. You need to have a credible presence and be doing innovative things."
Facebook will add about 84 million shares to its initial public share offering (IPO) and will now sell about 421 million shares, up from 337 million, raising $18bn (£11.3bn).
This is still only a small percentage of the entire company, and implies Facebook's full market value is around $100bn, similar to that of internet shopping giant Amazon.
The company makes only around $5 a year per member and has identified mobile devices, phones and tablet computers, as a key area for revenue growth.
But Patrick Moorhead, president of Moor Insights and Strategy, said building that revenue would not be straightforward.
"Mobility is Facebook's biggest challenge in that they don't monetise it currently, but it is where the largest growth is."
He pointed to sites such as Groupon, which offers discounts on goods and services to subscribers, as one potentially profitable sector: "I expect them to target the local deals sector first then tie it in with check-ins.
"I expect them to either buy Groupon and Foursquare, or very quickly build-out these capabilities."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18086426

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