Obama to deliver speech on Afghanistan troop pullout

Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama will deliver a highly anticipated speech Wednesday evening about troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.

The address is scheduled for 8 p.m. ET.

On Tuesday, an administration official told CNN that Obama will announce this week that 30,000 U.S. "surge" forces will be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.

Members of Congress are being informed that 10,000 troops will be withdrawn by the end of this year, followed by another 20,000 next year, a congressional source said.

The time frame would give U.S. commanders another two "fighting" seasons with the bulk of U.S. forces still available for combat operations.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pushed for additional time to roll back Taliban gains in the country before starting any significant withdrawal -- a position at odds with a majority of Americans, according to recent public opinion surveys.

Gates -- along with Afghan war commander Gen. David Petraeus -- had pushed for an initial drawdown of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops this year, the congressional source said. The secretary also urged the president to withdraw support troops only -- not combat troops.

Obama, however, ultimately decided to adopt a more aggressive withdrawal plan.

Gates acknowledged Tuesday that the president must take into account public opinion and congressional support for further military engagement.

"Sustainability here at home" is an important consideration, Gates said, noting that people are "tired of a decade of war."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, repeated his call Tuesday for a withdrawal of 15,000 troops this year.

"The level of U.S. troop reductions in Afghanistan needs to be significant to achieve its purpose --- letting the Afghan government know we are determined to shift primary responsibility for their security to the Afghan security forces," Levin said in a written statement.

An estimated 100,000 U.S. troops are serving in Afghanistan, some 30,000 of which are part of the so-called surge ordered in 2009 in a bid to control the rising violence.

Obama has been mulling how many troops should be withdrawn this summer and by the end of the year.

The president is expected, in his remarks Wednesday, to stress the importance of preserving flexibility in force levels on the ground so commanders can adjust as conditions warrant, the official said.

The drawdown will be accomplished by troops returning home and not being replaced as well as canceling some proposed deployments.

So far, Obama has only said publicly that troops will begin coming home in July, and he recently indicated the number would be "significant."

The president has repeatedly said he is confident the United States can meet the self-imposed deadline to begin bringing troops back from Afghanistan without compromising Afghan security, though military commanders and government officials have raised concern about the readiness of Afghan security forces.

"We have made great strides toward achieving the objectives laid out in the mission that the president articulated in December of 2009," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.

Obama "will make his decision based on the need to succeed further in achieving those objectives and to transfer authority gradually, security authority, over to the Afghan national security forces, with an eye to the fact that, as agreed to by NATO in Lisbon, we will eventually transfer full security lead over to the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) in 2014," Carney said.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans polled this month said they support the United States pulling some or all of its forces from Afghanistan.

That figure jumped 10 percentage points since May, likely as a result of the death of Osama bin Laden, pollsters said.

The deployment of U.S. forces also hasn't been popular with many Afghan leaders, who openly criticize the presence of the Americans in their country.

It's a message that's not lost on U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry.

"When we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse, our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on," Eikenberry said during a Sunday speech at Herat University in western Afghanistan.

"At the point your leaders believe that we are doing more harm than good, when we reach a point that we feel our soldiers and civilians are being asked to sacrifice without a just cause ... the American people will ask for our forces to come home."

Republicans -- who have been the strongest supporters of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan -- appear to be shifting their opinion on the conflict. Forty-seven percent of Republicans said in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll in May that they favored a partial or full withdrawal of American troops. Sixty percent of Republicans favored a withdrawal when asked this month.

The most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted June 3 through 7, with 1,015 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

CNN's Aliza Kassim, Barbara Starr, Ted Barrett and Alan Silverleib contributed to this report.

CNN

G20 urged to deliver pledges for world hunger (OneWorld.net)

June 19 (OneWorld.net) - Evidence continues to emerge that the release of international donor funds to support global food security is matching neither the scale of the promises nor the urgency of the situation.

According to its June report, grants have been awarded to a total of 12 developing countries by the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), a key multilateral fund established to support national hunger plans by G20 leaders at the Pittsburgh summit in 2009.

But 20 countries have been turned away, according to Lael Brainard, under-secretary for international affairs at the US Treasury. And GAFSP administrators say that new proposals must remain on hold, "pending availability of funding."

Only six of the richer countries, together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have so far made pledges to GAFSP. The total of $925 million includes offers from Spain and Ireland whose economies are facing exceptional difficulties.

Lael Brainard has emerged as a cheerleader for GAFSP fundraising. "Without swift support from the rest of the G8 and the G20, the global fight against hunger could be put at great risk," she wrote in the UK Guardian last week.

This is a bold position for the under-secretary to adopt because the current gap between funds received by GAFSP and funds promised is almost entirely attributable to the US. Of $475 million pledged, only $167 million has been approved by Congress.

Ms Brainard did acknowledge the embarrassment in a recent speech at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs. "Without greater progress on our pledge, it is difficult for the United States to convince other development partners to contribute. That's why it will be critical for Congress to fund the Administration's request of $308 million in FY2012," she said.

This funding tension comes at a time of rising concern about hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. Escalating global prices of staple grains combined with persistent extreme weather conditions in vulnerable regions have driven an additional 44 million people into poverty, according to the World Bank.

Fearing a possible repeat of the 2008 food crisis, agriculture ministers from the G20 group of countries will assemble for an unprecedented meeting in Paris on Monday.

Recent days have witnessed a deluge of advice from international development agencies on action that ministers should take to protect global food security in general and the poor in particular.

Top favourite is a curb on speculative trading of food commodities. In its role as G20 chair, the French government is known to be sympathetic to this call but may be forced to rule the matter as the business of finance rather than agriculture ministers.

Shenggen Fan, Director General of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, is amongst those who have published advice on food security. But he prefers not to lose sight of the underlying financial imperative.

"Before the international community issues any new recommendations, they first need to make good on previous commitments," he says, referring to the 2009 pledge by G8 leaders to raise an additional $20 billion for agriculture in poor countries. Less than a quarter of this amount has been disbursed, according to the G8 accountability report published last month.

Ethiopia is a key country to monitor for progress on agriculture. Already seriously affected by the drought in the Horn of Africa, the country has over 10 million people in need of food assistance.

For longer term development of its farming sector, Ethiopia is one of the fortunate few countries to be funded by the GAFSP program. The grant totals $51.5 million.

But this figure may only scratch the surface. Ethiopia's Policy and Investment Framework, its ten-year plan for agriculture, estimates the funding gap that will have to be sought from international donors. It totals $6.2 billion.

* More Information:

Food Security in Ethiopia, a OneWorld briefing

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Steve Jobs to deliver Apple keynote next week (AP)

NEW YORK – Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs will take a break from medical leave to deliver the keynote speech at next week's Apple conference, the company said Tuesday.

Apple shares rose $5.49, or 1.6 percent, to $342.90 after rising as high as $344.09 earlier in the session on the news.

Jobs went on medical leave in January for unspecified reasons, handing over day-to-day control to chief operating officer Tim Cook. Jobs has remained involved in larger decisions at the company, and demonstrated the new iPad model at a news conference in March.

Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off Monday in San Francisco. The keynote speech will feature Apple's new Mac software, Lion, and the next version of Apple's iPhone and iPad software, the company said.

Apple said the keynote will also feature an "iCloud" service, but didn't explain what the service will do. Apple has been in talks with all four major recording companies on a music service that will allow users to stream songs stored on remote computer servers, presumably to an array of portable Apple-made devices, a person familiar with the matter said recently. The person was not authorized to speak publicly on the deals and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Such a service would give users a wide array of music on-the-go, without having to worry about limited storage space and the need to physically connect different devices to transfer songs.

The June developers' conference has in years past been the opportunity for Apple to reveal the year's new iPhone model, ahead of a retail launch a few weeks later. But this year, analysts are speculating that the new iPhone won't arrive until the fall. Apple launched a version of the iPhone 4 for Verizon's network in February, and a June-July release of a new model could disappoint new owners of that phone.

The brief statement Tuesday did not mention any new hardware.

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Yahoo ready to deliver on promise to upgrade email (AP)

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke, Ap Technology Writer – Tue May 24, 7:53 am ET

SAN FRANCISCO – Yahoo Inc. is giving its popular email service a long-promised facelift in an attempt to make it more appealing to people who are increasingly using Facebook, Twitter, Google and other online alternatives to communicate.

The changes announced Tuesday build upon a redesigned email format that Yahoo began testing seven months ago. The estimated 277 million users of Yahoo's free email service will be switched to the new version during the next few weeks.

The overhaul will enable updates to Facebook and Twitter accounts to be posted from within Yahoo's email boxes. The revamped service is supposed to be two times faster and capable of sending attachments of up to 100 megabytes. Other tools include better junk-mail controls and the ability to chat with friends and family logged into Facebook.

Yahoo is counting on the changes to help attract and retain email users at a time when more people are flocking to the rival Gmail service run by Internet search leader Google Inc.

Although Yahoo's service remains larger than Gmail, it has been losing ground in the past year. Through April, Yahoo boasted 277 million email users worldwide, a drop of about 3 million, or 1 percent, from the same time last year, according to the research firm comScore Inc. Meanwhile, Gmail had grown to 220 million wordwide users, up 43 million, or 24 percent during the past year.

Most of Gmail's gains appear to be coming at the expense of Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail service, which remained the global leader with 327 million users, according to comScore. But that figure was down 27 million, or 8 percent, from last year.

Cultivating loyal email users is important because they tend to be frequent visitors and they often remain logged in when using other online services run by the email providers. The return trips and logged-in activity creates more opportunities to show Internet ads, the main way that both Yahoo and Google make money.

Yahoo, though, hasn't been luring as many advertisers as Google for years, a problem that has weighed on Yahoo's stock.

The email upgrade is expected to be among the signs of progress that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz emphasizes Wednesday when she and other top company executives are scheduled to update analysts on their turnaround plan.

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