Obama, part of a congressional delegation, was also due to
meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai later in the day, the Afghan
Foreign Ministry said.

Obama’s trip, which will also take him to Iraq, Jordan,
Israel, Germany, France and Britain, is aimed at bolstering his
foreign policy credentials and answering critics who say he
does not have the experience to be armed forces’
commander-in-chief.

“They had breakfast at Camp Eggers with the soldiers,” said
U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Johnson. “They sat with the
soldiers, shared stories with the soldiers about what is going
on in Afghanistan … shared experiences.”

Obama arrived in Afghanistan on Saturday and was briefed by
the commander of NATO-led forces in the east of the country,
where mostly U.S. troops have seen a 40 percent rise in Taliban
attacks this year.

Together with fellow senators Jack Reed and Chuck Hagel,
Obama then traveled to the eastern city of Jalalabad where he
met the provincial governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, a former
anti-Taliban warlord who has claimed some success in bringing
relative order to the frontier province.

It is more than six years since U.S.-led and Afghan forces
toppled the Taliban for sheltering al Qaeda leaders behind the
September 11 attacks, but violence has risen sharply in recent
months and there are few signs the insurgency is weakening.

NATO says part of the reason for the rise in violence is de
facto ceasefires between militants and the military in
Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt, which provides the Taliban with
sanctuaries from which to launch attacks into Afghanistan.

Obama wants to send two more brigades, or some 7,000 U.S.
troops, to Afghanistan and shift the emphasis from what he
calls the Bush administration’s “single-minded” focus on Iraq.
He has called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 16
months.

The United States has about four times more troops in Iraq
than the 36,000 it has in Afghanistan. But more of its soldiers
were killed in Afghanistan in both May and June than in Iraq.

(Editing by Alex Richardson)

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The Illinois senator also is to meet with opposition leaders in Israel and Britain. Officials have yet to provide precise dates for the visits and have confirmed few details about the itinerary, citing security details.

They said they were not yet ready to disclose where in Berlin Obama would speak when he delivers an address on U.S.-European relations. But it will not be the Brandenburg Gate. A senior foreign-policy adviser to Obama, Denis McDonough, said that the candidate thought a speech at the Brandenburg Gate “would be too presumptuous,” after German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she opposed such a visit.

“The trip is not at all a campaign trip, a rally of any sort,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said. He said Obama would hold “a series of substantive meetings with our friends and our allies to talk about the common challenges that we face.”

McDonough said Obama would meet with Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Germany, President Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative Party leader David Cameron in Britain. In Israel, Obama will meet with Olmert as well as President Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Palestinian leaders have said Obama will also visit the West Bank for his talks with Abbas.

Obama intends to travel aboard a jet chartered by his presidential campaign. And while his own aides insist politics are not involved, Democrats criticized Republican rival John McCain this spring when he flew to Canada aboard his campaign jet for a brief trip that he described as nonpolitical.

In addition to his trip to the Middle East and Europe, Obama has also said he intends to visit Iraq and Afghanistan this summer.

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8:43am UK, Friday July 18, 2008

Public sector net borrowing for the first quarter of 2008/2009 was £24bn - the biggest quarterly figure since records began in 1946.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics also show that public sector debt at the end of June stood at 38.3% of GDP, the highest since July 1999.

The figures are likely to raise expectations the Government could break one of its key fiscal rules - to keep borrowing below 40% of GDP.

Earlier, Gordon Brown was accused of “losing control” of the economy as reports emerged that his fiscal rules are being rewritten to allow more Government borrowing.

Government officials are drafting a looser framework to ensure the Treasury would not break the present borrowing limit, the Financial Times reports.

The fiscal rules were laid down by Mr Brown as Chancellor when Labour came to power in 1997 in an effort to assure the party’s reputation for economic competence.

But with the Government predicted to face a £8bn tax revenue shortfall because of the current economic downturn, it appears they will be breached soon.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne told Sky News: “The collapse of these fiscal rules means the era of Brown economics is over.

“The Government should have put aside money in the years of economic growth, and it didn’t.

“Britain lacks economic leadership at the very moment it needs it the most.”

However, Alistair Darling insisted that “no decision” had been taken on the future of the rules.

The Chancellor admitted the framework was “under review” but stressed that no announcement would be made until the autumn.

However, he appeared to hint at a rethink by pointing out that Government borrowing levels in Britain were currently lower than in most other major economies, including France, Germany, Italy and the US.

Sky’s political correspondent Niall Paterson said: “He appears to have two options - raise taxes, unpopular at a time of economic slowdown, or declare that the economic cycle is over and rewrite the fiscal rules.”

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable believes policy should be put in the hands of an independent body to stop the Government “fiddling” the figures.

He added: “It’s completely lacking credibility for the Treasury to be marking its own exam papers and setting its own questions.

“What we need is an Ofsted for the economy.”

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After liberal constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky was hired, fired and then rehired as dean of the fledgling UC Irvine School of Law last year, some said the politically charged controversy meant Orange County had missed its shot at a nationally renowned law school.

At the time, university officials acknowledged that the hiring debacle, which erupted into a battle over academic freedom, could put such a blemish on the institution that it would be difficult to assemble a top-tier team of legal scholars.

But this month, Chemerinsky officially started as dean and proved many of those dire predictions wrong, announcing an 18-member “dream team” of founding faculty and administrators that observers in legal and higher education circles praised as an impressive lineup. The first class of 60 students is scheduled to start in fall 2009.

Chemerinsky, who left his post at Duke University to head the UC Irvine law school, is considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on constitutional law, though his left-leaning positions have drawn fire from conservatives.

The list of founding faculty was seen as an important milestone after UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake’s decision in September to abruptly fire Chemerinsky as founding dean, only to offer him the job again five days later after a national outcry.

Chemerinsky contended that Drake bowed to pressure from conservatives and sacked him because of his outspoken liberal positions. Drake later admitted he “bungled” the appointment but denied outside influence.

The assortment of professors brought on staff has dispelled concerns that Chemerinsky’s hiring fracas would undermine the school’s ability to recruit top faculty, and to do so quickly, said Robert Pushaw, a politically conservative constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University.

“It’s very difficult to persuade top law professors to leave their schools to join an upstart operation, but he’s hired some very high-profile people,” Pushaw said. “I’m guessing there won’t be a whole lot of McCain bumper stickers in the parking lot there, but that’s true of academia in general.”

The incoming professors include specialists in intellectual property, labor, clinical education, civil rights and dispute resolution.

Among the well-known names are civil rights and education expert Rachel Moran from UC Berkeley, who is the incoming president of the Assn. of American Law Schools; Dan Burk, a cyber law and biotechnology expert from the University of Minnesota; Chemerinsky’s wife, Catherine Fisk, a noted Duke University labor law professor; and former Times reporter Henry Weinstein.

The university also named four administrators and four current UCI professors who will teach interdisciplinary courses.

“These choices are indicative of Erwin’s pledge to make this not the typical law school,” said John Eastman, dean of Chapman University’s law school.

Eastman, whose school is known for its conservative bent, said the lineup was “a bit eclectic” and overall appeared to be slightly left of center, with several well-known liberals but no staunch conservatives.

The qualifications of the hires, he said, were “par for the course in higher legal education.”

Chemerinsky, who taught at USC’s law school for 21 years before moving to Duke in 2004, has deliberately courted prominent right-wing thinkers for hire at UCI — so far unsuccessfully — said Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychology professor who will teach courses at the law school and has been involved in recruiting.

“He is not afraid to be in a place where there’s people who disagree,” she said. “He was working for Valerie Plame and I’m Scooter Libby’s expert witness, and we’re getting along.”

Chemerinsky said he went after a faculty with diverse political views but, more importantly, sought professors who were in the top of their field.

“It’s always been my goal that our law school will have no ideology. I don’t want to make a liberal law school or a conservative law school,” he said. “To the extent that conservatives had doubts about me, all I want is for them to give me a chance.”

The hires prompted tempered reactions from conservatives, who said the new staff did not appear to skew too heavily to the left.

Individual professors are bound to be less controversial than Chemerinsky, said Scott Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, who took issue with the way the appointment was handled because Chemerinsky was “not vetted out properly” and because he was a “polarizing figure.”

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