President-elect Barack Obama announced as expected that Hillary Clinton would be his top diplomat and Robert Gates would stay on as defense secretary.

President-elect Barack Obama on Monday officially introduced the members of his national security team, including former Democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state and Robert Gates, who will be remain as defense secretary.

Obama also announced that retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones — a former top commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Europe — would be his national security adviser.

President-elect Obama stands with Secretary of State-designate Sen. Hillary Clinton -- calling her nomination 'a sign to friend and foe.'

“I am confident that this is the team that we need to make a new beginning for American national security,” Obama told reporters during a morning news conference in Chicago.

Obama’s team will advise him on foreign and national security issues in an era marked by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and terrorism around the globe. Obama takes office Jan. 20.

Obama said his team “must pursue a new strategy that skillfully uses, balances, and integrates all elements of American power: our military and diplomacy, our intelligence and law enforcement, our economy and the power of our moral example.

“The team that we have assembled here today is uniquely suited to do just that,” he added as his Cabinet picks stood behind him on a flag-draped stage. “They share my pragmatism about the use of power, and my sense of purpose about America’s role as a leader in the world.”

Obama named Washington lawyer Eric Holder as attorney general and Arizona Gov. Janet Naploitano as homeland security chief. He also named two senior foreign policy positions outside the Cabinet, including campaign foreign policy adviser Susan Rice as U.N. ambassador.

Obama introduced Clinton first, saying of his former presidential rival, “She possesses an extraordinary intelligence and toughness, and a remarkable work ethic. … She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world’s leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world.”

Clinton will give up her seat as a senator from New York to join the Obama Cabinet. Her appointment was preceded by lengthy negotiations involving her husband, the former president, whose international business connections posed potential conflicts of interest.

The former president also agreed to disclose the donors to the foundation that built his library, as well as contributors to his international foundation.

She said to Obama, in brief turn at the lectern, “Mr. President-Elect, I am proud to join you on what will be a difficult and exciting adventure in this new century.”

Sen. Clinton had scarcely finished speaking when her husband issued a written statement.

“She is the right person for the job of helping to restore America’s image abroad, end the war in Iraq, advance peace and increase our security, by building a future for our children with more partners and fewer adversaries, one of shared responsibilities and opportunities,” he said.

Gates said he was “mindful that we are engaged in two wars and face other serious challenges at home and around the world.”

“I must do my duty as they do theirs,” he said of the men and women in uniform in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “How could I do otherwise?”

He said he was “honored to serve President-elect Obama.”

Gates’ appointment fulfilled a campaign promise by Obama, the naming of a Republican to his Cabinet.

Obama said Napolitano understands the need to protect against terror attacks and to respond to natural disasters — and that she also understands as well as anyone the danger of unsecured borders.

Obama now has half of the 15-member Cabinet assembled less than a month after the election, including the most prominent positions at State, Justice, Treasury and Defense.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/12/01/obama-unveils-national-security-team/

Sorry if it sounds like I’m drinking the Google Kool-Aid here, but I switched from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome as my default browser for the very reason Google’s executives said we should: speed.

Years ago, Firefox won me over chiefly with plug-ins, tabbed browsing, and some security advantages. But using Chrome removed a bit of friction from Web I hadn’t realized was there. It felt like discovering I’d been driving with the parking brake on just a bit.

Here’s what coaxed me away: Chrome starts way faster than Firefox. Web pages load faster when I type in an address or click a link. The Omnibox–Chrome’s combination location bar and search box–often gets me where I want to go at least a keystroke faster, and I’m not terribly worried about sending Web navigation and search data to Google.

Individually, a few tenths of a second here or there doesn’t make much difference. But it adds up fast. I spend hours a day using the Web–not just browsing, but also uploading photos, issuing instructions to my bank, editing documents online, and posting comments. As the Web gets more complex and more deeply embedded in my life, waiting for it gets more annoying.

I hadn’t set out to convert to Chrome. I just wanted to see how well it worked, so I used it to run my personal e-mail while at work. Then I added in reading RSS feeds. After a few weeks, I noticed that I was manually copying Web addresses to Chrome and realized that my subconscious mind had made its decision. So last week, I set it as my default browser, despite a range of criticisms (see below).

After I told Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker about my experience, she sounded a bit crestfallen. “We’ve been increasing our focus on performance for some time. Maybe comments such as yours will increase that,” she said.

Faster stripped-down Firefox
More to the point, Mozilla suggested I try a fresh installation of Firefox, one that’s not burdened by those pesky extensions. I hadn’t been running a large quantity, but I started with a fresh reinstallation of Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

I have to say that Firefox picked up the pace a notch. But I compared it again with Chrome on many Web sites I use daily and a variety of others, and with the exception of Flickr and My Yahoo, I still found Chrome snappier.

Of course, disabling extensions is a shame, given that it’s one of Firefox’s big advantages. Google has promised an extensions framework at some point, and it’s the top-requested feature, with 381 people having starred it as a priority in Google’s issue-tracking system for Chrome.

Reinstalling Firefox also reminded me of a feature in the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 that I was happy to leave behind: tab-switching behavior. I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, and use Ctrl-Tab hundreds of times daily to switch between browser tabs. I loathe the new Firefox mechanism, which switches to your most recently used tab rather than cycling one tab to the right, and showing a miniature preview version of the Web page instead of actually switching tabs. I don’t know if others’ brains work differently, but the new mechanism leaves me completely lost in a sea of tabs, forcing me to use the mouse, which slows me down.

I reverted to the earlier tab-switching feature by adjusting Firefox’s behavior thus: First, type “about:config” into the address bar, then move past the warning message, then type “ctrlTab” into the “Filter” box, then double-click first on browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed and then on browser.ctrlTab.smoothScroll to set them to “false,” then restart the browser.

Meanwhile, though, Chrome cycles the way I like, and in another nice move, it opens new tabs immediately to the right of the page I’m reading when I middle-click to open a page in a new tab. That conveniently groups related tasks together.

Off-color remarks
Here’s what’s keeping me an active Firefox user, though: Chrome’s lack of support for color profiles.

Most images on the Web are encoded with a color scheme called sRGB, but there are others out there including AdobeRGB and Microsoft’s scRGB that can show a much broader range of colors. I’m a photography buff with an eensy-weensy photo business, so I prefer images to look as good as possible on the Web.

Apple’s Safari was the pioneer for color management, and Firefox added color profile support with version 3.0 if users manually enable it. With version 3.1, Firefox applies color profiles for images that have been tagged with one. As a result, images on my high-gamut monitor at home look fine in Firefox, but in Chrome they’re hideously garish and oversaturated. It’s a showstopper for me when I’m doing anything photo-related on the Web.

I recognize my color preference is at odds with Google’s performance push. Mozilla programmers found that supporting color profiles slowed Firefox 20 percent to 30 percent, though they reduced that number 4 percent to 5 percent with testing. Eventually, to get it lower, they went with a third way, applying color profiles only for tagged images, which caused only a 1 percent performance hit.

(Credit: Paul Ford)

But Google hasn’t even gotten to the stage of evaluating performance effects. “I don’t see how any sites could depend on this feature if it’s missing/disabled for 90 percent of users,” said Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson in a response to a request to add color management to Chrome, referring to the fact that color management is missing in Internet Explorer and not enabled yet in mainstream Firefox. “I’m all for it, but it’s definitely not a release priority.”

Other gripes
Chrome has other issues that frequently annoy me. Allow me to share.

• There’s no plug-in mechanism. I’m getting by, but there are some I’d like to have back.

• Bad support for RSS subscription feeds. In Firefox, a site with an RSS feed gets an icon in the address bar, and clicking it signs me up for the subscription. In Chrome, I have to hope someone manually put a link on the page, but usually I just move back over to Firefox.

• When I launch a new window, Chrome never starts it maximized, even if the last window was. This is a bit surprising, given Google’s laudable emphasis on showing as much real estate as possible. I always want my browser page maximized. On a related note, I miss Firefox’s maximized mode (hit F11 to try it out).

• Chrome doesn’t respect changing monitor sizes well. When I move to a dual-monitor setup, Chrome stomps all over Windows’ task bar.

• Selection and copy-paste issues. When I’m selecting text in Chrome, I don’t like how the blue selection box spreads wider than the text box. And when text is selected but I missed a few characters, I don’t like the inability to use Shift-right arrow keys to extend the selection a bit.

Read more at http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10107152-2.html

AP photographer tracks down family of terrified children split by war

This photo of an 11-year-old girl carrying her 3-year-old niece as she looks for her parents in the village of Kiwanja, eastern Congo, drew reaction from people around the world wanting to help them.

Eleven-year-old Protegee carried her sobbing niece on her back as they searched for relatives in a sea of people in eastern Congo.

An Associated Press photograph of the girl — using her filthy T-shirt to wipe the tears from her face as 3-year-old Reponse clung to her neck and wailed — prompted hundreds of e-mails from people around the world hoping to help them.

I returned to Kiwanja on Sunday to try to reunite the girls with family and even succeeded in finding them. But it turned out that not all problems in Congo can be solved by an outsider’s sympathy.

When I first photographed Protegee on Nov. 6 in a crowd of thousands in the town of Kiwanja, she told me only her first name and that she was looking for her mother.

I learned later that she and Reponse had wandered alone for three days after being separated from Protegee’s mother on Nov. 3 as the family fled on foot from their village of Kiseguru, about 12 miles away.

Protegee had spent one night sleeping in a church, huddled with Reponse under a flimsy scarf. “I had no food or water,” she said, speaking in the Kiswahili language.

Hundreds of children have been separated from their families since fighting flared in eastern Congo in August and more than 1,600 children in the province were seeking their parents last week alone, according to UNICEF. The children’s young ages and inability to give detailed information — plus the lack of official records in the Congolese countryside — make it even more difficult to track down their families.

Faces of desperation
When I set out to search for Protegee, I had little certainty of success but I was determined to try to help. As a journalist, I’ve photographed war and refugees all over the world since the early 1980s.

But I was particularly moved by readers’ reactions to this photograph of two little girls, their faces wrenched in fear and desperation. I knew that the chances of finding them again were slim, as I see children walking alone on the roads every day. But I found myself imagining how it would feel if I were searching for my own daughters — and having two, that was not difficult.

Years of sporadic violence in eastern Congo intensified in August, and fighting between the army and its allied militia on one side and fighters loyal to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda on the other has displaced at least 250,000 people since then — despite the presence of the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world. Some fear Congo’s current crisis could again draw in neighboring countries. Congo’s devastating 1998-2002 war split the vast nation into rival fiefdoms and involved half a dozen African armies.

Reaching Kiwanja meant crossing an uneasy front line just a few miles north of Goma, with hundreds of heavily armed rebels and government troops deployed on either side. Then it was a bone-jarring two-hour drive on what was once a paved road, and is now one giant pothole.

In the name of hope
Kiwanja is a typical African town, with one strip of dirt road as the main drag, a few small shops on each side, one roundabout, one crossroad, and huts sprawling to infinity on the hills to the east and the valley to the north.

Armed with the photograph of Protegee and Reponse, I started asking around. Women frowned — they did not know the girls. I traveled to the school yard, to the clinic. No luck.

As I was about to head back to Goma, I stopped near a U.N. base. Just a few days earlier its outskirts were refuge to thousands. But now it was a nearly empty lot with the skeletons of makeshift huts and a white UNHCR tent.

I ventured inside the tent. There, Maria Mukeshimani’s eyes lit up at the sight of the photo — the woman, who had been displaced herself by the violence, knew these children. She had seen them in that very tent five days earlier. And she knew Protegee’s mother: Her name is Esperance Nirakagori.

Esperance — the French word for hope.

Esperance had taken refuge at the local Catholic church in Kiwanja. When I arrived there, I was greeted by the sounds of a choir. It was evening Mass.

“Does anyone know if Esperance is around?” I asked.

An elderly man replied that she was in a small house nearby.

Wearing a yellow and red dress, Esperance greeted us. She had sweat dripping from her headscarf and spoke softly.

‘Happy to see your mother’?
I showed her the picture and she smiled at the sight of the girls. Then, to my surprise, she said they had already found her, but she had sent them back to their village, alone and on foot. She feared for their safety in Kiwanja and believed they would be more secure in the care of her elder daughter; she was too weak to make the journey herself.

She kept staring at the photo. Only when I told her I would return the next morning and drive her to rejoin the girls in Kiseguru did her face light up in a wide, genuine smile.

We set off the next day after stopping for food at a restaurant in town. Esperance was quiet as we drove the 20 minutes to the village. She clutched the girls’ photo as she walked through the streets, a trail of excited children in her wake.

The reunion with Protegee and Reponse, in a small mud hut, was brief. They smiled at each other. No one spoke. I prompted Protegee, a shy girl who was only 2 months old when her father was killed in Congo’s last bloody war.

“Are you happy to see your mother?” I asked.

She answered, in a soft voice: “Yes.”

Protegee told how she had arrived exhausted in Kiseguru on Nov. 12. But when she did, she found her family’s hut empty — her sister and other relatives had already fled toward Uganda. For five days she waited for an adult to come for her. No one did. She was planning to set off for Kiwanja that very day to rejoin her mother, when I arrived instead.

Rather than remain in their village, Esperance asked me to take them all back to Kiwanja.

‘When the war is over’
In the streets of Kiseguru, we had seen 20 men wearing civilian clothes and toting Kalashnikovs. When I asked her who they were, her answer was swift and certain: “Mai Mai.”

Earlier this month, Kiwanja residents were terrorized by the pro-government Mai Mai militia, who the U.N. said killed people accused of supporting the rebels. Then the rebels won control and killed those they claimed had supported the militiamen.

And now the Mai Mai were in her family’s village.

Protegee, Reponse and Esperance are back in Kiwanja now. They have set up a cot in the corner of a room on the Catholic church grounds. Outside, the U.N. World Food Program is distributing food, but the situation in the town remains volatile.

Before I left, I gave Esperance the photograph of her daughter and granddaughter. She handed it to Protegee, who, with Reponse in her lap, gazed at the image. I left them there on their cot, clutching the photo, one of their few possessions.

Asked when they would return to their village, Esperance replied: “When the war is over.”

Jerome Delay is AP’s chief photographer for Africa. Associated Press writer Anita Powell contributed to this report from Kiwanja, Congo.

Read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27790850/?GT1=43001

The U.N. Human Rights Council, frequently accused of coddling some of the world’s most repressive governments, threw itself a party in Geneva Tuesday that featured the unveiling of a $23 million mural paid for in part with foreign aid funds.

Nov. 18: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, far right, attends the unveiling of a $23 million mural at the European headquarters of the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland.

In a ceremony attended by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo told the press that his 16,000-square-foot ceiling artwork reminded him of “an image of the world dripping toward the sky” — but it reminded critics of money slipping out of relief coffers.

“In Spain there’s a controversy because they took money out of the foreign aid budget — took money from starving children in Africa — and spent it on colorful stalactites,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch.

Click here to see photos of the $23 million ceiling art.

Spanish taxpayers paid for most of the sprawling sculpture, which has been compared to the Sistine Chapel, but around $633,000 came from Spain’s budget for overseas development aid.

Spain’s conservative opposition party blasted the government for diverting money from projects to alleviate poverty in poorer countries, though the government insisted the funding for Barcelo’s work was kept separate.

Ban himself praised the piece and thanked Barcelo for putting his “unique talents to work in the service of the world.” The artwork will soar above the Human Rights Council’s chambers at U.N.’s European headquarters in Geneva, which may soon undergo a $1 billion renovation — but only after a $1.9 billion facelift of the U.N.’s New York offices is completed.

Meanwhile, international humanitarian groups pleaded with the human rights panel to take time out from their party to address the worsening human rights “catastrophe” in the Congo, where the government is fighting a deadly battle with several rebel groups.

“Mass displacement, killings and sexual violence — involving hundreds of thousands of victims, if not more — require an urgent response,” according to a statement issued jointly Tuesday by Freedom House and U.N. Watch.

Congo has been off the radar at the Human Rights Council, which removed its monitor from the African country in March when the Congolese government and a group of neighboring nations applied pressure on the council to expel the monitor.

“When the Human Rights Council was established two years ago there were about 12 or so monitors, and gradually one after another has been scrapped,” said Neuer. “The other ones are all on the chopping block.”

Violence is worsening in the country, where an estimated 4 million people have been killed in the past 10 years and tens of thousands have been displaced in recent months.

“The [Lord's Resistance Army] leader, Joseph Kony, is continuing his brutal and abusive tactics,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The U.S. and U.K., along with the U.N. and governments in the region, should actively work together to apprehend LRA leaders wanted by the [International Criminal Court].”

Secretary-General Ban has supported a U.N. resolution that would increase the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo by 3,100 troops and police, but some critics say that move would not be enough.

Human rights groups — and U.N. officials themselves — have criticized the peacekeeping force for failing to protect civilians in places like Kiwanja, where at least 20 people were killed this week.

The 17,000-man U.N. deployment is already the U.N.’s largest peacekeeping commitment, but is restricted by tough rules of engagement and has a massive territory to cover. Congo is the size of Western Europe, and North Kivu, where the fighting is centered, is one-and-a-half times the size of France.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Read more on this story at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,454191,00.html

Barack Obama’s election on Tuesday set off international celebrations and ignited a fervor for the United States that has been unseen since the days immediately following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

To some observers, the international reaction has elevated America’s president-elect to an unparalleled post: president of the world.

A resident of Obama, Japan holds Obama fish burgers to celebrate Barack Obama's victory in the U.S. presidential election. Obama is being embraced worldwide as a symbol of a new beginning for relations with the U.S. (AP photo)

In Kenya, where Obama’s father was born, a national holiday was declared on Thursday. In Indonesia, children danced at the school Obama attended when he was a young boy, embracing him as much for what he represents abroad as for the policies he advocates at home.

Click here to see photos of celebrations around the world.

“People from all over Africa, especially in Kenya, where this is a holiday, are feeling that the most powerful person in the world does not have to be a white guy. That’s a huge breakthrough for the United States and for humanity,” said Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“This is the fall of the Berlin Wall times ten,” Rama Yade, France’s junior minister for human rights, told French radio. “On this morning, we all want to be American, so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.”

America’s popularity abroad waned dramatically during the Bush administration, and some voters expressed hopes that in electing Obama, they could restore the country’s image. The wave of good feelings since Tuesday night suggests that even before taking office, Obama has made substantial inroads.

“This may be the beginning of a new world. It marks the end of old elites and opens the door for new approaches worldwide,” an Israeli man in his mid-50s said in Tel Aviv.

Foreign observers, who paid rapt attention during the long election season, are taking a personal stake in the outcome of a vote a world away. Expectations are high for the 47-year-old Obama, who will take over on January 20 amid a financial collapse and who will preside over two wars on his first day in office.

“The standing of everybody in the world is going to be affected by what President Obama does or doesn’t do,” said Mead, noting that all eyes will be looking to the new president for a way out of the global financial crisis.

In the Muslim world, the response has been mixed. A journalist with a pan-Arab news channel told FOX News that on election night, workers were going around the newsroom congratulating each other, as if Obama were their president-elect.

Iraqis have expressed skepticism that any rapid changes will come as a result of the election, but many see their fates ineluctably tied to Obama’s foreign policy. “By God, the new American President Obama has promised to pull the troops out. This is in the best interest of the Iraqi people,” said one Baghdadi.

Arab heads of state have been more circumspect, waiting to see whether Obama’s Mideast policy will depart significantly from that of the Bush administration, and some newspapers in the Arab world have openly announced their distrust of the president-elect.

“There is no significant difference between Obama and McCain. They disagree only on the means to achieve America’s chief goal, which is to rule for another hundred years,” said an editorial in the Saudi daily Al-Watan, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors the Arab press.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad congratulated Obama Thursday for his win — the first time an Iranian leader has welcomed an incoming president since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And some Iranians, speaking to FOX News, said they were excited by the prospect of the coming administration.

“I want to congratulate you on Barack Obama’s victory that really turned a new chapter in the world’s history — that an African-American man, decent and intelligent, became president of the world,” one Iranian said.

“This was done in America. Your nation has the credit for it.”

Not all observers expect this world embrace to be long-lasting. “I think overseas, as at home, opinion over the longer term will depend on what he actually does,” said John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Obama was issued an early challenge Wednesday, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the deployment of short-range missiles near his country’s border with Poland.

“Those who have issues with us are certainly not giving him a honeymoon,” Bolton said of Russia’s action, which may have been intended to send a cold word of welcome to Obama and to test his resolve.

Russian citizens, too, have been wary in their evaluation of the next president.

“I don’t think he can really become the world political leader,” said Tatyana Solomonova, a real estate agent in Moscow. “The fact that he’s black can be an obstacle — there’s still a lot of racism in the world, in Europe and Russia too. I think he can take a leading role in the Western hemisphere, but not in this part of the world.”

In Moscow Thursday, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has a history of controversial remarks, was asked by a reporter about the prospect for U.S.-Russian relations after Berlusconi met with Medvedev.

Berlusconi responded by saying that the relative youth of Medvedev, 43, and Obama should make it easier for Moscow and Washington to work together.

Then he said, smiling: “I told the president that [Obama] has everything needed in order to reach deals with him: he’s young, handsome and even tanned.”

Italian news agencies said Berlusconi later defended his remark, calling the statement “a great compliment.”

“Why are they taking it as something negative? … If they have the vice of not having a sense of humor, worse for them,” the ANSA news agency quoted him as saying.

But Italy’s only black lawmaker, Jean-Leonard Touadi, called the comment embarrassing.

“In the United States, a joke like that wouldn’t just be politically incorrect, but a great offense to this amazing example of integration, which it seems the Italian premier should take as an example,” Touadi said.

For good or ill, all eyes are now on Obama.

“Not everybody is going to get what they want, but this is a moment of hope,” said Mead, who added that Obama was sure to fall short of some expectations.

“If you look at Jesus Christ, he walked on water and fed the 5,000 and he ended up getting crucified, so I think it’s not unlikely that President-elect Obama is gonna disappoint some people also.”

FOX News’ Dasha Bond, Courtney Kealy, Reena Ninan and Amy Kellogg contributed to this report