WASHINGTON -- The renewed push for Senate confirmation of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has picked up Jewish support that could neutralize New York's two Democratic senators.

Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton both voted against cutting off debate with cloture nearly a year ago when a Democratic filibuster prevented Bolton's confirmation. Jewish leaders, impressed with Bolton's support of Israel at the UN under a recess appointment, have urged the New Yorkers to back cloture this time. Schumer, praising Bolton's support for Israel, has said another filibuster is "unlikely." Clinton has not stated her current position.

A footnote: Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, by switching his position to support Bolton, now provides a Bolton majority in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota has pleaded with Voinovich and other doubtful fellow Republicans that the U.S. government should not be deprived of its voice at the UN.

MITT RISING

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, trailing in national polls of Republican voters, has the lead in organizing early primary states for the 2008 presidential run, in the opinion of neutral GOP politicians.

Romney is particularly strong in Iowa, where caucuses begin the presidential hunt. A win there would swell Romney's now anemic identification among Republican voters.

A footnote: A report in this column that Rudy Giuliani intends to run for president has been confirmed by one of the former New York mayor's closest Republican friends. He said Giuliani definitely is running.

BYRD DECLINING

Sen. Robert Byrd, the 88-year-old senior Democratic senator, has started to cast his votes from the well of the Senate for the first time in his 47-year career. To colleagues, that pointed up Byrd's declining physical condition.

Byrd has been a stickler for "old school" Senate procedures, including senators voting from behind their desks. He has become a solitary follower of that practice. But, using two canes, he now has trouble getting to his desk and joins colleagues in the well of the Senate to vote in front of the presiding officer's chair.

After the Republican failure to recruit the popular Rep. Shelley Moore Capito to run against Byrd in West Virginia, he has been heavily favored this year to win his ninth term against industrialist John Raese. Republican hopes have hinged on public perception of Byrd's frailty.

MURTHA'S MISTAKE

Rep. John Murtha, responding Wednesday to a defamation lawsuit filed by a Marine accused of killing Iraqi civilians in 2005, mistakenly said Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich had been "charged in the incident at Haditha." In fact, no charges have been filed against anybody.

Murtha quickly issued a new press release Wednesday deleting "charged" and describing Wuterich as leader of "the squad accused of killing two dozen civilians." The lawsuit accused Murtha of spreading "false and malicious lies" about the sergeant in his May 19 statement which said Marines "killed a number of civilians without anybody firing at them."

Although Murtha has carried his western Pennsylvania district by landslide margins and was unopposed in 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry won it with only 51 percent. Diana Irey, a Republican county commissioner, is waging a vigorous campaign, and last week accused Murtha of "regular and willful misstatements of key facts."

LAIRD ON RUMMY

Melvin R. Laird, who as secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld's fellow Nixon Cabinet member 37 years ago, has publicly declared his old colleague should have left his post after the 2004 election on grounds that one term is enough to lead the Pentagon.

Laird endorsed the one-term limit in Atlanta June 9 in a conference of former Defense secretaries. "I told that to Rummy, that he should stay only four years," said Laird. "He didn't pay any attention to me."

Bush advisers, with no replacement in hand, say Rumsfeld can stay in the Pentagon as long as he wants.

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CAIRO, Egypt - An American thought to be an al-Qaida activist appeared in a videotape with the terror group's deputy leader Saturday and called on his countrymen to convert to Islam and for U.S. soldiers to switch sides in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The 48-minute video, posted on an Islamic militant Web site, had footage of al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, and of Adam Yehiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old American who the FBI believes attended al-Qaida training camps in Pakistan and served as an al-Qaida translator.

It was the second time Gadahn appeared in the same video with al-Zawahri. In a July 7 video marking the one-year anniversary of the terror attack on London commuters, Gadahn appeared briefly, saying no Muslim should "shed tears" for Westerners killed by al-Qaida attacks.

But Saturday's video - and the length of Gadahn's speech - suggested al-Qaida has found in him someone it believes can communicate effectively with Americans.

Appearing days before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the U.S., Gadahn spoke for nearly the entire video, wearing a white robe and a white turban, sitting in front of a desk with a computer and Islamic religious books in a room with a white wall.

The video included no direct threats of terror attacks.

Gadahn delivered a lecture on Islam and the "errors" in Christianity and Judaism. He also said the United States is losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and told U.S. soldiers they are fighting President Bush's "crusades."

"Instead of killing yourself for Bush ... why not surrender to the truth (of Islam), escape from the unbelieving army and join the winning side. Time is running out so make the right choice before it's too late," he said.

Al-Zawahri gave only a brief introduction to the video, calling on Americans to convert to Islam.

"To the American people and the people of the West in general ... God sent his Prophet Muhammad with guidance and the religion of truth ... and sent him as a herald," he said.

The CIA said it had conducted a technical review on the videotape and concluded the voice is al-Zawahri's. A CIA spokeswoman said the agency is not authorized to conduct such analysis on U.S. citizens such as Gadahn.

White House spokeswoman Christie Parell said the message reflects al-Qaida's "continued attempts to subjugate the world under its twisted view of Islam, which labels as enemies and infidels those who do not have the same beliefs."

Little is known about Gadahn's role in al-Qaida. A Californian who converted to Islam, he disappeared soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2004, the FBI announced it was seeking Gadahn in connection with possible terrorist threats against the U.S., but adding it did not have information linking him to any specific terror activities.

"You know that if you die as an unbeliever in battle against the Muslims you're going straight to Hell without passing 'Go,'" Gadahn said on the video, addressing American soldiers. "You know you're considered by Bush and his bunch of warmongers as nothing more than expendable cannon fodder ... You know they couldn't care less about your safety and well-being."

"We send a special invitation (to convert to Islam) to all of you fighting Bush's crusader pipe dream in Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever else 'W' has sent you to die. You know the war can't be won," he said, using Bush's nickname.

Gadahn also urged other Americans to convert to Islam.

"It is time for the unbelievers to discard these incoherent and illogical beliefs," he said. "Isn't it the time for the Christians, Jews, Buddhists and atheists to cast off the cloak of the spiritual darkness which enshrouds them and emerge into the light of Islam?"

Gadahn and al-Zawahri appeared in separate parts of the video, which was released by al-Qaida's production wing, As-Sahab. Gadahn spoke with his face uncovered, resembling FBI photos, with his name and nom de guerre - "Azzam the American" - written in titles in Arabic and English next to him. Arabic subtitles translated his comments.

Besides the July 7 video, Gadahn is believed to be a masked figure who appeared in two previous videos not officially from al-Qaida, one given to ABC television in 2004 and another a few days before the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the 2005 tape, the speaker - who had black cloth draped over his face, leaving only his eyes visible - threatened new terror attacks in Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia. The 2004 tape praised the Sept. 11 attacks and said a new wave of attacks could come at any moment.

Much of Gadahn's latest speech was dedicated to urging Americans to convert to Islam, and he dotted it with fluently recited Arabic verses from the Quran and stories from Islamic history.

He denounced Christianity as a "hollow shell of a religion, whose followers cling to an empty faith and a false conviction in their own salvation."

"It is time for the unbelievers to discard these incoherent and illogical beliefs," he said. "We invite all Americans and other unbelievers to Islam, wherever they are."

Gadahn grew up in rural simplicity on a ranch southwest of Hemet, Calif. His father, Philip, said he moved there in the 1970s to escape the noise and traffic of the city, changing the family name from Pearlman because he was starting a new life. The family tried raising goats as a business, but it wasn't profitable and they now keep them just to eat the grass around the home as fire protection.

Gadahn did not attend college, choosing instead to move to the suburbs of Los Angeles where he became a Muslim and worshipped at the Islamic Society of Orange County. The mosque later expelled him for attacking one of its leaders.

The new video had been advertised on militant Web sites for several days. Al-Zawahri last appeared in a video July 27, calling for Muslims to unite in a holy war against Israel and to join the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza.

Nancy Pearlman, Gadahn's aunt, declined to comment about the tape when contacted by The Associated Press, saying she had not seen it. She declined to talk about anything else regarding Gadahn.

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Associated Press writers Omar Sinan and Bassem Mroue contributed to this report.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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Today the BBC tells us the Artic ice is disappearing;

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year, according to new data released by US scientists.

They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century.

The fourth consecutive year the ice cap has shrunk!  Wow, it must be global warming and the weather is so hot it's warming Mars too!

That's just one of the surprising discoveries that have resulted from the extended life of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which this month began its ninth year in orbit around Mars. Boulders tumbling down a Martian slope left tracks that weren't there two years ago. New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress. [emphasis mine]

It's time to ditch the car and go back to the horse!  But before we do that, I'd like to know what happened over a century ago that resulted in even smaller ice caps than we have now?  Maybe the Mr. Richard Black wrote a poorly constructed sentence, but when he said, "They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century," he's inferring that over a century ago the ice caps were smaller and I want to know why.  As well, I want to know why Mars' ice caps are shrinking too!

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BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia on Tuesday denied that top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive General Ratko Mladic had been arrested, but Bosnian and Serbian media insisted he was in custody and had been taken to neighboring Bosnia.

The storm of conflicting reports exposed Belgrade's extreme jitters one week from a European Union decision on whether to go on talking to Serbia about its EU membership prospects or freeze the process as punishment for not arresting Mladic.

"The news about Ratko Mladic is not correct," government spokesman Srdjan Djuric said. "It is a manipulation which damages the (Serbian) government," he said in a statement phoned to various agencies including Reuters.

The handover of Mladic to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where he faces genocide charges, is increasingly seen by Serbia as a sacrifice it must make to appease the West, although many Serbs believe he did no wrong.

Serbian newspapers have speculated that Belgrade planned to whisk Mladic to Bosnia after an arrest to defuse anger at home and cast doubt on Western charges that he has been hiding in Serbia all along, with government knowledge and army help.

Independent Belgrade broadcaster B92 insisted the 63-year old general had been arrested in Serbia, then transferred to Tuzla in northeastern Bosnia for a flight to The Hague.

This was the route used to deliver former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to the tribunal in 2001, using the U.S. military's Eagle Base near Tuzla.

Serbia's state news agency Tanjug and the main Bosnian Serb agency SRNA also said that was what had happened to Mladic too: the wartime Bosnian Serb Army commander had been arrested in Belgrade but moved swiftly to Tuzla.

HAGUE, WASHINGTON NOT IMPRESSED

Mladic personifies the ruthless Serb nationalism blamed for the wars that erupted as Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s, with up to 200,000 dead. To westward-looking Serbs he is the main obstacle to reinstatement in the European mainstream.

He was indicted in 1995 for genocide for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo, which claimed 12,000 civilian lives, and for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of 8,000 unarmed Muslims at Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War Two.

His political boss Radovan Karadzic, indicted on the same charges, is still at large.

Serbian newspapers have debated for days whether Mladic would be in The Hague in time to avert suspension of EU talks with Belgrade, a penalty which would deal a body blow to the minority coalition government.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn is due to present a report to EU foreign ministers next Monday or Tuesday assessing whether Serbia is cooperating with the tribunal or stalling.

Belgrade is desperate to save the association talks it began with Brussels four months ago. But the EU has warned they will be frozen if Mladic is not handed over very soon.

"The government is aware of the consequences," said Vladeta Jankovic, an adviser to Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica. The government was approaching a decisive moment and Mladic's handover was "almost a condition of survival".

Reports of the imminent arrest of Mladic or efforts to bring him in intensify each time Serbia faces a Western deadline.

The retired general lived openly in Belgrade until the fall of Milosevic in 2000. He is still a poster-boy for hardliners and he drew his pension via surrogates until last year, facts that fuel Western suspicion of Belgrade.

"Unfortunately, nothing happened," said a spokeswoman for Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte of Tuesday's arrest reports. "Mladic was not arrested, although he is within the reach of the authorities in Belgrade."

State Department Deputy Spokesman Adam Ereli also said Washington was "not aware that there's any change in the status of Mladic. He continues to be a fugitive from justice".

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History is evoked more and more these days, even as fewer of us read it.

That apathy explains why when public figures turn to false historical analogies for political purposes, they're often given a free pass to exaggerate or distort. Take, for example, filmmaker Michael Moore, who once compared terrorists in Iraq to our own Minutemen, or Yasser Arafat who implied that the taking of Jenin was as brutal as the battles for Leningrad and Stalingrad. Even Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) recently likened the conditions found in Guantanamo Bay to those in Nazi death camps.

So the next time someone quotes philosopher George Santayana for the umpteenth time that "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," just assume that what follows will probably be wrong. Having a Rolodex of cocktail party quotes to beef up an argument is not the same as the hard work of learning about the past.

Thus, we are now warned that the war against terror is failing because it has lasted as long as World War II — as if the length of war, not the cost, determines success.

Yet the nearly 2,000 U.S. combat fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq, while tragic, are a fraction of the 292,000 American battle deaths in World War II — about 0.6 percent, in fact.

The mantra "Bush lied; thousands died" charges that President Bush altered his reasons for the war from the original worry over weapons of mass destruction. But aside from the fact that the U.S. Senate voted for the war on 22 additional counts, wars, rightly or wrongly, have often had a variety of changing public explanations.

Lincoln led the North into the Civil War emphasizing that it was a struggle to preserve the Union, not outlaw slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was not passed until January of 1863, when enough Union progress allowed Lincoln to publicly redefine a practical struggle of restoration into one of sweeping idealism.

Woodrow Wilson ("He kept us out of war") and Franklin D. Roosevelt ("Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars") won re-election by promising non-involvement in Europe's fighting. Yet, when voted back in, they both prepared for war, convinced that there was no living with either Prussian militarism or Axis fascism.

Since America entered World War I without first being attacked, should we conclude "Wilson lied, thousands died"?

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) intoned of the USA Patriot Act he voted for, "We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night." Though, so far, that mild statute pales before exigencies of past liberal wartime presidents who really did jail innocents, night and day, without warning or sometimes even justification.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. During World War I, under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, Woodrow Wilson detained citizens without trial and made it a crime to slander the United States. Franklin Roosevelt convicted and executed saboteurs through military tribunals and sent thousands of Japanese Americans to relocation camps.

We're constantly reminded of the regrettable intelligence lapses from Sept. 11, 2001, onward, but they seem almost minor in light of prior blunders in the fog of war.

Thousands of Americans perished at Shiloh, Pearl Harbor and during the Battle of the Bulge because commanders like Ulysses S. Grant, Adm. Husband Edward Kimmel and Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't have a clue what the enemy was planning.

In our confusion during this war, why do we often ignore history or twist its details to fit our own particular needs?

First, in our schools, formal study of the past has given way to the more ideological agenda of the social sciences. Mastery of historical facts is seen as passe, while the less educated instead "do theory" to prove preconceived notions.

Second, good intentions don't always equal good history. Being politically correct often makes us plain wrong, relegating history to melodrama and negating history's power to put tragedy into context.

Third, we're in thrall to the present affluent age, convinced that our own depressing experiences are unique, naturally dwarfing all prior calamities.

But history is not a parlor game used to prove a political point. Instead, at its best, history should offer us solace that we are never really alone.

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United States of Earth brings aspiring writers the ability to report the news and write opinions.

The aim of United States of Earth is to attract would be writers, reporters and opinionators from the ranks of regular citizens from all over the globe.

Any registered member can submit original articles even without donating, but to achieve rank a cash contribution is required to help maintain the site.

• Anything less than $2 per month is has no rank assigned.
• A donation of $2 per month gives the rank of Author 3rd Class.
• A donation of $4 per month gives the rank of Author 2nd Class.
• A donation of $8 per month gives the rank of Author 1st Class.
• A donation of $16 per month gives the rank of Editor.
• A donation of $32 per month gives the rank of Chief Editor.
• A donation of $64 per month gives the rank of Executive Editor.
• A Super User account is available for $128 per month. These accounts will be considered on a case by case basis.

The rank names, donation amounts, article submission scheme, and other aspects of the ranking system could change without notice.

This ranking system for donations will be put into place very soon, but any donation you make will be honored once the system goes live.

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From now on, when you need to post an artilce, click on Authoring Area, and then click on New Article.

This change is part of an overall effort to design an area where each user will manage their unpublished articles.

Additionally, those users with the proper security levels will have the opportunity to edit and publish articles submitted by subordinate writers.

Please leave any commnet on how to improve this system.

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Due to expenses, I'm prompted to put out the tip jar in the hopes of covering these charges. Some of these expenses include hardware upgrades and repair. There's also software upgrades. Additionally, donations cover the single largest expense - electricity.

I hope all the people I know are visiting US of E can at least donate a dollar to keep United States of Earth archiving newspaper article and providing average people a voice in world events.

Even if you don't donate, everyone is welcome to register to United States of Earth.

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