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US Republican presidential hopeful John McCain arrived in Mexico Wednesday on the second stop of his short Latin America tour seeking to score points with the large Latino voting block back home.

With his previous stop in Colombia overshadowed by the dramatic rescue of 15 hostages of the leftist FARC guerillas, and amid talk of a shakeup in his campaign organization, McCain flew into the Mexican capital planning to meet President Filipe Calderon on Thursday and to visit the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the world-famous shrine for Mexican Catholics.

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Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has reignited an examination of race relations in America. It has led some to question how deep the divide is between black and white Americans. From my perspective, the question ignores the reality of our diverse society. We must also consider the divide between the majority from another group, one that I happen to belong to: Latinos.

According to the Pew Research Center, Latinos are the nation’s largest minority group, at 42 million people and 14% of the population. By 2050, that population will triple, to 128 million, which will be 29% of the American population.

Those numbers are already having a political impact. Just how strong it may be could become clear in November. In a close presidential election, the Latino vote could decide the outcome. For example, in the closely contested strategic states of New Mexico, Florida and Colorado, Latinos make up, respectively, 37%, 14% and 12% of eligible voters.

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Liberal groups plan to deliver a petition to Capitol Hill next week calling on Democrats to oust Sen. Joe Lieberman from his committee chairmanship in the 111th Congress.

The Independent from Connecticut, who was the Democrats’ 2000 vice presidential nominee, has become a lightning rod on the left for his hawkish stances on the Iraq war and his staunch support for Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz) presidential bid. Senate Democrats have been alarmed as Lieberman has left open the possibility of speaking at the Republican Convention in September and has launched attacks at Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

The liberal Los Angeles-based production company Brave New Films is trying to capitalize on those concerns. Last week, the company released a Web video carrying controversial statements made by Lieberman and launched a petition drive to request Democratic leaders to strip Lieberman of his position as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

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John McCain has insisted that his trip through Mexico and Colombia was not supposed to be campaign-related. But there have been plenty of political overtones throughout.

The Republican presidential hopeful planned an early morning visit Thursday to Mexico City’s famed Basilica de Guadalupe before meeting with President Felipe Calderon as he concluded a three-day Latin American visit aimed at promoting free trade in the Western Hemisphere.

The Basilica de Guadalupe is Mexico’s holiest site for Roman Catholics, and Catholic and Hispanic voters are expected to be key swing voters in the November election. McCain’s Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, has worked to woo Catholics and Hispanics as well after those groups voted heavily for Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primary season.

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Oil prices neared $146 a barrel Thursday for the first time ever on reports of declining U.S. stockpiles and the threat of conflict with Iran.

Comments by Saudi Arabia’s oil minister suggesting his country had no immediate plans to boost production also lifted prices.

Expectations that the European Central Bank will raise interest rates later Thursday could further weaken the U.S. dollar and drive oil prices even higher, as investors turn to commodities as a hedge against a falling greenback, traders said.

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They preach the “Prosperity Doctrine” - that God can make you healthy and wealthy - and they live what they preach.

Every year America’s best known TV evangelists bring in hundreds of millions of dollars from donors all over the world. But as BBC’s Jonathan Beale reports, some of the evangelists’ own lifestyles have begun to ring alarm bells and have prompted a Senate investigation into their activities.

Last fall, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, began probing the finances of six TV evangelists whose lifestyles include mansions, Rolls-Royces, and private jets, all paid for out of church funds. Grassley told BBC, “I would not contribute to an organization that is Christian and evangelical with money being wasted that way.”

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John McCain put a top adviser in control of day-to-day campaign operations Wednesday after weeks of private concerns among Republicans that the GOP presidential campaign had not made the transition for the general election.

Steve Schmidt, a veteran of President Bush’s re-election and a member of the Arizona senator’s inner circle, will oversee daily political, strategy, coalitions, scheduling and communications efforts from the campaign’s northern Virginia headquarters.

The campaign’s estimated 300-person staff will report to Schmidt, who will report to campaign manager Rick Davis.

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Voting by Hispanics surged in the last congressional elections, showing strength that could swing this year’s presidential vote in closely contested states like Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

A government report released Tuesday shows that 5.6 million Hispanics voted in the 2006 general election, an increase of 18 percent over 2002, the previous year for a federal election without a presidential race on the ballot. That compares to a 7 percent increase among white voters and a 5 percent increase for black voters.

“For years they called the Latinos the sleeping giant. Well, they woke us up,” said Luis Vera, general counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC.

Vera said the debate over illegal immigration has energized Hispanic voters, a trend he expects to continue this year.

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Imagine a pool of eight million potential new voters in this November’s presidential election, an untapped resource waiting for presidential candidates to woo them.

And 680,000 of these prospective voters are in the swing state of Florida; another 140,000 are in what may turn out to be the new battleground state of Virginia, and 80,000 more in another emerging battleground, Colorado.

All three states went Republican in the 2000 and 2004 presidential election.

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A Republican congressional candidate in a majority-white Mississippi district runs ads trying to tie his Democratic rival with Barack Obama’s former pastor, seen by some as an anti-white firebrand. Democrats distribute fliers accusing the Republican of wanting a statue to honor the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

The only black justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is defeated after his rival runs an ad with the justice’s picture next to that of a black convict. A watchdog group calls it a “disgraceful attack.”

In South Carolina, a Republican challenger for the U.S. Senate airs an ad with people stepping over wire fencing and protesters holding “Secure Our Borders” signs. It includes a man and woman saying, “Muchas gracias, Lindsey Graham,” the incumbent Republican.

In the first year a major party is poised to choose a black nominee for president, American politicians are still appealing to voters’ racial fears, with varying degrees of success.

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As automakers dropped their latest batch of awful sales numbers on the market on Tuesday, reinforcing the gloom spreading across the economy, the troubles confronting American workers seemed to intensify.

Plummeting home prices have in recent months eliminated jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, from bankers and real estate agents to construction workers and furniture manufacturers. Tighter lending standards imposed by banks in the wake of huge mortgage losses have made it hard for many Americans to secure credit — the lifeblood of expansion in recent years — crimping the appetite of consumers, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the economy.

Joblessness has accelerated, and employers have slashed working hours even for those on their payrolls, shrinking the size of paychecks just as workers need them the most.

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Four months have passed since John McCain effectively captured the party nomination, and the insiders are getting restless. Top GOP officials, frustrated by what they view as inconsistent messaging, sluggish fundraising and an organization that is too slow to take shape, are growing increasingly uneasy about the direction of the McCain presidential campaign.

While the practice of second-guessing presidential campaign decisions is a quadrennial routine, interviews with 16 Republican strategists and state party chairmen — few of whom would agree to talk on the record — reveal a striking level of discord and mounting criticism about the McCain operation.

“It’s not just message or not having just one single meta-theme to compete with Obama,” said a veteran Republican strategist with close ties to McCain’s top advisers. “It’s not just fundraising, which is mediocre. And it’s not even just organization, which is [just] starting or nonexistent in many states.”

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Sen. Barack Obama and retired Gen. Colin Powell met privately two weeks ago in Powell’s personal office in Alexandria.

Peggy Cifrino, Powell’s spokeswoman, confirmed that the presumptive Democratic nominee and the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chatted June 18, one-on-one for about an hour at the Armed Forces Benefit Association, where Powell rents space.

“Just an informal conversation,” Cifrino told On Call.

“There’s no looming endorsement,” she added. “They came to talk about issues.”

Obama’s campaign declined to comment.

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People would rather barbecue burgers with Barack Obama than with John McCain.

While many are still deciding who should be president, by 52 percent to 45 percent they would prefer having Obama than McCain to their summer cookout, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Wednesday.

Men are about evenly divided between the two while women prefer Obama by 11 percentage points. Whites prefer McCain, minorities Obama. And Obama is a more popular guest with younger voters while McCain does best with the oldest.

Having Obama to a barbecue would be like a relaxed family gathering, while inviting McCain “would be more like a retirement party than something fun,” said Wesley Welbourne, 38, a systems engineer from Washington, D.C.

Party label means a lot, with three-quarters of Democrats picking the Democrat Obama and the same number of Republicans picking McCain, a Republican. Independents are about evenly split.

“John and I would probably have a lot to talk about,” said Republican Michael Mullen, 53, of Merrimac, Mass., like McCain a Navy veteran.

One in six people saying they’d vote for McCain prefer Obama as their barbecue guest; just one in 20 Obama backers would invite McCain.

The AP-Yahoo News survey of 1,759 adults was conducted online by Knowledge Networks from June 13-23 and had an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. The margin of sampling error for subgroups was larger.

Via AP

Back on the campaign trail late last year, amid snowdrifts and ice storms, candidate Tom Tancredo spoke often about the possibility of defecting from the Republican Party if its eventual nominee failed to meet his benchmarks of conservatism, most importantly a zero-tolerance policy for undocumented immigrants.

“I am absolutely tired and sick and tired of being forced to go to the polls and say I’m going to make this choice between the lesser of two evils,” the Colorado congressman said at an October debate in Michigan, standing across the stage from his ideological opponent, John McCain, who supports a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “I really don’t intend to do that again.”

But just months later, with Washington sweltering in humidity, the hawkish immigration reformer, who wants to deport the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants, has declared his support for McCain. “I expect to be supporting him in November,” Tancredo told TIME last week. “But certainly it is not set in stone.”

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Colorado, with its large population of independent voters, could become the ultimate battleground state in the general election.

The state, which will host the Democratic National Convention in August, is home to deep political divisions. Republicans, Democrats and independents each make up about a third of Colorado’s voters.

But in the last four years, those voters have handed key state jobs to Democrats, including Gov. Bill Ritter.

“There’s been, I think, a trend to elect leaders who are pragmatic, who are centrists,” Ritter told CNN.

He said he believes his state’s voters have grown weary of the current administration.

“I think people are really disappointed about what happened respecting the Iraq war. How we got into it; in some respects, how we were misled in getting into it,” Ritter said.

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When you’re poor, it can be hard to pay the bills. When you’re rich, it’s hard to keep track of all the bills that need paying. It’s a lesson Cindy McCain learned the hard way when NEWSWEEK raised questions about an overdue property-tax bill on a La Jolla, Calif., property owned by a trust that she oversees. Mrs. McCain is a beer heiress with an estimated $100 million fortune and, along with her husband, she owns at least seven properties, including condos in California and Arizona.

San Diego County officials, it turns out, have been sending out tax notices on the La Jolla property, an oceanfront condo, for four years without receiving a response.

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The silence between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton has been broken, with the Democratic White House hopeful on Monday asking the former president to campaign for him during their first conversation since the heated primary.

Bill Clinton was often Obama’s harshest Democratic critic, trying to bring down the Illinois senator as his candidacy surpassed former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s. While Hillary Clinton has begun to help Obama by encouraging her supporters and fundraisers to back his campaign, a chill remained between the last Democratic president and the man running to be the next one.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Obama is honored to have the former president’s support.

“He has always believed that Bill Clinton is one of this nation’s great leaders and most brilliant minds, and looks forward to seeing him on the campaign trail and receiving his counsel in the months to come,” Burton said.

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Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.

“Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads.

With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

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John McCain has changed his mind about the president’s tax cuts and drilling for oil off the U.S. coast, but the Republican presidential hopeful says his advocacy of free trade is unyielding.

McCain said he knows he has work to do to convince voters in states losing jobs to Mexico and other countries, such as Pennsylvania where he campaigned Monday, that free-trade agreements will benefit them and their families over time.

“I have to convince them the consequences of protectionism and isolationism could be damaging to their future,” the Arizona senator said, pledging to improve programs for displaced workers and unemployment insurance if elected.

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