A look at how Russia, US still spy on each other

The Cold War is long over, but espionage is forever. Russian spies still operate in the U.S. and American ones in Russia. On Tuesday, Russia's security services said they had caught a U.S. diplomat whom they claim is a CIA official trying to recruit a Russian agent.

Here's some other cases of apparent spying between the old rivals:

THE ANNA CHAPMAN RING

These Russian spies lived in suburban U.S. homes and worked at jobs like real estate brokers or travel agents, quietly inserting themselves into American life and trying to penetrate U.S. policy circles. Court papers said Chapman and nine others assumed the identities of people who had died, swapped bags in passing at train stations and communicated with invisible ink and coded radio transmissions. After their 2010 arrests, all 10 pleaded guilty to spying charges. An 11th man was arrested in Cyprus but jumped bail.

Dubbed a femme fatale, the red-headed Chapman, 28 at the time, became the most notorious member of the ring, partially because of glamorous photos she posted on social networking sites of her international travels. She has stayed in the limelight since her deportation to Russia, hosting a reality TV show, modeling lingerie and becoming the face of a Moscow bank.

SERGEI TRETYAKOV

Tretyakov once called the United Nations a nest of spies. And he would know. For five years in the 1990s, Tretyakov worked at Russia's diplomatic mission at the U.N. — recruiting and running spies. He also found Canada to be fertile ground for finding people willing to rat on the U.S.

Tretyakov claimed his agents helped Russia siphon nearly $500 million from the U.N. oil-for-food sanctions program for Iraq. Then in 2000, he defected to the U.S. It's thought that Tretyakov handed significant information over to Washington, although he never specifically confirmed that he became a double agent. He died in Florida in 2010 at age 53 of a heart attack.

STANISLAV BORISOVICH GUSEV

Gusev, a Russian diplomat, planted a bug inside the State Department in Washington, D.C., and then hung around on a bench outside the building or in his car to listen, according to U.S. authorities. Agents became suspicious when they spotted him feeding a parking meter outside State Department headquarters without ever going inside. He was arrested in 1999 and expelled from the U.S.

ALDRICH AMES

As a CIA officer in Turkey, Ames worked to turn Russians against their government. But in 1985, he switched sides himself, offering his services to the Soviets. He continued working for the Russians after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. He communicated with his handlers by leaving chalk marks on a Washington, D.C., mailbox. He eventually passed along to Moscow dozens of names of Russians who were spying for the U.S. The Soviet Union executed 10 of them. The FBI arrested Ames in 1994 and he pleaded guilty to spying that same year.

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Iran president still a force even as his era ends

BIRJAND, Iran (AP) — When many struggling families in this eastern Iranian city take stock of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's legacy, it's not about the oratory full of bluster and menace or his tussles with Iran's ruling clerics that are known to much of the world.

What matters more here are the dusty rows of government-subsidized, two-story apartment buildings on the outskirts of the once-neglected outpost — testament to an effective populist outreach that has won the president millions of loyal backers in the provinces.

That support could give him influence beyond next month's election to pick his successor, underscoring how public opinion is relevant in Iran despite the heavy hand of clerical rule.

At first glance, Ahmadinejad may appear as a mostly spent political force. Damaging internal battles with the Islamic establishment over power and policies have left him so politically toxic in ruling circles that the possible leading candidates to replace him have all joined to ridicule his presidency.

But counting Ahmadinejad out grossly underestimates his most critical asset: A deep well of grateful and loyal supporters in hardscrabble places such as Birjand, a city of nearly 300,000 in wind-swept hills near the border with Afghanistan.

"May God bless Ahmadinejad," said Birjand taxi driver Ali Reza Farsi. "He is my hero."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second story in an occasional series examining the June 14 Iranian election and the wider global and internal Iranian consequences at the end of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's era.

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While Iran's theocracy holds many levers in the election, including vetting all candidates and deciding who appears on the final ballot, public opinion remains a legitimate force in Iran. It gave pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami a landslide re-election in 2001 and unleashed its fury after claims that vote fraud brought Ahmadinejad back for a second term four years ago.

Now, it's Ahmadinejad's backers who could rattle the system. No previous Iranian president has left office on such bad terms with the ruling clerics. A cozy landing for the 56-year-old leader in the inner circle or as an elder statesman is highly unlikely. This leaves Ahmadinejad with his big political ego and his still-significant political base.

"There is no doubt that an Ahmadinejad loyalist is a tough challenger no matter what," said prominent political analyst Saeed Leilaz. "Conservatives and reformists would have to fight an Ahmadinejad loyalist, who has strong supporters in small towns and rural areas."

His main goal has been to get his chief adviser, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, on the June 14 ballot. But the chances that his protege, whose daughter is married to Ahmadinejad's son, would be approved are sharply dimmed because of his messy power struggles with the clerics.

The relationship worsened in 2011 with a dispute over the choice of intelligence minister. The atmosphere became so divisive that Ahmadinejad boycotted government meetings for 11 days to protest being overruled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in all critical affairs.

Even without Mashaei on the ballot, Ahmadinejad has clout in other ways stemming from his policies funneling money and public works to long-neglected areas.

He could suddenly be transformed from scorned to courted by the front-runners, including a former nuclear negotiator, a top adviser for Khamenei and the mayor of Tehran, if they decide an endorsement from Ahmadinejad could bring in a potential voter windfall in the provinces

Or he could break away and start his own political movement, which could quickly become a serious force. Ahmadinejad cannot run this year because of term limits, but a comeback bid is possible as early as 2017.

The five-day registration period for candidates closes Saturday. The election overseers, known as the Guardian Council, will announce the handful of candidates on the ballot later this month. The list is expected to be weighted heavily toward establishment-friendly hopefuls. Reformists and liberal-leaning groups have been widely crushed and left leaderless after massive street protests following Ahmadinejad's disputed 2009 victory.

Ahmadinejad was the surprise winner in 2005 by portraying himself as a champion of the poor. In many ways, he has remained true to this identity even as he morphed from loyal foot soldier for the theocracy to an agitator who broke taboos and challenged the authority of Khamenei.

Those failed battles left Ahmadinejad politically humbled and openly derided by the presumed front-runners in the June election. But Ahmadinejad has weathered the storms in the hinterlands. For eight years, his political roadshow traveled to small towns and villages across Iran where many people say even local authorities had never visited.

His government redirected oil revenue into development projects and cash handouts in impoverished areas. His critics called it demagoguery and evidence of gross fiscal mismanagement, which is blamed for soaring prices and worsening the blows from international sanctions over Iran's nuclear program. Yet it also earned Ahmadinejad the devotion of millions outside Tehran and other major cities.

In a rare message to his eventual successor, Ahmadinejad said last week that government "subsidies belong to the people" and they should continue despite the shrinking resources under sanctions.

Ahmadinejad has offered no clear signals on his next moves. Any kind of political future, though, would almost certainly tap into the support built in rural areas and small cities such as Birjand, which had some of the highest reported turnout for Ahmadinejad in the past two elections.

"My husband would have never been able to buy a place to live in his lifetime without Ahmadinejad's support. God may prolong his life," said Razieh Esmaeili, 41, whose husband works in a bakery. Last year, they received an apartment in Birjand's Mehr housing development, part of a nationwide low-income project initiated under Ahmadinejad.

"I'll vote only for the candidate Ahmadinejad supports," she added.

In 2005, Ahmadinejad, then mayor of Tehran, reportedly took 88 percent of the votes in Birjand, his highest percentage in the country. In his re-election, Ahmadinejad still took about 70 percent of the votes, according to official results that have been dismissed by opposition groups as tainted with fraud.

The low-income housing project, however, also is an example of the shortcuts taken by Ahmadinejad's government in its populist outreach.

The streets are still dusty. Electricity and natural gas have been hooked up gradually, but some of the houses still don't have water, which is supplied by a tanker truck. Some of the houses were given to residents half-complete.

Still, few in Birjand complain about the president — a major contrast to Tehran where even Khamenei in February described Ahmadinejad's combative political style as "bad, wrong, inappropriate."

The taxi driver Farsi likes to recount a story about a 2005 letter he wrote to Ahmadinejad asking for help to expand his small house.

"Two months later," he said, "I got a call from the governor's office" offering a loan of about $3,400.

"My family and I will vote for anyone who will be supported by Ahmadinejad, no matter if is Mashaei or somebody else," said Farsi, who is also an active member of the Basij, a paramilitary force allied with the Revolutionary Guard in the South Khorasan province around Birjand.

But Abdollah Hadinia, conservative editor of Khorasan daily in Birjand, has dropped his support for Ahmadinejad after the feud with Khamenei.

"I was proud of Ahmadinejad's statements. But some of his decisions in the past two years have shamed us," he said. "He deviated from his path, and this has harmed has popularity."

Still, there is little sign of reformist activity in Birjand, which reflects the significant gulf between the pockets of liberal-leaning politics in some of Iran's urban areas and the deep traditionalism in the provinces. Voters in Birjand will likely look to Ahmadinejad for cues on how to vote.

"A pro-Ahmadinejad candidate will have a good number of votes. There are 2,000 villages in South Khorasan province and most people in those villages have benefited from Ahmadinejad's government," said Abolfazl Zahei, a pro-reform activist. "People here care about making their ends meet and welfare, not politics."

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Murphy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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Egypt's Mubarak still jailed despite release order

Apr 15 (Reuters) - Leading money winners on the 2013 PGATour on Monday (U.S. unless stated): 1. Tiger Woods $4,139,600 2. Brandt Snedeker $3,137,920 3. Matt Kuchar $2,442,389 4. Adam Scott (Australia) $2,100,469 5. Steve Stricker $1,935,340 6. Phil Mickelson $1,764,680 7. Dustin Johnson $1,748,907 8. Jason Day $1,659,565 9. Hunter Mahan $1,553,965 10. Keegan Bradley $1,430,347 11. Charles Howell III $1,393,806 12. John Merrick $1,375,757 13. Russell Henley $1,331,434 14. Michael Thompson $1,310,709 15. Kevin Streelman $1,310,343 16. Bill Haas $1,271,553 17. Billy Horschel $1,254,224 18. ...

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Israel at 65: Success still plagued by uncertainty

JERUSALEM (AP) — In 65 years, Israel has surpassed the dreams of its founders, emerging as the Middle East's strongest military force, a global high-tech powerhouse and a prosperous homeland for the Jewish people.

Yet it remains a divided society, and its most intractable problem — peace with its Arab neighbors — has yet to be resolved.

On the eve of the 65th anniversary of its creation, the Jewish renaissance in the Holy Land remains a work in progress.

Dominating the short term is Iran's nuclear program, which Israel believes is aimed at developing an atomic weapon that could be used against the Jewish state, despite Iranian denials. Unrest along Israel's borders is equally worrisome.

Over the longer term, reaching peace with the Palestinians remains elusive, with the sides unable to agree even on how to restart negotiations. Palestinians consider creation of Israel a catastrophe that caused a stubborn refugee problem.

The 46-year occupation of Palestinian territories also ignites domestic and international tensions. Without a partition, Arabs could one day outnumber Jews, threatening Israel's democratic nature.

Israel began observing its annual Memorial Day on Sunday evening, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of militant attacks. At 8 p.m., air raid sirens sounded nationwide to mark a minute of silence. A two-minute siren was set for Monday morning.

At sundown Monday, the country abruptly shifts its mood to mark its 65th Independence Day with fireworks, military processions and picnics. The transformation from grief to joy is an annual ritual meant to show the link between the sacrifices and the accomplishments.

"Today there are also those who rise up against us and threaten to destroy us. They did not succeed in the past, and they will never succeed," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Memorial Day ceremony Sunday. Netanyahu's older brother, Yonatan, was killed in a military operation in 1976.

Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, marking the date each year on the Hebrew calendar. Since then, it has been in a constant state of conflict with its neighbors, most recently eight days of exchanges last November with Palestinian militants firing rockets from the Gaza Strip. It has signed peace treaties with just two Arab nations, Egypt and Jordan.

Yet the country is thriving in other ways. It has weathered the global financial crisis better than most, with unemployment below 7 percent and a growing economy. As a "startup nation," it has pioneered breakthroughs, including Wi-Fi technology, the computer firewall and instant messaging. In the past decade, Israeli scientists have won six Nobel prizes in chemistry and economics.

It has absorbed immigrants from more than 100 countries to host the world's largest Jewish population, evolving from a largely agrarian backwater to consistently rank high in measures of standard of living. Israel has given the world international supermodels, and its war history has inspired Oscar-nominated films and a TV series that was adapted into "Homeland," the award-winning American show.

"The state of Israel is truly a fantastic success story, perhaps among the greatest success stories of the 20th century," said Tom Segev, an Israeli author and historian. "There's an Israeli culture, a renewal of the Hebrew language. The most amazing thing is that we now have a third generation of Israelis for whom the country is a given. 'Israeliness' has become something that we take for granted."

On the other hand, Segev noted that the country is still grappling with the same basic issue that plagued it in 1948 — its relations with the Palestinians.

Israel still does not have internationally recognized borders, and remains in control of about 2.5 million Arabs living in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Israel captured the areas, along with the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Mideast war, withdrawing from Gaza in 2005. The Palestinians claim all three territories for a future state.

"We haven't been able to solve this and we may not be able to solve it all," Segev said. "Most Israelis look at the Palestinian issue as a military problem and not a political problem. As long as it is quiet and there is no terror, we think everything is fine."

Israelis argue that the Palestinians have rejected generous peace offers, a claim the Palestinians reject, pointing to Israel's construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a sign of bad faith.

Nahum Barnea, a veteran newspaper columnist, said that even if Israel can resolve its conflict with the Palestinians, its place in the heart of the Muslim world will never be certain.

"The occupation (of the West Bank) is an open wound. But even if the occupation were to miraculously end, the country's relations with the rest of the world would not suddenly be solved," he said. "Our struggle is not behind us. It is with us and ahead of us."

Israel has serious internal problems as well.

About 20 percent of its 8 million citizens are Arabs, who are often treated like second-class citizens and frequently identify with the Palestinians.

Nearly 10 percent of Israelis are ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have clashed with the general public over their dependence on welfare instead of work, refusal to serve in the military and attempts to impose their strict practices on broader society.

More than half of Israel's first grade students are now either Arab or ultra-Orthodox Jews, predicting a future demographic makeup that is less loyal to the state and less productive to its workforce.

Israel's transformation into a high-tech, knowledge-based economy has also fueled a growing gap between rich and poor, setting off protests in the summer of 2011 against the country's high cost of living.

Despite all their issues, Israelis are among the world's happiest people. Recent surveys by the OECD, Gallop and the United Nations' World Happiness Report all had Israel near the top.

Most Israelis appear to have developed an ability to block out the nation's problems and focus on life in a country that just a century ago was just a dream.

"Israelis feel that things are good with them, but not with the state," Segev said.

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Follow Heller on Twitter (at)aronhellerap

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Knox saga still not over for Italian courts

ROME (AP) — It's not over yet for Amanda Knox.

Italy's top criminal court dealt a stunning setback Tuesday to the 25-year-old college student, overturning her acquittal in the grisly murder of her British roommate and ordering her to stand trial again.

"She thought that the nightmare was over," Knox's attorney, Carlo Dalla Vedova, told reporters minutes after conveying the unexpected turn of events to his client, who had stayed up to hear the ruling, which came shortly after 2 a.m. West Coast time. "But she's ready to fight."

Now a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Knox called the decision by the Rome-based Court of Cassation "painful" but said she was confident that she would be exonerated.

The American left Italy a free woman after her October 2011 acquittal — but only after serving nearly four years of a 26-year prison sentence from a lower court that convicted her of murdering Meredith Kercher. The 21-year-old exchange student's body was found in a pool of blood, her throat slit, in a bedroom of the house the two shared in Perugia, a university town 100 miles north of Rome.

Raffaele Sollecito, Knox's Italian boyfriend at the time, was also convicted of the Nov. 1, 2007, murder, then later acquitted. His acquittal was also thrown out Tuesday and a new trial ordered.

Italian law cannot compel Knox to return for the new trial and Dalla Vedova said she had no plans to do so.

In any case, the judicial saga is likely to continue for years. It will be months before a date is set for the new trial, to be held in Florence instead of Perugia because the small town has only one appellate court, which already acquitted her.

Prosecution and defense teams must also await details of the ruling explaining why the high court concluded there were procedural errors in the trial that acquitted Knox and Sollecito. The court has 90 days to issue its explanation.

Another Knox defender, Luciano Ghirga, said she was gearing up psychologically for her third trial. Ghirga said he told Knox: "You have always been our strength. We rose up again after the first-level convictions. We'll have the same resoluteness, the same energy" in the new trial.

Still, it was a tough blow for the former exchange student, whose parents mortgaged both their homes to raise funds for her lengthy, expensive defense.

"It was painful to receive the news that the Italian Supreme Court decided to send my case back for revision when the prosecution's theory of my involvement in Meredith's murder has been repeatedly revealed to be completely unfounded and unfair," Knox said in a statement.

She said the matter must now be examined by "an objective investigation and a capable prosecution."

"No matter what happens, my family and I will face this continuing legal battle as we always have, confident in the truth and with our heads held high in the face of wrongful accusations and unreasonable adversity," Knox said.

Prosecutors alleged that Kercher was the victim of a drug-fueled sex game gone awry. Knox, then 20, and Sollecito, then 24, denied wrongdoing and said they weren't even in the apartment that night, although they acknowledged they had smoked marijuana and their memories were clouded.

An Ivory Coast man, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the slaying in a separate trial and is serving a 16-year sentence.

Sollecito, whose 29th birthday was Tuesday, sounded shaken when a reporter reached him by phone.

"Now I can't say anything," said the Italian, who has been studying computer science in the northern city of Verona after finishing up an earlier degree while in prison.

A local Italian news report quoted Sollecito's current girlfriend as saying he and Knox spoke by phone and described him as being psychologically destroyed.

His lawyer, Luca Maori, said neither Sollecito nor Knox ran any danger of being arrested. "It's not as if the lower-court convictions are revived," he said, noting that the high court didn't determine "whether the two were innocent or guilty. "

For those familiar with the U.S. legal principle of "double jeopardy" — which holds that no one acquitted of a crime can be tried again for it — the idea that the Italian justice system allows prosecutors to appeal acquittals is hard to absorb.

Knox attorney Dalla Vedova dismissed the "double jeopardy" concern, maintaining the high court ruling hadn't decided the defendants' guilt or innocence, but merely ordered a fresh appeals trial, which he said was unlikely to start before early 2014.

The appeals court that acquitted Knox and Sollecito had criticized virtually the entire prosecution case, especially the forensic evidence that helped clinch their 2009 convictions. It noted the murder weapon was never found, and said DNA tests were faulty and that prosecutors provided no murder motive.

In arguing for overturning the acquittals, prosecutors said the Perugia appellate court was too dismissive of DNA tests on a knife they maintained could have been used to slash Kercher's throat as well as DNA traces on a bra belonging to the victim and tests done on blood stains in the bedroom and bathroom.

The court on Tuesday also upheld a slander conviction against Knox. During a 14-hour police interrogation, she had accused a local Perugia pub owner of carrying out the killing. The man was held for two weeks, based on her allegations, before being released for lack of evidence.

Her defense lawyers say Knox felt pressured by police to name a suspect so her own interrogation could end.

Because of the time she served in prison before the acquittal, Knox didn't have to serve the three-year sentence for the slander conviction. The court on Tuesday ordered her to pay 4,000 euros ($5,500) to the man, as well as the cost of the lost appeal.

Whether Knox ever returns to Italy to serve more prison time depends on a string of ifs and unknowns.

"Questions of extradition are not in the legal landscape at this point," another Knox attorney, Theodore Simon, said on NBC TV.

If she is convicted by the Florence court, Knox could appeal that verdict to the Cassation Court. Should that appeal fail, Italy could seek her extradition from the United States.

Whether Italy actually requests extradition will be a political decision made by a future Italian government. It would then be up to U.S. officials to decide whether they will send Knox to Italy, and Dalla Vedova said U.S. authorities would carefully study all the case's documentation to decide whether she had received fair trials.

U.S. and Italian authorities could also come to a deal that would keep Knox in the U.S.

For now, Knox has a memoir, "Waiting to Be Heard," coming out April 30, for which publisher HarperCollins reportedly paid her $4 million. She still plans to appear in a prime-time special with Diane Sawyer to promote the book, according to ABC News.

In her statement, Knox took the Perugia prosecutors to task, saying they "must be made to answer" for the discrepancies in the case. She also said "my heart goes out to" Kercher's family.

The Kercher family's attorney, Francesco Maresca, called Tuesday's ruling "what we wanted" and relayed a message from the late woman's sister, Stephanie.

"To understand the truth about what happened that night is all we can do for her now," the family's message said.

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AP writer Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report.

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Administration still pushing for assault weapons ban: Biden

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that the Obama administration would continue to press for an assault weapons ban as part of gun control legislation despite a serious setback on the issue earlier this week.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledged on Tuesday that there was not enough support for the ban in the Senate, meaning it would fail when gun control legislation comes to the floor of the chamber next month.

Biden, who has led President Barack Obama's push for tighter gun regulations, said he was undeterred.

"We are still pushing that it pass," Biden told NPR in an interview, according to its website.

"I believe that the vast majority of the American people agree with us, the vast majority of gun owners agree with us, that military-style assault weapons are — these are weapons of war. They don't belong in the street," he said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

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Students Still Hope to Visit White House After Capitol Visit 'Wow'

Disappointed, but still determined, 15 Iowa sixth-graders woke up before dawn today and boarded a plane for the nation's capital, still hopeful that they would get to visit the White House.

It's been 10 days since the students of St. Paul's Lutheran School, just outside Cedar Falls, Iowa, learned their White House tour was in jeopardy, a casualty of those across-the-board spending cuts.

"We have not gotten an answer, but our tour is not scheduled until 11:30 a.m. tomorrow [Saturday], so we are hoping for late-breaking news," Karen Thalacker, chaperone and mother of 12-year-old Malcolm Newell, told ABC News' Jonathan Karl shortly after their arrival in Washington.

The White House cancelled all public tours indefinitely as a result of the sequester cuts, saying they had to choose between nixing the tours or possibly furloughing Secret Service officers.

President Obama told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos earlier this week that the administration is trying to find a way to accommodate school groups, but it seems unlikely a solution will be reached in time for the students from St. Paul's.

"The Secret Service and the White House are talking about what is possible. I would not anticipate that opening tours that soon would be possible," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said earlier this week, when asked about the students.

One boy today told ABC News he'll miss seeing inside the White House but understands the president had a tough decision to make.

Another classmate said, "We're upset, but there's nothing that we can really do about it. We've done our best to try. And that's only really we can do."

Turning their disappointment into a real-life civics lessons, the students launched a social media blitz to spread their message: "The White House is our house! Please let us visit!"

"We can make a difference. Maybe we're just 12 and 11 years old, but that doesn't matter," one of the students told ABC today.

"These kids aren't Democrats, they're not Republicans, they're American kids who want to see the White House, and everybody should be let in regardless of who's living there," Thalacker said.

While they wait for news from the White House, the students kicked off their Washington weekend with a visit to the Capitol, which remains open for business.

One boy's first reaction: "Wow. It's overwhelming. I never would have thought we could have gotten this far."

House Speaker John Boehner's office learned of their story and offered some special treatment, including a stop by the speaker's balcony to take in the view of the Mall and the opportunity to go inside the chamber.

On Saturday, they're still hoping to visit the White House - or at least get a look at it from outside the gates.

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Obama lunches with budget hawk Ryan, deal still far off

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Legislation easily passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday to avert another partisan budget battle and a possible government shutdown, as President Barack Obama also opened new lines of communication with Republicans.

By a vote of 267-151, the House passed a measure to fund government programs until the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The Democratic-controlled Senate is expected to pass a similar bill next week.

Without such legislation federal agencies would run out of money on March 27.

The bill to continue funding the government without last-minute drama came as Obama took the unusual step of inviting Republican senators to a dinner on Wednesday night at a Washington hotel a few blocks from the White House, which lasted about an hour and a half.

An administration official told Reuters Obama was hoping to take advantage of a lull in a series of budget crises to launch a dialogue with Republican lawmakers, which he hopes will lead to a broad deficit-reduction deal.

While the dinner was not intended to be a negotiation, it was an opportunity for Obama to correct the record on a perception among some Republicans that he is unwilling to consider some difficult spending cuts that are unpopular with his fellow Democrats in Congress.

Those could include cuts to programs that include the Social Security pension system and Medicare for the elderly.

Discussion at the dinner was expected to concentrate on budget issues, the official said. Obama will discuss his other legislative priorities, including immigration reform, gun control and tackling climate change, at meetings on Capitol Hill next week.

In another bipartisan gesture, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that at his suggestion, Obama will join Republicans for a lunch on Capitol Hill on March 14.

Obama is also due to meet with congressional Democrats next week, the White House said.

The meetings, whether or not they produce results, depart from what has been an at best a stand-offish relationship between Obama and Republicans in Congress.

They suggest that Obama and Republicans are getting the message that public patience with Washington is wearing thin. This has become apparent as Americans read of inconveniences they may soon confront at airports and elsewhere as a result of across-the-board cuts to the federal budget that kicked in on Friday after lawmakers and the White House failed to agree on an alternative.

"This is the first indication in really a long time that the president is willing to exert leadership and bring people together and that's exactly what needs to be done," said Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who has spoken by phone in recent days with Obama.

REPUBLICAN DOUBTERS

At the heart of the bitter budget dispute are deep differences over how to rein in growth of the $16.7 trillion federal debt. Obama wants to narrow the fiscal gap with spending cuts and tax hikes. Republicans do not want to concede again on taxes after doing so in negotiations over the "fiscal cliff" at the New Year.

Despite the scheduled dinners and meetings and the vote on funding the government, few expect those differences to be resolved any time soon.

Some Republicans remain skeptical of Obama's overtures. "This president has been exceptional in his lack of consultation and outreach to Congress," said John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Senate Republican.

Cornyn, like Collins, was not invited to dinner with Obama, but he warned that talk of tax increases would be unwelcome. "I don't know if the purpose of the meeting is social or if he has an agenda. But if it is about raising taxes, we're done."

While Republicans have taken most of the beating in surveys in connection with the so-called sequestration, a Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Wednesday showed 43 percent of people approve of Obama's handling of his job, down 7 percentage points from February 19.

Confounding the White House's efforts to blame Republicans for the spending cuts, most respondents in the online survey hold both Democrats and Republicans responsible.

As recently as last month, Republicans were threatening to use the bill to fund the government, called a "continuing resolution," to extract spending cuts from the White House.

Instead, the bill they fashioned, which passed on Wednesday, embraced the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts that were triggered last Friday, while providing some additional spending flexibility to the military and other security operations.

Republican Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma said his party would like to shift the cuts to other areas of the budget, noting that there are 20,000 military employees in his Oklahoma district.

"We'll sit down and renegotiate where they should come from," Cole said in the debate on the House floor. "We think we've got some great ideas, but they (the cuts) are going to occur. They're the first and appropriate step for getting our fiscal house back in order."

Many Democrats in the Republican-controlled House voted against the funding bill because it would not give the Obama administration flexibility in carrying out the new, automatic spending cuts for domestic programs such as education. Last month, Democrats had sought to replace about half of the automatic cuts with tax increases on the rich.

"This bill falls short in a number of areas, but most of all because it does nothing to prevent the loss of 750,000 jobs that will result because of the sequester," said Representative Chris Van Hollen, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

(Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal, Susan Heavey, Thomas Ferraro and Rachelle Younglai.; Editing by Fred Barbash and David Brunnstrom)

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Carnegie: Stalin still admired in ex-Soviet lands

MOSCOW (AP) — An opinion survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment says that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has remained widely admired in Russia and other ex-Soviet nations, even though millions of people died under his brutally repressive rule.

The Carnegie report, released Friday, was based on the first-ever comparative opinion polls in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It found that support for Stalin in Russia has actually increased since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The report has concluded that public attitudes to the dictator have improved during Russian President Vladimir Putin's 13-year rule as the Kremlin has found Stalin's image useful in its efforts to tighten control.

The tyrant led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Communists and other hardliners credit him with leading the country to victory in World War II, and making it a nuclear superpower, while others condemn the brutal purges that killed millions of people.

One of the report's authors, Lev Gudkov, a Russian sociologist whose polling agency conducted the survey, noted that in 1989, the peak of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to liberalize the country and expose Stalinist crimes, only 12 percent of Russians polled described Stalin as one of the most prominent historical figures.

In the Carnegie poll last year, 42 percent of Russian respondents named Stalin as the most influential historical figure.

"Vladimir Putin's Russia of 2012 needs symbols of authority and national strength, however controversial they may be, to validate the newly authoritarian political order," Gudkov wrote in the Carnegie report. "Stalin, a despotic leader responsible for mass bloodshed but also still identified with wartime victory and national unity, fits this need for symbols that reinforce the current political ideology."

Putin, a former KGB officer, has avoided open public praise or criticism of Stalin, but he has restored Soviet-era symbols and focused on the nation's Soviet-era achievements rather than Stalinist crimes. Kremlin critics have seen attempts to whitewash Stalin's image as part of Putin's rollback on democracy.

Many in Russia have been dismayed by government-sponsored school textbooks that paint Stalin in a largely positive light and by the reconstruction of a Moscow subway station that restored old Soviet national anthem lyrics praising Stalin as part of its interior decoration.

In the most recent sign of respect for the dictator earlier this year, the regional legislature decreed that the city of Volgograd, which was known as Stalingrad until its renaming in 1961, should once again be known by its old name on days commemorating the historic WWII battle. In some Russian cities, authorities ordered images of Stalin to be put on city buses as part of festivities.

The Carnegie report revealed that while a high number of Russians have a positive view of Stalin, his era mostly draws negative perceptions, an ambiguity that reflects public confusion, the legacy of totalitarian "doublethink" and paternalist state model.

An even greater admiration of Stalin was seen in his homeland, Georgia, where 45 percent of respondents expressed a positive view of him. In Armenia, 38 percent of those polled said their country will always need leaders like Stalin. In Azerbaijan, where respondents viewed Stalin more negatively compared to the three other nations, 22 percent of those polled didn't even know who Stalin was.

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Venezuela's Chavez still suffers breathing trouble

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's cancer-stricken President Hugo Chavez is still suffering breathing problems after his operation in Cuba more than two months ago, the government said on Thursday.

"The breathing insufficiency that emerged post-operation persists, and the tendency has not been favorable, so it is still being treated," read the first official communiqué on Chavez's health since his return to Venezuela on Monday.

(Reporting by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Todd Eastham)

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