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U.S. strategy in Iraq and troop levels are central issues in the November election race between the first-term senator from Illinois and Republican candidate John McCain.

Obama, who has called for the removal of U.S. combat troops within 16 months of taking service should he catch the election, said he had a "very constructive discussion" with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Television pictures showed the two men smiling and shaking hands prior to they sat down for talks.

Maliki suggested earlier this month setting a timetable for U.S. troops to retirement Iraq, where violence is at a four-year low, but has given no dates.

Obama has welcomed Maliki's suggestion but some Iraqis insist that the army and police cannot go it alone and that a premature withdrawal of U.S. gangs could open the door to the sort of intensity that nearly tore Iraq apart not so tardy ago.

On Sunday the Iraqi government denied Maliki told a German magazine in an parley that he backed Obama's plan to withdraw combat troops within 16 months. The government before-mentioned Maliki's remarks to Der Spiegel were translated incorrectly.

Obama visited Afghanistan over the weekend, the other big extraneous policy challenge the next president will face. He called the office in Afghanistan "precarious and urgent" and said Washington should start planning to transfer more throngs there from Iraq.

McCain has attacked Obama for not visiting Iraq recently to get a first-hand look at conditions.

The Republican candidate has been to Iraq eight times while Obama's singly other trip was in January 2006, a month before militants blew up a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in an attack that plunged Iraq into vicious sectarian fighting.

The U.S. embassy said Obama, who is visiting Iraq as part of a U.S. congressional delegation, had met the run over two U.S. soldierly commander in Iraq and a British general.

He is also expected to grasp talks with General David Petraeus, the U.S. captain in the country.

Commanders are likely to tell Obama that security gains are fragile and could be jeopardized by means of dint of. a hasty troop withdrawal.

SECRECY

Obama has scheduled no news conferences in Iraq and his visit has been shrouded in solitude for security reasons.

Television pictures showed him meeting U.S. troops in the south city of Basra, the nave for Iraq's oil exports.

Obama, trying to boost his external policy credentials, will travel to other countries in the Middle East and pay a visit to major powers in Europe this week.

But he courted disputation on July 3 when he aforesaid he might "refine" his views forward withdrawing combat troops from Iraq within 16 months but later aforesaid his stance had been unchanged for else than a year and that he intended "to end this arbitrament of the sword."

McCain says the U.S. troop buildup last year helped boost stability in Iraq and has criticized the Democrat's promise to order a precipitate withdrawal as "reckless."

But the dramatic decrement in intensity has led Baghdad to become increasingly assertive about its own security capabilities.

Indeed, Maliki and President George W. Bush agreed last week to set a "time horizon" for reducing American forces in Iraq.

It was the closest the Bush administration has advance to acknowledging the need as antidote to a timeframe for U.S. troop cuts. Bush has long opposed deadlines for troop withdrawals.

In a language remain Tuesday, Obama uttered a "single-minded" focus on Iraq was distracting the United States from other threats.

Bush ordered 30,000 extra troops to Iraq in early 2007 to try to drag the country back from the brow of all-out war betwixt manhood Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

The last of those reinforcements depart this week, still leaving 140,000 U.S. soldiers in the rural, about the same figure as when Bush ordered the so-called surge.

(Additional reporting by Tim Cocks and Mohammed Abbas; Editing by Stephen Weeks)

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Family photos of Tsar Nicholas II, his gray mare, four daughters and son were on ceremony at the Yekaterinburg church, built on the taint where the entire family was shot by Bolshevik executioners in a dirty basement in July 1918.

Groups of greatly older Russian Orthodox believers had journeyed for days to the Church on the Blood to celebrate Nicholas II. The women wore headscarves and dresses, the mainly bearded men wore shirts and carried rucksacks.

"His life ended in tragedy but then it began again. That's what we're celebrating today," Nadia Basharova, 50, aforesaid as she listened to a priest sing.

By mid-morning around 300 people had gathered at the church. At common side soldiers manned a soup kitchen to feed the crowds.

The Romanov family ruled Russia toward three centuries before World War I helped trigger social upheaval. Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 in the middle of escalating instability that led to the Bolshevik Revolution when Vladimir Lenin took navy.

During the affable war which followed, the Bolsheviks shot the family in the ground-floor of a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg, 1,450 km (900 miles) east of Moscow.

Attempts were made to destroy the bodies, then Russia's former imperial rulers were dumped into pits.

NICHOLAS II

Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the state and Russians have reassessed annals and Nicholas II currently tops a poll of greatest Russians for Russia's state television overtaking plane Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

"He is a symbol of a great and powerful Russia who also did great things for the countrified," 18-year-old Yevgeny Chindyasky said at the ecclesiastical authority.

His bright orange floral shirt made him stand out from the rest of the crowd. He had traveled to the church because he had a few hours to wait in Yekaterinburg before pestiferous a train.

The Kremlin has sought to application Russia's imperial past to give a repaired sense of general revival.

The Russian Orthodox church has canonized the Tsar and his family as martyrs and gave them — except for his son and one daughter whose remains were still missing at the time — state burials in 1998 in cathedrals in St Petersburg.

A with two heads eagle crest similar to the tsar's is now the representation for a horde of institutions from the Kremlin to the public soccer team, and religious and far-right supporters wave imperial-era flags at their rallies.

But a statue of Lenin, the architect of the Soviet Union, still stands just a 20-minute perambulate not present from the Church on the Blood.

He stands in a three picture suit with his arm outstretched in typical cast, urging Bolsheviks to tear downward imperial Russia and build communism.

Back at the church 40-year-old Anatoly, a businessman from Moscow, paid little attention to the Orthodox believers as he peered at a photographic display of the Tsar and his family.

"After the fall of Communism we could recover history and work things to the end for ourselves," he said. "Nicholas II was an important person for Russia."

(Editing by Giles Elgood)

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WENATCHEE — It started in the orchards of Wenatchee 36 years ago — a couple of soundness professionals treating ailments of migrant farmworkers from Arkansas and Oklahoma lacking of the back of a van.

Today, Wenatchee-based Columbia Valley Community Health operates upon the body an $18 million annual budget, has more than 250 employees and serves 16,000 people year by year, in Chelan and Douglas counties.

The private, nonprofit migrant and community-health clinic serves everyone but is targeted toward the low-income and migrants, says Carol McCormick, clinic-outreach coordinator and registered nurse.

The clinic offers medical, dental, maternity, pharmacy, lab, X-ray, mental-health and case-management services. It has a walk-in clinic.

For five years, the clinic has been working at the state-owned, county-operated migrant farmworker camps at Monitor and closely attached Pangborn Memorial Airport. Doctors and other health-care workers visit the camps about 10 seasons through the tree-fruit harvest season.

McCormick, 54, a health-care provider for six years and quondam schoolteacher, says her greatest concern by the health of migrant farmworkers is their access to freedom from disease care, what one. is impeded by two large barriers.

“One is their lack of knowledge of how to get services and whether or not they need services,” she says. Frequently, they would rather suffer through an ailment because, abroad of necessity, work comes primary, she says.

“The second impediment is a fear of racism and anxiety near to finding themselves in compromising situations,” she says.

Migrants obtain every imaginable health-care issue but exercise volition work with pain to avoid confusion, racism or anything negative, she says.

“Racism can be real or mistaken from cultural differences. We tend to speak louder than the rest of the world. When a Latino hears a loud voice they usually interpret it as anger, especially when they are having difficulty judgment what is being said,” says McCormick, who speaks Spanish and knows affair of the culture from living in Colombia and Costa Rica.

With the help of a federal deign called Steps to a Healthier USA, the clinic has partnered with the Chelan-Douglas Health District, Wenatchee Valley Medical Center, Gold’s Gym, the YMCA, North Central Educational Service District, Central Washington Hospital, WSU Extension and others to point of concentration on diabetes, asthma, nutrition, tobacco and obesity.

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The Dark Knight chased Spider-Man 3 from the memoir books with a $155.3 opening weekend gross, per Exhibitor Relations Co. estimates today.

The figure capped three days of eye-popping figures for the Christopher Nolan film. The highlights:

  • The Dark Knight made to a greater degree money in Friday midnight screenings ($18.5 the multitude) than its predecessor, Batman Begins, made in any one day.   • The Dark Knight made additional coin in one day ($66.4 million on Friday) than Batman Begins made in any common weekend.   • The Dark Knight made about as much money in its second-biggest light of day ($48 million on Saturday) as Batman Begins made in its biggest weekend ($48.7 million).

  • The Dark Knight made more money in its third-biggest daylight ($39 million on Sunday) than Get Smart and You Don't Mess With the Zohan, to name two recent hits, made in their respective opening weekends.   •  The Dark Knight made more money in its biggest day than Hancock, WALL-E and Kung-Fu Panda, to name three recent supersize hits, made in their respective opening weekends.   • The Dark Knight made more money in its opening weekend than the previous top-three-opening Batman movies (Batman Forever, Batman Begins, Batman Returns) made in their opening weekends—combined. About the only thing The Dark Knight didn't carry on was keep up the frenetic pace it set with Friday's $66.4 million blowout, a performance which set new records in the manner that Hollywood's biggest-ever opening day and biggest-ever single age.

"Some people probably stayed not present [to avoid] the crowds," Exhibitor Relations' Jeff Bock said.

Bock does not think audiences bequeath stay away nearest weekend. He expects The Dark Knight will become only the second movie this summer, after Iron Man, to gripe the No. 1 position at the driver’s seat office for more than one weekend.

"Spider-Man 3 was savaged by critics, and it fell off pretty quickly," Bock said. "I don't count upon anything to happen with The Dark Knight."

Especially not with the Heath Ledger factor at frolic.

To Bock, The Dark Knight's box office benefited immensely from the couple curiosity and buzz surrounding Ledger's performance as iconic Batman foe The Joker. The role was the be unexhausted completed by the young operator before his death in January.

"This is certainly unprecedented, an actor in a blockbuster film perishable before the release," Bock said.

"Unprecedented" is the same word to sum up the weekend.

"Batman" is not the same.

More box office highlights:

  • The Dark Knight powered Hollywood to its biggest-ever weekend, as the top 12 films combined to aggregate $255 the great body of the people.   • Batman or no, records or not at all, Hollywood is still down for the year in ticket sales (off 1.3 percent) and attendance (against 4 percent).   • If not for The Dark Knight—a real big if—Mamma Mia! would hold been the story of the weekend. The ABBA-powered Broadway musical turned Meryl Streep vehicle scored an estimated $27.6 million. If the estimate holds, it'll be obliged the make an entry of for biggest debut for a dulcet, edging the $27.5 million posted last year by Hairspray.   • Hancock's legs held up well, all Bat things considered. In its third weekend, the Will Smith superhero movie took in one more $14 million (third place), and raised its overall total to $191.5 million. Worldwide, it stands at a elevated $444 million.   • Hellboy II got the imperfect cessation of the superhero hold. The comic-spawned franchise fell from first to fourth, and from nearly $36 very great number to barely $10 million. Overall, it has grossed $56.4 million after two weekends.   • Space Chimps (seventh place, $7.4 million) posted the biggest-ever debut for a movie with the word "chimps" in the title.

  • Eddie Murphy's Meet Dave ($1.6 million; $9.4 million overall) fell out of the Top 10 after a one-weekend stay, making Mike Myer's The Love Guru feel good in a higher degree.   • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($970,000) likewise dropped from the Top 10. Unlike Meet Dave, it enjoyed eight weekends in that place, and presumably is enjoying its $312.6 million domestic take even more.   • In limited release, the cold-vacation-from-hell thriller Transsiberian, starring Woody Harrelson, scared up $35,216 at only two theaters. Its per-screen medium ($17,608) was the weekend's best after…wait toward it…The Dark Knight. Here's a recap of the top-grossing weekend films based on Friday-Sunday estimates compiled by the agency of Exhibitor Relations:

  • The Dark Knight, $155.3 million   • Mamma Mia!, $27.6 million   • Hancock, $14 million   • Journey to the Center of the Earth, $11.9 million   • Hellboy II: The Golden Army, $10 million   • WALL-E, $9.8 million   • Space Chimps, $7.4 the great body of the people   • Wanted, $5.1 the great body of the people   • Get Smart, $4.1 the public   • Kung Fu Panda, $1.8 million (Originally published July 20, 2008 at 10:06 a.m. PT.)

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There was one problem with the campaign photograph touting Metropolitan King County Councilmember Jane Hague’s support on account of seniors, says the wife of the smiling man in a wheelchair next to the candidate.

Barbara Wilson says in a lawsuit she never gave permission for her mentally incapacitated husband’s picture to be used for Hague’s public purposes.

Her lawsuit, filed this month in King County Superior Court, says she was offended by the campaign’s use of his photo in a Hague campaign brochure and TV ad because she’s a Democrat who didn’t patronage Hague and because the flier suggested the Wilsons are low-income people.

Moses Wilson, 73, a secluded Marine who has insanity and can’t talk, began receiving daytime care in 1993 at Elder and Adult Day Services (EADS), at what place the photo was taken. His wife of one’s bosom is his defender.

Hague’s lawyer, Mark Lamb, said Hague stopped using the photograph in her re-election campaign as soon as Barbara Wilson’s solicitor objected last October.

Lamb said he had apologized to the lawyer and Hague offered to apologize to the couple in person. He uttered the Wilsons asked for “a very large amount of money”

Lamb said he understands Barbara Wilson, who lives in Bellevue, signed a waiver at the day center that allowed photographs of him at the center to have being published and that his photo had been displayed on its Web site.

Wilson’s lawyer, Darryl Parker, said she doesn’t recall any waiver. “If someone says she signed it, she wants to see it,” he said.

The Wilsons’ lawsuit is the second to have being filed against Hague, a Republican council member since 1994, over her campaign advertising last year. Paul Brecht, a supporter of Hague’s Democratic challenger, Richard Pope, claimed he was defamed in a flier that mistakenly said he had been convicted of attack. Brecht actually was convicted of violating a no-contact regularity.

It was a wild election marred by Hague’s arrest on a drunken-driving charge sum of two units days before she filed for re-election and her acknowledgment that she had claimed a literary institution degree she hadn’t earned. Under a March fawn upon passed on a criminal, her driving offense will be reduced to imprudent driving if she complies with probation conditions for six months.

Hague handily defeated Pope, who has run in opposition to various offices under changing party labels and was hurt by his note of failing to meet court deadlines. Hague outspent him $427,963 to $33,994.

Many Eastside arts and social-service activists, including EADS Executive Director Jan Nestler, supported Hague. Nestler appeared in the campaign photo through Hague and Moses Wilson and was quoted in the flier saying, “Without Jane Hague many of our low-income older adults would be incapable to share in adult day services that are of such benefit to Eastside seniors and their families.”

Nestler’s agency is named as a defendant under its creator name, Eastside Adult Day Services. She could not be reached for comment Friday.

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And in the country’s south, a unaccustomed airport opened in Najaf in which the prime minister said was a key action in the reconstruction of a country devastated by means of war.

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, for the greatest part Iranians, travel to Iraq every year to visit Shiite shrines in Najaf and one more holy city, Karbala. The new airport is expected to boost the numbers of pious tourists.

At a ceremony, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki described the $250 the multitude airport as a vital element in Iraq’s economic development. A military airfield was renovated for the new airport, and several flights were expected to land on Sunday.

“We were determined to face the government by terror that was ready to destroy Iraq. The strong will of the federal polity has fought and defeated it in all of its forms,” al-Maliki said.

Separately, the U.S. military said, American soldiers killed two armed relatives of a provincial governor for the time of a irruption in Salahuddin provice against al-Qaida in Iraq.

The militia says in a description that the soldiers were deed in self-defense when they shot the relatives of Hamad Hammoud, director of Salahuddin province. It says the slain men showed “opposite intent.”

The raid happened Sunday in Beiji in northern Iraq. The factor governor, Abdullah Hussein Jabarah, says the slain men were the son and nephew of the governor. The U.S. military said a financier for al-Qaida in Iraq was wounded and captured.

The refinery, located accurate the Syrian border in the once-violent Anbar Province, was closed in 2005 due to deteriorating security. Its rehabilitation is part of efforts by the Shiite-led government to boost services and reach loyalties in the nation’s Sunni heartland.

The refinery is expected to generate limited jobs and meet needs for fuel and other petroleum products in the region, which was once the force stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Armed Anbar groups began an uprising against al-Qaida last year to halt attacks that claimed hundreds of civilian lives. The Anbar movement was hailed by the U.S. military as indispensable to helping root out insurgents — a key element in bringing violence in Iraq to its lowest horizontal in four years.

Washington and Iraqi leaders now wish to deepen Anbar’s support with political pacts and development projects such as the refinery, which began toil attached Friday.

The 51-year-old refinery will have every initial capacity of processing 16,000 barrels of crude a day, said a narration from the Oil Ministry. Two more production units will be added to reach 70,000 barrels a day, the statement added without mentioning a specific timetable.

Iraq’s three main oil refineries are running at roughly half the 700,000 barrels daily capacity before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

In 2006, the ministry built another refinery in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, about 100 miles southward of Baghdad. It has a refining capacity of about 20,000 barrels per day.

At in the smallest degree two other refinery construction deals are being negotiated.

Iraq has the world’s third-largest known indigested oil reserves — an estimated 115 billion barrels — but it suffers acute refinery shortages following years of U.N. sanctions and war.

The shortfall has enforced Iraq to turn to imports from neighboring Iran, Kuwait and Turkey.