The Pew Centre said: "Despite growing concern over Iran's nuclear ambitions, the US presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran - and in many countries much more often - as a danger to world peace."

The survey, carried out annually, shows a continued decline in support for the US since 1999. The US image for most of the 20th century has been relatively positive, being regularly identified with democracy, human rights and openness in spite of criticism from the left, which reached a height during the Vietnam war, and a residual suspicion in the Muslim world.

But even in the UK, Washington's closest ally, favourable ratings have slumped from 83% in 1999 to 56% this year. The pattern is similar in France, down from 62% to 39%, Germany 78% to 37%, and Spain 50% to 23%.

In Muslim countries with which the US has traditionally enjoyed a good relationship, such as Turkey - a member of Nato - and Indonesia, there have also been slumps. In Indonesia favourable ratings for the US have dropped from 75% to 30%, and in Turkey from 52% to 12%.

"It's all [because of] Iraq," Carroll Doherty, associate director of the Pew Centre, said. He added that it was a sign of how "dangerous Iraq is to the US image" that, in spite of common cause between the US and Europeans on Iran, there had been no improvement in the American position in Europe.

Mr Doherty said: "Short-term measures do have an effect. The outpouring of US tsunami aid helped in Indonesia and India but that faded quickly, and now we see US aid for Pakistan earthquake victims only helping at the margins." Favourable ratings of the US in India dropped over the year from 71% to 56%.

He said US domestic polling indicated that Americans were well aware of how the country was perceived abroad. The US image has become a political issue, with Republicans saying it doesn't matter as long as the correct policies are being pursued overseas, while Democrats argue that repairing the country's image and relationships will be a priority for the next president in 2009.

The poll provides little comfort for Condoleezza Rice, who has worked hard at improving relations with Europe since becoming Secretary of State last year.

As part of the overall decline in US support, the survey also records a drop in support for the US-led "war on terror", even in countries such as Spain, in spite of the Madrid bombings two years ago by al-Qaida that left 192 dead. Support for the "war on terror" dropped in Spain from 26% last year to 19% this year.

Throughout the period the poll was conducted the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme, intensified by hardline comments from its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was repeatedly in the news. Iraq, too, has been in the news on an almost daily basis, with the formation of a new Iraqi government being accompanied by fears of a civil war.

Only in the US and Germany is Iran seen as a greater danger than the US in Iraq. Public opinion in 12 of the other countries - Britain, France, Spain, Russia, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, India and China - cite the US presence in Iraq as being the greater danger. Opinion in Japan was evenly divided.

As well as Iraq and Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also high on the list of issues that present a danger to world peace. Public opinion in about a third of the countries polled put it at the top of their list of threats.

In the UK, the second biggest contributor of troops in Iraq, 60% said the Iraq war had made the world more dangerous. Only 30% said it had made the world safer, and 41% of British people said the US presence in Iraq represented a great danger to world peace, with 34% citing Iran as a big threat.

By contrast, concern about Iran has almost doubled in the US over the past two years. Some 46% of Americans view Mr Ahmadinejad's government as "a great danger" to stability in the Middle East and world peace, up from 26% in 2003. The concern in the US is shared in Germany, where 51% see Iran as a great danger to world peace, against 18% three years ago.

He was a formulator of the Bush doctrine making the spread of democracy the fundamental goal of U.S. foreign policy, a policy hailed as revolutionary by some and criticized as unrealistic by others. He led a personal crusade to make unprecedented multibillion-dollar investments in fighting AIDS, malaria and poverty around the globe. He became one of the few voices pressing for a more aggressive policy to stop genocide in Darfur, even as critics complained of U.S. inaction.

"He might have had more influence than any White House staffer who wasn't chief of staff or national security adviser" in modern times, said William Kristol, who was top aide to Vice President Dan Quayle and now edits the Weekly Standard. "Mike was substantively influential, not just a wordsmith, not just a crafter of language for other people's policies, but he influenced policy itself."

"He is the best and most influential presidential speechwriter since Ted Sorenson," said Peter H. Wehner, director of White House strategic initiatives, referring to the adviser to President John F. Kennedy. "Mike is one of the key intellectual architects of the Bush presidency, whether we're talking about compassionate conservatism at home or the freedom agenda abroad."

Gerson is the latest in a series of longtime Bush aides to leave, following White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., press secretary Scott McClellan and Treasury Secretary John W. Snow. But newly installed Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten said in an interview that the departure is not part of his broader shakeup of the president's operation. No one is being tapped to take Gerson's most recent assignment as senior adviser.

"He's one of the few people who is irreplaceable," Bolten said. "He's a policy provoker, a grand strategist and a conscience who in many cases has not only articulated but reflected the president's heart."

Gerson, 42, said he had originally planned to leave after Bush's 2004 reelection but decided to stay when he was asked to shift from chief speechwriter to senior adviser with an office a few doors from the Oval Office. He had a heart attack in December 2004 but said his health is now fine and was not an issue in his decision. "It was never my intention to stay to the end," Gerson said.

He plans to look at writing, speaking and think-tank opportunities, with help from Robert B. Barnett, the high-powered lawyer who represents major figures such as former president Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Gerson stood out in a White House known for swagger. A somewhat slight, pale, bespectacled and soft-spoken Midwesterner, he nonetheless forged a strong bond with the outgoing, backslapping Texan president, in part through their shared conservative Christian faith. He found a way to channel Bush's thoughts, colleagues said, transforming a sometimes inarticulate president into an occasionally memorable speaker.

Gerson wrote or co-wrote every major speech Bush gave since announcing his candidacy, including convention and inaugural addresses and State of the Union messages. He crafted the two speeches after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that will probably be recorded as Bush's signal moments of national leadership: the service at the Washington National Cathedral and the address to Congress.

He crafted the State of the Union language that labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil" and the inaugural address that committed the United States to "ending tyranny in our world." He came up with the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" to focus on minority education problems.

Gerson believed strongly in the "compassionate" part of Bush's "compassionate conservatism," saying he wanted to pursue liberal goals through conservative means. To that end, he helped promote the president's No Child Left Behind education initiative, the Medicare prescription drug program and grants to faith-based charities. "It's a more activist approach," Gerson said. "That was a major change from what came before."

He also pushed for a $15 billion program to combat HIV and AIDS worldwide, telling Bush in the Oval Office that they would never be forgiven if they passed up the chance. Although he kept a hand in major speeches during the second term, he became increasingly focused on Africa and traveled there four times to see Darfur and other places firsthand, returning to describe searing scenes to his White House colleagues.

While toiling for an uncommonly polarizing president, he made few, if any, enemies, even finding admirers in circles often not friendly to Republicans.

"Mike Gerson has been an important voice," said the Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, a global anti-poverty organization.

Although groups have grievances about how some programs have been administered, it did not redound on Gerson, said David Gartner, policy director for the Global AIDS Alliance. "He's been committed and effective," Gartner said. "To get a moral issue the kind of attention it deserves, I'm sure is not easy to do."

The Christian Coalition had placed legislation to increase the fines as the No. 5 item on its 2006 legislative agenda. The new law also caps any continuing violations from an incident at $3 million.

The drive for the higher fines came when pop singer Justin Timberlake ripped off part of duet partner Janet Jackson's costume and briefly exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl football halftime entertainment show aired on national television.

Television and radio broadcasters are barred from airing obscene material and are limited from broadcasting indecent material between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., times when children are likely to be in the audience.

Those restrictions do not apply to cable or satellite services. That prompted radio shock jock Howard Stern to move his show to satellite radio to avoid the federal regulations since his antics led to fines against stations that aired his show.

The act requires government agencies to waive fees if the request is considered to be a matter of public interest or contributes to public understanding of governmental operations. Waivers are generally granted to news organizations. Depending upon the scope of the request, search and duplication fees can run hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The archive has won rulings in federal district and appeals courts that require government agencies to treat it as a member of the news media. The archive shared an Emmy award last year for its work on a documentary dealing with President Nixon's 1972 trip to China, and it has won other major journalism awards.

It's also frequently clashed with the CIA. Earlier this year, the archive gave the CIA its "Rosemary Award" for the federal agency with the worst FOIA record. In its citation, the archive noted that the CIA had already begun to deny fee waiver requests based on its perception of their newsworthiness, and the archive predicted the action would "lead to wasteful re-litigation of a settled issue."

In its lawsuit, the archive said the CIA rejected immediate waivers for 42 FOIA requests over the last year, demanding in many cases to know how its requests were related to current events. The delayed FOIA requests dealt with issues such as U.S. assistance to Afghan rebels after the 1976 invasion by the Soviet Union and CIA daily briefings for the Truman White House.

The CIA told the archive that it wouldn't waive search and duplication fees because many of the requests wouldn't interest the general public. Thomas Blanton, the archive's executive director, said the response was illegal and potentially dangerous for the entire FOIA process.

"This means they get to decide what's news," Blanton said.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Va.-based Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she hasn't heard of the CIA making similar responses to other news organizations, but she called the response "horrifying" and said it sets a bad precedent.

"It's not up to the CIA to decide what's newsworthy," Dalglish said.

A CIA spokesman said the agency would have no comment.

"Everyone who wants to work will feel this provision,'' said Tim Sparapani, legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "People are just beginning to understand the implications of it, and they're big.''

The need for a nationwide system through which employers can verify whether potential workers are citizens or legal residents has been the one element of the pending immigration reform upon which Republicans and Democrats have largely agreed.

But privacy advocates say the rush to mandate widespread eligibility checks is being done with little understanding of the technical snafus that could wrongly put thousands of people out of work each year while leading to rampant discrimination.

And, they warn, the government may also begin to compile new and vast stores of knowledge on every employable man, woman and child.

Department of Homeland Security officials and advocates of the employer verification system say privacy activists are fanning overblown fears.

No personal information is stored or tracked, they maintain, and the program is devised to protect employees from being left jobless while waiting for a green light from the system.

Currently that system is called the Basic Pilot Program, and it is voluntary. About 6,000 participating employers use it annually to electronically check workers' I-9 forms against Social Security and visa info.

Should the system go national, it will have to accommodate a U.S. work force of about 144 million people.

About 57 million people, according to the Department of Labor, take new jobs each year, 13.4 million in Western states alone.

Mark Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said most Americans wrongly think they will be exempt from verification.

"Generally speaking, people who aren't in the immigrant community assume it won't affect them. But for the system to work, it has to encompass the entire American work force,'' he said.

The bills, he said, "put the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security in the middle of every employment decision in the United States.''

Under the Senate bill, employers would be required to use the system to check every new employee, while the House requires employers to check current workers as well as prospective ones.

"This is many orders of magnitude greater than what currently exists,'' Sparapani said. "As a computer network problem, that's a massive undertaking.''

Chris Bentley, spokesman for the U.S. Department Citizenship and Immigration, which oversees the program, said he is confident the Basic Pilot Program could rapidly expand if required.

"Absolutely,'' he said.

Bentley noted that the system is not a database that needs to be created, but rather an interface that can access information from the Social Security Administration and USCIS records.

Ramping up the system, then, would require money and resources to accommodate the heavy influx of new users.

Currently, when employers enter a workers' Social Security or visa number along with other identifiers such as birth date, the system either confirms an employee's eligibility or issues what is called a "tentative non-confirmation.''

Employers are required to notify workers, who then have 10 days to contest it.

During that time, employers are prohibited from firing, suspending or docking pay. Bentley also noted that employees must already be hired and working before the verification can be done, so that employees are not waiting on the wheels of bureaucracy to turn in order to feed their families.

"No one is in a holding pattern here,'' he said.

But reality does not always conform to law.

According to the UCSIS's own 2002 study, employers do use the pilot system to screen applicants. And when they receive a tentative non-confirmation, "job applicants are unlikely to be notified,'' the study found.

Moreover, 67 percent of employees who contested a non-confirmation reported being suspended, docked pay or having their job training delayed while they sorted out their records.

A 2004 agency report found that erroneous non-confirmations for foreign born workers was "unacceptably high'' and "higher than desirable'' for U.S.-born workers.

The errors, it found, are largely the result of data entry mistakes and accuracy problems with either the Social Security or USCIS databases.

"This creates burdens for employees and employers, increased verification costs for the government and led to unintentional discrimination against foreign-born persons,'' the study found.

These days the USCIS pegs the overall error rate as low as 1.4 percent.

But extrapolated to 54 million workers in a mandatory national system, and that could result in more than 750,000 people each year wrongly told they aren't eligible to work.

Sparapani likened it to DHS's no-fly list, which led to dozens of men named David Nelson being detained at airports because one man named David Nelson apparently was listed as a potential terrorist.

"I've called this system the 'no-work list,''' Sparapani said.

"Pick your common surname. It's a nightmare for the system. And imagine not being able to work and provide for your family,'' he said.

While the Senate bill provides employees with broader ability to contest and appeal their finding, the House version does not.

But accuracy could have its dangers as well.

The more information the government collects in the name of preserving accuracy and preventing identity fraud, the more information the government has on all of us, experts point out.

"It's the government creating another system of identification'' Rotenberg said.

While DHS officials maintained that no employment data is tracked or stored, Rotenberg and others predicted it someday would be. And without privacy restrictions on how the information is used, they warned, numerous agencies could potentially tap into the data at any time.

Ultimately, though, immigration experts said the employer verification program, even with its faults, is the best way to block illegal immigration.

"There are legitimate concerns in terms of privacy and the rights of individuals to access and correct their records,'' said Deborah Meyers, a senior policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute.

But, she said, "ultimately, from an immigration perspective, only an employer verification system has the potential to reduce illegal immigration to the United States, because ultimately it's the job magnet that draws illegals to the U.S.

"The deterrent has to be the inability to get a job,'' she said.

The crackdown, dubbed "Operation Return to Sender," kicked off May 26. An Associated Press reporter and photographer accompanied a fugitive task force as it made raids Tuesday night and early Wednesday.

A swarm of immigration agents had sped silently, headlights off, down a Boston side street and surrounded an apartment house.

"Police! Policia! Police!" Monico yelled, holding his badge to a window where someone had pulled back the curtain. "Open the door!"

Soon agents led a dazed-looking Jose Ferreira Da Silva, 35, out in handcuffs. The Brazilian had been arrested in 2002 and deported, but had slipped back into the country. He now faces up to 20 years in prison.

"This sends a message," said Daniel Monico, a deportation officer, after a successful raid early Wednesday. "When we deport you, we're serious."

The operation has caught more than 140 immigrants with convictions for sexual offenses against children; 367 known gang members, including street soldiers in the deadly Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13; and about 640 people who had already been deported once, immigration officials said. The numbers include more than 720 arrests in California alone.

More than 800 people arrested already have been deported.

ICE's 2006 budget increased the number of fugitive task forces to 52, and the Bush administration is pushing for 70 by 2007. The teams face a mounting challenge.

There are more than 500,000 "fugitive aliens" who have been deported by judges and either slipped back into the country or never left. There is often a disconnect between local and state prisons and the federal government that allows illegal immigrants to serve time and be released without being transferred to federal officials for deportation.

The government has conducted large scale sweeps from time to time, including on April 20, when Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff announced a new get-tough policy. That day, agents rounded up 1,100 illegal immigrants in 40 cities.

During the raid late Tuesday, the federal squad, which includes a Boston police sergeant detective, wore bulging bulletproof vests and stiff Kevlar gloves to protect their hands from needles, knives and rusty fences.

Badges dangled on chains around their necks as they passed around wanted posters and shined flashlights on the face of a 24-year-old Latvian man who had served prison time for assaulting a police officer.

The team moved in the dark, climbing fences and hiding behind parked cars to encircle a three-story house in Boston's Allston-Brighton neighborhood. All at once they emerged from the shadows. A half-dozen agents filled the front porch, their knocks on the door echoing down the block. The target had moved, the agents learned, and a team split off and caught him in Weymouth, about 15 miles south of the city.

Another man caught in the recent blitz was a Salvadoran gang member who was convicted in a stabbing that left a 13-year-old boy paralyzed. Agents caught him working at Budget Rental Car at Boston's Logan Airport.

"The problems with immigration aren't going to be solved overnight," Raimondi said as the team sped toward another raid. "You start chipping away at it ... The more teams we get up and running, the more dangerous people we are going to get off the streets."

New Jersey Attorney General Zulima Farber, a Democrat, and other officials sent subpoenas to five carriers on May 17, asking for documents that would explain whether they supplied customer records to the NSA, the lawsuit said.

The subpoenas followed by a few days a USA Today report that the phone companies had complied with the secretive agency's request for the phone records of millions of ordinary Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The companies' deadline to respond to the subpoenas is Thursday, the federal lawsuit said.

Farber subpoenaed the phone companies for information because she suspected state consumer protection laws may have been violated if in fact the phone companies were turning over such records, Farber spokesman David Wald said.

"The phone companies were turning over information without any notice to consumers," Wald said. "We were seeking to protect the people of New Jersey."

The Justice Department said more than 20 lawsuits have been filed around the country alleging that the phone companies illegally assisted the NSA. The government says sensitive national security information would be revealed if judges allow those cases to proceed.

The American Civil Liberties Union also has filed complaints in more than 20 states, including New Jersey, asking state utility commissions and attorneys general to investigate.

In this matter, the federal government said the New Jersey officials are treading on federal turf and that the companies, if forced to comply with the subpoenas, would be confirming or denying the existence of the program.
President Bush and other top federal officials have refused to do that.

Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler also warned lawyers for the phone companies that responding to the subpoenas "would violate federal laws and executive orders."

A separate letter that Keisler, head of the department's Civil Division, sent to Farber made the same points, but it took a softer approach.

"We sincerely hope that you will withdraw the subpoenas, so that litigation over this matter may be avoided," Keisler said.

Not that Mac, as he is often known, didn't have advantages of his own being both a local media celebrity - he's the host of "Mac Talk" on KNOX radio - and a Marine in a time when the military enjoys the most prestige it's had since World War II.

As things turned out, he had no problem wooing the voters. Mac got 49 percent of the 695 votes cast in Ward 2, the city ward with the biggest voter turnout. His closest rival was Jon Dorner, who had 19 percent of the vote.

Mac's wife, Susan, who went door-to-door on his behalf with their children and other volunteers, said no one they spoke with thought his being away was a problem. She said it would be no different than when current council members are away during meetings: They call in.

Mac is scheduled to return in 93 days, according to his Web site, VoteMcNamara.com.

Ward 2 wasn't the only race, of course, just the most intense. In Ward 4, Council President Hal Gershman was unchallenged and, in Ward 6, former council member Art Bakken is back after four year's absence. Bakken won 54 percent of 441 votes cast.

While he and his erstwhile rival Tom Potter were of different political orientations - Bakken a conservative and Potter a liberal - the two shared very similar views on the major issues.

"A lot of it is just common sense," Bakken said.

Both said they wanted to put a freeze on property taxes and both thought the city needs to explore other options for its proposed landfill, which is now in litigation.

But Bakken might not be around very long. Depending on the direction the city is going in four years, the 60-year-old said, he might just step aside and let someone younger run.

"We hope that this report will astonish the nation."

The Institute, an independent body that advises the federal government on health matters, issued three reports on the fragile status of emergency care in the United States. It noted that emergency services are the primary source of health care for many uninsured people or on evening and weekends when clinics are closed.

"Each year in the United States approximately 114 million visits to emergency department occur, and 16 million of these patients arrive by ambulance. In 2002, 43 percent of all hospital admissions in the United States entered through the ED," one of the reports reads.

LACK OF TRAINING, SUPPLIES

Despite increasing attention placed on emergency and disaster preparedness in the United States after the September 11 attacks, emergency services received only 4 percent of $3.38 billion distributed by the Homeland Security Department for emergency preparedness in 2002 and 2003, the Institute said. The report did not give figures for 2004 or 2005.

"The result is that few hospital and EMS professionals have had even minimal disaster preparedness training," one report said.

"Even fewer have access to personal protective equipment; hospitals, many already stretched to the limit, lack the ability to absorb any significant surge in casualties; and supplies of critical hospital equipment, such as decontamination showers ... ventilators, and intensive care unit beds, are wholly inadequate."

Experts say none of the complaints are new and yet little has been done to address the problem, perhaps because the U.S. healthcare system relies heavily on private enterprise.

"Hospitals must be reimbursed for the significant amounts of uncompensated emergency and trauma care they provide. To do otherwise threatens to destroy the critical emergency care infrastructure that all Americans depend on," said Dr. Rick Blum, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The reports call for a pool of $50 million to pay for this.

State and federal governments must also work to ensure that hospitals and emergency medical services can communicate with police, fire departments and other emergency responders -- something many cannot do now.

Some of the nation's emergency medical services are municipally managed, others are privately owned. Some are organized under fire departments, while others are operated by hospitals or other medical organizations and they all need to coordinate better, the panel said.

It recommended that Congress allocate $88 million for projects to find ways to do this.

Hospitals also have to stop diverting patients to the emergency room, get patients out of the ER and into hospital rooms so they do not clog up the system, and learn to communicate with one another better, the committee said.