by Frank James
A quick guided tour of some of the morning’s most important or interesting (or both) Washington-related stories.
An unstable immigration compromise collapsed and appeared dead in the Senate after a bid to move the bipartisan legislation to a vote derailed because a large majority of senators voted against ending debate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin defused the disagreement between himself and President Bush by offering the use of a Soviet-era radar base in Azerbaijan for the U.S. anti-ballistic missile shield.
The death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq surpassed 3,500 on Thursday with the death of another soldier from an improvised explosive device. Deaths of U.S. service members have averaged four a day in June.
Gen. Douglas Lute, President Bush’s choice to oversee the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, told Congress the situation in Iraq had not improved significantly despite the surge of U.S. and Iraqi troops into hotspots and warned that violence would continue into the future unless Iraq’s leaders made significant political progress.
Turkey is increasing its military efforts along Iraq’s northern border as it contends with militant Kurdish extremists who have taken refuge there, increasing tensions in the north as the U.S. policymakers try to quell violence in the rest of the country.
New passport rules requiring U.S. citizens to show passports on re-entering the country from Canada, Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere will be temporarily eased by the Bush Administration because of huge backlogs in passport applications and processing.
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Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign which has already taken a number of hits, is hemorrhaging major campaign donors to former Sen. Fred Thompson who hasn’t yet officially declared his candidacy.
Democrats’ control of the House may depend on freshmen who won in Republican-leaning districts, forcing those new members to distance themselves from their party to get re-elected and underscoring their vulnerability.
Former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Bandar bin Sultan, a key Middle East ally of both President Bush and his father, was revealed, in a widening British investigation into corruption, to have received up to $2 billion from British aerospace company BAE.
Federal investigators are looking into Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Steven’s ties to a former oil industry executive who pleaded guilty last month to bribery charges in a wide-ranging probe of corruption in the state.