United States Congress okays Nuclear Deal

The India-US civil nuclear deal is finally done, with the US Senate giving a resounding 86-13 approval to the historic accord visualised by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush over three years ago.

The Senate approval, allowing resumption of nuclear commerce with India, four days after an equally emphatic 298-117 endorsement from the House of Representatives, clears the way for President Bush to sign it into law, possibly later Thursday.

Mr Bush, who had hoped to seal the accord when Dr Singh visited him at the White House a week ago, had made the India deal a “very, very high priority” of his administration even in the midst of America’s great financial crisis.

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who led efforts to secure passage of the deal with numerous meetings and endless phone calls to legislators, is expected to carry the deal package to New Delhi Saturday.

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Technology reshapes America's classrooms

From online courses to kid-friendly laptops and virtual teachers, technology is spreading in America's classrooms, reducing the need for textbooks, notepads, paper and in some cases even the schools themselves.

Just ask 11-year-old Jemella Chambers.

She is one of 650 students who receive an Apple Inc laptop each day at a state-funded school in Boston. From the second row of her classroom, she taps out math assignments on animated education software that she likens to a video game.

"It's comfortable," she said of Scholastic Corp's FASTT Math software in which she and other students compete for high scores by completing mathematical equations. "This makes me learn better. It's like playing a game," she said.

Education experts say her school, the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Boston, offers a glimpse into the future.

It has no textbooks. Students receive laptops at the start of each day, returning them at the end. Teachers and students maintain blogs. Staff and parents chat on instant messaging software. Assignments are submitted through electronic "drop boxes" on the school's Web site.

"The dog ate my homework" is no excuse here.

The experiment at Frederick began two years ago at cost of about $2 million, but last year was the first in which all 7th and 8th grade students received laptops. Classwork is done in Google Inc's free applications like Google Docs, or Apple's iMovie and specialized educational software like FASTT Math.

"Why would we ever buy a book when we can buy a computer? Textbooks are often obsolete before they are even printed," said Debra Socia, principal of the school in Dorchester, a tough Boston district prone to crime and poor schools.

There is, however, one concession to the past: a library stocked with novels.

"It's a powerful, powerful experience," added Socia. Average attendance climbed to 94 percent from 92 percent; discipline referrals fell 30 percent. And parents are more engaged, she said. "Any family can chat online with teacher and say 'hey, we're having this problem'."

Unlike traditional schools, Frederick's students work at vastly different levels in the same classroom. Children with special needs rub shoulders with high performers. Computers track a range of aptitude levels, allowing teachers to tailor their teaching to their students' weakest areas, Socia said.

SURGE IN ONLINE COURSES

The Internet is also a catalyst for change. U.S. enrollment in online virtual classes reached the 1 million mark last year, 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning, an industry body.

That's only the beginning, said Michael Horn, co-author of "Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns".

"Our projections show that 50 percent of high school courses will be taught online by 2019. It's about one percent right now," said Horn, executive director of education at Innosight Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Massachusetts.

K12 Inc, which provides online curriculum and educational services in 17 U.S. states, has seen student enrollment rise 57 percent from last year to 41,000 full-time students, said its chief executive, Ron Packard.

Much of the growth is in publicly funded virtual charter schools.

"Because it is a public school, the state funds the education similar to what they would in a brick and mortar school, but we get on average about 70 percent of the dollars," Packard told Reuters.

"We don't usually get capital dollars, or bond issue dollars. Sometimes we don't get local dollars. So on average it works out 70 percent of the per pupil spending that an average school in the state would receive," he said.

"We're getting the kids who the local school is not working for. And the spectrum goes from extreme special education to extremely gifted kids," he said.

U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley says K12 and similar companies look set to capture an increasing share of the $550 billion publicly funded U.S. education market for children aged from about 5 to 18 as more U.S. states adopt virtual schools.

Virginia-based K12 recently opened an office in Dubai to expand overseas. Packard says he expects strong offshore demand for American primary and secondary education tailored for foreign nationals who want to enter U.S. universities.

Apex Learning Inc, based in Bellevue, Washington, is seeing a similar surge in demand. It started in 1997 by offering online advanced-placement courses to parents and individual schools but now sells an array of online classes for entire school districts and state departments of education.

"Over the last two years in particular we have seen very, very significant growth in the interest and demand for our type of digital curriculum," Apex chief executive Cheryl Vedoe said in a telephone interview.

Apex enrollments rose 50 percent to 300,000 in 2006-2007, and likely grew at the same pace last year, she said.

"Where we see the greatest growth today is actually in brick and mortar high schools for programs for students who are not succeeding in the existing programs," she added.

Online tutoring is also expanding rapidly. Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched online U.S. services in 2005, estimates its average global growth in active students at 22 percent a month -- all taught by "e-tutors" mostly in India.

Horn expects demand for teachers to fall and virtual schools to boost achievement in a U.S. education system where only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school -- a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics, according to government statistics.

"You deliver education at lower cost, but you will actually improve the amount of time that a teacher can spend with each student because they are no longer delivering one-size-fits-all lesson plans," he said. "They can actually roam around."

Toyota struggles to meet hybrid, small car demand

The surge in popularity for small cars and fuel-efficient hybrids has left Toyota Motor Corp facing an unusual problem: deepening shortages of popular models such as the Prius hybrid.

A limited inventory of small cars hurt Toyota, which reported a 11.5 percent drop in U.S. sales in June.

In stark contrast, Japanese rival Honda Motor Co reported a 13.8 percent sales rise on record demand for its Fit subcompact car and Civic sedan.

Toyota executives said a dwindling inventory of vehicles, such as the Prius, Yaris and Corolla, had forced the automaker to scramble to try to keep up with demand in June, a month when industry-wide U.S. auto sales dropped almost 9 percent.

Sales of Toyota's Prius, the top-selling hybrid in the U.S. market, fell 26 percent as dealers ran short of inventory and customers faced a six-month waiting list. Toyota said it would only partly be able to satisfy the backlog of demand from its dedicated Prius factory in Japan this year.

Hybrids command about a $5,000 price premium compared with equivalent vehicles without the expensive battery.

"It is very doubtful that there is going to be a lot of recovery this year to be able to satisfy consumer demand and that is very unfortunate," said Jim Lentz, Toyota's head of North American sales, referring to the Prius.

Toyota had a one-day supply of the Prius hybrid and a 2-1/2 day supply of its hybrid Camry sedan at the end of June.

Inventory of other popular Toyota cars also ran low in June. Dealer supply of Corolla sedans was down to a 15-day supply, while Yaris had a 7-day supply at the end of June, the automaker said.

Toyota said it expected inventories of Yaris and Corolla to increase in August and was working to add capacity at its hybrid battery manufacturing plant in Japan.

The current generation Prius uses nickel-metal hydride batteries made by Panasonic EV, a joint venture between the automaker and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd.

Toyota, which put the world's first hybrid car on the road in 1997, has a goal of reaching global annual sales of 1 million hybrid vehicles soon after 2010 -- more than double last year's sales tally.

Toyota's Lentz said the production constraint made it hard to forecast how large the market for the hybrid model could be in the United States, the Japanese automaker's largest market.

"We don't know what the top end on Prius is," Lentz said.

In a J.D. Power survey, 72 percent of U.S. consumers said they were interested in buying a hybrid.

Overall, the U.S. sales performance of the three major Japanese automakers were mixed in June with Nissan Motor Co posting a 7.5 percent decline.

Honda bucked the downtrend in overall U.S. light car sales, outselling Chrysler LLC for the second consecutive month in June to grab the No. 3 spot in the U.S. market.

On a combined basis, the three major Japanese automakers increased their share of the U.S. market to 34.7 percent, up from 32.9 percent from a year ago.

The market share of the three Detroit automakers -- General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler -- fell to 45.8 percent in June from 50.2 percent a year earlier.

Korea, United States break nuke deadlock

North Korea submitted a long delayed declaration of its nuclear program on Thursday, as the Bush administration immediately responded by saying it would remove the country it once described as part of the "axis of evil" from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The declaration was believed to provide a partial, though important, view of North Korea's nuclear capability, and it marked a significant step forward in a multi-national effort to end the country's drive to build nuclear weapons.

China, which has hosted the six-nation talks on the North's nuclear program, said Thursday afternoon that the North would abide by Thursday's deadline to submit its declaration. But an hour later, South Korea, another participant, said the North had already handed the declaration to China.

Whatever the source of the confusion, the White House announced shortly afterward that it would remove North Korea from the terrorism list and thus make it eligible for aid and assistance, a goal long sought by the cash-starved country.

The North was scheduled to follow up on Friday by blowing up a cooling tower at its Yongbyon reactor, about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. Pyongyang has invited officials and television networks from the five nations negotiating with the North on its nuclear program - the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia - to witness the tower's demolition. But the destruction, which is expected to be broadcast live, will be largely symbolic since the reactor was disabled late last year under American supervision. U.S. officials expected that the declaration, which had been due at the end of last year, would provide details about North Korea's nuclear facilities and programs, including the amount of plutonium produced at its nuclear reactor in Yongbyon.

"I do think it's important to note that if we can verifiably determine the amount of plutonium that has been made, we then have an upper hand in understanding what may have happened in terms of weaponization," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, after arriving in Kyoto, Japan, on Thursday for a Group of 8 meeting.

Ms Rice added that the declaration was "a natural step on the way to dealing verifiable with the devices or weapons themselves."

Partly to deflect criticism from hard-line critics in Washington that the current deal was too soft on North Korea, American officials have emphasized the importance of the information on plutonium. The North is believed to have produced enough weapons-grade plutonium at its reactor in Yongbyon to make as many as half a dozen bombs.

But, significantly, the North's declaration was not expected to reveal details on three critical points: the nuclear bombs the North has already produced; its alleged attempts to produce nuclear arms by secretly enriching uranium, which triggered the ongoing crisis in 2002; and accusations that the North helped Syria build a nuclear plant.

Some of the missing details, particularly on the North's existing nuclear bombs, are expected to be revealed at the next stage of the step-by-step agreement.

Gadget buyers seen as assertive, even arrogant: study

Know someone who loves gadgets and can't wait to buy the newest model? Chances are you would describe them as assertive and a strong leader -- and possibly arrogant, according a U.S. research.

An online study evaluating the characteristics of 25,000 American adults found avid technology consumers tended to score highly in personality traits such as leadership, dynamism and assertiveness -- but low in modesty.

"A lot of previous research points to wealthy young males as early adopters of technology," said Sarah Welch, lead researcher at Internet ad network firm Mindset Media that conducted the study in partnership with Nielsen Online.

"But this study tells us that there are characteristics beyond age and gender and income that are also extremely highly correlated with tech consumption," she added.

The study looked at 20 personality traits or "mindsets" including openness, creativity, self esteem and spontaneity.

Respondents were rated on a scale of 1 through 5, with 1 representing those who demonstrated the least amount of a given mindset and 5 representing those who demonstrated the highest intensity of a mindset.

Those who scored a 5 in leadership were 68 percent more likely to have purchased three or more computers in the past two years, the study found.

Likewise, respondents who rated highly in assertiveness were 62 percent more likely to purchase a new cell phone when the newest model arrived on the market.

Although tech consumers don't fit a typical demographic mold, the findings weren't entirely surprising, Welch said.

"If you look at those with qualities of a modern leader, they're often forward-facing and interested in what's next," she said.

"And those who are really assertive are the types to grab life by the horn, so it also makes sense that when they see something they want or like they go straight for it."

Welch said the results could have implications for technology companies looking to attract a new set of consumers and even potentially impact the way such products are designed.

But the study also found that avid tech consumers were also likely to be low in modesty and may be perceived as conceited or arrogant by others.

Low levels of modesty also correlate with what Welch calls "badge-buying", or a tendency to buy luxury brands.

"So there's an element of pride in being able to have the latest and greatest, not just in the realm of technology, but in all other areas," Welch said.

Philadelphia revives citywide Wi-Fi project

Philadelphia revived an effort on Tuesday to provide free citywide wireless Internet access in a project to be run by a new group of investors.

The city aims to provide free-of-charge outdoor Web access throughout its 135 square miles, which would be the largest area covered by public Wi-fi of any U.S. city.

The project, initially launched in 2005, came close to failure when EarthLink, the company that installed wireless transmitters on light poles, abandoned the effort in May amid complaints about signal weakness.

In a city of 1.4 million, about 6,000 people signed up for the EarthLink service.

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said the city -- which is providing no public money for the Wi-fi project -- believed it was important to revive the project because of the economic opportunities that can flow from increased Internet access.

"We now have the potential to reach more people with this network than in any other city in America," he said.

The network, which is about 80 percent complete, will now be taken over by Network Acquisition Company LLC, a new company of local investors that will assess the infrastructure and plans to complete the wireless coverage. Service for current users should be uninterrupted, officials said.

EarthLink had difficulty beaming the signal into homes, which City Councilman Bill Green cited as a reason the EarthLink model failed. But he also praised EarthLink for helping to save the network.

Under the new system, people can buy a $200 device called a repeater to bring the signal inside buildings.

The new owners plan to underwrite the cost of public Wi-fi by persuading businesses to buy technology allowing employees to access corporate networks from remote locations.

Revenue from corporate customers would pay for infrastructure to distribute a wireless signal to outdoor areas throughout the city, notably to low-income areas where many residents don't have the Internet access that could improve their ability to find jobs or access public services.

Officials from the new company declined to say how much they had paid for the EarthLink asset, how much they plan to invest or when the network would be complete. Co-founder Mark Rupp said it would take "months" to assess what work needs to be done to complete the network.

California gays, lesbians marry legally

California performed its first legally recognized same-sex weddings on Monday and opened its doors to gay and lesbian couples from around the country, a move likely to challenge other states that define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Octogenarians Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon took the first vows in San Francisco's ornate City Hall in a ceremony presided over by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who said California was leading a trend that would sweep the nation.

Acceptance of gay marriage has grown in the United States but most states outlaw it and, overall, Americans prefer to give marriage-like rights to homosexuals under a different name.

In a November election, Californians have the option to end same-sex marriage, making the next few months a crucial test of whether gays and lesbians can convince fellow citizens that there is no going back on marriage rights for all.

Martin and Lyon, who have been together for more than 50 years, were also the first to be married in 2004, during the "Winter of Love" when about 4,000 same-sex couples exchanged vows. Courts overturned those unions but last month the state Supreme Court struck down a ban on homosexual marriage, with that ruling going into effect late on Monday.

"When we first got together, we weren't really thinking about getting married," Lyon said to a small crowd that laughed, cheered and threw red rose petals.

Southern Californian couple Robin Tyler and Diane Olson, two of the plaintiffs in the state Supreme Court battle, exchanged vows in Beverly Hills, where for years they had petitioned unsuccessfully for a marriage license.

"Here is the final ending to our beautiful story -- 'And they lived happily ever after'," Tyler said.

Nearby, a supporter waived a placard that said "Finally."

Still, opponents aim to fight back in November and change the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Conservative Christians have vowed to get voters to the polls.

California is the second state, after Massachusetts, to marry same-sex couples but it is the first ready to grant licenses to couples from any state. Gay marriage is rejected by 45 states, although New York will honor California unions.

"If marriages performed outside of New York are going to be recognized, I'm sure it won't be too long before (gay) New Yorkers will be able to be married in their own state. So already it is having an impact that crosses to the Atlantic Coast," said Star Trek's Mr. Sulu -- actor George Takei -- who plans to wed longtime partner Brad Altman later this year.

"We are boldly going where no one has gone before," he said, jokingly echoing the opening of the TV series.

SWEEPING CHANGE?

Many countries allow domestic partnerships, although a relative few recognize gay marriage, including Belgium, Canada, Spain and the Netherlands.

Around California, the most populous U.S. state with more than 36 million people, a few marriage offices started ceremonies after 5 p.m. (8 p.m. EDT/0000 GMT) and planned to work into the evening. Hundreds of volunteers have been deputized to marry couples in tents and on courthouse lawns.

They may face opponents such as protesters in San Francisco waving signs reading "Homo Sex is Sin" and similar warnings.

Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, predicted "months of social chaos that could wreak havoc on every state in America."

He said California's new policy "threatens to undo thousands of years of natural marriage."

Less than a third of Americans responding to a recent CBS poll said gay marriage should be legal, although the trend is toward growing acceptance. More than a third opposed gay marriage.

University of Southern California law professor David Cruz predicted the practicalities of married gay couples moving from California to other states would spark change.

"People's attitudes are already changing, and what will change public opinion in favor of same-sex marriages further is knowing same-sex couples and seeing them live their lives like other married couples," he said.

MySpace plans redesign for next week

News Corp's MySpace plans to launch a global redesign next week in an attempt to widen its demographic and boost user engagement on the site, the social networking site said on Friday.

In what it said would be the largest scale re-launch of a website of its size, MySpace said it was changing its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpace TV player facilities and that many more changes would be coming over the summer.

"This is more than a face lift, we're changing the way people interact with the site and with brands," MySpace said, adding that a major advertiser had signed on to take over the US MySpace homepage on the first day of the relaunch.

The main phase of the relaunch is set for Wednesday, June 18.

MySpace said it had drastically overhauled the look and feel of its searches, which it said currently rank third in total number of searches by any site.

It said it was working with Lucene Open-Source engine and community, marking the first time MySpace has contributed to the Open-Source community. A glimpse of the new pages can be downloaded by clicking here .

Jobs recovery at least 6 months away

A surprisingly large jump in the U.S. unemployment rate during May sparked a sell-off in shares of staffing and employment services stocks on Friday, signaling that the length and depth of the current labor market down turn may well be worse than anticipated.

The Standard & Poor's HR Employment Services index was down 3.4 percent in morning trading.

Another several months of job losses are likely, analysts and staffing executives said, as evidence mounts that employers are more reluctant to hire.

But many also cautioned that some bright spots remain, and job losses remain relatively modest when compared with the millions of jobs added during the economic upturn.

The U.S. economy shed jobs for the fifth consecutive month in May, down 49,000 outside the farm sector, and job losses in April and March were wider than initially reported. The unemployment rate jumped to 5.5 percent from 5 percent, its biggest monthly rise in 22 years.

One explanation for the jump in people looking for work, which drove up the unemployment rate, is that more people are returning to the work force as their budgets get crimped by high food and gasoline prices.

"We do see more and more candidates because of gas prices and their inability to easily relocate; they're looking for work, but frankly they need something close to home," said Tig Gilliam, head of staffing company Adecco SA's U.S. operations.

"Costs are going up, so a bunch of people are going back and saying, 'OK, I've got to get serious,'" Gilliam said.

Jon Zion, who heads eastern U.S. operations at specialty staffing firm Robert Half International Inc, agreed.
"As a practitioner in the staffing business, my sense of the economy of what's going on energy prices, the housing industry probably forced a population of people to come back into the market."

As more workers look for jobs close to home, so more employers are thinking locally to cope with $4 per gallon gasoline.

Adecco clients are increasingly looking for candidates locally, Gilliam said, rather than doing nationwide searches. Some are offering gas cards to employees or organizing ride sharing and bus programs.

NO RECOVERY YET

A drop in professional payrolls in the government report was a troubling sign, said Scot Melland, CEO of Dice Holdings Inc, which runs jobs web sites focused on the technology and finance fields.

"That could be a leading indicator of a weakening in the labor market overall," Melland said. "We're probably looking at a couple of quarters before we see a change in the labor outlook."

The biggest change in recent months is that employers are taking longer to make decisions, said William Grubbs, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Spherion Corp. A permanent placement that may have taken 35 days six months ago now takes about 60 days.

"We're not on the road to recovery yet," Grubbs said. "Everybody was saying things would get better in the second half of the year, (and) I'm not sure this report shows that's going to happen," Grubbs said.

But he added that Spherion's staffing business was seeing "flat" trends, rather than declines, and he considered the big jump in the jobless rate to be "a little suspect."

THE BEARS' EVIDENCE

Fifty-two percent of U.S. employers are scaling back hiring over the next six months, according to a Dice survey released Friday.

Similarly, Chief Executive magazine, which polls CEOs, said this week its employment confidence index fell 4 percent last month, with 43 percent of CEOs saying they expect lower employment over the next three months.

The magazine's survey found that almost 36 percent of CEOs say "the worst is yet to come" in the U.S. economy, almost double the number who said "the worst is behind us."

Another troubling sign: the percentage of temporary workers in the overall work force, at 1.79 percent, is the lowest in four years, said BMO Capital Markets analyst Jeff Silber.

"As a decline in this metric typically foretells an oncoming recession, this may confirm the worst fears," Silber said in a note, adding that staffing stocks were likely to be weak.

NOT ALL GLOOMY

The jobs report showed 39,000 professional and business jobs lost last month, reversing the previous month's gains.

Still, the unemployment rate for skilled professionals engineers, accountants, finance experts - is around 2 percent, less than half the overall national rate, Gilliam said.

"There are still jobs out there," he said.

Indeed, many workers are feeling optimistic about their ability to find new jobs or to keep the ones they have. A monthly Spherion survey of employee sentiment showed the first increase in confidence in 10 months.

Job losses this year have been slow and gradual, and are far more similar to a downturn in 1987 than to the sharp drops in the two most recent recessions, said Robert Half's Zion. People also feared recession back in 1987 and one did not materialize, he said.

"We need to be cautious in how we interpret these things because so much of this is psychological," Zion said. "We'll get into a self-fulfilling prophecy thing."

Obama meets Clinton in private

Likely U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama met privately with former rival Hillary Clinton on Thursday as the party sought to unite for the general election campaign after a long nomination battle.

"Senator Clinton and Senator Obama met tonight and had a productive discussion about the important work that needs to be done to succeed in November," said a statement issued by the two campaigns.

Obama campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on a flight to Chicago that the Illinois senator met with Clinton but he declined to disclose the location or details of what they discussed.

Obama had been scheduled to fly back to Chicago on Thursday evening after a rally in northern Virginia, but skipped the flight and slipped away from the reporters traveling with him in order to meet secretly with Clinton.

Gibbs denied media reports that the meeting took place at Clinton's home in Washington.

As Obama enjoyed his first campaign swing as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, some prominent supporters of Clinton launched an effort to pressure him to invite her to join his ticket as the No. 2 in the general election battle against Republican John McCain.

But Clinton distanced herself from the push and said the decision on a vice president was his alone to make.

Critics of Clinton have accused her of trying to force her way on to the ticket. An aide to the New York senator issued a statement trying to dispel that impression.

"While Senator Clinton has made clear throughout this process that she will do whatever she can to elect a Democrat to the White House, she is not seeking the vice presidency, and no one speaks for her but her," said spokesman Phil Singer. "The choice here is Senator Obama's and his alone."

Backers of an Obama-Clinton ticket believe it would be the best way to unify the Democratic Party after the hard-fought, 16-month race between the candidates.

Obama made history on Tuesday when he became the first black to win a U.S. major-party presidential nomination. Clinton would have been the first woman to do so.

The former first lady did not immediately concede the race but told supporters in a letter on Wednesday she would hold an event on Saturday where she would formally back Obama.

Obama has not tipped his hand about whom he might pick as his running mate and when asked publicly about the option of choosing Clinton, he has praised her but emphasized his selection process would be deliberative and wide-ranging.

Clinton was seen as having promoted the idea of her becoming the vice presidential nominee when she told supporters in a conference call on Tuesday that she would be "open" to it if it would help her party win the White House.

Obama told reporters he appreciated the statement from Clinton's aide deferring to him on the running mate choice.

POTENTIAL VICE PRESIDENTIAL PICK

At the northern Virginia rally attended by 10,000 people, Obama shared the media spotlight with someone cited frequently by pundits as a potential running mate: Virginia Sen. Jim Webb.

Webb, who had remained neutral as Obama and Clinton battled for the nomination, gave the Illinois senator an emphatic endorsement as he introduced him.

"I'm honored to stand alongside this man, a man of great intellect who over the past 16 months has impressed all of us as he stood up to sometimes withering attacks with measured responses, unshakable composure," Webb said.

The decorated Marine veteran of the Vietnam War said Obama "has given all of us confidence in the steadiness that we want to see in a commander in chief."

In his Virginia speech, Obama said he hoped he and McCain could have a respectful debate about policy issues and keep the campaign from getting bogged down by "name-calling" and "scandal-mongering."

The Illinois senator told McCain of that wish when the presumptive Republican nominee called Obama to congratulate him on Wednesday.

"I said that I was looking forward to a civil, substantive debate on the issues. And he agreed," Obama said, adding they discussed McCain's idea of appearing jointly at town-hall style forums. Obama's campaign has said it is open to such formats and the two camps are exchanging views on options.

But Obama did not hold back from attacking McCain. At an event in southwestern Virginia earlier in the day, Obama likened his Republican rival's health care proposals to those of the unpopular President George W. Bush. He said McCain's ideas amounted to "Bush light."

McCain's campaign hit back, deriding Obama's attempts to cast himself as someone who could rise above party divisions.

"Barack Obama has no record of bipartisan success," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, adding Obama had voted "in lock-step with his party on issues from tax relief to funding of the Iraq war.