MINNEAPOLIS - Democrat Amy Klobuchar holds a strong lead over Republican Rep. Mark Kennedy in the latest Senate poll in Minnesota.

The Star Tribune Minnesota Poll showed Klobuchar with 50 percent of likely voters' support compared to 31 percent for Kennedy. The two are vying for the seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Mark Dayton, who is retiring after one term.

The poll was based on a survey of 813 adults statewide July 6-11. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who differ on whether to impose U.N. sanctions on Iran, expressed concern on Monday that Tehran had not responded to an incentives offer.

The two leaders made a show of unity in a joint statement declaring their intention to try to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons, including in the cases of Iran and North Korea.

"We are especially concerned by the failure of the Iranian government to engage seriously on the proposals" made by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, Bush and Putin said.

DIAMONDHEAD, MISS.--Here's what the front line of Howard Dean's revolution looks like: two dozen senior citizens seated inside this gated community's clubhouse listening intently as operatives from the state Democratic Party pitch them on becoming precinct captains. A rep named Jay Parmley approaches an oversize easel and flips to a page showing John Kerry's share of the 2004 presidential vote here in Hancock County. "28%" is scrawled in magic marker. "Kind of scary," Parmley says.

But he flips the page to show former Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove's share of the vote here in his unsuccessful 2003 re-election bid: "43%." The discrepancy, Parmley explains, shows that the better Mississippians know a Democrat, the more likely they are to vote for him. Which is why he's here recruiting precinct captains. If Democrats can define themselves on a "neighbor to neighbor" basis, Parmley says, their candidates can win again, even here, in a red county in a red state.

If that doesn't sound revolutionary, consider this: Mississippi's Democratic Party hasn't trained precinct captains for more than a decade. Until recently, the state party consisted of a single full-time staffer. In 2004, the Democratic National Committee invested so little here that activists shelled out thousands of their own dollars to print up Kerry yard signs. That all changed last summer, when newly elected DNC Chairman Howard Dean began rolling out his "50-State Strategy," a multimillion-dollar program to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up. Over the past year, the DNC has hired and trained four staffers for virtually every state party in the nation--nearly 200 workers in all--to be field organizers, press secretaries, and technology specialists, even in places where the party hasn't been competitive for decades. "It's a huge shift," Dean tells U.S. News. "Since 1968, campaigns have been about TV and candidates, which works for 10 months out of the four-year cycle. With party structure on the ground, you campaign for four years."

BEIJING (Reuters) - A vice-chairman of China's Central Military Commission has left for the United States on the highest ranking military visit since a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. surveillance plane in 2001.

Guo Boxiong, who ranks second only to President Hu Jintao in the commission, China's top military body, left on Sunday for Washington, at the invitation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the official Xinhua new agency said.

The visit was "the most important Chinese military exchange with another country this year," Xinhua quoted Qian Lihua, at the Foreign Affairs Office of China's Defense Ministry, as saying.

Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner remains opposed to an increase of the wage that has not changed since 1997 and currently stands 5.15 dollars an hour.

However, 64 Republicans joined Democrats Wednesday in demanding that the wage increase become part of a bill on professional education.

"With this vote, Republicans have gone on record as supporting raising the minimum wage," said Democratic House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

TRENTON, N.J. - Republican Tom Kean Jr. has pulled about even with incumbent Robert Menendez in New Jersey's U.S. Senate race, according to two polls released Monday.

The Quinnipiac University poll showed 40 percent of respondents in the heavily Democratic state favored Kean while 38 percent backed the Democrat Menendez and 18 percent were undecided.

However, 48 percent of those who selected a candidate said they might change their mind before the November election. The poll of 985 registered voters, taken during July 8-12, has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

WASHINGTON - The Senate will vote next week on three bills related to stem-cell research, including a measure that would expand federal funding for a procedure that uses and destroys human embryos in the drive to cure diseases that afflict millions of Americans.

The Senate is expected to pass that bill, which would send it to the White House for President Bush's signature. Bush has promised to veto the measure, effectively killing it because neither chamber of Congress has displayed the two-thirds majority needed to override it.

That would be the end of the story, a victory for social conservatives, but for two issues: The Senate debate set to open Monday occurs late in a year of midterm elections, and polls show 70 percent of Americans support the embryonic stem cell bill.

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Democratic Party chief Howard Dean said on Saturday the Bush administration had "cut and run" on Gulf Coast hurricane recovery and created a political legacy of deficits, divisiveness and deceit.

Dean, speaking at the Democratic National Committee's spring meeting, said November's congressional elections would be a choice between real change from Democrats or more of the same from Republicans.

"There has been enough of fear, incompetence and corruption," Dean told DNC members. He said voters would judge President George W. Bush's administration and the Republicans on their slow response to Hurricane Katrina and failure to develop a suitable recovery plan.

WASHINGTON - Responding to North Korea's missile tests, congressional Republicans urged greater efforts to build a national missile defense system and proposed new sanctions on nations doing weapons business with North Korea.

"We have to have a defense that allows us to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles," said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., at a news conference Tuesday.

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, also said the North Korean test-firing last week of seven missiles including one that potentially could reach the United States underscored the need for a U.S. missile defense system.

TOKYO - Japan has begun preparations to impose its own set of economic sanctions on North Korea after the hardline regime rejected a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning its ballistic missile tests, top government official said Tuesday.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told a news conference that he has instructed officials to ready necessary procedures to ban cash remittances to North Korea in addition to sanctions already called for in the U.N. resolution.

North Korea drew international condemnation this month after firing seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2 believed capable of reaching parts of the U.S., violating a self-imposed moratorium. Japan so far has in place only limited sanctions against Pyongyang.