LOS ANGELES - Brad Garrett is the latest celebrity to tangle with photographers. Garrett, who stars in the Fox sitcom "'Til Death," is shown slapping away a camera in a video posted online Monday.

The camera belonged to a photographer working for TMZ.com, which posted the video, TMZ Managing Editor Harvey Levin said Monday.

The 47-year-old actor was leaving a restaurant Sunday night, according to TMZ, when he was surrounded by paparazzi. He's seen chatting amiably with them as he walks to his car, when one begins shouting insults.

He looks into the video camera of a TMZ photographer, says, "Excuse me," and slaps the lens.

"What are you hitting me for?" the videographer shouts, adding he wasn't the one yelling at Garrett. "You hit my face with that," he says as Garrett gets in his car to leave.

Levin said the man suffered minor injuries, including a swollen eye.

Garrett's manager, Glenn Robbins, didn't immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Levin said TMZ wouldn't press charges because the camera wasn't damaged.

Garrett won three Emmy Awards for his role as Ray Romano's brother, Robert, on CBS' "Everybody Loves Raymond."

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Fox is a unit of News Corp.

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On the Net:

TMZ:

http://www.tmz.com

Fox:

http://www.fox.com/tildeath/

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 8 (OneWorld) - A new public opinion poll has found nearly two thirds of Iraqis oppose plans to open the country's oilfields to foreign companies.

The poll found a majority of every Iraqi ethnic and religious group believe their oil should remain nationalized. Some 66 percent of Shi'ites and 62 percent of Sunnis support government control of the oil sector, along with 52 percent of Kurds.

Eric Leaver, of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studies, a non-profit think tank that helped pay for the poll, said it was the first time ordinary Iraqis have been asked their views about an oil law geared towards privatizing Iraq's most lucrative natural resource.

The law has been debated in Iraq's parliament for more than a year.

"You have a question that's of vital importance to the future of the country," Leaver said. "Most of the Iraqi budget comes from the development and sale of Iraqi oil and here we have arguably one of the largest questions that's going to be decided for the future of Iraq being done without any citizens' consultation or input."

Only 4 percent of Iraqis polled said they had been given "totally adequate" information for them to feel informed about the oil law.

The U.S. government has been pressuring the Iraqi government to pass the oil law by September. Anontia Juhasz of the group Oil Change International told OneWorld that the Bush administration and Congress have made the law's passage one of the "benchmarks" that would indicate the U.S. is making progress in the war.

According to Oil Change International, the oil law sets no minimum standard for the extent to which foreign companies would have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers, or share new technologies.

It also would allow multinational oil companies to sign exclusive 30-year contracts with Iraq's current government.

"We're talking about opening up the second largest oil reserves in the entire world to foreign investment," Juhasz said. "It costs about $75 a barrel -- and about 60 cents to get it out of the ground. Do the math."

So far the Iraqi Parliament has resisted the bill. After debating it for more than a year, the body adjourned for a month-long vacation and so will not take up the issue until at least September.

But officials in northern Iraq passed their version of an oil law Tuesday, a move that the Kurdistan Regional Government Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani called a "historic moment."

The measure gives Kurdish leaders the right to administer its oil wealth in the three northern governates -- Arbil, Sulaimaniyah and Dohuk -- as well as what it called "disputed territories," including the ethnically mixed, oil rich city of Kirkuk.

In June, the Kurdish regional government said it was planning to offer 40 new oil blocks to foreign companies.

"The Kurds are really pushing this process of extreme federalism by entering into their own oil agreements," Leaver told OneWorld. "This is causing a destabilizing effect on the rest of the country because now they feel like they really need to move on getting a grip on what the oil laws will be before they become de facto, because that's the way the Kurdish area has been operating."

The poll was based on interviews with 2,200 Iraqis conducted in June and July by KA Research and was paid for by a coalition of non-profit groups in the United States and Great Britain, including Oil Change International, the Institute for Policy Studies, Global Policy Forum, PLATFORM, and Jubilee Iraq.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The resignation of Karl Rove, architect of President George W. Bush'selection triumphs and a crucial behind-the-scenes policy guru, is the latest sign of the White House's diminished agenda and shattered dreams of a Republican super-majority, analysts said.

Rove, the last and most prominent of Bush's inner circle of Texas advisers to quit the administration, leaves a lame-duck president suffering from low approval ratings, an unpopular war in Iraq and public rejection in the 2006 elections.

With Democrats in control of Congress and brimming with optimism about the 2008 White House race, Rove's talk of a lasting and historic shift to Republican dominance seems long ago.

"This closes the chapter where George Bush and Karl Rove thought they were building a new Republican majority that would last a generation. That is clearly off the table," said Cal Jillson, a political analyst at Southern Methodist University inDallas.

Bush's top domestic priorities -- overhauls of Social Security and immigration -- are dead in Congress, leaving the administration scrambling in its final 17 months to save his first-term tax cuts, blunt Democratic spending priorities and salvage the war in Iraq.

"At this point all they are trying to do is save some of the signature items from their first term and hand off the war in Iraq to the next guy in better shape than it looks today," Jillson said.

Rove, known as "Bush's brain" by foes but nicknamed "boy genius" by the president, said on Monday he will leave the White House at the end of the month to return to Texas with his family.

His departure leaves a huge void in a White House where his influence was matched only by Vice President Dick Cheney, and where since the 2004 election he had filled multiple policy roles as deputy chief of staff.

"Rove is the guy who wove all the policy and political threads through the needle. Now you're talking about a small committee to just duplicate the expertise and perspective he brought," said Bruce Buchanan, a political analyst at the University of Texas.

BUSH ISOLATED

He said Rove's departure, along with the recent resignation of adviser and longtime Bush aide Dan Bartlett, would leave Bush increasingly isolated in the White House.

"There is nobody left with that kind of relationship with Bush and that closeness," he said, adding that might explain a recent increase in Bush's visits with his father, the former president.

But White House spokesman Tony Snow said Rove's resignation was not a sign the administration was starting to count down the days to the end on January 20, 2009.

"If you take a look, the president's got a pretty aggressive domestic agenda and there's a lot of stuff to be done on foreign policy," Snow said. "As the president has said many times, he's going to sprint to the tape."

Analysts said Bush's declining political fortunes and the Democratic win in 2006 had proved the flaws in Rove's political strategy, implemented after the September 11 attacks, of focusing on pleasing the Republican Party's conservative base.

"The idea you could govern by appealing to the Republican base was simply wrong," Jillson said. "The independents drifted away until all they had was the base."

Rove told reporters traveling to Texas with the president he viewed November's election results as a temporary setback for Republicans. He said he would not take an "official" role with any 2008 Republican presidential campaign, but left the door open for an unofficial consulting position.

Democrats, happy to see Rove go, condemned him for increasing political partisanship and divisiveness in Washington.

"Goodbye, good riddance," Democratic presidential contender John Edwards said in a statement.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The resignation of Karl Rove, architect of President George W. Bush'selection triumphs and a crucial behind-the-scenes policy guru, is the latest sign of the White House's diminished agenda and shattered dreams of a Republican super-majority, analysts said.

Rove, the last and most prominent of Bush's inner circle of Texas advisers to quit the administration, leaves a lame-duck president suffering from low approval ratings, an unpopular war in Iraq and public rejection in the 2006 elections.

With Democrats in control of Congress and brimming with optimism about the 2008 White House race, Rove's talk of a lasting and historic shift to Republican dominance seems long ago.

"This closes the chapter where George Bush and Karl Rove thought they were building a new Republican majority that would last a generation. That is clearly off the table," said Cal Jillson, a political analyst at Southern Methodist University inDallas.

Bush's top domestic priorities -- overhauls of Social Security and immigration -- are dead in Congress, leaving the administration scrambling in its final 17 months to save his first-term tax cuts, blunt Democratic spending priorities and salvage the war in Iraq.

"At this point all they are trying to do is save some of the signature items from their first term and hand off the war in Iraq to the next guy in better shape than it looks today," Jillson said.

Rove, known as "Bush's brain" by foes but nicknamed "boy genius" by the president, said on Monday he will leave the White House at the end of the month to return to Texas with his family.

His departure leaves a huge void in a White House where his influence was matched only by Vice President Dick Cheney, and where since the 2004 election he had filled multiple policy roles as deputy chief of staff.

"Rove is the guy who wove all the policy and political threads through the needle. Now you're talking about a small committee to just duplicate the expertise and perspective he brought," said Bruce Buchanan, a political analyst at the University of Texas.

BUSH ISOLATED

He said Rove's departure, along with the recent resignation of adviser and longtime Bush aide Dan Bartlett, would leave Bush increasingly isolated in the White House.

"There is nobody left with that kind of relationship with Bush and that closeness," he said, adding that might explain a recent increase in Bush's visits with his father, the former president.

But White House spokesman Tony Snow said Rove's resignation was not a sign the administration was starting to count down the days to the end on January 20, 2009.

"If you take a look, the president's got a pretty aggressive domestic agenda and there's a lot of stuff to be done on foreign policy," Snow said. "As the president has said many times, he's going to sprint to the tape."

Analysts said Bush's declining political fortunes and the Democratic win in 2006 had proved the flaws in Rove's political strategy, implemented after the September 11 attacks, of focusing on pleasing the Republican Party's conservative base.

"The idea you could govern by appealing to the Republican base was simply wrong," Jillson said. "The independents drifted away until all they had was the base."

Rove told reporters traveling to Texas with the president he viewed November's election results as a temporary setback for Republicans. He said he would not take an "official" role with any 2008 Republican presidential campaign, but left the door open for an unofficial consulting position.

Democrats, happy to see Rove go, condemned him for increasing political partisanship and divisiveness in Washington.

"Goodbye, good riddance," Democratic presidential contender John Edwards said in a statement.

ARLINGTON, Texas - A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.

Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.

"It's a slap in the face. It's like, 'Oh, we're sorry he died, but he's gay so we can't help you,'" she said Friday.

Wright said High Point offered to hold the service for Sinclair because their brother is a janitor there. Sinclair, who served in the first Gulf War, died Monday at age 46 from an infection after surgery to prepare him for a heart transplant.

The church's pastor, the Rev. Gary Simons, said no one knew Sinclair, who was not a church member, was gay until the day before the Thursday service, when staff members putting together his video tribute saw pictures of men "engaging in clear affection, kissing and embracing."

Simons said the church believes homosexuality is a sin, and it would have appeared to endorse that lifestyle if the service had been held there.

"We did decline to host the service — not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle," Simons told The Associated Press. "Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it — yes, we would have declined then. It's not that we didn't love the family."

Simons said the decision had nothing to do with the obituary. He said the church offered to pay for another site for the service, made the video and provided food for more than 100 relatives and friends.

"Even though we could not condone that lifestyle, we went above and beyond for the family through many acts of love and kindness," Simons said.

Wright called the church's claim about the pictures "a bold-faced lie." She said she provided numerous family pictures of Sinclair, including some with his partner, but said none showed men kissing or hugging.

The 5,000-member High Point Church was founded in 2000 by Simons and his wife, April, whose brother is Joel Osteen, well-known pastor of the 38,000-member Lakewood Church in Houston. Now High Point meets in a 432,000-square-foot facility in Arlington, near Dallas.

Wright said relatives declined the church's offer to hold the service at a community center because they felt it was an inappropriate venue. It ultimately was held at a funeral home, but the cancellation still lingered in some minds, she said.

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On the Net:

High Point Church: http://www.churchunusual.com

WASHINGTON - Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush's new war adviser said Friday.

"I think it makes sense to certainly consider it," Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

"And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another," Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a "major policy shift" and Bush has made it clear that he doesn't think it's necessary.

"The president's position is that the all volunteer military meets the needs of the country and there is no discussion of a draft. General Lute made that point as well," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

In the interview, Lute also said that "Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well."

Still, he said the repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan affect not only the troops but their families, who can influence whether a service member decides to stay in the military.

"There's both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families," he said. "And ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions."

The military conducted a draft during the Civil War and both world wars and between 1948 and 1973. The Selective Service System, re-established in 1980, maintains a registry of 18-year-old men.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has called for reinstating the draft as a way to end the Iraq war.

Bush picked Lute in mid-May as a deputy national security adviser with responsibility for ensuring efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are coordinated with policymakers in Washington. Lute, an active-duty general, was chosen after several retired generals turned down the job.

BARCELONA (Reuters) - "Galactic Suite," the first hotel planned in space, expects to open for business in 2012 and would allow guests to travel around the world in 80 minutes.

Its Barcelona-based architects say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing $4 million for a three-day stay.

During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.

Company director Xavier Claramunt says the three-bedroom boutique hotel's joined up pod structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that each pod room had to fit inside a rocket to be taken into space.

"It's the bathrooms in zero gravity that are the biggest challenge," says Claramunt. "How to accommodate the more intimate activities of the guests is not easy."

But they may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness -- the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around.

When guests are not admiring the view from their portholes they will take part in scientific experiments on space travel.

Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.

An American company intent on colonizing Mars, which sees Galaxy Suite as a first step, has since come on board, and private investors from Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates are in talks.

PLENTY RICH ENOUGH

If Claramunt is secretive about the identity of his generous backer, he is more forthcoming about the custom he can expect.

"We have calculated that there are 40,000 people in the world who could afford to stay at the hotel. Whether they will want to spend money on going into space, we just don't know."

Four million dollars might be a lot to spend on a holiday, but those in the nascent space tourism industry say hoteliers have been slow on the uptake because no one thought the cost of space travel would come down as quickly as it has.

Galactic Suite said the price included not only three nights in space. Guests also get eight weeks of intensive training at a James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island.

"There is fear associated with going into space," said Claramunt. "That's why the shuttle rocket will remain fixed to the space hotel for the duration of the guests' stay, so they know they can get home again."

In an era of concern over climate change, Galaxy Suite have no plans so far to offset the pollution implications of sending a rocket to carry just six guests at a time into space.

"But," says Claramunt, "I'm hopeful that the impact of seeing the earth from a distance will stimulate the guests' urge to value and protect our planet."

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's strategic bombers have resumed Cold War-style long-haul missions to areas patrolled by NATO and the United States, top generals said on Thursday.

A Russian bomber flew over a U.S. naval base on the Pacific island of Guam on Wednesday and "exchanged smiles" with U.S. pilots who had scrambled to track it, said Major-General Pavel Androsov, head of long-range aviation in the Russian air force.

"It has always been the tradition of our long-range aviation to fly far into the ocean, to meet (U.S.) aircraft carriers and greet (U.S. pilots) visually," Androsov told a news conference.

"Yesterday we revived this tradition, and two of our young crews paid a visit to the area of the (U.S. Pacific Naval Activities) base of Guam," he said.

President Vladimir Putin has sought to make Russia more assertive in the world. Putin has boosted defense spending and sought to raise morale in the armed forces, which were starved of funding following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Androsov said the sortie by the two turboprop Tu-95MS bombers, from a base near Blagoveshchenskin the Far East, had lasted for 13 hours. The Tu-95, codenamed "Bear" by NATO, is Russia's Cold War icon and may stay in service until 2040.

"I think the result was good. We met our colleagues -- fighter jet pilots from (U.S.) aircraft carriers. We exchanged smiles and returned home," Androsov said.

Ivan Safranchuk, Moscow office director of the Washington-based World Security Institute, said he saw nothing extraordinary in Moscow sending its bombers around the globe.

"This practice as such never stopped, it was only scaled down because there was less cash available for that," he said.

"It doesn't cost much to flex your muscles ... You can burn fuel flying over your own land or you can do it flying somewhere like Guam, in which case political dividends will be higher."

COLD WAR CAT-AND-MOUSE

The bombers give Russia the capability of launching a devastating nuclear strike even if the nuclear arsenals on its own territory are wiped out.

During the Cold War, they played elaborate airborne games of cat-and-mouse with Western air forces.

Lieutenant-General Igor Khvorov, air forces chief of staff, said the West would have to come to terms with Russia asserting its geopolitical presence. "But I don't see anything unusual, this is business as usual," he said.

The generals said under Putin long-range aviation was no longer in need of fuel, enjoyed better maintenance and much higher wages, a far cry from the 1990s when many pilots were practically grounded because there was no money to buy fuel.

The generals quipped that part of the funding boost was thanks to a five-hour sortie Putin once flew as part of a crew on a supersonic Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber, known as the "White Swan" in Russia and codenamed "Blackjack" by NATO.

The current state of Russia's economy, which is booming for the eighth year in a row, has allowed Russia to finance such flights, said Safranchuk from the World Security Institute.

"Maintenance and training are not the most expensive budget items of modern armies. Purchases of new weapons really are."

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's indigenous tribes are being surrounded and cut off from food supplies by criminal gangs made up of right-wing paramilitaries that disbanded under a government peace plan, rights experts said on Wednesday.

To control lucrative cocaine-smuggling routes, new gangs with names like the Black Eagles are blocking access to and from indigenous communities around the country, tribal leaders told a United Nationsforum.

More than 31,000 paramilitaries have turned in their guns over the last three years, but the government admits that thousands of former militia fighters have regrouped into drug and extortion gangs.

"The Black Eagles are a paramilitary army that is refining itself as an organized crime group," said Luis Andrade, president of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia.

He said that about 12,000 tribe members throughout the country have been hemmed into their villages by new and old paramilitary groups as well as soldiers enforcing President Alvaro Uribe's hard-line security policies.

"They can't leave to fish or hunt, which has caused hundreds to starve," Andrade said. "This confinement is causing more victims than direct actions such as assassinations."

Indigenous people who do try to leave their villages risk being shot as rebel collaborators, he said.

Urban violence associated with Colombia's four-decade-old guerrilla war has declined under Uribe, who was re-elected last year. But wide swathes of countryside are still controlled by left-wing rebels, paramilitaries and other criminal bands.

The government has never controlled all of the Andean country, which is the world's biggest producer of cocaine. The "paras" were formed in the 1980s to help cattle ranchers, drug lords and other rich Colombians beat back the rebels.

'WILDER, YOUNGER'

The United Nations says the new crime gangs are less disciplined and more dangerous than their paramilitary predecessors.

"They are wilder, younger and not as well organized as they were before. They do not have a political agenda at all. It is pure narco-trafficking," said Roberto Meier, Colombia's representative for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.

"They run over everything in front of them," Meier said.

Uribe's international standing has been damaged by a scandal in which some of his closest allies in Congress have been jailed while awaiting trial on charges of colluding with paramilitary drug gangs.

Human rights groups say the demobilization has not forced paramilitary chiefs to get out of the cocaine business.

The northern Sierra Nevada region remains filled with coca crops used to make cocaine as well as laboratories for processing the drug, said indigenous leader Leonor Zalabata.

"That illicit economic structure is not being dismantled," she said.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle Endeavour was due to blast off fromFlorida on Wednesday on its first mission in nearly five years, carrying a former teacher who trained with the ill-fated Challenger crew and gear for the International Space Station.

The mission will be the second of four that the U.S. space agency plans this year as it presses to finish construction of the $100 billion space station before the three remaining U.S. shuttles are retired in 2010.

Florida's weather, often marked by afternoon thunderstorms during the state's steamy summer, was expected to cooperate, with an 80 percent chance of clear skies for the 6:36 p.m. EDT launch,NASA said.

Endeavour has not flown since before the February 1, 2003, Columbia disaster, in which seven astronauts were killed when their spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry into the atmosphere.

NASA and Columbia's crew had not been aware that a falling chunk of insulation foam had knocked a hole in the ship's protective heat shield during launch. The agency now monitors liftoffs with dozens of cameras and shuttle crews scrutinize their ship's heat-resistant tiles when they reach space.

Endeavour has undergone an extensive overhaul since its last flight in 2002 and NASA managers say the spacecraft is virtually new. It has a new piece of equipment that can tap into the power grid of the space station and could allow the shuttle to extend its 11-day mission to 14 days.

The primary purpose of Endeavour's flight, which is the 119th in the shuttle program, is to deliver and install a new beam for the station's main support structure, replace a faulty gyroscope needed to keep the outpost positioned properly in orbit, and deliver supplies.

CIVILIANS WERE BANNED

But it is the crew that has fallen under the spotlight, partly because the five-man, two-woman team includes former elementary school teacher Barbara Morgan.

Morgan trained 22 years ago as the backup to Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire social studies teacher who died along with six astronauts seconds after Challenger's liftoff on January 28, 1986, when a booster rocket blew up.

Civilian fliers were banned from shuttles after Challenger and Morgan joined the astronaut corps in 1998.

The astronaut corps itself is also under some scrutiny after allegations last month that a drunken astronaut was allowed to fly on a Russian spacecraft and another almost flew on a shuttle.

"To imply that my crew or I would ever consider launching on our mission in anything but the best possible condition is utterly ridiculous," Endeavour Commander Scott Kelly wrote in a letter to journalists, denouncing the panel that reported the allegations for posting unsubstantiated opinions.

NASA managers have launched an investigation and vowed to reinforce a 12-hour ban on alcohol before spaceflights.

Endeavour's mission was also clouded by the revelation that a component it is taking to the space station had been sabotaged by a worker at one of NASA's subcontractors. The computer has been fixed and an investigation is under way.