Veteran Reuters political correspondent Steve Holland is reading Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life” and sharing his thoughts on Twitter. He’s well-qualified as a reader — he broke the news of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

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• Sarah Palin says presidency “not on my radar screen”
• Palin stirs controversy ahead of book release
• Hillary Clinton is open to coffee with Sarah Palin

Reuters will provide live updates of President Obama’s news conference, scheduled to start on Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET. (Editor’s note: Reader comments appear in a smaller font)

Reuters’ Andrew Quinn will be providing live updates on the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor, scheduled to start on Tuesday at 0930 ET. (Editor’s note: Reader comments appear in a smaller font)

By Sumeet Desai and Matt Spetalnick

With the British anxious about the state of their “special relationship” with the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown goes to Washington this week bearing gifts for President Barack Obama as reminders of that long transatlantic lovefest.

Brown, the first European leader to visit Obama since his Jan. 20 inauguration, will give him a first edition of Martin Gilbert’s seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill, whose World War Two partnership with Franklin Roosevelt epitomized the Anglo-American alliance.
 
The second gift will be a framed commissioning paper for HMS Resolute, a Royal Navy ship that became icebound in the Arctic in the early 1850s while searching in vain for British explorer John Franklin’s lost expedition that had been seeking a Northwest Passage to Asia.
 
An American whaler later found Resolute and it was freed from the ice and returned to Queen Victoria in 1856. In 1880, the British goverment, as a gesture of thanks, presented President Rutherford B. Hayes with a desk made from timbers of the ship, and ever since it has been used in the Oval Office by most presidents, including Obama. A replica figured as a plot device in the Hollywood thriller “National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets”, in which a secret compartment in the desk contained pieces of a clue.
 
At their White House talks on Tuesday, Brown also planned to give Obama a pen holder fashioned from the timber of HMS Gannet, a sister ship of the Resolute that also served for a time on anti-slavery missions off Africa.
 
The hope, it seems, is Obama will be reminded of America’s longstanding ties to Britain, which lost its 13 colonies after they rebelled against the Crown in 1776 but which later forged an alliance that spanned two world wars in the 20th century.
 
Brown wants to strengthen an alliance with Obama to combat the global financial crisis and reinforce London’s relationship with Washington. But there is growing concern in Britain that Washington’s attention is increasingly on Asia, with its growing economic clout, rather than Europe. 

There was no word, however, on what gift Obama might have in mind for his guest.
 
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Many U.S. farmers don't have confidence in President-elect Barack Obama, with many fearing the new administration will not be receptive to the needs of American farmers and ranchers.

A Reuters straw poll of more than 800 farmers at the American Farm Bureau Federation's annual meeting in San Antonio found 72 percent of the respondents did not believe Obama would have the best interest of the farmer in mind.

Instead of helping U.S. sectors that produce goods for the country, such as farmers, several mentioned Obama would focus on programs that work to even out income and help those that are seeking something from the government.

U.S. farmers, who tend to be social and fiscal conservatives, have traditionally supported Republicans. One Illinois farmer said he was "not necessarily a Republican beating a drum here but... I just don't have the confidence in him that I probably should have."

The Farm Bureau, the nation's largest farm group, representing growers and ranchers, has adopted a more optimistic tone. Bob Stallman, president of the group, said Obama made several positive comments toward agriculture during the campaign and has expressed a need to have a healthy farm economy.

-- Christopher Doering

Photo: President-elect Barack Obama  tastes some peaches during a campaign stop at a farmers market in Greensboro, North Carolina, on August 20, 2008.  REUTERS/Jim Young

One of the great rules of inventory management -- first in, first out -- could apply to the process of deducing who will be agriculture secretary in the Obama administration with a wry renaming. In this iteration, it is "first named, first discarded."

The list of potential nominees deemed as front-runners or consensus choices to run USDA has churned continuously since Barack Obama won the presidential election. And it is unclear when a nominee will be named. Most of the front-runners have faded from attention like flowers at the approach of winter.

In early November, the list of potential nominees was filled with Washington heavyweights, like National Farmers Union president Tom Buis or former Texas Rep. Charles Stenholm, along with former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

They were superseded by a series of state officials, such as Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff. Still more potential names surfaced, including first-tem Montana Sen. John Tester and John Boyd, head of the National Black Farmers Association.

One agricultural commentator listed more than a dozen possible candidates at a conference last week, ranging from Patty Judge, the Iowa lieutenant govenor, to Jill Long Thompson, a former USDA official who ran for Indiana governor this year.

Speculation now centers on Colorado Rep. John Salazar, a farmer-rancher and Army veteran. "It's a real long shot," Salazar told Reuters. All the same, members of the House Agriculture Committee greeted Salazar like a returning hero when he arrived at a hearing on Monday.

In the Washington parlor game of "Who Gets the Job?" some of the people mentioned for secretary are deemed better candidates for other slots -- Dallas Tonsager of the Farm Credit Administration as undersecretary for rural development and lawyer Marshall Matz as undersecretary for nutrition. Matz and Tonsager were prominent in seeking rural votes for Obama. And Californians have been consistent in backing Karen Ross for deputy secretary, the No. 2 post.

South Dakota Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin still draws some attention as a potential nominee. A few congressional staff workers have a theory that Obama eventually will ask the House Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson, despite his frequent disavowals. "It will not be me, I can tell you," Peterson said a couple of weeks ago.

    -- Chuck Abbott

Posted by Michael Peltier and Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON — Republican Mel Martinez of Florida — a Cuban immigrant who says he lived “The American Dream” — is calling it quits as a member of the U.S. Senate.

Having narrowly won a first term in 2004 and facing an anticipated tough re-election in 2010, Martinez announced on Tuesday he will not run for a second term.

“The inescapable truth, for me, is that the call to public service is strong — but the call to home, family and lifelong friends is even stronger,” Martinez said in a statement that he read at a news conference in Orlando, Florida, and was also released in Washington.

Martinez made his declaration almost a month after the Nov. 4 elections that saw Democrats expand their majorities in Senate and House of Representatives, largely because of the unpopularity of outgoing Republican President George W. Bush and the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression.

Martinez is the second U.S. senator up for re-election in 2010 who has announced he will not seek another term. The other is Sam Brownback of Kansas, who’s also a Republican. Both plan to complete their six-year terms before leaving.

Thirty-five seats of the 100 Senate seats will be up for grabs in two years, 16 of them held by Democrats, 19 by Republicans.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which tracks congressional races, had listed Martinez as among the most vulnerable incumbents. It had called his race as a “tossup.”

Martinez, 62, came to the United States at age 15, graduated from college, earned a law degree and ended up getting elected to the Senate after serving in Bush’s Cabinet as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

“We proved the American Dream is alive and well,” Martinez said. He said his decision not to seek another term was personal, not political.

“Some might try to characterize this decision in terms of political affairs. Some will say a re-election campaign would have been too difficult. But I’ve faced much tougher odds in political campaigns and in life. My decision was not based on reelection prospects, but on what I want to do with the next eight years of my life,” the senator said.

Democrats and Republicans are certain to move quickly in a search for possible candidates to replace him.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Robert Galbraith (Martinez speaks during the Republican National Convention in September.)

MIAMI - Voting monitors in swing-state Florida said the biggest problem was long lines, especially on college campuses.

In two Sarasota precincts, so many votes were cast that no more could be stuffed into the ballot boxes.

“The lock box is overflowing and they are putting the ballots in bags,” said Marcia Johnson-Blanco from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which was part of a vote-monitoring coalition.

Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning said turnout could eclipse the 1992 record of 83 percent in the nation’s fourth most populous state.

That suggests there could still be a lot of people waiting in line to vote when the polls close, delaying results in the state that kept the nation waiting for weeks to determine who won its 2000 presidential election. 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

- Reporting by Jane Sutton in Miami and Michael Peltier in Tallahassee.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Hans Deryk (voters wait in line in Miami Beach)

By Ori Lewis

TEL AVIV - The possibility that the United States will vote in a first black president next week is in no small part due to the opportunities President George W. Bush gave to blacks in senior government posts, boxing promoter Don King said on Monday.

King, an erstwhile larger-than-life personality and probably the world’s best known boxing promoter, is in Israel this week to participate in Israeli President Shimon Peres’s Center for Peace’s 10-year anniversary celebrations.

“We had 43 presidents in the United States, he was the 43rd president, 42 of them promised us everything and gave us nothing, both Democrats and Republicans,” King said in an interview with Reuters.

“(Bush formed) the most diverse cabinet of any president in the history of the United States. I know that they are condemning him now … but this man prepared us for a Barack Obama, for the ‘great change,’” King added, naming Bush Cabinet members Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Rod Paige and Alfonso Jackson as examples.

King said he believed that if Obama had been white “he would win by a landslide”.

“I appeal to (all those) who believe that it is inconceivable that they could ever pull the lever for a black candidate … I think it is America’s time … when you go to the ballot box … imagine that Barack Obama is a white man, then you pull the lever, then tomorrow you make him black again … because it is for the good of the nation and the betterment of the world,” King said.

But after a typically long and eloquent speech during which the 77-year-old did not falter even once as he stared at the camera and brandished a clutch of American and Israeli flags, King said he was not actually endorsing either candidate.

“Let us make history in the making let us go to the polls, let us have two candidates irrespective of their race, color, creed or religion who will be best to serve the people who are the most important … so I’m for America, not for the candidate,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Ronen Zvulun (King during an interview in Israel.)

SIOUX CITY, Iowa - Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin took a shot at her own party while campaigning solo in the battleground state of Iowa on Saturday.

Poking fun at the Republican National Committee for buying her and her family over $150,000 worth of clothing for the campaign, she said when she stepped off the plane in a chilly Iowa that she’d grabbed “my own jacket”.

Her reference to the controversy drew applause and whistles from the crowd.

In Des Moines Palin argued that her running mate John McCain, was more “worthy” of the presidency, saying he was “someone who inspires us with heroic and trustworthy deeds and not just words.” 

According to Palin, the election will go “down to the wire” and Iowa’s seven electoral voters are crucial to McCain’s candidacy. “So Iowa, I would ask you? Will ya hire us? Will ya send us to Washington to shake things up and clean things up?” Palin asked. The crowd cheered, clapped, whistled and pounded together the “thunder sticks” the campaign had handed out.

“Well, it’s a deal because we want the job,” Palin said when the crowd wound down. However, she and McCain are trailing in recent polls for the Midwest state, including down eight points in the latest Rasmussen survey released on Friday.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

- Reporting by Kay Henderson of Radio Iowa, writing by Jeremy Pelofsky

- Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Palin at a rally in Ohio earlier this week)