Democratic Sen. John Kerry conceded the White House race to President Bush in a phone call on Wednesday, ending uncertainty about ballot counting in Ohio and cementing Bush's re-election to a second four-year term.

Bush's election win sends him into a second term facing daunting challenges, from a worsening insurgency in Iraq--the aftermath of his decision to invade the country in 2003--and soaring federal budget deficits.

Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, told supporters in Boston there would be no concession until all votes had been counted in Ohio.

"With a bigger majority, we can do even more exciting things," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican from Texas.

US presidential candidates George W Bush and John Kerry are campaigning in key swing states in a final push ahead of Tuesday's election.

A fresh video message from Osama Bin Laden, released on Friday, has pushed national security back to the top of the agenda.

President Bush started Sunday's campaigning in Florida, which he won by just 537 votes in 2000 after a series of recounts that decided the overall election. He then moves on to Ohio.

Also in Florida, President Bush cheered supporters in Miami with an attack on Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

"I strongly believe the people of Cuba should be free from the tyrant," the president said.

Are republicans dyslexic we wonder? One keen Bush supporter has signed up for the latest propaganda from the Bush-Cheney '04 team. He appears to know where he lives but apparently he doesn't know what his email address should actually be.

So The INQ's email address on MSN (the precursor to Hotmail) has just been bombarded with emails explaining the nuances of the campaign trail. Including one entitled 'Two articles on Osama politics.'

Unfortunately, the unsubscribe URL generated the following error message. "You don't have permission to access http://www.georgewbush.com/email/Unsubscribe.aspx on this server".

Snippets of a purported new video clip of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden appeared on the Web on Friday, shortly after the clip was broadcast on the Arabic language Al-Jazeera TV network.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said, according to the MSNBC translation of the clip. In addition, bin Laden threatened new attacks on the United States.

Bin Laden has released several video and audio messages since he went into hiding after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. The last purported recorded message from bin Laden was posted on the Web on several sites on May 6. The audiotape urged the assassination of top U.S. and U.N. officials in Iraq.

Surfers outside the US have been unable to visit the official re-election site of President George W Bush.

The blocking of browsers sited outside the US began in the early hours of Monday morning.

The blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by vandals or malicious hackers, but as a result of a policy decision by the Bush camp.

The international exclusion zone around georgewbush.com was spotted by net monitoring firm Netcraft which keeps an eye on traffic patterns across many different sites.

The site can still be seen using anonymous proxy services that are based in the US. Some web users in Canada also report that they can browse the site.

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision might have been taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice to throw out a flawed felon voter list before it went out to county election offices despite warnings from state officials, according to a report published Saturday.

A software program matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the list of 48,000 names. Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database in July after acknowledging that 2,500 ex-felons on the list had had their voting rights restored.

Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error.

U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, the Florida chairman of Democratic Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, said the report shows the extent Bush will go to ensure his brother's re-election.

Those who think that e-voting in the US is just asking for trouble have had their case strengthened, when a test run of the system crashed in Florida.

Apparently the system was due to be tested on Tuesday but the test had to be delayed because excessive heat caused a computer server that tabulates data from the touch-screen machines to crash.

Officials were quick to blame Hurricane Jeanne, which struck in September. They think that a stray bolt of lightning may have zapped electricity and air conditioning to the room where the server was stored, causing temperatures to soar to 90 degrees or more.

So no-one noticed that the server room had warmed noticeably in the last month since the storm and the servers only chose the day of the voting test to crash. Sounds a little odd, but in a State were Robert Mugabe jokingly offered to send troops to help restore democracy anything is possible.

According to pressure group Blackbox Voting, here, by entering a two digit code on the Diebold central tabulator a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes, this web site alleges.

The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, it's claimed.

There are more than a 1,000 Diebolds in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time. According to Blackbox not a single location in the US has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

The meeting was behind closed doors it seems. According to Black Box the undersecretary of state, Mark Kyle, left early, and one voting panel member, John Mott Smith, appeared to sleep through the entire thing.

The machine's manufacturer are aware of the claims. In fact they tried to slap a cease and desist order on the group in 2003 when it first approached them. However, despite the group offering to show the company how to fix the problem it has ignored them.

Both sites have left themselves open to online "vandalism" because of errors in their scripting codes, Richard Smith says on his site.

Mr Smith says Bush's site uses a third party company to track user habits on the campaign site through web bugs.

Although both sites have good privacy policies, an explanation of why the Bush site makes use of a third party to do this is not made very clear in the statement, claims Mr Smith.

"Both banner ad schemes allow the campaigns to track visitors to web pages where the banner ads appear," explains Mr Smith.

"In addition, the Bush JavaScript scheme allows the Bush web server to run any script code inside of other people's web pages.

"This scheme doesn't strike me as a very good idea from a security standpoint," he says.

The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry is criticizing President Bush for featuring Nazi images in an ad on his official reelection campaign website, but the images in question come from an ad featured on the website of liberal advocacy group.

"The fact that George Bush thinks it's appropriate to use images of Adolf Hitler in his campaign raises serious questions about his fitness to spend another four years in the White House," said Singer in a statement.

"Using images of Hitler and terminology from the Nazi regime in campaign attacks is offensive and demeaning to the memory of the six million and others who died in the Holocaust," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the ADL, in a press release.

The words "God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them" are shown over top of a picture of Adolf Hitler while Hitler is heard speaking in German. The picture of Hitler disappears and is replaced by a picture of Bush, while the words "...and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did," are centered on the screen.