Morning News Roundup (28 Feb)

• At least 35 people have been killed and scores injured by four bomb blasts in Baghdad. In the bloodiest attack, 24 people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up next to a petrol station in a Shia district of the city. [BBC] The WaPo also reports that retribution attacks after last week's shrine bombing killed over 1300.


• The U.S. Coast Guard, in charge of reviewing security at ports operated by a Dubai maritime company, warned the Bush administration it could not rule out that the company's assets could be used for terrorist operations. [WaPo]
  

  [I]n a Dec. 13 intelligence assessment of the company and its owners in the United Arab Emirates, the Coast Guard warned: "There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for DPW or P&O assets to support terrorist operations, that preclude" the completion of a thorough threat assessment of the merger.
  
  "The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities," says the document, released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
  
  "Security measures were thoroughly reviewed, including intelligence matters," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. She did not know whether the White House was briefed on the Coast Guard assessment, but, she said, "I do know that at the end of the day, when the process was completed and the transaction was approved, homeland security questions were resolved."

• This is one of the costs of getting bogged down in Iraq: The Financial Times reports that Nigeria has criticised Washington for failing to help protect the country’s oil assets from rebel attack, forcing it to turn to other military suppliers, including China, for support.
  

  Atiku Abubakar, Nigeria’s vice-president, told the Financial Times the US had been too slow to help protect the oil-rich Niger Delta from a growing insurgency. He said talks with the US over security plans for the region did not “appear to be moving as fast as the situation is unfolding” and Nigeria was instead sourcing military equipment elsewhere.

• The chaos in Darfur, the war-ravaged region in Sudan where more than 200,000 civilians have been killed, has spread across the border into Chad. Arab gunmen from Darfur have pushed across the desert and entered Chad, stealing cattle, burning crops and killing anyone who resists. [NYTimes]


• Iran is advancing its uranium enrichment program, but the U.N. atomic monitoring organization still cannot determine whether the country is secretly developing nuclear weapons. [WaPo]


• Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to a higher federal gasoline tax, but a significant number would go along with an increase if it reduced global warming or made the United States less dependent on foreign oil. [NYTimes]
  

  Eighty-five percent of the 1,018 adults polled opposed an increase in the federal gasoline tax, suggesting that politicians have good reason to steer away from so unpopular a measure. But 55 percent said they would support an increase in the tax, which has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, if it did in fact reduce dependence on foreign oil. Fifty-nine percent were in favor if the result was less gasoline consumption and less global warming.

• An EPA report notes that the growth rate of U.S. emissions of gases blamed for global warming rose in 2004, as the country burned more fossil fuel for transportation and electricity. [ENN]


• For Washington State readers, Chris Cillizza (over at the WaPo's The Fix blog) had a short interview with Governor Christine Gregoire, as well as this dire polling note about a possible rematch with Republican Dino Rossi (who was just barely defeated after a contentious recount back in 2004):
  

  Polling would seem to indicate that Gregoire would enter a rematch against Rossi as an underdog, however. A survey conducted by the GOP polling firm Strategic Vision in mid-December showed Rossi with a 55 percent to 35 percent lead over Gregoire. Just 38 percent approved of the job Gregoire was doing as governor compared to 54 percent who disapproved. Other polls have shown Gregoire with a roughly one-to-one favorable/unfavorable score.

• Editorial sampling:

  • Boston Globe: The real threat to the security of US ports comes not from Arab ownership of the terminals' managing company but from the failure of the United States to better monitor what comes through our harbors, big and small. [...] Perhaps the most effective initiative for protecting the United States from dangerous contraband cargo is the program established by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar in 1991 to secure the nuclear-weapons materials and facilities of Russia and other former Soviet republics.
  
  
  
  • Stephen Flynn, James Loy [NYTimes]: America's port security challenge is not about who is in charge of our waterfront. The issue is that we are relying on commercial companies largely to police themselves.
  
  
  
  • John Tierney [NYTimes]: The Maroon looks to a University of Virginia study on the happiness of married couples, focusing on an egalitarian division of labor/responsibility:
    

    In a more egalitarian world, there would be more wives mining coal and driving trucks, and more husbands cooking dinners and taking children to doctor's appointments. But that wouldn't be a fairer world, as Nock and Wilcox found.
    
    The happiest wives in their study were the ones who said that housework was divided fairly between them and their husbands. But those same happy wives also did more of the work at home while their husbands did more work outside home. Nock doesn't claim to have divined the feminine soul, but he does have one answer to Freud's question.
    
    "A woman wants equity," he says. "That's not necessarily the same as equality."

  And don't forget Nicholas Kristof's column on the Zogby poll of armed forces service members--72 percent of whom say they should be pulled out within a year (posted previously).