Morning News Roundup (28 July)

• Yo! Tony Blair's in town hanging with Dear Leader at his crib. Foreign Policy magazine's Passport blog has a preview:
  

  The backdrop to the meeting will be, as it has been since 9/11, events in the Middle East. Obscured by what's happening in Lebanon is quite how fast the situation in Iraq is deteriorating. There's now serious talk of effectively partitioning Baghdad, a task that would be messy beyond belief and would mark the end of any hope of Iraq acting as a beacon to the rest of the region. The truth is that serious numbers of troops, not a few hundred or even a couple of thousand, need to be moved to Baghdad - and fast - if the authorities are to regain control of the city. Seeing as how spare troops aren't exactly abundant over there, that means more will have to be sent, at least temporarily. If Bush were to announce this, though, it would likely guarantee that 2006 is 1994 in reverse.
  [...]
  One thing to watch for: Will Bush apologize for the U.S. military supposedly not following procedure while using a British airport to transfer weapons to Israel? The British press corps are bound to raise it - it even came up at the White House press briefing - and it would be smart politics for Bush to defuse the issue by saying in his opening statement that he'd apologized to Blair for this technical infringement.

• The “tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind” Hezbollah, turning the group’s leader Nasrallah “into a folk hero.” Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which initially had criticized the group, are now publicly “scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• The economy's growth slowed sharply in the second quarter, logging just a 2.5 percent pace as consumers tightened their belts and spending on home building nose-dived. Inflation, however, shot up. The economy had grown 5.6% in the previous quarter.
  
  The second-quarter's performance -- which reflected the bite of high energy prices and rising interest rates on people and businesses as well as a cooling in the once red-hot housing market -- was weaker than the 3 percent pace analysts were forecasting.
  
  "These numbers will probably underpin expectations that US growth will slow quite sharply in the second half of the year and into 2007," said Shaun Osborne, a strategist at Scotia Capital. [NYTimes and BBC]
  
  
• Today, the leaders of the House of Representatives will finally allow a vote to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour over two years. It would be the first increase in the minimum wage in ten years. Raising the minimum wage would benefit 7.3 million low-wage workers.
  [...]
  Actually, the provision that Rep. Howard McKeon plans on attaching to the minimum wage bill is an ideologically driven proposal to enact Association Health Plans (AHPs). The proposal would “allow selective groups of small businesses to be exempt from state regulation – reducing their insurance premiums while raising them for those not in AHPs.” Rep. McKeon and his allies are counting on the fact that progressive members will find the Association Health Plan proposal so repugnant that they won’t vote for the bill raising the minimum wage. [ThinkProgress]
  
  
• With gasoline selling for $3 and more across the country, all three Detroit companies reported losses or sharp declines in their profits in North America. At the same time, consumers’ interest in fuel economy was nearly three times as great as it was in 2002, when the decisions about the vehicles Detroit would sell this year were essentially made.
  
  Car sales are up 2.5 percent this year, while light truck sales have fallen 6.3 percent. S.U.V. sales alone are down 12 percent. The shift from big vehicles toward cars is a particular problem for Chrysler, where almost 75 percent of its sales are light trucks (essentially the same percentage as in 2002). That is the highest among the Detroit companies, according to the industry statistics firm Autodata. [NYTimes]
  
  
• Good news turned sour: The United States is dropping Bechtel, the American construction giant, from a project to build a high-tech children’s hospital in the southern Iraqi city of Basra after the project fell nearly a year behind schedule and exceeded its expected cost by as much as 150 percent. Called the Basra Children’s Hospital, the project has been consistently championed by the first lady, Laura Bush, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and was designed to house sophisticated equipment for treating childhood cancer.
  [...]
  Mrs. Bush and Ms. Rice were unwavering supporters, and Project HOPE, a charitable organization, planned to provide at least $50 million in medical equipment. In a gala for Project HOPE last October, Mrs. Bush praised the project, describing its plan for 94 beds, a state-of-the-art neonatal unit, a linear particle accelerator for radiation therapy and CAT scanners. Ms. Rice added that the hospital “will make a real difference, a life-saving and lasting difference, to the thousands of children and their families.”
  
  But like so many other reconstruction projects in Iraq, the hospital was blindsided by changing realities on the ground. Once considered a relatively tranquil section of Iraq, the south has become increasingly dangerous with the rise of Shiite militias in the past two years — so much so, said Mr. Mumm, the Bechtel official, that construction was often forced to shut down. [NYTimes]
  
  
• Threats against federal judges are on a record-setting pace this year, nearly 18 months after the family of a federal judge was killed in Chicago. Threats and inappropriate communications have quadrupled in 10 years. There were 201 reported incidents in the 1996 government spending year and 943 in the year that ended Sept. 30, the US Marshals Service said. This year alone, the Marshals Service has had 822 reports of inappropriate communications and threats, a pace that would top 1,000 for the year. [BoGlobe]
  
  
• Canadian liberals have charged Prime Minister Harper with following the lead of U.S. climate skeptics by censoring researchers and shutting down the government's main climate-information website. They charge Harper's "Made in Canada" climate policy is a sham designed to cover up what they call an "Orwellian" campaign to suppress the truth about climate change. Harper's actions follow by about a month a meeting with Frank Luntz, the American spin srategist who counseled President Bush to "keep the public confusted" about the state of climate science. [DeSmogBlog]
  
  
• I've been a fan of director Michael Mann for some time, and I gotta say I'm a bit excited about checking out Miami Vice at some point. Check out this tidbit from the NYTimes review:
  

  Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. “Miami Vice” is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa.
  
  I’m not exaggerating about the art. Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures.

  The review also has this handy explanation for the movie's R rating:
  

  “Miami Vice” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has heavy swearing, heavy breathing and heavy gunplay.