Morning News Roundup (07 August)

Keep up with the latest news on the Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas conflict with these regularly updating news sources:

• Wall Street Journal
  
• BBC Crisis Map
• WaPo -- Latest Headlines | Interactive Updates

Now onto the rest of the day's news...

Top Story

• Prominent economists of all ideological persuasions long believed that raising the U.S. minimum wage would retard job growth, creating unintended hardship for those at the bottom of the ladder. Today, that consensus is eroding, and a vigorous debate has developed as some argue that boosting the wage would pull millions out of poverty.
  
  A moderate increase in the minimum wage won't raise unemployment among low-skilled workers, according to recent studies, many economists say. They are joined by some business executives who say they can live with that, especially if it's coupled with tax relief.
  
  "My thinking on this has changed dramatically," says Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve vice chairman who teaches economics at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. "The evidence appears to be against the simple-minded theory that a modest increase in the minimum wage causes substantial job loss." [Bloomberg]

Middle East Sturm und Drang

• Hezbollah launched its deadliest rocket attacks since fighting commenced last month, killing approximately 15 Israelis, three of whom were civilians. Israeli bombs killed about a dozen Lebanese while inflicting further damage on Lebanon's shattered road system. The attacks came one day after the United States and France sponsored a U.N. draft resolution calling for a cease fire. [Slate's Today's Papers]
  
  
• “President Bush will move U.S. troops out of Iraq if the country descends into civil war, according to one senior Bush aide who declined to be named while talking about internal strategy,” Newsweek reports.
  
  20 percent: Bush’s approval rating among Americans age 18 to 24, with 53 percent disapproving. The Iraq war is a major factor. [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• A suicide bomber blew himself up among mourners at a funeral in Saddam Hussein's hometown yesterday evening, killing at least 10 people and wounding 18, police said. Sixteen more people died in political or sectarian violence elsewhere in Iraq.
  
  Also yesterday, several Marines were wounded and a few vehicles were destroyed by a suicide car bombing in Anbar Province, the US military said without elaborating. Iraqi police said the attack was in Fallujah, a heavily guarded city 40 miles west of Baghdad. [BoGlobe]
  
  
• Iraq is not on track to become another Iran despite the disconcerting images last week of Iraqis burning U.S. flags and chanting "Death to America," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.
  [...]
  "That people would go out and demonstrate and say what they feel is the one sign that perhaps Iraq is one place in the Middle East where people are exercising their right to free speech," she said. "No. I don't like what they said." She said she thinks that as Iraq becomes more stable and democratic "you won't have demonstrations of that kind." [AP via Yahoo!]
  
  
• As their anger against Israel and America swells, protesters across the Middle East are also increasingly venting their frustration at their Arab rulers, especially in moderate countries whose governments have been reliable U.S. allies.
  [...]
  The rising resentment is weighing heavily on Arab leaders as their foreign ministers gather in Beirut on Monday for an emergency meeting. Moderates like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia may want a halt to the fighting, but they can't be seen as backing a U.S.-promoted cease-fire plan that Hezbollah has depicted as a surrender.
  
  Even more worrisome for Arab leaders is the possibility violence may turn on them. On Saturday, al-Qaida announced that an Egyptian militant group had joined the terror network. While the group denied it, many fear that public anger could nonetheless boost militants around the region. [SFChronic]

Climate Crisis

• “For the fifth year in a row, unusual wind patterns off the coast of Oregon have produced a large ‘dead zone,’ an area so low in oxygen that fish and crabs suffocate.” “There is no other cause [besides climate change], as far as we can determine,” said Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University. [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Thank goodness for air conditioning. To keep old folks alive, cities from Washington to Los Angeles are opening artificially cooled buildings to the public. Meanwhile, people are lining up to buy window units. According to the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute, shipments of air conditioners and heat pumps have tripled over the last three decades. The percentage of single-family homes built with central air has gone from 36 to 87. The percentage of cars built with air conditioning has risen from 61 to 98. In 1970, only 42 percent of occupied mobile homes had it. By 2003, that percentage had more than doubled.
  
  It's a heartwarming—or, more precisely, a heart-cooling—story. Unfortunately, the story doesn't end there. Air conditioning takes indoor heat and pushes it outdoors. To do this, it uses energy, which increases production of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere. From a cooling standpoint, the first transaction is a wash, and the second is a loss. We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable. [William Saletan in Slate]
  
  
• The Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK-based think tank, issued a report yesterday warning environmentalists and communicaters to stay away from alarmist language that may be causing more harm than good when it comes to getting the message across about global warming. The IPPR report is just another in a series of reports and research urging envrionmentalists and those who want real action on climate change to re-think the way we communicate the issue to the public.
  
  In the case of the IPPR report, the authors, a linguist and a textual analyst, make the sound argument that alarmist language can elicit an effect more akin to "climate porn," than a call to arms by the citizenry to tackle global warming. In other words, many public interest groups assume that melting glaciers and heat waves will scare people to action, when in fact it has the opposite effect of people tuning out the message they are trying to get across. PR professionals have known this for years, but much like smoking, we all know that alarmism is bad for us, but many of us continue to do it anyways. [DeSmogBlog]
  
  
• And I suppose we offer our fair share of doom and gloom climate news around here. But I do try to mix it up with stories of change and hopeful possibility, and there really are loads of stories on positive movement happening in all walks of life to find alternatives to power our everyday needs and limit our CO2 emissions. Here's one tidbit from Treehugger that is very cool:
  

  The East Japan Railway Company (JR-East) is doing research on how to make its train stations more eco-friendly. One of the technologies they are working on is a ticket gate that has piezo elements that would generate electricity as commuters walk through. "R claims that this sort of human-powered electricity generation system may provide a portion of the electricity consumed at train stations in the future. [...] When combined with high-efficiency storage systems, the ticket gate generators can serve as a clean source of supplementary power for the train stations. Busy train stations (and those with large numbers of passengers willing to bounce heavily through the gates) will be able to accumulate a relatively large amount of electricity."