Cracks in the Facade: Morning News Roundup (08 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

Due to a widespread corrosion problem in its Alaskan pipeline, BP will need to replace 16 miles of a 22-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay and to shut down 400,000 barrels a day of production from the largest oil field in the United States.

News that BP would have to suspend production equal to 8 percent of U.S. petroleum output for an indefinite period helped push the price of crude oil up by 3 percent yesterday, to $76.98 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price jump underlined the fragility of world oil markets, already anxious about the thin cushion between global supply and demand and potential threats to flows from Iran, Nigeria, Iraq and the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico.
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Prudhoe Bay's production level has been slowly declining since it hit a peak of 1.5 million barrels a day in 1989, and BP has increasingly turned to new prospects in places such as Russia.
[WaPo]
Washington drivers will likely feel the brunt of BP's closure of its Prudhoe Bay oil field in Alaska, although gasoline-price increases are not expected to hit hard until later this week. Washington's five refineries get more than half of their crude oil from Alaska's North Slope, which includes the Prudhoe field.
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The West Coast has no pipelines to oil supplies in the Eastern United States, leaving it cut off from immediate relief even if the government releases oil from its emergency stockpile on the Gulf Coast. [Seattle Times]

Middle East Sturm und Drang

At least 19 people have been killed and scores hurt in a series of blasts in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Two bombs claimed at least 10 lives and injured 69 people in a busy market in the al-Shurja district. Earlier, a bomb hit a minibus and a taxi in the centre of the city, killing at least nine people. Two other blasts targeted police, wounding three. [BBC]
A predawn raid by Iraqi troops and American military advisers on a stronghold of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr erupted into a two-hour gun battle Monday, according to residents and the U.S. military. The operation in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood was aimed at "individuals involved in punishment and torture cell activities," the U.S. military said in a statement.

But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sharply criticized the operation, saying that it could hinder his efforts at national reconciliation. Maliki, who has been working with U.S. commanders on a new program to crack down on violence in Baghdad, appeared on local television Monday and said he was "very angered and pained." "This operation used weapons that are unreasonable to detain someone -- like using planes," Maliki said. [WaPo]
As the Bush administration seeks to negotiate a diplomatic end to the fighting in the Middle East, it finds it has a strikingly weak hand.

The war in Iraq, a halting U.S. response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now the prolonged fighting in Lebanon and Israel have led to intense anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Alliances with longtime Arab friends are strained. And the U.S. lacks relations with two key regional players: Iran and Syria.
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Adding to the challenge is, remarkably, inexperience. Despite 5 1/2 years in office, President Bush's foreign policy team has been involved in surprisingly few high-stakes negotiations in the region.
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Successful diplomacy requires being able to broker between enemies by having the trust of both parties and enough force, moral and military, to enforce a deal. America's recent foreign forays have relied largely on force, but the military victories have been short-lived and unable to bring about the democracy that was promised.

"In the Middle East, historically people always go with the strong horse, but we don't look like the strong horse anymore," said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and now director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. "To Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, we look like we're short of breath." [LATimes]
Israel looks to escalate its operations in southern Lebanon after hitting targets in Beirut last night. Still, Israeli PM Olmert calls the Lebanese offer - approved by Hezbollah reps - to deploy 15,000 troops to the southern border and to place Shebaa Farms in UN custody "interesting". The Daily Star reports that early word from the UN indicates that there may be an agreement on the wording of a cease-fire resolution. [Foreign Policy's Passport]

Domestic Potpourri

Culture of life: New study shows that children on Medicaid or with no insurance have a death rate twice as high as that of children with private insurance. “Nationwide, providing more primary and preventive care to those children could save an estimated $5 billion a year.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
Democratic voters in Connecticut began casting their ballots Tuesday morning and by 10:30 this evening, both Sen. Joe Lieberman and his rival Ned Lamont will likely know whether Lamont’s daring challenge has succeeded in defeating the man who only six years ago carried the party’s banner as its vice presidential candidate.
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A Quinnipiac University poll released Monday showed Lamont leading Lieberman 51 percent to 45 percent among likely Democratic voters, a lead within the poll’s margin of error. [MSNBC]

Climate Crisis

The continental United States suffered through its second-hottest July on record because of a blistering heat wave from California to Washington, D.C. The heat wave broke more than 2,300 daily temperature records for the month and eclipsed more than 50 records for the highest temperatures in any July, according to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The hottest July on record occurred in 1936, and the third hottest was 1934.
“A plague of jellyfish along Europe’s beaches has become the latest environmental hazard to be blamed on global warming.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
Fifty-five people were reported killed by flooding in India as relief workers Monday moved thousands marooned by heavy monsoon rains to higher ground. Authorities raced to shift some 30,000 people when the city of Surat in the western coastal state of Gujarat was flooded after the Tapti river burst its banks, local officials said.
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The state's main Godavari river and its tributaries were flowing over the danger mark due to rain in neighbouring states, Andhra Pradesh's additional commissioner for relief, Priyadarshini, told AFP. More than 100,000 people had been evacuated to relief camps, she said. [TerraDaily]
A new campaign against Hong Kong's air pollution began at eight o'clock on Tuesday, the eighth month's eighth day. It is called the Lights Out campaign and people were asked to turn their lights off for three minutes.

Using the positive symbolism of the number eight in Chinese, organisers hoped ordinary people would be inspired to show that they cared about the air they breathe.The campaign has caught on among the public, but government and corporate offices said they would not join in. [BBC]