Morning News Roundup (17 August)

Middle East Sturm und Drang

• 1,666: Number of roadside bombs that went off in Iraq in July, the highest monthly total of the war. Seventy percent of those bombs were directed at U.S. troops. “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time,” said a senior Pentagon official. [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Clashes between rival Shiite Muslim militias erupted Wednesday in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, when scores of gunmen stormed the governor's office after accusing his supporters of assassinating their tribal leader. Meanwhile, car bombs in Baghdad killed 25 people.
  
  The gunmen in Basra, a predominantly Shiite city, laid siege to the office for two hours, lobbing mortar shells and barricading nearby bridges, before British troops and Iraqi police pushed them back. The fighting left at least four policemen dead, police said. Authorities imposed a curfew on the city. [WaPo]
  
  
• The Washington Post leads with Lebanon's government, as expected, ordering its army into the south after it hammered out a don't-show don't-search deal with Hezbollah: The guerrilla group isn't supposed to flash its weapons and the Lebanese army won't go looking for them. The Post dubs it a "compromise whose contours remained indistinct.
  
  Israel didn't seem thrilled with the terms but isn't making a big fuss. As Lebanese troops began moving in this morning, Israel said it has begun "transferring responsibility" to them. [Slate's Today's Papers]
  
  
• Nervous officials in France are fretting over their decision to lead the UN peacekeeping mission in the region, mostly because Lebanon hasn't agreed to disarm Hezbollah, but also because they could be miring themselves in a long, impossible mission. Germany, which may also contribute troops to the multinational effort, has some unease of its own over the possibility of German troops shooting at Israelis.
  
  Israeli Defense Minister Peretz says IDF officials didn't warn him about the Hezbollah threat when he took office. Efforts to put together a committee to examine Israel's performance in the war are met with criticism. And what about those three kidnapped soldiers? Still kidnapped. [Foreign Policy's Passport]
  
  
• The White House made a big to-do about President Bush's meeting Monday with four outside experts on Iraq. Spokesman Tony Snow held the meeting up as proof that the president is interested in -- and consistently exposed to -- different points of view, and even dissent.
  
  But the only thing that meeting demonstrated is that true dissent is still not welcome at the White House, unless you define dissenters as anyone who doesn't agree with the president on absolutely everything.
  
  By all independent accounts, none of the academics who were granted an audience with the president Monday criticized his fundamental approach to Iraq. At most, they suggested minor course corrections.
  
  And none of them told him what he evidently refuses to hear: That it's not working. [Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing at WaPo]

Climate Crisis

• A University of California, Berkeley study found capping greenhouse gas emissions in the state “would create 17,000 new jobs and add $60 billion to the gross state product by 2020.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Some 250,000 evacuees from last year's Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast may never return permanently and should be considered "climate refugees," whose ranks around the world could grow until global warming is mitigated, an environmental expert said.
  
  "What we're looking at is the potential not of displacing thousands of people, but possibly millions of people as the result of rising seas and more destructive storms in the years and decades ahead if we don't move quickly to reduce CO2 emissions," said Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute in Washington D.C. [Reuters via Climate Ark]
  
  
• The world's oceans have taken a beating in the past couple of weeks. Off the coast of Lebanon, an estimated 15,000 tons of oil spilled from an Israeli-struck storage facility is being described as “the biggest environmental catastrophe in Lebanon’s history” and a “threat to biodiversity” in the Mediterranean Sea. Clean-up was impossible until Tuesday, for obvious security reasons. As far as ecological costs, In the Mediterranean, the oil will affect tuna, whose eggs float on the water’s surface, and compromise newly-hatched green turtle as they burrow out of Lebanon’s beaches and race for sea.
  [...]
  One of the perverse effects of the way we measure the economy is that such disasters show up as a plus in the GDP figures, because of the huge sums spent on clean-up, but the ecological losses suffered are off the books. [Sightline's Daily Score]

Domestic Potpourri

• Monster retailer Wal-Mart has distributed a "voter guide" to its 18,000 employees in Iowa attacking Democratic congressmen and governors across the U.S. who have criticized the company. The "voter guide" targets four prominent potential Democratic presidential candidates: Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, and Tom Vilsack.
  
  It's more than coincidence that Wal-Mart chose to release its voter guide in Iowa - the first election stop in the Democratic presidential caucuses - where nominees are often made or broken. It's also no surprise that many Democratic politicans have made a big show of their criticism of Wal-Mart, which has become a hot-button political issue in small towns and states across the Midwest, and yes, in Iowa. [Foreign Policy's Passport]
  
  
• President George W. Bush, hungry for a domestic victory, will sign into law with much fanfare today a measure revamping the U.S. private pension system that will also make the first of his tax cuts permanent. Wall Street firms are anticipating an influx of investment capital from the law, which contains $59 billion in tax breaks while making permanent tax incentives enacted in 2001 that are likely to boost workers' savings and investments.
  [...]
  The most significant of the breaks include higher annual caps on retirement-account contributions; a guarantee that gains in so-called "529" state-sponsored college tuition accounts will be exempt from federal taxes; a tax credit matching deposits by low-income Americans in retirement accounts; and the Roth 401(k), which allows postponement of taxation until retirement. [Bloomberg]
  
  
• There were plenty of anxious moments on Seattle's waterfront when a bomb-sniffing dog suddenly "alerted" on a pair of cargo containers shipped from Pakistan, prompting a rare cargo terminal shutdown.
  
  No explosives or radioactive materials were found when the Port of Seattle bomb squad searched the containers. One was loaded with new textiles, such as shirts and pants. The other was filled with old textiles that would likely be made into rags. [Seattle P-I]

Big Blue Marble

• UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has given vent to his private feelings about the Bush presidency, summing up George Bush's administration in a single word: crap. His condemnation of President Bush and his approach to the Middle East could cause a diplomatic row but it will please Labour MPs who are furious about Tony Blair's backing of the United States over the bombing of Lebanon. [The Independent]

Misc.

• Pieter Hintjens, the CEO of iMatix, has launched the Capsoff organization in a campaign urging hardware manufacturers to ditch the oft-abused and misused Caps Lock key. Hintjens' plan is to build the entire infrastructure for the movement using only freely available tools from Google. He's already set up a Blogger Capsoff blog and a forum at Google Groups.
  
  "The Caps key is an abomination," Hintjens writes on his blog. "It's a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it's only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers." [Wired]

And finally... The Revealer spirituality news blog notes this recent missive by Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren (author of The Purpose Driven Life) about how he teaches "moral integrity" (i.e., relations between different sexes) to his church staff. He writes, "I have told my staff that if any of them even flirt with temptation, I will come after them with a baseball bat, and I’ve told them to do the same with me." Here are some of the "Saddleback staff standards for maintaining moral integrity:"

- Thou shalt not go to lunch alone with the opposite sex.
- Thou shalt not have the opposite sex pick you up or drive you places when it is just the two of you.
{these first two don't apply to unmarried staff}
- Thou shalt not visit the opposite sex alone at home.
- Thou shalt make your secretary your protective ally.

I'm not really sure what that last one means. And what's with the allusion to violence as a deterrent to temptation?