Morning News Roundup (21 August)

Aloha! Still in Hawai'i (till tomorrow), so the roundup's a tad late (though it is early here).
Hawai'i

• Unable to find workers for its Kona store, Pizza Hut has been paying to fly employees from O'ahu to the Big Island for shifts, increasing their pay and putting them up in company-provided housing. The worker shortage along the Kona Coast has led the company to borrow workers from one island to pull shifts at another in yet another sign of the effects of Hawai'i's tight labor market on Island businesses. [Honolulu Advertiser]
  
  
• Another bumper macadamia nut crop is expected this year, but Big Isle farmers' biggest problem might be finding someone to buy Hawaii's signature nuts. With only a handful of processors on the island and one of the biggest temporarily out of the market for fresh mac nuts, hundreds of independent farmers are concerned. They produced a healthy 56 million pounds last year, and many appear to be on track for a good crop this year, too. [Honolulu Star Advertiser]

Middle East Sturm und Drang

• The UN peacekeeping force faces more trouble: Several EU countries delay a decision on contributing troops until the mission is more clearly defined. Coming just a few days after Israel staged a raid deep inside Lebanon, new fears that the cease-fire won't hold are spreading. Perhaps after pressure from the American and Israeli governments, Turkey has prevented Iranian and Syrian airplanes from flying to Lebanon after it was suspected the planes were carrying arms for Hezbollah. [Foreign Policy's Passport]
  
  
• Iraqi insurgents killed 20 people and injured 300 as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims gathered for a holy Shiite festival over the weekend. But in a sign of just how routine the intense sectarian bloodshed in the capital has become, the U.S. military reported “relatively little violence.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• From today's press conference with Dear Leader via the WaPo:
  

  "We're not leaving so long as I'm president," an animated Bush said in a wide-ranging White House press conference. "That would be a huge mistake." He conceded, though that the war was "straining the psyche of our country."

  
  
• Also, this (via ThinkProgress, which also has the video):
  

  President Bush was in the midst of explaining how the attacks of 9/11 inspired his “freedom agenda” and the attacks on Iraq until a reporter, Ken Herman of Cox News, interrupted to ask what Iraq had to do with 9/11. “Nothing,” Bush defiantly answered.

  
  The ThinkProgress post futher notes that despite the President's protestations that "nobody ever suggested that the attacks of September 11th were ordered by Iraq," the administration certainly tried to blend the two issues in the lead-up to the war:
  

  As ThinkProgress has repeatedly documented, Vice President Cheney cited “evidence” cooked up by Douglas Feith and others to claim it was “pretty well confirmed” that Iraq had contacts with 9/11 hijackers.
  
  More generally, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the administration encouraged the false impression that Saddam had a role in 9/11. Bush never stated then, as he does now, that Iraq had “nothing” to do with 9/11. Only after the Iraq war began did Bush candidly acknowledge that Iraq was not operationally linked to 9/11.

Recent Huggs
[Translation: Recent enviro news tidbits that I've submitted over at Hugg.com]

• British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity. "We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground," says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. Jim Gilbert from the University of Hull has been charged with developing the prototype system for capturing footfall. He's working with hydraulic-powered heel-strike generators that could be installed in the floors of busy public places like subway stations. (Just heard Gilbert interviewed on the Canadian radio program, As It Happens, but sadly there doesn't seem to be any audio available online right now.) [Wired]
  
  
• Has Hurricane Katrina created the world's first "climate refugees"? A year after the storm struck, taking 1,800 lives and causing $80bn worth of damage, New Orleans is less than half its former size with 370,000 still living away from Louisiana and Mississippi. Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, notes: "Those of us who track the effects of global warming had assumed that the first large flow of climate refugees would be in the South Pacific with the abandonment of Tuvalu or other low-lying islands. We were wrong." [Independent]

Domestic Potpourri

• The one-year anniversary of Katrina's landfall is Aug. 29, and USA Today breaks out a poll (with Gallup) that finds that half the respondents have returned to their communities and plan to stay, one-fifth have returned but plan or have to move, while a quarter haven't returned. The LAT focuses on those who are remaining in Houston, as many as 150,000. Since the influx of evacuees, Houston's homicide rate has gone up 18 percent, and according to police statistics, "one in every five homicides in the city involves a Katrina evacuee as suspect, victim, or both." This has led to anxiety among residents, but local government is planning ahead and is considering adding two seats to City Council to represent the larger population. [Slate's Today's Papers]

Cars

• Chevy is betting that the MySpace generation will be hot for a hatchback that lists for under $10K. While it has a slightly bigger engine than the comparable Toyota Yaris and Scion xA and is the least expensive of the trio, the Aveo is also the least fuel efficient, rated at 27/35, which will make for interesting messaging. Chevy's small car sales are up 40 percent this year thanks in part to the Korean-built car. So here's a quandary for "buy American folks" -- do you feel better buying a Chevy built in Korea, or a Honda built in the U.S.? [Wired's Autotopia]
  
  
• China, already the world’s third largest ethanol producer, is planning on a dramatic expansion of its production and use of biofuels for transportation from about 1 million tonnes of ethanol and biodiesel in 2005 to 12 million tonnes in 2020. Twelve million tonnes of biofuels would represent about 15% of the transportation fuel pool in 2020. [from World Changing's Sustainable Mobility update via GreenCarCongress]