Morning News Roundup (12 September)

The Morning After

• Tim Grieve at Salon's War Room wraps up the President's 9/11 Oval Office speech and memorializing:
  

  Bush laid wreaths at ground zero Sunday, and the Washington Post said Monday morning that the event "left aside the partisan rancor that long ago supplanted the sense of unity and shared purpose" that prevailed in the days immediately after 9/11. Perhaps what the paper meant was that Bush left aside some of the partisans. New York's Republican governor and New York City's Republican mayor and former mayor were invited to join the president at the wreath-laying event; as the American Prospect reports, the state's two Democratic senators were apparently not.
  
  Monday night's speech wasn't exactly a "We Are All Americans" moment, either. The president spoke eloquently and appropriately of the need for a "unified country" in a time of war. But when he said that "we must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us," he acknowledged neither the extraordinary efforts his administration has taken to exploit the differences among Americans nor the fact that the test we face most immediately -- the war in Iraq -- is one that he, not history, has put on the table before us.
  [...]
  When the president said Monday night that Americans must "put aside our differences and work together," he gave no sign that this politics-free coming together would be anything other than a one-way deal. You put aside your differences, you work together with me, and I'll be the president who wages war, expands the power of the executive branch and presides over two more of these unhappy anniversaries.

• The NYTimes offers more details:
  

  Mr. Bush spent roughly one-fifth of his 17-minute address making the case that the nation’s safety hinged on success in Iraq, even as he implicitly acknowledged there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 strikes.
  
  “I’m often asked why we’re in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” Mr. Bush said, going on to say that Mr. Hussein was a threat nonetheless, that he needed to be confronted and that the world was safer with him in captivity.
  
  And Mr. Bush reprised some of his tougher talk against Osama bin Laden, delivering a message to him and other terrorists, “America will find you, and we will bring you to justice.”

Middle East Sturm und Drang

• Al-Qaeda marked the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks with a video posted on Islamic Web sites by al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, calling for Muslims throughout the world to violently oppose the international peacekeeping force gathering in southern Lebanon and position themselves for direct assaults against Israel and Persian Gulf governments. [WaPo]
  
  
• Rival Palestinian factions agreed yesterday to form a power-sharing government in the hope of ending a crippling international economic blockade. Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader who heads the current government, will remain prime minister in the new cabinet, according to officials. Although Hamas still refuses to recognise Israel, a senior aide said the group has agreed to delegate negotiating power to Mahmoud Abbas, the more moderate president and head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which does recognise the Jewish state. [The Guardian]
  
  
• At least three armed assailants and a Syrian security guard were killed Tuesday outside the U.S. Embassy building in what Syrian authorities said was a foiled plot to storm the compound. No Americans were injured. [WaPo]
  

Climate Crisis

• Warmer seas causing more violent hurricanes and typhoons are almost certainly the result of greenhouse gas emissions, conclude a group of the world's most distinguished climate scientists in a piece of research published yesterday; they are caused, ultimately, by the carbon dioxide from the power station that provides your electricity, from the exhaust of the car you drove to work this morning.
  
  The 19 scientists, from America, Britain and Germany, include James Hansen of Nasa, the doyen of American climate change researchers, and Professor Phil Jones from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia at Norwich.
  
  They said that, in a comprehensive investigation, they had found an 84 per cent probability that human triggers accounted for most of the observed increases in sea surface temperatures (SSTs), during the past century, in the breeding grounds for hurricanes (as they are called in the Atlantic) and cyclones (as they are known in the Pacific). [The Independent]
  
  
• With British PM Tony Blair on his way out sometime in the next year -- though he won't be pinned down on a date -- Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka Finance Minister) Gordon Brown is poised to assume leadership of the Labour Party and hence the British government. What will this mean for the environment? The British press is starting to assess.
  
  Sarah Mukherjee of BBC writes that greens haven't been impressed with Blair's follow-through on efforts to fight climate change, but they're "even more worried about Gordon Brown. [GristMill]

Domestic Potpourri

• The controversial ABC film "The Path to 9/11," which concluded its two-day run on Monday night, has been hit for alleged political bias, and fictional or compressed events, but a major corporation has now denounced its treatment in the movie, as well.
  
  The film in both its first part and second part appears to suggest that chief hijacker Atta was flagged as a security risk at Boston's Logan Airport by American Airlines personnel. According to the 9/11 Commision Report that incident occured earlier that morning, in Maine, and the airline was US Airways.
  
  Late Monday, American Airlines released the folllowing statement: "The Disney/ABC television program, 'The Path to 9/11,' which began airing last night, is inaccurate and irresponsible in its portrayal of the airport check-in events that occurred on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
  
  "A factual description of those events can be found in the official government edition of the 9/11 Commission Report and supporting documents.
  
  "This misrepresentation of facts dishonors the memory of innocent American Airlines employees and all those who lost their lives as a result of the tragic events of 9/11." [Editor & Publisher]
  
  
• Mayor Richard Daley vetoed the City Council’s plan to make Chicago the first city in the nation to single out “big box” retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot for wage minimums for their workers, saying "I believe it would drive jobs and businesses from our city, penalizing neighborhoods that need additional economic activity the most.”
  
  The veto, praised by business leaders but condemned by labor groups and the aldermen who had pressed for the ordinance, set up the mayor for a rare political fight: Mr. Daley, who is up for re-election next year, may face an effort to override his veto at City Hall on Wednesday. NYTimes]
  
  
• Coupled with Sen. Maria Cantwell's TV advertising blitz, Republican challenger Mike McGavick's mishandled disclosure of a 1993 drunken-driving arrest might be damaging his poll numbers and how electable national pundits see him to be. Cantwell has surged to a 17 percentage-point lead over him in a new survey of Washington voters taken Sept. 6 by Rasmussen Reports, a national, independent polling firm. [Seattle P-I]

And finally... I'll be covering the today's big Apple media event over at the Amazon Electronics blog. With the iTunes store temporarily disabled, I think it's fair to say that the movie download rumor is a good bet. Check in early afternoon for a summary of all the news.