Tuesday, August 08, 2006
The Guns of August 2006
Blather, blather * Incumbents Beware * AOL
Hopes for a solution to the Lebanon crisis appear to be bogged down as the parties debate about the terms of settlement. What is worse is that the UN resolution could fail to bring a lasting peace that we keep hearing about.
The Guardian The UN security council will almost certainly adopt a ceasefire resolution this week, in spite of objections from Lebanon and others in the Arab world. But diplomats and analysts were united in despair yesterday, expressing doubts that the resolution could stop the fighting. "It does not look good," one European diplomat said. "There is nobody interested in stopping now. Hizbullah has no reason to stop. The discrepancy between what is being discussed at the diplomatic table and what is happening on the ground is terrible." Washington Post The foreign ministers from member states of the Arab League gathered in Beirut despite the hostilities for a day-long show of solidarity. They decided to send representatives to the United Nations to press the case for an immediate cease-fire and other changes in a proposed Security Council resolution. Their deliberations were overshadowed, however, by knowledge that a cease-fire decision resided not with Arab governments, but with Israel, Hezbollah and the big powers on the Security Council. |
Good news in the Post about voters' dissatisfaction with their elected representatives. If the polls are right then we can expect quite a few of them to lose their seats in the mid-term election. They deserve it.
Most Americans describe themselves as being in an anti-incumbent mood heading into this fall's midterm congressional elections, and the percentage of people who approve of their own representative's performance is at the lowest level since 1994, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. As attention turns to Connecticut for Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's Democratic primary showdown today, the poll found some of the same political currents that have buffeted his campaign flowing through the national electorate. The public has soured on politicians backing the Iraq war, which Democrats consider the most important issue of the election. |
AOL - Was it a "Screw Up"
Ellen Nakashima in the Post: AOL issued an apology yesterday for posting on a public Web site 20 million keyword searches conducted by hundreds of thousands of its subscribers from March to May. But the company's admission that it made a mistake did little to quell a barrage of criticism from bloggers and privacy advocates who questioned the company's security practices and said the data breach raised the risk of identity theft. "This was a screw-up and we're angry and upset about it," the company said in a statement. "Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we're absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize." |
