A Palestinian gunman opened fire Tuesday on an Israeli vehicle in the West Bank and killed four passengers on the eve of a new round of Mideast peace talks in Washington. The Islamic militant Hamas has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the gunman opened fire at a vehicle traveling near Hebron—a volatile city where some 500 ultranationalist Jewish settlers live in heavily fortified enclaves in the city amid more than 100,000 Palestinians.

Israel’s national rescue service said the victims were two men and two women. Israeli media reported that one of the women was pregnant and that everyone in the car was killed.

The attack occurred as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was en route to Washington for a White House summit launching peace talks on Wednesday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was already in the U.S. capital meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

President Barack Obama hopes to forge a peace agreement within one year.

Netanyahu, leader of a hard-line coalition of religious and nationalist parties, has said that protecting Israel’s security interests will be his top priority as he negotiates with the Palestinians.

There is widespread opposition to the resumption of the peace talks among Palestinians. Hamas, which rules Gaza, opposes any contact with Israel and has harshly criticized Abbas for agreeing to resume the negotiations.

Opposition to resuming talks is also coming from within the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group headed by Abbas. Some Fatah activists threaten to try to depose him if he makes concessions.

The attack disrupted a relative lull in the West Bank. The last fatal attack occurred in June, when Palestinians opened fire on a police vehicle near Hebron and killed one officer.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Federal officials urged U.S. residents to prepare for possible evacuations, and islanders in the Turks and Caicos braced for high winds Tuesday as powerful Hurricane Earl howled over open seas toward the East Coast of the United States.

The Category 4 hurricane, with winds of 135 mph, was expected to remain over the open ocean before turning north and running parallel to the U.S. coast, potentially reaching the North Carolina coastal region by late Thursday or early Friday. It was projected then to curve back out to sea, perhaps swiping New England or far-eastern Canada.

Earl delivered a glancing blow to several small Caribbean islands on Monday, tearing roofs off of homes and cutting electricity to people in Anguilla, Antigua, and St. Maarten. Cruise ships were diverted and flights canceled across the region. But there were no reports of death or injury.

Forecasters warned that Earl, at the very least, could kick up dangerous rip currents in the United States. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said evacuations may be necessary along the eastern seaboard later this week if the storm does not veer away from the coast as expected.

By midday Tuesday, Earl’s center was about 205 miles east of Grand Turk island as it headed west-northwest at 14 mph, according to the hurricane center, and hurricane-strength winds extended up to 70 miles from the center. Tropical storm conditions were expected to spread into the Turks and Caicos by Tuesday afternoon.

A surfer died in Florida and a Maryland swimmer had been missing since Saturday in waves spawned by former Hurricane Danielle, which weakened to a tropical storm Monday far out in the north Atlantic.

Tropical Storm Fiona formed Monday afternoon in the open Atlantic. The storm, with maximum winds of 40 mph, was not expected to reach hurricane strength over the next several days.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Americans with the strongest opinions about the country’s most divisive issues are largely unhappy with how President Barack Obama is handling those issues.

In nine of 15 issues examined in an Associated Press-GfK Poll this month, more Americans who expressed intense interest in a problem voiced strong opposition to Obama’s work on it, including the economy, unemployment, federal deficits, and terrorism.

They were about evenly split over the president’s efforts on five issues and strongly approved of his direction on just one: U.S. relationships with other countries.

Most Americans extremely concerned about 10 of the issues say they will vote for the Republican candidate in their local House race. Only those highly interested in the environment lean toward voting for Democratic candidates.

The poll revealed that just 35 percent in the AP-GfK poll said the country is headed in the right direction.

To find people with the most intense views, AP reporters examined poll respondents who called an issue extremely important and compared those who strongly approved of Obama’s handling of that matter with those who strongly disapproved.

Those with the strongest views represent a minority of the population, ranging from one in nine people to one in three people, depending on the specific issue. Even so, they could be disproportionately crucial because turnout in election years without a presidential race is usually light.

The poll was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications from Aug. 11 to 16, using landline and cell phone interviews with 1,007 randomly chosen adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

An FBI probe of two men arrested in Amsterdam after suspicious items turned up in one of the men’s luggage reveals that they probably were not on a test run for a future terror attack, a U.S. official said Tuesday. These findings cast doubt on earlier assumptions, as Dutch authorities held the pair on suspicion of conspiring to commit a terrorist act.

The United States does not expect to charge the men, a law enforcement official said. The two men arrested in Amsterdam—both traveling to Yemen—did not know each other and were not traveling together, a U.S. government official said.

Both of the detained men, Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi and Hezam al Murisi, missed flights to Dulles International Airport from Chicago, and United Airlines then booked them on the same flight to Amsterdam, the U.S. government official said.

The men were not on any U.S. terror watch lists, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told CNN Tuesday.

When Customs officials discovered one passenger was not on the flight from Dulles to Dubai, they called the plane back to the gate and removed his luggage. It was then they discovered suspicious items in his bag, a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle, multiple cell phones and watches taped together, and a knife and box cutter, according to another U.S. official who had been briefed on the investigation.

None of the items found on the men or in their luggage violated U.S. security rules. But the items and the men’s changing travel itinerary raised concern that it may have been a deliberate test of the U.S. aviation security system to determine what would raise red flags.

The men were arrested Monday morning at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport after getting off the flight from Chicago.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Roadside bombs and insurgent fire killed five U.S. troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, the latest casualties in a particularly bloody spell that has left 19 service members dead since Saturday.

Meanwhile, on the southern outskirts of Kabul, a gunman opened fire on a busload of Afghan Supreme Court clerks, killing three and wounding 12, the Interior Ministry reported.

Although the gunman has not been identified as such, suspicion immediately fell on Taliban insurgents who have threatened, kidnapped, and killed candidates and their aides in the run-up to the Sept. 18 elections for the lower house of parliament. Many voters say they plan to stay away from the polls for fear of violence.

In Tuesday’s attacks, a NATO official said a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan killed four troops, while a fifth died in a battle with insurgents in the country’s south, bringing this month’s total to 55. Sixty-six service members were killed in July, the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.

NATO officials said its forces, working with Afghan army and police, had killed 19 insurgents and captured five in a major air assault in the eastern province of Kunar Tuesday. Members of ground forces also uncovered insurgent fighting positions, along with weapons caches and ammunition stockpiles during the assault.

Officials said ground forces killed two insurgents and wounded a third in an airstrike in Kandahar on Monday, and detained a number of Taliban and allied Haqqani Network commanders in other operations the same day.

An explosion in Helmand killed a 20-year-old Estonian soldier, bringing the total number of Estonian soldiers killed in Afghanistan to eight. One hundred-sixty soldiers from the Baltic country are serving in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led force.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A Texas-born fugitive known as “the Barbie” who allegedly led a violent smuggling network was arrested Tuesday—the third suspected drug lord to fall in Mexico in the past 10 months.

Edgar Valdez Villarreal is wanted in the United States for allegedly smuggling tons of cocaine. In Mexico, he is blamed for a brutal turf war that has included bodies hung from bridges, decapitations, and shootouts as he and a rival fought for control of the divided Beltran Leyva cartel.

Security forces had been closing in on Valdez for over a year, the biggest breakthrough being the death of his boss, Arturo Beltran Leyva, in a December shootout with Mexican marines, Federal Police Commissioner Facundo Rosas said.

Federal police nearly nabbed Valdez during a raid in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico City on Aug. 8. He got away, Rosas said, but police found him hiding out in a woody weekend getaway just outside the Mexican capital.

An elite squad of federal police captured Valdez and four members of his inner security Tuesday, Rosas said.

Valdez, 37, was charged in May in U.S. District Court in Atlanta with distributing thousands of pounds of cocaine from Mexico to the eastern United States from 2004 to 2006.

There was no word from Mexican authorities on any extradition plans. Rosas said Valdez was a U.S. citizen but that authorities were not quite sure if he also held Mexican nationality.

Since President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of federal police and soldiers in 2006 to fight drug traffickers in their strongholds, drug-gang violence has surged, claiming an unprecedented 28,000 lives. But the crackdown has brought down several major traffickers.

Experts said Valdez’s capture could be valuable because of the intelligence he might provide on Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted drug lord.

But Mexico’s violence overall is not expected to drop because most of the deaths are caused by the battle between other, more powerful gangs in Ciudad Juarez and along the northeastern border with the United States.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Once upon a time I worked for a small company that needed to fill a key position in one of its departments. The chair of the search committee told us that a person had been identified through personal contacts and she would like to bring the guy in for an interview. Since the candidate was a recent graduate of an elite school with practical experience in the field and excellent recommendations from respected professionals, he did look like the perfect fit. But there was catch: We had to move fast and make an offer the guy could not refuse (no mafia pun intended) before he went on the open job market and was tempted by more glamorous and better-paying career opportunities at much larger firms than ours.

As we were about to approve the motion, a colleague of mine raised a valid objection—not about the candidate but about the process of the selection itself. His argument boiled down to the fact that any organization larger than a nuclear family needs to be guided by time-tested rules based on firmly held principles rather than ad hoc decisions taken for the sake of expediency. The ensuing discussion reminded me of my favorite TV drama, which portrays an eccentric, abrasive, misanthropic, politically incorrect genius doctor whose job is to diagnose the most unusual cases. Gregory House (the medical version of Sherlock Holmes) often clashes with the hospital ethics commission for not following established procedures. I have always seen him as a hero since his breaking of the rules allows him to save lives. But is it possible that Dr. House is a villain in disguise? After all, if every medical practitioner followed his example, only patients with very rare atypical symptoms will have a chance to survive their visits to the hospital.

It is true that by acting outside the ordinary channels of advertising the job opening and reviewing all candidates we could have saved resources and struck gold attracting an extremely gifted and motivated person to our team. But my colleague’s words made me realize that such precedents could easily corrupt any institution, creating an environment of cronyism and preventing us in the future from hiring the best people for each position. It took me back to my student days when I first studied the case for “a government of laws and not of men” (laid in 1780 as a foundational principle for the Massachusetts Constitution by John Adams) made by John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu. And whether we work in a small firm, a parliament, or a central bank, we should heed the council of these two great political philosophers of the Enlightenment.

President Obama may have experienced his Walter Cronkite moment over the economy.

Responding to Cronkite’s reporting from Vietnam four decades ago that the only way to end the war was by negotiating with the North Vietnamese, President Lyndon Johnson was reported (though never confirmed) to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Now President Obama appears to have “lost” New York Times liberal economic columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman, who enthusiastically supported the president’s redistributionist and stimulus plans, has bowed to the reality that they are not working. In a recent column titled “This Is Not a Recovery,” Krugman took issue with the president and Vice President Joe Biden that we have experienced a summer of economic recovery. “Unfortunately, that’s not true,” he wrote. “This isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policymakers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.”

Krugman asked an essential question: “Why are people who know better sugarcoating economic reality? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s all about evading responsibility.”

It is that, and more. The administration is so locked into its left-wing, “tax, borrow, and spend” ideology that it has become like someone trapped in a cult—unable to escape and endlessly repeating the same mantra.

In a speech last week to central bankers and economists in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledged the economy is fragile, especially in light of the government’s latest report, which showed the weakest quarterly growth in a year. He added that high unemployment poses a serious threat. Still, Bernanke tried to sound optimistic by forecasting some pickup in growth in 2011 and beyond.

Optimism not based on reality is false hope based on wishful thinking. One might as well ask a high-performance engine to run at peak level after several of its cylinders have been disabled. It is impossible, no matter how shiny the paint job.

An economy burdened with debt because of too much government spending, a healthcare law that will add new and unknown burdens, expiring tax cuts that will take more money from the private sector for government to waste and abuse, and a stock market unsure and thus unable to fuel the economic engine to propel us out of this recession is not a “summer of recovery” but a winter of discontent.

The solution is not a Star Trek approach in which we must go where no one has gone before. We know what works and what must be done. Social Security and Medicare must be reformed; government programs that have failed, or are obsolete, should be scrapped; military spending designed to enhance reelection prospects for some members of Congress, while doing nothing to improve the military, must be ended, and people should be asked to return to the attitude of previous generations that all of us, including government, must live within our means.

Writing in U.S. News & World Report, publisher Mort Zuckerman takes the Krugman view a step further by calling the administration he once supported “The Most Fiscally Irresponsible Government in U.S. History.”

Zuckerman writes: “People see the stimulus, fashioned and passed by Congress in such a hurry, as a metaphor for wasted money. They are highly critical about the lack of discipline among our political leaders. The question that naturally arises is how to forestall a long-term economic decline.”

The answer is for the Republicans, so eager and so likely to regain power in the House and possibly the Senate in the coming election, to expose the administration’s sugarcoating of reality and get out the bad-tasting medicine. The good news is that by swallowing fiscal responsibility, we will all be better off in the end. But can Republicans withstand and prevail over the Democratic demagoguery that will predictably be heaped on them? They’d better, or they don’t deserve to lead.

As Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it is.”

© 2010 Tribune Media Services Inc.

Mr. Magoo was a cat with nine lives. He would merrily blunder through traffic jams and plow through creaky ladders and emerge unscathed through the catastrophes he caused.

Sometimes I have taken to doubting God’s love for me when a specific prayer request was not answered my way. I have effectively made His answers to my prayers the litmus tests of His love.

It occurred to me as I was driving to Michigan this summer that God is busy all the time for me, firing off a thousand orders to his angels for every one puny prayer request I think to ask Him for: “Keep that car from swerving into her.” “Send her a red light to avoid that accident three miles ahead.” “Hold that rickety bridge up.” The favor I found with that car rental agency and with the prison C.O. and with the stranger I asked for directions—these are all His busy graces toward me and His running interference for me, all while I grumbled at His inactivity because I didn’t see the answer to one puny prayer request.

Why should I not assume, when I send up a blanket prayer like “protect my kids” that every single thing that happens after the words leave my lips and reach His ear is the unfolding of that granted petition? My son was beat up by four guys in a dark park recently. Maybe he would have been killed. (He’s alright, just so you know.)

I think that from now on the way to pray is with the attitude—the unwavering confidence—that God has heard my prayer and has begun immediately (Daniel 10:12) to implement a plan for the best possible execution of the best spirit of that prayer.

“Many times he delivered them,” says Psalm 106:43. And they and I probably never knew the half of it.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

Good morning!

Random question of the day: What social injustice bothers you the most and why?

My answer to Saturday’s question: “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey

Remember: This is our daily (except for Sundays) open thread, where you can 1) answer my question, 2) talk about something else, or 3) say something truly encouraging to the commenter before you