Israeli General Says Lebanon Offensive Will Last Weeks  —  JERUSALEM, July 18 — A top Israeli general said today that Israel's offensive in Lebanon would last another few weeks, and he said that the use of large numbers of ground forces had not been ruled out.

Bush Gropes Germany's Merkel  —  updated below—  President Bush took time out from the G-8 Summit to grope German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  I'm not kidding.  It boggles the mind.  —  Via Mash (by the way, great get!), we get photos via a friend of his in Germany.

Hunker Down With History  —  The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake.  It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims …

NYT to cut paper size and close plant  —Text+NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co. (NYT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) plans to narrow the size of its flagship newspaper and close a printing plant, resulting in the loss of 250 jobs, the company said in a story posted on its Web site late on Monday.

Hizbollah's Iranian Rocket Force  —  July 18, 2006: It's been no secret that, for years, Iran has been shipping, through Syria, thousands of unguided rockets to Hizbollah in Lebanon.  As far back as 2001, there were reports of 240mm Fadjr rockets arriving in Hizbollah controlled territory in southern Lebanon.

Why the Left Is Furious at Lieberman  —  A blogger's blast at the embattled Connecticut senator.  Hint: It's not just Iraq.  —  SOME TIME AFTER having lunch in Iraq with the junior senator from Connecticut, Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware told an interviewer …

Transformation's Toll  —  "Grotesque" was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's characterization of the charge that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was responsible for the current Middle East conflagration.  She is correct, up to a point.  This point: Hezbollah and Hamas were alive and toxic long before March 2003.

G.O.P. Senator Resisting Bush Over Detainees  —  WASHINGTON, July 17 — Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina often plays the contrarian, the conservative Republican willing to poke a stick in the eye of the White House.  —  Now Mr. Graham is playing an even higher-profile variant of that role …

Car Bomb Kills Dozens Near Shiite Shrine in Iraq  —  BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 18— A bomb killed 53 people and wounded more than 100 in the Shiite city of Kufa today, a day after at least 48 people died as dozens of gunmen suspected of being Sunni Arabs went on a rampage through a mostly Shiite market area …

The Democrats' message dilemma  —  WASHINGTON — It was a bit startling the other morning to hear Sen. Charles Schumer of New York — the garrulous poster boy of Democratic liberalism — intone that New Deal Democracy is over.  But also, he added just as surprisingly, so is Reagan Republicanism.

U.S. citizens remain in dark about evacuation  —  Official: Operation costs more than available resources; 64 have left so far  —  A French toddler is carried over a fence by relatives as they wait Monday with hundreds of other French citizens near their embassy in Beirut to be evacuated from Lebanon.

IDF needs another week to alleviate Hizbullah threat  —  Forty to fifty percent of Hizbullah's military capability has been destroyed in the six days of the IDF counter-attack following last Wednesday's Hizbullah raid in northern Israel, The Jerusalem Post has learned.