Tom McCarthy

A dispatch from my brother Dan from today's caucus in Omaha:

Notes on the Nebraska Democratic Caucus - Douglas County

After attending the Barack Obama rally at the Omaha Civic Auditorium on Thursday, it was clear to me that the turnout would be quite high for the first-ever...

"Don't speak English to me," said Ali. "Because you know, all the Arab people, they are watching us."

One day earlier Ali, a twenty-year-old security guard who works in the East Beirut neighborhood where I live, had offered to take me and a reporter to see the destruction...

We went to the pool on Saturday. It's possible that by doing so we broke an unwritten rule of appropriate wartime conduct. At the time the question didn't come up.

Because of the 10,000-15,000 tons of fuel oil that flowed into the Mediterranean when the storage tanks at Jiyye were...

The fact that I'm writing this represents a failure on my part.

Luckily the particular failure that I mean does not on first blush feel like one of those that sticks with you, haunting you for years, like turning back within reach of the summit on doubts about the...

Throughout the work-week I've been chewing on the speech the president gave in Miami on Monday.

[It's nearly 8 a.m. Friday and they are bombing some part of town - one has to assume the southern suburbs - inside out. The low rumbling strikes sounding as I write follow the...

Consumers of Western Media are by now familiar with many of Hizbullah's despicable tactics in its ongoing fight with Israel.

As the latest villain in the War on Terror - having inherited the role with breathtaking suddenness from, in very particular order, Osama bin Laden (need him), Saddam Hussein (got...

Throughout the brief seven months that I've lived in Beirut I've been a devoted reader of the New York Times online, with a tendency to dwell in a sentimental way on the New York/Region section. Nothing like a lurid Westchester murder story or cross-borough custody battle or the latest chapter...

Wednesday moving into Thursday, 1:30 am

Single deadliest day of the assault on Lebanon so far, with Israeli strikes mostly in South Lebanon and the Bekaa killing 57 civilians and a Hizbullah fighter. It was quieter in Beirut proper today. Two very loud air strikes about 24 hours ago then...

Two cartoons that appeared in the streets of majority-Christian neighborhoods in Beirut over the last week. Probably they were dropped by Israeli planes although I have heard at least one person speculate that they were distributed by anti-Hizbullah factions inside Lebanon. The top one I found one morning on a...

It's a little past midnight at the end of Monday, moving into Tuesday a.m. There hasn't been a major strike in Beirut since maybe 6 p.m. this afternoon.

That's in sharp contrast with yesterday and especially two nights ago, Saturday night, when an hours-long, post-midnight attack leveled whole blocks...