John Menick

According to AP, more than 300 Lebanese and 30 Israelis dead, and close to half a million Lebanese refugees.

Wired devotes an article to profiling one young blogger in Beirut, plus links to several others.

Daily updates from Zena in Beirut.

Mazen Kerbaj in Beirut.

“Yo Blair!” Read the full transcript.

Artist Walid Raad writing from Beirut:

…Rumors aplenty, every ten minutes. The news, all of it, Arab and international, makes me sick. We are stuck with a false choice: Support HizbAllah, or be an Israeli agent. That is at least what HizbAllah and their Syrian allies are saying. The Christian right’s position is equally naive. They want to assume that HizbAllah will just go away. they are wishing it at least. That wont happen, no matter what. Everyone is miscalculating it seems: HizbAllah, the Americans, the Israelis, The Saudis, the Palestinians, The French, The Russians, The Chinese. You name it. The effects on the ground will remain once this crisis is resolved, and has already generated enough antagonism to last us another decade…

…Doi we need to say this again and again and again: There is no such thing as targeted/surgical shelling in a city with hundreds of thousands of homes, built cheek to cheek. Israel shelled the house of Hassan Nasrallah. I suppose they thought he would be home enjoying his afternoon tea at the time. They took out the light house that stood on the Corniche, lest it send out distress signals that the world will not see. A family leaving, fleeing its village in the South was pulverized — surely the smoke from the shelling blinded the scope of the gunner, preventing him/her from seeing that the small people in the car were not extremely short HizbAllah fighters. Should we tally numbers? Do we need to open more morgue doors b to reveal yet another mangled body, yet another weeping parent, yet another angry relative denouncing this or that government? this or that policy?

Complete text posted on The Thing. (Via Ricardo.)