The Times of London has a couple of stories that I find very interesting. This story indicates that some people around Senator Hillary Clinton believe she may decide not to run for President in 2008. They are also reporting that the Israelis are making plans for a war against Syria and Iran. The Telegraph is reporting that Hezbollah is arming Palestinian militants in Gaza for a new war against Israel.

Walid Phares has some thoughts about the new videotape from "Azzam the American".

Uriel Heilman has a column in the NY Post about how the recent Israeli-Hezbollah war has revived hopes even among "moderate" Arabs that Israel can be militarily defeated.

Mark Steyn thinks the recent conversion to Islam by two Fox journalists in order to escape captivity sends the message to the Muslim world that we in the West are hollow men, without values or convictions of any kind. Jeff Jacoby writes that he hopes he would have the courage to take a bullet rather than renounce his own religious convictions.

IF YOU WERE one of the journalists kidnapped in Gaza last month and ordered at gunpoint to become a Muslim, what would you have done? Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and photographer Olaf Wiig announced their acceptance of Islam on a videotape released by their kidnappers -- ``because they had the guns," Centanni later said, ``and we didn't know what the hell was going on."

Whether their acquiescence was an act of cowardice or of prudence, reasonable people can debate. Clearly it wasn't their only choice. If I were ever told, with a gun to my head, to recite the Shahada or die, I hope I would have the courage to take the bullet.

And I hope I would remember the example not of Centanni and Wiig, but of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, an Italian security guard taken hostage in Iraq in 2004. Quattrocchi's jihadi captors, intending to make a video of an infidel's craven death, ordered him to kneel beside an open grave with a hood on his head. Defiantly, he stood up, tried to rip off the hood, and shouted, ``I will show you how an Italian dies!" They murdered him an instant later, but he died bravely, on his feet, refusing with his last breath to be humiliated by savages.

Like Jacoby, I wonder if I would have had the courage to refuse to give my captors the satisfaction of seeing me renounce my own beliefs.

Niall Ferguson writes an interesting article in Time Magazine speculating about what the world might look like to a future historian (himself) looking back on the 30th anniversary of 9/11 in 2031.

Here is an in-depth piece from the Washington Post examining how Republican insiders are worried about losing the House this November.