The McCain campaign has taken to mocking the press corps left behind to cover the Arizona senator while Barack Obama is overseas, Hotline reports. Here are the luggage tags McCain staffers jokingly put on reporters' bags yesterday:

Chuck Todd and company at MSNBC's First Read comment, "Why does McCain think belittling his own press corps is a good idea?" Good question.

This was a good line on the size of Obama's entourage from McCain spokesman Brian Rogers:

Who does he think he is?" Rogers asked of Obama. "Clay Aiken?"

On the other side, why does Cindy McCain need two assistants when she travels?

Here's what Barack Obama wrote in the guestbook at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. You have to admit, the man has a way with words:

GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images

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Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Visiting Jerusalem, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama vowed to uphold the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel, whose success he hailed as a "miracle." More here on the Illinois senator's meetings today with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Obama, answering Katie Couric's persistent questions last night about the "surge," cited it as just one factor among many in reducing the violence in Iraq and said that the surge "doesn't meet our long-term strategic goal." McCain pounced, saying, "It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign."

Global Economy

The world's stock markets advanced as the price of oil fell to below $126 a barrel.

Speaking at a closed fundraiser in Houston, U.S. President George W. Bush said that "Wall Street got drunk" and now it's feeling the hangover.

Asia

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she had a "good meeting" involving the North Korean foreign minister, which she called "informal."

The government of Indian PM Manmohan Singh survived a no-confidence vote, keeping the U.S.-India nuclear deal alive.

Eighty-six percent of Chinese say they are satisfied with their country's direction, according to a new Pew poll.

Middle East and Africa

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that U.S. envoy William Burns spoke "politely and in a dignified way" at this weekend's nuclear meeting in Geneva. He called the meeting a "positive step."

Iraq's provincial elections will likely be delayed.

Europe

U.S. and British intelligence agencies helped catch Radovan Karadzic. The war criminal's first request? "A haircut and a shave." Seeing this, I don't blame him. Next up? Ratko Mladic.

Bulgaria is getting a stern talking-to from the EU for its failure to crack down on corruption.

Europe unveiled its new manned spacecraft, a joint venture with Russia.

Today's Agenda

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, shrugging off an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, is visiting Darfur.

Pakistan's fractious ruling coalition is meeting to hammer out its differences. And they are vast.

U.S. lawmakers are to vote today on a rescue package for mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac whose cost could run to the tens of billions.

If choosing a U.S. president were up to the French, the Germans, and the British, Barack Obama would have a lock on the presidency. As Gallup reports today, large majorities in three countries the Illinois senator plans to visit this week would rather see Obama elected than John McCain. They also say that which candidate wins "makes a difference" to their country.

This poll fits well our intuitions about Europe's big three: They tend to favor Democrats, and they don't like George W. Bush. In 2007, Gallup found that approval of U.S. leadership in those countries had sunk to disturbing depths: -- reaching just 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in France, and 20 percent in Britain. Gallup attributes the low numbers to the Iraq war, the U.S. stance on climate change, and anger over Guantánamo.

The differences between Obama and McCain on these issues, at least on a superficial level, appear to be narrowing. Both Obama and McCain have pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq -- they are now arguing over whether to set an explicit timetable for doing so or whether to allow "conditions on the ground" to be the determining factor. Both Obama and McCain want to join international efforts to combat global warming, though Obama would push for greater emissions cuts. And both senators would like to see Guantánamo shut down. From a European perspective, either senator would be a step up from Bush (or at least the Bush of 2004).

If Obama does win in November, the great expectations he is setting in Europe could come back to haunt him. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, quoting a German friend, wrote last year, "Underneath every America-hater is a disappointed America-lover." Last week, one European diplomat shared with me his fear that the real Obama can't possibly live up to the hype. (Try, for instance, counting the votes in the Senate for a climate-change bill with real teeth.) This is the moment, then, for Obama to tell Europeans that he is going to let them down. Better they hear it from his own lips now than figure it out on their own, two years down the road.

The September cover of Esquire is going to be pretty cool. An electronic ink diplay, built on the same technology that E Ink used in the Amazon Kindle, will flash the words "the 21st Century Begins." The logistics of pulling of this feat are a story in globalization:

First Esquire had to make a six-figure investment to hire an engineer in China to develop a battery small enough to be inserted in the magazine cover. The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine's distributor in Glazer, Ky.

So, has the magical world of Harry Potter and its animated Daily Prophet sprung into being? Esquire Editor-in-Chief David Granger sees a bright future for e-ink:

Pointing to the prototype sitting on a conference room table, Mr. Granger said, "The possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones."

Alternatively, it could look a lot like this.

Jarod Perkioniemi/Multi-National Forces Iraq Public Affairs via Getty Images Lorie Jewell/U.S. Army via Getty Images Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images Thaier al-Sudani-Pool/Getty Images. Collage by Blaine Sheldon

John McCain is having trouble attracting media attention for his New Hampshire tour:

In Manchester last night, there was just one reporter and one photographer waiting for McCain as his plane -- a white, blue and gold Boeing 737-400 emblazoned with his campaign slogan, "Reform, Prosperity, Peace" -- touched down on the Wiggins Airways tarmac.

Also worth noting: Getty Images hasn't posted a photograph of the Arizona senator since Sunday. During that time, Getty has posted roughly 40 photos of Obama, depending on how you count.

Eli Lake reports:

The matter [of endorsing Barack Obama's withdrawal timeline] was taken up at a meeting of Iraq's National Security Council on Thursday on the recommendation of Mr. Maliki, who had been advised by the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi to express public support for the Obama withdrawal plan. Asked for a comment yesterday, Mr. Chalabi, an old hand at working the American political process to the advantage of Iraq, conveyed a statement via his Washington representative, Francis Brooke: "This is an honor I will not claim and a rumor I will not deny."

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GORAN SIVACKI/AFP/Getty Image

After more than a decade on the lam, Radovan Karadzic has finally been captured. The former Bosnian Serb president and accused war criminal had been hiding out in Belgrade under the name Dragan Dabic, practicing alternative medicine and disguising himself with a white beard. Karadzic had been wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for his role in the slaughter of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. "Of the three most evil men of the Balkans, Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, I thought Karadzic was the worst," said Dayton Accords negotiator Richard Holbrooke.

Karadzic's capture sent the Serbian dinar upwards and raised hopes for Serbia to join the European Union.

Decision '08

Barack Obama traveled to Anbar province, once the heart of Iraq's insurgency.

John McCain, visiting George H.W. Bush in Maine, criticized Obama's policy on Iraq, yet appeared to agree that troops could be withdrawn by 2010.

CNN runs the McCain op-ed piece that the New York Times allegedly rejected.

Obama is spending more money on organizers; McCain is putting resources into media.

Global Economy

Efforts to revive the Doha round of trade talks seem to be going nowhere.

Ford is making a major shift from trucks to small cars.

Americas

Argentina moved to renationalize its airline, Aerolineas Argentinas.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called for a strategic alliance with Russia.

Asia

Unidentified gunmen killed a top security aide to Asif Zardari, the head of Pakistan's most powerful political party.

China's double bus bombing was preceded by bizarre text messages.

A white whale has been spotted off the coast of Australia.

Middle East and Africa

The "surge" has officially ended: The last additional U.S. combat troops left Iraq this past weekend. Today, fewer U.S. convoys are being attacked.

Israeli President Shimon Peres welcomed his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, to his house for peace talks.

Zimbabweans are hoping their lives will get back to normal as a power-sharing deal gets hammered out between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai.

Europe

British PM Gordon Brown experienced the Obama effect on his trip to Israel.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy narrowly won a vote on constitutional changes that will make the presidency more à la Américain.

Today's Agenda

Obama dines with Jordan's King Abdullah.

Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki and PM Raila Odinga of Kenya are in London for talks with British PM Gordon Brown.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is heading to Singapore for the ASEAN meeting, where she's expected to encounter her North Korean counterpart.

Preeti Aroon

"A Priest Walks Into Qatar and …" by Ryan J. Maher in the Washington Post. Maher, a Jesuit priest who taught a theology course in Qatar, says American students lack a "felt-in-the-bone understanding of what it is to live one's life committed to one's faith." When it comes to international relations, that is a problem.

Patrick Fitzgerald

"War crimes trial gets underway Monday at Guantánamo," by Carol Rosenberg in Sunday's Miami Herald. Rosenberg tackles the key questions about the trial of Salim Hamdan, better known as Osama bin Laden's former driver, as he faces the United States' first war-crimes tribunal since World War II.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Blake Hounshell

"The King of Green Investing." Richard Shaffer profiles Vinod Khosla (right), the legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, for Fast Company. Khosla has sunk more than $450 million of his own money into "green" startup companies, and now his old firm is following his lead.

Katie Hunter

"Dear Barack Obama," a guide in this week's New Republic to the Democratic nominee about his upcoming visit to Israel. Yossi Klein Halevi tells Obama what to expect in a nation blessed by economic prosperity and plagued by security problems, and explains why Israel is more worried right now about finding solutions to the Iran problem rather than the Palestinian one.

Joshua Keating

"How Not to do an American Accent," by Stephen Robb for the BBC. Americans and Brits all think they can imitate each other. They are wrong. The BBC's correspondent took a course with Hollywood's top accent coach and still came out sounding like a "slightly camp game show host with an occasional lisp." (After watching the video, I would say that description is generous.)

A show of hands: Who remembers anything that happened during John McCain's travels to Colombia and Mexico?

Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

Well, I'd bet you have a good handle on what Barack Obama is up to this week. He just came from Afghanistan, and now he's in Iraq, where he got a big boost when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki basically endorsed his withdrawal plan. After a few more days in the Middle East, he'll head to Europe, where by all accounts he'll be treated like a savior coming to rescue transatlantic relations from George W. Bush.

His trip is getting major, wall-to-wall coverage -- with much more to come -- but in fact, Obama has gotten the lion's share of media attention since the general election began:

Since June 9th, when Obama effectively clinched the votes for the nomination, the Project For Excellence In Journalism took a weekly look at 300 political stories in newspapers, magazines and television. In 77 percent of the stories, Obama played an important role, and 51 percent featured McCain.

A quick look at Google Trends shows that McCain hasn't even been able to capitalize on the times he has made news. Here's a graph of searches and news mentions for the past 30 days, with Obama in blue and McCain in red. As you can see, McCain's Latin America trip was during the first week of July (point A), and it barely made a dent:

Many conservatives, no doubt, will see the dark hand of media bias at work here. But is that really the case? Is McCain the victim of the liberal media? Or is Obama just more interesting and new than McCain? Discuss.

UPDATE: As for this, maybe the New York Times did McCain a favor. Check out this line from the op-ed that the Times supposedly spiked:

[Obama] makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Well, 2010 is getting fairly specific, no?

Here's a photograph from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's recent trip to Iraq. What do you think was on his mind? Who do you think he wants to see on the receiving end?

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

UPDATE: And the winner is... nycbrian, with "do you think i can mow my backbenchers into submission w/ this?"

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QASSEM ZEIN/AFP/Getty Images

Controversy erupted over the weekend when Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told German magazine Der Spiegel that he more or less agrees with U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Through spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, Maliki later claimed he was misinterpreted, but did not specify exactly how -- the translator who allegedly mistranslated the interview works for Maliki, and Der Spiegel stands by its version. The story behind Dabbagh's statement is revealing: The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad had contacted Maliki's office, seeking clarification after his remarks to Der Spiegel, and U.S. Central Command distributed Dabbagh's statement to American news organizations.

All of this, of course, happened against the backdrop of a visit by Obama himself, which began Monday. First stop? Basra. He also meets with Maliki and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani today. Obama renewed his call Sunday to move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Decision '08

The Obama campaign's cash on hand is increasing while John McCain's is decreasing.

After his defeat in 2000, McCain "mastered the art of political triangulation," according to a long profile of the Arizona senator in the New York Times.

Why does either man want the job, anyway?

Global Economy

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson predicted a period of "slow growth" Sunday, stressing that the U.S. banking sector is sound after two large mortgage companies stumbled last week. Nonetheless, the mortgage meltdown is spurring growing concern abroad.

Americas

A U.S. B-52 bomber has crashed off the coast of Guam.

Tijuana, Mexico, is apparently the place to buy suicide drugs.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has offered to give the king of Spain a hug.

Asia

Twin bus explosions in China's southwestern Yunnan province may be the work of terrorists.

The six-party talks over North Korea's nuclear program are about to be kicked up a notch, to the ministerial level.

China and Russia have settled a long-running border dispute.

Thailand and Cambodia's border dispute, in contrast, is just heating up.

Middle East and Africa

Western powers did not get the response they were seeking from Iran this weekend. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran must give a "serious answer" in two weeks.

Zimbabwe's opposition is reportedly close to signing a framework deal with the government of Robert Mugabe.

Nairobi, Kenya, is a hotbed of computer programming.

Europe

Europe is offering to cut its farm tariffs by 60 percent.

In a game of chicken, who will blink first: BP or the Kremlin?

French authorities admit that a facility where a quantity of Semtex explosive has gone missing wasn't well-guarded.

Today's Agenda

British PM Gordon Brown is visiting Israel.

Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers are meeting to discuss a deteriorating situation in Kashmir.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is visiting Ireland to discuss the Lisbon Treaty.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Ukraine to talk about NATO and EU membership.

The White House welcomes Kosovo's president and prime minister.

The trial of Osama bin Laden's ex-driver, Salim Hamdan, begins in Guantánamo.

This is extremely disturbing:

July 18, 2008 -- Hundreds of baby penguins swept from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro's tropical beaches, rescuers and penguin experts said Friday.

More than 400 penguins, most of them young, have been found dead on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro state over the past two months, according to Eduardo Pimenta, superintendent for the state coastal protection and environment agency in the resort city of Cabo Frio.

Of course, people prefer rising stock prices to declining ones. Wouldn't it be wonderful if shares never fell? But such actions call into question the claim that ours is a free-market system. More and more, our version of free markets holds that they are free only when asset values rise. When they fall, the markets must be managed.

China Photos/Getty Images

This is what it takes:

For gymnastics, the first task is to find the right kind of bodies, says veteran coach Yan Yongping, reeling off a list of essential criteria including deep chests, small buttocks and straight arms and legs. "We select the seedlings, build the foundations and deliver the talent" to provincial gymnastic and diving teams, acrobat troupes and military trainers, says Yan, adding that pupils must have "determination, no fear of death and an ability to 'eat bitterness'". [...]

Yan and other staff at the Li Xiaoshuang school pride themselves on care of their wards, saying training for the youngest is essentially organised play and that physical punishment is banned. "Bottoms can be spanked... but that's a kind of love," says Yan. "It's done very lightly, very lightly."

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Scrap metal is piled up at a metal recycling facility on July 17 in Chicago, Illinois. With scrap metal prices near historic highs, many communities are experiencing an increase in thefts of metal including cemetery ornaments, plumbing pipe, gutters, and even manhole covers.

In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals -- such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.

—Statement by the Press Secretary on Iraq, WhiteHouse.gov

More here from the New York Times.

Marc Ambinder, writing about today's fascinating Elizabeth Bumiller story on the Obama foreign-policy team, observes:

The McCain response to all this -- John doesn't need daily talking points -- is a reflection on Obama's learning curve, although McCain is also very clearly learning as he is going, too.

Matt Yglesias complains:

It's true that, in some sense, McCain doesn't need daily talking points. But the reason he doesn't need daily talking points isn't that he can talk about national security issues with fluency and skill without them. Lacking daily talking points, he's repeatedly confused Sunni and Shiite, repeatedly forgotten that Czechoslovakia doesn't exist, changed his position on Afghanistan twice in 24 hours, etc. In short, he's made a ton of gaffes just as you would expect from an underprepared candidate. But he's allowed to get away with a lack of adequate preparation because, in the mind of the press, his years in captivity decades ago are adequate demonstration that he understands national security issues even though there's no real basis for that view.

Please. McCain doesn't need an advisor to inform him that the Czech Republic and Slovakia are separate nations. He knows this; he just misspoke (twice). Ditto for the Sunni/Shiite stuff. It happens when you age. And "the press," of course, isn't letting McCain get away with anything -- just how did we find out about all this? Maybe CzechoslovakiaGate and these other gaffes have failed to light up the cable networks simply because they aren't really a big deal.