Washington Post Top Online Stories: Fri 11/19/10

The Washington Post lead headline online early Friday morning says "U.S. sending battle tanks to hit harder at Taliban." The paper says deployment of M1 Abrams tanks for the first time in the Afghan war will allow ground forces to target insurgents from a greater distance.

The paper tells of one family's plunge from the middle class into poverty.

It says despite an impassioned, tearful apology and a plea for leniency, Rep. Charles B. Rangel on Thursday became the first House member in nearly three decades to be recommended for censure.

The paper says Presidents have often turned to foreign policy after domestic setbacks - from Ronald Reagan's Latin American tour and speech calling the Soviet Union the "focus of evil in the modern world" in the months after his party's 1982 congressional losses to Bill Clinton's escape to Indonesia and the Philippines following his own midterm trouncing a dozen years later.

It says late Thursday morning, a few General Motors retirees gathered at the Angle Inn, just a half-mile from the automaker's now-closed Broening Highway plant, to ponder their old company's newfound resurgence.

And the most popular story says White House officials said Thursday that the acquittal of Ahmed Ghailani on all but one of more than 280 criminal charges in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa would not undermine their effort to try former Guantanamo detainees in civilian court, even as the mixed verdict reignited debate over that policy.