Barack Obama

From Rolling Stone Magazine:

JANN WENNER: "Is there a marker you would lay down at the end of your first term where you say, ‘If this has happened or not happened, I would consider it a negative mark on my governance’?"

OBAMA: "If I haven’t gotten combat troops out of Iraq, passed universal health care and created a new energy policy that speaks to our dependence on foreign oil and deals seriously with global warming, then we’ve missed the boat. Those are three big jobs, so it’s going to require a lot of attention and imagination, and it’s going to require the American people feeling inspired enough that they’re prepared to take on these big challenges."

Summer

Photo: Charity de Meer for The New York Times
Trunks: PATAGONIA WAVEFARER II: $50: recyclable nylon: patagonia.com

Athens, Greece

Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Residents watched a fire spreading in the Glyka Nera area near Athens. Firefighters battled the fire on Mount Hymettus that destroyed at least 250 acres of pine forest but did not threaten any homes.

Olafur Eliasson

Photo: Vincent Laforet for The New York Times

"The New York City Waterfalls" is a public art project of four man-made waterfalls rising from New York Harbor, some as high as the Statue of Liberty. Organized by the nonprofit Public Art Fund and the city of New York, the artist Olafur Eliasson's much-publicized initiative cost $15 million. It will appear from June 26 to Oct. 13 and run from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. City officials and the Public Art Fund say that no city money is being used to pay for the waterfalls, with all of the funds coming from foundations, corporations and private supporters.

Israel

Photo: Pavel Wolberg/European Pressphoto Agency

The security detail of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert moved into action after a man shot himself during a farewell ceremony for President Nicolas Sarkozy of France at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Mr. Olmert, center, was lead to his car after the shooting. No officials were hurt.

Jakarta

Photo: Bay Ismoyo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Indonesian police fired water cannons to break up a rally by about 1,000 stone-throwing protesters who were demanding the president to resign over a recent fuel price hike. The demonstrators joined arms and covered up in the face of the water cannons as the police tried to move them away from the front of the Parliament House in Jakarta.

Florida

Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times
A U.S. Sugar Corporation plant in Clewiston, Fla.

NYTimes:
LOXAHATCHEE, Fla. — In a deal that environmental groups said would be the largest ecological restoration in the country’s history, a plan for the state to buy the nation’s largest producer of cane sugar was announced Tuesday by the governor and officials of U.S. Sugar Corporation.

The intention is to restore the Everglades by restoring the water flow from Lake Okeechobee, in the heart of the state, south to Florida Bay. That flow had been interrupted by commercial farming and the Everglades have suffered as a result.

Under term of the tentative deal, U.S. Sugar would continue farming and processing for six more years before closing the business and allowing 187,000 acres of land to return to its natural state. For its part the state would pay U.S. Sugar $1.7 billion.

Environmental groups hailed the undertaking. “This is putting it back the way it was in 1890,” said David Guest, a lawyer with Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. “When you come back in 20 years, it will look indistinguishable from the way it looked before the white man.”

Baghdad

NYTimes — An explosion apparently caused by a bomb inside a district council building in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad on Tuesday killed two American soldiers and two civilians working for the United States military, the American command said.

The explosion took place at around 9.30 a.m. as four council officials were gathering in a room for a meeting with five Americans to discuss the election of senior local council members, a spokesman for the council said.

American officials could not immediately confirm the nationalities of the civilian workers, but Iraqi council members who were at the scene of the attack described the civilians as American.

Later, a United States Embassy spokeswoman in Baghdad, Mirembe Nantongo, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying the dead civilians were American and included one State Department and one Defense Department employee.

A third American soldier was wounded in the attack, the military said in a statement. At least six Iraqi civilians also died in the attack, The Associated Press reported, and the United States military said a suspect in the apparent bombing had been detained after he was caught “leaving the scene and tested positive for explosive residue.”

The latest deaths follow an incident on Monday when a security guard for an Iraqi politician grabbed his Kalashnikov automatic rifle and opened fire on at least a half-dozen American soldiers, killing two of them. That attack took place during a meeting with Iraqi officials in a village southeast of Baghdad, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.

NYTimes: Report Sees Illegal Hiring Practices at Justice Dept.

Erich Lichtblau:

WASHINGTON -- Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.

The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what will be a series of investigations growing out of last year’s scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys. It appeared to confirm for the first time in an official examination many of the allegations from critics who charged that the Justice Department had become overly politicized during the Bush administration.

“Many qualified candidates” were rejected for the department’s honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”

The shift began in 2002, when advisers to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft restructured the honors program in response to what some officials saw as a liberal tilt in recruiting young lawyers from elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. While the recruitment was once controlled largely by career officials in each section who would review applications, political officials in the department began to assume more control, rejecting candidates with liberal or Democratic affiliations “at a significantly higher rate” than those with Republican or conservative credentials, the report said.

The shift appeared to accelerate in 2006, under then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, with two aides on the screening committee — Michael Elston and Esther Slater McDonald — singled out for particular criticism. The blocking of applicants with liberal credentials appeared to be a particular problem in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which has seen an exodus of career employees in recent years as the department has pursued a more conservative agenda in deciding what types of cases to bring.

Applications that contained what were seen as “leftist commentary” or “buzz words” like environmental and social justice were often grounds for rejecting applicants, according to e-mails reviewed by the inspector general’s office. Membership in liberal organizations like the American Constitution Society, Greenpeace, or the Poverty and Race Research Action Council were also seen as negative marks.

Affiliation with the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative group, was viewed positively.

Obama takes 15-point lead over McCain

Independent U.K.

By Stephen Foley in New York
Monday, 23 June 2008

Democratic Party strategists are daring to hope and starting to campaign for a landslide election victory, after Barack Obama opened up a 15-point lead over John McCain in the latest presidential race opinion poll. The Obama campaign is preparing this week to send paid workers into states where Democratic party candidates have not previously been competitive, expanding the political battleground in November and drawing in millions of first-time voters through voter-registration drives.

The latest opinion poll, for Newsweek magazine, was the first to show Mr Obama pulling ahead since he wrapped up the nomination fight against Hillary Clinton, ending months of damaging internecine rivalry and winning her endorsement. He leads Mr McCain by 51 to 36 per cent.

Topanga Canyon

Noon, outside my window.

Phillip Toledano

Bankrupt Offices
http://mrtoledano.com/frame_bankrupt.php

Lemtosh

Photo: Dean Isidro for The New York Times
Return to the 80s: Checkered cotton shirt, $190 at Reiss; striped T-shirt, $22 at American Apparel; Dolce & Gabbana shiny black denim jeans, $825 at Saks; suspenders, $12 at Trash & Vaudeville; Lemtosh glasses, $129 at Sol Moscot Opticians.

Sam Taylor-Wood

Hayden Christiansen
From "Crying Men"
A series of portraits: 2002-04

Illustrator: Christopher Silas Neale

California

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Del Martin, seated, and Phyllis Lyon were the first same-sex couple in San Francisco to exchange wedding vows on Monday. Mayor Gavin Newsom, left, presided. The couple has been together since 1955.

NYTimes: Clerks’ offices across the state braced for a crush of marriage applications as California became the second state, and by far the largest, in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. In Bakersfield, where couples exchanged vows on a tree-lined patio outside the clerk’s office, reporters and photographers outnumbered people applying for marriage licenses on Tuesday morning. There were no protestors in sight.

“We are so happy, we can’t stop smiling,” said Kathi Gose, 52, who wed Keren Briefer, 45, in Bakersfield on Tuesday morning. The couple, who have been together for 11 years, plan to change their surnames to Briefer-Gose. “We want to have the same rights as any other American citizen,” said Ms. Gose.

Michael D. at Balloon Juice:

Lyon and Martin will now be able to inherit from each other, have hospital visitation rights, and share in the many of the same things straight couples do (with the exception of federal benefits.) What won’t change is the state of your marriage. You and your husband or wife will still be able to love each other, raise your kids, file a joint tax return, and all the things you’ve been doing together for years. And if all that comes crashing down around Tony Perkins and Jim Dobson because Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin got married yesterday, they may feel the urge to scapegoat them. If allowing gays to marry is going to affect their marriages, then they probably just have shitty marriages to begin with.

Bangkok

Photo: Barbara Walton/European Pressphoto Agency
Monsoon season.

Martha's Vineyard

Photo: Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

Baghdad

Photo: Karim Kadim/Associated Press
Supporters of Moktada al-Sadr, a radical cleric, protested a security agreement being negotiated with the U.S. in Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq, on Friday.
BBC News:
Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki has said that talks with the US on a long-term agreement allowing US forces to remain in Iraq have "reached an impasse." Speaking in the Jordanian capital, Amman, Mr Maliki said the American demands infringed Iraqi sovereignty. Meanwhile, BBC Baghdad correspondent Nick Witchell says the disagreement between Mr Maliki and US negotiators goes to the heart of the immensely sensitive issue of who is actually in charge in the country: the Americans or the Iraqis.

The Americans are trying to negotiate a new Status of Forces agreement with the Iraqis. But the Iraqi government regards many of the American demands as infringements of Iraqi sovereignty.

"We have reached an impasse, because when we opened these negotiations we did not realise that the US demands would so deeply affect Iraqi sovereignty and this is something we can never accept," Mr Maliki said. "We cannot allow US forces to have the right to jail Iraqis or assume, alone, the responsibility of fighting against terrorism," he said.

The Americans want to maintain military bases and, it is reported, to keep control of Iraqi airspace. They also want immunity from prosecution for their own forces and for US contractors, a proposal which Mr Maliki said Iraq "rejected totally."

Northern Martian Plains

Photo: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Arizona
NYTimes:
Holy cow. That's what the scientists said when they saw this picture of the ground underneath the Phoenix lander. The two flat, bright surfaces look like ice, which was the reason Phoenix was sent to the arctic region. These patches, which have been named "Holy Cow," are out of reach of the robotic arm. However, ice should be close to the surface all around the lander and within easy reach.

Karl Zahn

A white pine table is $620 from oboiler.com.

Illumination

Blown glass bubble lights are $950 each, from lindseyadelman.com.

Beichuan, China

Photo: Kota Kyogoku/Associated Press

NYTimes: Bystanders watched as water from one of the so-called “quake lakes” was drained into an abandoned Chinese town on Tuesday.

New York City

Photo: Andrew Henderson/The New York Times
The Hamilton Grange National Memorial, Alexander Hamilton's historic home that is known as the Grange, undertook a highly choreographed journey to a new location in St. Nicholas Park facing West 141st Street. It previously stood around the corner, jammed between a six-story apartment house and St. Luke's Episcopal Church on Convent Avenue.

Andreas Angelidakis

DAMDI Architectural Publishing: Korea
Global distribution: ideabooks.nl
ISBN 9788991111325, DAMDI, Idea Code 08128

Paris

Photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
NYTimes:

In a final that rarely resembled anything other than one-way traffic, Nadal was at his clay-covering, forehand-whipping finest as he won his fourth straight French Open by beating up on his erratic, increasingly dispirited Swiss rival.

The stunning final score — 6-1, 6-3, 6-0 — was the most lopsided result in a major men’s final since John McEnroe also surrendered just four games against Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in 1984.

“I was walking out worrying about losing; it would have been impossible to imagine it would turn out like this,” Nadal said. “I think I played an almost perfect match, and Roger made more mistakes than usual.”

Oil

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Traders working in the energy options pit on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday in New York City.
Dow Slides 394 Points; Oil Surges $10.75
All 30 of the stocks that make up the Dow Jones industrials took a hit as the index dropped nearly 400 points on fears that high energy prices will extend and deepen an economic slowdown.

“The market is meeting its worst fears right now,” said Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist at the Hartford, a financial services firm.

The New, New City

Sze Tsung Leong for The New York Times
The Frontier: Southwestern Shenzhen under construction.
From Sunday's New York Times Magazine (The Architecture Issue):

“Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we headed down the F.D.R. Drive in New York, “but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.” Koolhaas’s viewpoint is widely shared by close observers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems, was completely prepared for what would come next.

In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to New York have sprouted up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village of a few thousand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people. Today Shenzhen has a population of eight million, and Dubai’s glittering towers, rising out of the desert in disorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates from Riyadh and Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhou have more than doubled in size in a few decades, their original outlines swallowed by rings of new development. Built at phenomenal speeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have been called, have no recognizable center, no single identity.

It is sometimes hard to think of them as cities at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of the world’s most expensive private islands, the tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has been derided as an urban tomb where the rich live walled off from the poor migrant workers who serve them. Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development, better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also become vast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.

http://tiny.cc/qTcyh

"Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world."

1968

Photo: Richard Valles

Illustrator/Author: Eric Hanson

© Eric Hanson.
Watercolor. From "The Terrible Truth About Grownups" written and illustrated by Eric Hanson. Publication to be announced.

"What you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon -- that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first."

Thomas Hargrove

Like a bird
Singing in the rain,
Let grateful memories
Survive in time of sorrow.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Happy Birthday, Tommy.

Whitman

Photo: Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University
"Leaves of Grass," by Walt Whitman, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Self published, July 4, 1855. Original binding.

Yves St Laurent 1936 - 2008

Photo: AP
ca 1955
"I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober."

Greece

NYTimes:

ATHENS — Defying governmental wrath, the mayor of a remote Greek island performed the country’s first same-sex marriages on Tuesday, wedding two men and two women.The civil ceremonies, held at sunrise in the nondescript town hall of Tilos, a tiny island in the eastern Aegean Sea, defied statements by a senior Greek prosecutor last week that such unions were illegal.“It’s done, now,” the mayor, Anastassios Aliferis, said in a telephone interview. “The unions have been registered and the licenses have been issued. It’s a historic moment.” With its abundance of glamorous gay bars and summer island resorts such as Mykonos, Greece has long drawn thousands of gay tourists annually. But gays and lesbians in this European Union nation of 11 million people frequently complain of discrimination. Public displays of affection are widely frowned upon. The country’s military bars gays from joining its ranks, and in 1993 a private Greek television network, Mega Channel, was fined $116,000 by the National Radio and Television Council for showing men kissing in a weekly drama. Greece’s powerful Orthodox Church has also denounced homosexuality as a sin and “defect of human nature.” On Tuesday, however, a bubbling just-married Evangelia Vlami emerged from the Tilos town hall, telling the BBC that the unions would help end discrimination. “We did this to encourage other gay people to take a stand,” she said.

Spain

Photo: Monica Gumm for the International Herald Tribune

IHT: The combination of resort-building and intensive farming has put new pressures on the land and its dwindling supply of water.

This year farmers are fighting developers over water rights. They are fighting one another over who gets to water their crops. And in a sign of their mounting desperation, they are buying and selling water like gold on a burgeoning black market, mostly from illegal wells.

Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical drought, but the current crisis, scientists say, probably reflects a more permanent climate change brought on by global warming. And it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict.

The battles of yesterday were fought over land, they warn. Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future — a future made hotter and dryer by climate change in much of the world — seem likely to focus on water, they say.

“Water will be the environmental issue this year — the problem is urgent and immediate,” said Barbara Helferrich, a spokeswoman for the European Union’s Environment Directorate. “If you already have water shortages in spring, you know it’s going to be a really bad summer.”

Weegee

"Opening of the George Washington Bridge, New York City," Oct. 25, 1931

NYTimes: As his star rose in the 1950s and 1960s, Weegee began to travel extensively, make experimental films and worked for other directors, some as illustrious as Stanley Kubrick, for whom he served as a consultant during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.”

Texas, America

Eric Gay/Associated Press
Nancy Dockstader, a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, embraced her 9-year-old daughter Amy after they were reunited at the Baptist Children's Home Ministries Youth Camp near Luling, Texas, on Monday.
NYTimes:
http://tinyurl.com/5odbey