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• Denver Post - For Obama, there's a bit of gray

  The rigors of the presidential campaign appear to be taking a toll on Barack Obama, whose closely shorn black hair appears to be increasingly gray... "I've been running for president for 19 months, which explains the gray hair," the 47-year-old presumptive Democratic nominee told supporters last week. Zariff, a Chicago barber who goes by one name and who has been cutting Obama's hair for about 15 years, said he first noticed gray about three years ago. "It has showed up a little bit more, especially in the past year," said Zariff, who has worked at the Hyde Park Hair Salon and Barbershop for nearly two decades. But he demurred when asked whether campaign stress is the cause. "Well, if he's under any stress, I don't notice it. He's pretty smooth when it comes to that," Zariff said.

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• CS Monitor - Record number of US contractors in Iraq

  The American military has depended on private contractors since sutlers sold paper, bacon, sugar, and other small luxuries to Continental Army troops during the Revolutionary War. But the scale of the use of contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in US history, according to a new congressional report that may be the most thorough official account yet of the practice. As of early 2008, at least 190,000 private personnel were working on US-funded projects in the Iraq theater, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) survey found. That means that for each uniformed member of the US military in the region, there was also a contract employee – a ratio of 1 to 1... The CBO estimates the total cost of these military contractor operations from 2003 through 2008 to be $100 billion. That's about 20 percent of all US funding for operations in Iraq.

The Press Association reports US plans to send troops to Georgia.

The US is to send troops to embattled Georgia in the form of a humanitarian aid exercise, President George Bush said.

Mr Bush said military planes would deliver supplies in a move which would put American forces in the heart of the region.

Bush, in a prepared statement, said:

I've also directed Secretary of Defense Bob Gates to begin a humanitarian mission to the people of Georgia, headed by the United States military. This mission will be vigorous and ongoing. A U.S. C-17 aircraft with humanitarian supplies is on its way. And in the days ahead we will use U.S. aircraft, as well as naval forces, to deliver humanitarian and medical supplies.

Jerry Northington, or possum as he's known to the Daily Kos community, is running for Congress in Delaware's at-large seat.

The ugly truth is running for Congress takes money... and when challenging an entrenched politican, it takes a lot of money. To quote Wilmington's newspaper, The News Journal, possum is getting "crushed" by the Republican incumbent.

The eight-term Delaware lawmaker crushed his Democratic competitors last quarter, ending the period with $1.55 million in the bank compared with Democrat Jerry Northington's $10,036...

This is where we make a difference. By contributing to Northington's campaign, we amplify Jerry's voice so his progressive message can be heard in Delaware.

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• WaPo - Fed Up by Costs, Many Grow It Alone

  Just beneath an L train subway platform in Brooklyn, Tanika Gentry fingers the deep green leaves of a collard plant in the black soil of a community garden. This is dinner. Gentry, fed up with the spiking cost of food, recently decided to grow her own. Now she is reaping a harvest of collards, cabbages, tomatoes and pumpkins to feed her family. "Once you have to choose between eating and fuel, there's nothing greater than going back to the beginning and making your own," said Gentry, 32, who home-schools her two daughters. "With the way things are going, it may be something a lot more people are realistically doing."

"You can’t imagine the happiness I am feeling," said Maria Benedita Sousa.

Sousa is an American success story. She has pulled herself up by the bootstraps in one of the poorest areas of the country and now owns her own business. Sousa now employs 25 people that produce 55,000 pairs of women's underwear a month. Not only is she a small business owner, this mother of three has bought and restored a home for her family and is helping pay for her daughter's schooling to become a pharmacist. When she graduates from college, she'll become the first in the Sousa family to do so.

"I battled and battled, and today my children are studying, with one in college and two others in school. It’s a gift from God," she said.

Proof positive the American dream is alive and well... in South America — Brazil to be precise.

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• BBC News - Iraq floats US pullout timetable

  Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has raised the prospect of setting a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It comes as the US attempts to push through a new security deal before the end of 2008, when the UN mandate allowing a US presence in Iraq expires. The Pentagon has played down the suggestion of a withdrawal timetable... A statement from Mr Maliki's office quoted him as telling Arab ambassadors in the UAE: "The direction we are taking is to have a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or to have a timetable for their withdrawal." "The negotiations are still continuing with the American side, but in any case the basis for the agreement will be respect for the sovereignty of Iraq." It was the first time that the prime minister had specifically suggested the setting of a timetable for a US withdrawal.

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• Globe and Mail - Climate-change goals fall short at G8

  Hopes have dimmed for stronger action on climate change – a central goal of this week's G8 summit in Japan – with countries such as the United States and Canada resisting calls for the group to set hard midterm targets for reducing emissions... Environmental groups and European groups had called for the G8 to set midterm targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020.... Instead, the G8 is likely to declare a longer-term, “aspirational” goal of leading efforts to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 – criticized by environmentalists as too weak and too far in the future to spark real action – and perhaps some other modest steps.

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• WaPo - Bush Still Fundraiser in Chief

  His popularity rating in national polls is dismally low, and the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, is doing his best to avoid him, but Bush remains a formidable force on the GOP fundraising circuit during his final months in office. He has already clocked 31 political events this year, raising nearly $70 million for GOP candidates and the national and state parties, according to the Republican National Committee. The tally puts the president on track to meet or exceed the amount he raised before the midterm elections in 2006, according to GOP officials. To look at it another way: Since the start of 2007, Bush alone is responsible for raising more money than the entire Democratic National Committee.

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• Guardian - Iraqi MPs stall deals on Bush benchmarks

  Three key US-backed measures on oil, provincial elections and the future of US troops are mired in the Iraqi parliament, raising doubts as to whether they can come into effect before George Bush leaves office. Once listed as a crucial "benchmark" allowing the US president to claim success in Iraq, the provincial elections look likely to be delayed until next year. The oil law, which nationalist MPs blocked last summer over fears that foreign companies would take over Iraq's major resource, is facing the same problem again. The pact to permit US troops to remain in Iraq is equally sensitive, and was described by the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, this month as being in stalemate... Many MPs complain that it will give the US excessive rights.

Corporate television is having a near total news blackout on Iraq and Afghanistan. Reporters covering the wars have gone on record saying the networks have put war on the back burner, according to the NY Times.

For example, take Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. She joked with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that she has to threaten to kill her bureau chief with an armor-piercing RPG in order to get her stories on the air. Sure, she was joking, but was she?

"If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts," Ms. Logan said.

How little coverage of our nation's wars appear on the three network evening newscasts?

Only 2 minutes per week.

• NYT - Travelers Shift to Rail as Cost of Fuel Rises

  Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues -- all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month. But the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand. Many of the long-distance trains are already sold out for some days this summer... "We're starting to bump up against our own capacity constraints," said R. Clifford Black, a spokesman for Amtrak. The problem is that rail has shriveled. The number of "passenger miles" traveled on intercity rail has dropped by about two-thirds since 1960, and the companies that build rail cars and locomotives have also shrunk, making it hard to expand... Today Amtrak has 632 usable rail cars, and dozens more are worn out or damaged but could be reconditioned and put into service at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each. And it needs to buy new rail cars soon.

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• McClatchy - CIA advised military on questioning at Guantanamo

  The CIA, which had authority to use harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorist detainees, advised U.S. military officials at Guantanamo in 2002 on how far they could go in extracting information from captives there, documents released at a Senate hearing Tuesday show. "If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong," Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, told a meeting of officials on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes from the meeting... The CIA involvement clearly bothered some at Guantanamo. "This looks like the kinds of stuff Congressional hearings are made of," Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo, wrote in an Oct. 28, 2002 e-mail to his headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va. "Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this."

• NYT - Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir

  The Army official who managed the Pentagon's largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops. The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations. Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company... But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors -- after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR's claims -- approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

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• LA Times - Oglala Sioux could regain Badlands national parkland

  The southern half of this swath of grasslands and chiseled pink spires looks untouched from a distance. Closer up, the scars of history are easy to see. Unexploded bombs lie in ravines, a reminder of when the military confiscated the land from the Oglala Sioux tribe during World War II and turned it into an artillery range. Poachers who have stolen thousands of fossils over the years have left gouges in the landscape. On a plateau, a solitary makeshift hut sits ringed by empty Coke cans and shaving cream canisters. It is the only remnant of a three-year occupation by militant tribal activists who had demanded that the land be returned. Now the National Park Service is contemplating doing just that: giving the 133,000-acre southern half of Badlands National Park back to the tribe. The northern half, which has a paved road and a visitor center, would remain with the park system.

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• CS Monitor - Cyclists form a first-of-its-kind union in Toronto

  Kathy Marks cocks her head, listening for the din of a thousand bicycle bells. For the Toronto grandmother, it’s a cue to hop on her three-speed bicycle and join a riding protest for more bike lanes in Canada’s largest city. But after several years of participating in this annual demonstration, she’s considering joining a new group of rabble-rousers to show her dissatisfaction with cycling conditions here: the Toronto Cyclists Union... Believed to be a global first, the union already has enrolled hundreds of card-carrying members since it formed in May. Modeled on auto programs like AAA, the union plans to offer members insurance, roadside assistance, and advocacy on their behalf – all for a $24 annual fee.

Mike Bernards is a farmer in McMinnville, Oregon and he just had installed a 120-foot tall wind turbine that is capable of supplying upward of 25 percent of the energy used by his family farm. The story about his 'planting' a wind turbine to yield a bumper crop of energy is in today's The Oregonian.

In Oregon, grants are available for wind turbine installation, but only for properties with 1 acre or more. Fortunately, Bernards' farm is 500 acres. So with the help of grants and Oregon Department of Energy tax credits, Bernards wound up paying only $12,000 for his $70,000 microgeneration set-up: a 10-kilowatt turbine is capable of generating 1,300 kilowatts of power a month.

This investment for the future will not only help lower energy bills for Bernards' farm, but also will help it keep growing produce — strawberries, beans, walnuts, filberts, artichokes, and zucchini — to feed hungry people in nearby Portland. This on-site microgeneration turbine is a small start to a more sustainable future, but more steps need to be taken.

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• Miami Herald - 9/11 trial sought during presidential campaign

  Defense lawyers for the alleged 9/11 conspirators on Thursday accused the Pentagon prosecutor of rushing to begin the complex Sept. 11, 2001, mass-murder trial in the height of the presidential campaign season... The document includes an e-mail from a civilian member of the prosecution team proposing to set the trial date for Sept. 15, the Monday after the seventh anniversary of the suicide attacks. "Not coincidentally," the defense attorneys say, "that would force the trial of this case in mid-September, some seven weeks before the general elections." The date, in fact, is 10 days after Sen. John McCain, an architect of Military Commissions law, is expected to be officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate at the GOP national convention in St. Paul, Minn.