The White House took a bold stand this week in favor of reality: No longer, the administration said, would it help create staged news photos.

Those pictures of the president standing at the lectern for one of his televised speeches? Yeah, they're a kind of a crock. For decades, little known to the public, photos of the president making a major address were reenactments. Presidents — stretching at least as far back as Harry Truman, apparently — finished their speeches and then pretended to do it again a few minutes later, so that photographers barred from the actual event could snap photos.

The economic downturn has not been kind to liberal arts schools. Middle-income families with depleted portfolios are fleeing to public colleges. To some, the very term "liberal arts" now symbolizes impractical indulgence. Tuition is at an all-time high. So, too, are tuition discounts. The vicious cycle is driving colleges into debt.

For Christopher Nelson, that fractured business model begets a single question: What would Socrates say?

Nelson is completing his 20th year as president of St. John's College in Annapolis, one of the nation's oldest and most distinctive schools, where there are no academic departments. At this college devoted to great works of Western civilization, Nelson has become a national spokesman for the liberal arts, a visible and passionate defender of learning for learning's sake.

A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. commandos who killed him, current and former U.S. officials said Friday.

The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on the condition of anonymity.

The officials said they were not sure where in the compound the pornography was discovered or who had been viewing it. The officials said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials.

Already struggling to avoid a debt default that could seal Greece's fate as a financial pariah, this Mediterranean nation is also scrambling to contain another threat — a breakdown in the rule of law.

Thousands have joined an "I Won't Pay" movement, refusing to cover highway tolls, bus fares, even fees at public hospitals. To block a landfill project, an entire town south of Athens has risen up against the government, burning earth-moving equipment and destroying part of a main access road.

The protests are an emblem of social discontent spreading across Europe in response to a new age of austerity. At a time when the United States is just beginning to consider deep spending cuts, countries such as Greece are coping with a fallout that has extended well beyond ordinary civil disobedience.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's spy chief offered to resign Friday amid public outrage over the U.S. operation that killed Osama bin Laden, an incident that humiliated the nation's army and cast doubt on the capabilities of an intelligence network long believed to be nearly omnipotent.

Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in emotional testimony at a private session of Parliament, apologized for what he said was an intelligence lapse and said he would leave his post if Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani deemed him unfit for the job, according to lawmakers. Yet Pasha also spoke in defiant tones about Pakistan's alliance with the United States, which was severely strained even before the bin Laden killing.

NEW DELHI — India's beleaguered ruling coalition received a boost Friday as it notched up victories in three out of four key states when votes were counted after month-long state elections.

The state votes do not immediately affect the national coalition government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but many here view them as a collective referendum ahead of national elections expected in 2014.

Analysts said victories by the ruling Congress party, as well as the resounding defeat of one party tainted by corruption scandals, could give Singh more freedom to act against allies accused of serious financial wrongdoing.

SHANGHAI – On summer holidays here, Chinese are increasing jumping into their cars and engaging in what was once considered a quintessential American pastime, — the road trip. And that's great news for U.S. carmaker General Motors, which has ridden the booming Chinese auto market to recover from bankruptcy and now sees mostly a long open highway to bigger profits ahead.

With a mix of high-end Buicks, minivans and low-end Chevrolets, GM has emerged as one of the top sellers of passenger cars in the world's largest automobile market, surpassing Toyota this year and second only to Volkswagen.

TUNIS, Tunisia — The Tunisian interior minister says Italy has delivered four frigates to Tunisia's government to help patrol its coasts as part of efforts to curb illegal immigration toward Europe.

The state news agency TAP is quoting Habib Essid as saying the delivery comes as part of a bilateral accord reached during his two-day visit to Italy to meet with officials Thursday and Friday.

Italy has sparred with France, Germany and other European Union members over its demand that the EU help take in some of the 25,000 people — most of them Tunisians — who have arrived in Italy since popular uprisings toppled Tunisia's longtime president in January.

Every year, the U.S. Golf Association considers giving special exemptions into its premier event, the U.S. Open. They are few and precious, with just 50 since 1977. Tom Watson and Vijay Singh got them last year, but none at all were offered the four previous years. The criterion? None. The USGA just thinks you deserve to bypass their grueling qualifying stampede. In and of themselves, such invitations are considered an honor within the sport because they often reflect on the whole career and character of the recipient. This year, Tom Lehman merits a special exemption.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — David Toms doesn't feel as though he's done anything special over 36 holes, which sometimes can be good enough at The Players Championship. At least before the wild weekend begins.

He hasn't made any long putts, like the 50-footer Bubba Watson made on the island-green 17th that produced the loudest cheer of another steamy day on the TPC Sawgrass. Toms hasn't holed any bunker shots, as Nick Watney did in the opening round.

And he hasn't tried to be perfect on a course that can look as though it demands it.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — David Toms quit trying to be perfect on a TPC Sawgrass course that appears to demand it. It led to nearly perfect play over two days at The Players Championship and a one-shot lead over Nick Watney going into the weekend.

Toms went 25 holes before making a bogey Friday and countered with enough good shots for a 4-under 68, surprising only because he has missed the cut more than half of the times he has played in his nearly two decades at this event.

Watney did his best to catch him.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — With his ball nestled near a tree on the par-4 fifth at TPC Sawgrass, Mark Wilson decided to turn around and hit a left-handed chip shot.

It ended up being a costly mistake.

Wilson seemingly struck the ball twice and called a two-shot penalty on himself. The extra strokes caused him to miss the cut at The Players Championship on Friday.

SON SERVERA, Spain — Chris Wood shot a 5-under 65 to lead the Iberdrola Open by three shots after the second round Friday.

The 23-year-old Englishman made six birdies before dropping a shot at No. 16 to finish at 8-under-par 132 at the halfway stage.

"You just have to keep it in play and think your way round," said Wood, who has had 14 top-10 finishes on the European Tour. "I was cruising along and then came to 16, and that is not an easy tee shot."

Navy junior Dominique Wright, a defender on the women's lacrosse team, forced a turnover and picked up the loose ball in the final seconds of the Patriot League championship game against Colgate last month. Navy was holding a one-goal lead.

"I was standing right there, she had this awesome backcheck and then picked up the ball," said Danielle Vivonetto, a junior attacker. "After the game she came over and said, 'All I heard was you yelling, 'Run!' "

As she showed by keeping the ball until Navy had secured its 15-14 victory, running is the easy part for Wright. Lacrosse is not.

The ball arrived at home plate at the same time as Omar Infante, and for a few crucial seconds in the top of the 11th inning they stopped playing baseball at Nationals Park. Washington Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos held the ball. Infante, the Florida Marlins' base runner, lay flat on his stomach. All of Friday night's twists and turns would be decided by an odd question: Could Ramos touch Infante before Infante touched the plate? They played tag.

Infante won. With an incredible, contortionist's slide, he scored the game-winning run and sent the Nationals to their second straight extra-innings loss, a heartbreaking 6-5 defeat to the Marlins. The Nationals, after erasing an early three-run deficit and a one-run hole in the eighth, nearly walked away with a win. They left the bases loaded in the ninth and then missed a walk-off homer by inches in the 10th.

Ian Desmond will sit out Saturday with a strained left quadriceps muscle suffered during Friday's 6-5 loss to the Marlins, Manager Jim Riggleman said. The Nationals will re-evaluate Desmond in the morning, but Desmond felt confident late Friday night he will not miss significant time.

"It was earlier in the game where it kind of got me, and then it just kept on not really getting worse, but it was there," Desmond said. "I've never had anything like this before so I didn't want to – I knew my body was telling me I was to the point where it didn't want me to push it anymore. I just backed off, I should be all right."

The Nationals arrived home from Atlanta late last night, and today Manager Jim Riggleman made a rare concession to his road-weary players: He made batting practice optional. Most players hit outside at the usual time. Jayson Werth, Laynce Nix and Adam LaRoche decided to take the option of not taking batting practice.

The Nationals have faced the Marlins six times already this season, including six days ago in Florida, when Tom Gorzelanny out-pitched Chris Volstad and the Nationals won, 5-2. Gorzelanny, the Nationals consolation prize when they missed out on Zack Greinke, has been perhaps the Nationals' best starter this season. He has a 2.87 ERA with 6.9 strikeouts per nine innings, both best in the rotation.

While saying "it's not cast in stone who's going to be playing left field," Manager Jim Riggleman strongly intimated Michael Morse could be returning the bench role he excelled in last season. Morse, who became the Nationals' starting left fielder with an outstanding spring training, has been supplanted lately by Laynce Nix, who is starting for the ninth straight game, eight of those coming in left.

"Sometimes there are players who are just a little more comfortable coming to the ballpark and seeing if they're playing, where they're playing, where they're hitting rather than the norm," Riggleman said. "Mike might be one of those guys who's a little more comfortable moving around to different positions, spots in the lineup, playing a day, sitting, whatever. That routine was real good for him last year. That may be that's the direction we go with Mike."

Third baseman Ryan Zimmerman jogged for the first time in his rehab from abdominal surgery, which remains in the "very early stages," Zimmerman said. The Nationals expect Zimmerman, who underwent the surgery 10 days ago, to return about four and a half weeks from now.

Before today, Zimmerman had only walked, "and that he was it," he said. He feels some swelling and soreness, which is to be expected, but less so than in the days immediately following the surgery. He has always deals with scar tissue from the surgery. Still, the mental aspect has been more challenging than the physical recovery.

CARSON, Calif. — When the boxers in the Super Six tournament headed to Berlin two years ago to promote their unique endeavor, Andre Ward remembers feeling like a kid shoved into the background, straining to peer over the shoulders of European stars Arthur Abraham and Mikkel Kessler.

Guess who's standing at center stage now.

Ward dominated Kessler in his first Super Six fight, and the Olympic gold medalist from Oakland is determined to do something worse to Abraham in their semifinal bout Saturday night.

MONTREAL — Lucian Bute of Montreal will defend his IBF super middleweight title in his native Romania against unbeaten Jean-Paul Mendy of France.

Bute (28-0) will make his eighth title defense in the July 9 bout against Mendy (29-0-1), the IBF's No. 1 ranked contender and mandatory challenger.

The fight is not included in Bute's contract with Showtime, but it fulfills his wish to defend his belt in his home country, where he was named athlete of the year the last three years.

There's a statue of Hippocrates standing in the middle of the medical center where I work. He's enormously tall and white and handsome, and you would think he'd be hard to miss, but often when I ask a colleague to meet me there, the person replies, "There's a statue of Hippocrates here?" It's true that he's obscured almost to his knees by foliage, and that his pedestal is high enough to take him out of the common line of sight, but still it has always struck me as curious that he could simultaneously loom large and be invisible.

Adam Hochschild does many things well in this account of World War I as experienced by Great Britain, not least taking a very familiar story and making it new. We all know that the war bogged down in ghastly stalemate as it degenerated into a battle of attrition in the trenches; that the political leadership of virtually every participating nation was foolish at best, incompetent at worst; that the war's awful casualties — "more than 8.5 million soldiers were killed on all fronts," civilian deaths "estimated at 12 to 13 million" — were exacted for no clear purpose; that the terms laid down at the Treaty of Versailles left Germany bitter, angry and vindictive, paving the way for Hitler and the even worse cataclysm that followed. We know all of this, yet Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story, and explores it in provocative ways.

The prevailing myth about baseball's invention, that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday drew the whole thing up out of his imagination during a stopover in Cooperstown, N.Y., had long been debunked by the time John Thorn, the noted baseball historian, set out to write "Baseball in the Garden of Eden."

But before Thorn, in his engaging book, gets around to explaining baseball's true origins, he spends some time on the remarkable Doubleday myth — which was not merely exaggerated, but wholly made up. Having resolved to "set matters straight," Thorn writes, "I found myself more engaged by the lies, and the reason for their creation, and have sought here not simply to contradict but to fathom them."

The great thing about the Nazis . . . hmm. No, that isn't going to work, for all the obvious reasons. Surely there are no good things about the Nazis, I hear you say.

Well, there is one good thing, and it is this: In an age of moral relativism, we can all agree that the Nazis were evil and that the Western Allied forces opposing the Nazis were good. (I say "Western" Allied forces because I don't think one can argue that the Soviet Union could be described as a force for good.)

With the Nazis you have a proper villain: Adolf Hitler. You have some heinous crimes, and here you can take your pick: the Holocaust, waging aggressive war, etc. You have a story arc that even the dumbest studio exec can understand, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and gosh, they're even in that order. You have some unlikely hero figures: Churchill and Roosevelt, though not, I think, de Gaulle. And, best of all, at the end of the story, the villain is completely destroyed. Good triumphs over evil in a series of epic battles that Tolkien might have imagined. Victory is total. Everyone — even the long-suffering population of Germany — is glad. Ding-dong! The witch is dead.

In 1947, the radio producer Dan Golenpaul issued the first Information Please Almanac. In 1938, he had started the popular radio quiz show "Information Please." Listeners submitted questions, which a panel of performers, newspapermen and writers had to answer quickly and wittily. Those who stumped the panel received small cash prizes (or, in the early 1940s, war bonds). The Almanac, which traded on the show's popularity but did not rival its comic flair, compressed a vast number of facts about American government, history and geography, official statistics and popular culture into a single book. That was what information meant in the late '40s to pretty much everyone from high school debaters to professional journalists (my family included both, and they fought over each year's Almanac).

CBS became the hottest chick at next week's Broadcast TV Upfront Week Orgy of Excess, when it announced Friday that Ashton Kutcher is replacing Charlie Sheen on "Two and a Half Men."

So far as we know, this has never happened before — CBS being the hottest chick at Upfront Week, that is, not the whole younger sitcom star replacing sacked cantankerous older sitcom star thing.

"I can't wait to get to work with this ridiculously talented 2.5 team and I believe we can fill the stage with laughter that will echo in viewers' homes," Kutcher said in a canned quote — which, while ranking pretty high on the Lame-o-Meter, does insure that, going forward, the country's most popular comedy series will be known as simply "2.5." That's because Ashton, you know, is a god in the social media world and what he says, goes.

Shortly after taking the 9:30 Club stage on Thursday night, British soul singer Adele made a confession that didn't feel quite right: "I'm really, really nervous!"

Really? Really? Based on her irrepressible giggles and torrential chitchat between songs, the 23-year-old seemed positively giddy. And for good reason. Her sophomore album, "21," was enjoying its seventh week at the top of the American album charts, her heartsick hit "Rolling in the Deep" had just been named the No. 1 single, and here she was, kicking off her American tour before a capacity crowd that showered her with screams that felt almost Bieberian.

CBS became the hottest chick at next week's Broadcast TV Upfront Week Orgy of Excess, when it announced Friday that Ashton Kutcher is replacing Charlie Sheen on "Two and a Half Men."

So far as we know, this has never happened before — CBS being the hottest chick at Upfront Week, that is, not the whole younger sitcom star replacing sacked cantankerous older sitcom star thing.

"I can't wait to get to work with this ridiculously talented 2.5 team and I believe we can fill the stage with laughter that will echo in viewers' homes," Kutcher said in a canned quote — which, while ranking pretty high on the Lame-o-Meter, does insure that, going forward, the country's most popular comedy series will be known as simply "2.5." That's because Ashton, you know, is a god in the social media world and what he says, goes.

Watching "Freedom Riders" — filmmaker Stanley Nelson's laudably reverent but slightly stiff recounting of the historic bus rides that shamed a nation into dismantling its segregation laws — one is struck by how close yet distant all of it now seems. When it comes to an anniversary retrospective, 50 is the golden number: long enough ago to feel like history, but close enough to still include the thoughts and hindsight of those who lived it. Close enough to still make you wince with a mix of anger, pain and remorse.

There is nothing sinister about the gray hooded sweatshirt anymore, no mystery behind the aviator sunglasses.

Once, they were among the hallmarks of Ted Kaczynski, the anarchist Unabomber who killed three people and injured almost two dozen more during a nearly 20-year reign of terror. Now, his old clothes adorn a mannequin in a sterile government office in an online photo tagged Unabomb0001.

This is the first of 51 lots of Kaczynski's personal belongings that the government will auction online next week in what amounts to Uncle Sam's version of eBay. The bidding begins Wednesday, but the Justice Department has posted pictures of the goods to its Flickr stream to drum up interest — a final swipe at a man bent on stopping technology in its tracks.

CANNES, France — Of all the tribal rituals of the Cannes Film Festival — the stars' swanning climb up the red-carpeted stairs, the swimsuit-clad ingenue cavorting in the surf, the tinkling music from Saint-Saens's "Aquarium" that precedes every screening — the most colorfully bizarre is the Hijack-by-Hype, wherein a movie of uncertain merit and questionable provenance (and isn't even in the festival) temporarily upstages the tonier films on offer.

This year's case in point: "Unlawful Killing," a documentary about the death of Princess Diana that began to stir up controversy even before it got here. The film, directed by Keith Allen — father of the pop singer Lily, actor in "Trainspotting" and "Shallow Grave" and notoriously colorful off-the-cuffer — earned global disapproval for including a graphic image of the aftermath of the car accident that took Diana's life in 1997, the details of which have historically been distorted in the interest of taste.

Welsh-born fantasist Jo Walton has built an award-winning career on elegant, quietly subversive novels such as "Farthing," an alternate history that sets murder in an English country house against the background of a Britain that made peace with Hitler; and "Tooth and Claw," a riff on Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, where dragons stand in for the Victorians and social fence-hopping is enabled by eating one's betters.

In "Among Others," Walton's newest work, 10-year-old Morwenna and her twin sister, Morganna, look for fairies, not in the bottom of a garden but lurking in the ruins of a Welsh coal plant. It's the strongest conceit of this beautifully written, if somewhat underpowered tale: that fairies are drawn to human ruins, industrial as well as ancient, occupying them once weeds and vines overtake abandoned factories and mines and stone circles.

Adam Hochschild does many things well in this account of World War I as experienced by Great Britain, not least taking a very familiar story and making it new. We all know that the war bogged down in ghastly stalemate as it degenerated into a battle of attrition in the trenches; that the political leadership of virtually every participating nation was foolish at best, incompetent at worst; that the war's awful casualties — "more than 8.5 million soldiers were killed on all fronts," civilian deaths "estimated at 12 to 13 million" — were exacted for no clear purpose; that the terms laid down at the Treaty of Versailles left Germany bitter, angry and vindictive, paving the way for Hitler and the even worse cataclysm that followed. We know all of this, yet Hochschild brings fresh drama to the story, and explores it in provocative ways.

In 1947, the radio producer Dan Golenpaul issued the first Information Please Almanac. In 1938, he had started the popular radio quiz show "Information Please." Listeners submitted questions, which a panel of performers, newspapermen and writers had to answer quickly and wittily. Those who stumped the panel received small cash prizes (or, in the early 1940s, war bonds). The Almanac, which traded on the show's popularity but did not rival its comic flair, compressed a vast number of facts about American government, history and geography, official statistics and popular culture into a single book. That was what information meant in the late '40s to pretty much everyone from high school debaters to professional journalists (my family included both, and they fought over each year's Almanac).