i just was poking around the , the new york times site. i wanted to grab a photo that appeared on the front of the paper this morning. it showed an iraqi soldier holding a sign saying "center for voting this way" in arabic, with a big arrow pointing the way. the soldier however, was holding the sign upside-down (if you read arabic, it was rather comically clear). somehow, the photo seemed to symbolize the chaos of the iraq election for me.
but when i went to the nytimes site, there was no sign of the photo. the official "front page scan" of today's paper is now this photo,* which is clearly different from the physical newspaper sitting besides me as i write this. i can't find the original photo anywhere on the site
i'm guessing that someone told them, after press, that the sign was upside-down and so they erased all evidence of the photo from the web site. we can all now mourn the loss of a snarky post that i will never write.
on a related note, election turnout is looking high in iraq, at least in the shi'a and kurdish areas. i had an odd experience turning on npr this morning and listening to their fairly optomistic assessment as i read an email from someone i know in baghdad telling a slightly more chaotic story. will the elections really change anything in iraq as the bush administration keeps telling us? inquiring minds wanna know
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* login required--the nytimes bloglink program apparently does not cover front page scans.
