TESTING Reports of granite emitting high levels of radon and radiation are increasing.

SOMETHING NEW Karen Hohenstein, left, jokes with her attendants-to-be at a Botox party at the Tiffani Kim Institute Medical Wellness Spa in Chicago.

“Totally misleading” is the way T. Boone Pickens describes Republican attempts to convince the public that if we opened up more areas to oil drilling then gas prices would fall.

The high-plains spirit of the 1930s thrives today in the northern Wyoming city of Sheridan. In the Mint Bar, revelers celebrated after the city’s annual rodeo and parade.

Nicholas D. Kristof

Pine waste from a national forest near KL Process Design Group in Wyoming is used to make ethanol, a substitute for gasoline.

The London architect Zaha Hadid designed the Mobile Art pavilion, which has already made a stop in Tokyo. The structure is made of lightweight panels that are packed in 51 shippable containers.

The equestrian competition events in the Beijing Olympics will take place in Hong Kong.

HALF FULL Travis Piotrowski attending a Life is good festival in Boston.

GETTING REDDER John Ebert holds a Ramapo tomato; he has three acres of them on his Cherry Hill, N.J., farm.

Kaylah Frazier watering plants at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco.

AFFORDABLE Upper King Street.

William F. Browder in Red Square in 2005.

Yu Tingyun, left, lost his daughter, Yang, in the May earthquake in southwest China, and Huang Lianfen, right, lost a nephew. Ms. Huang holds an agreement that Chinese officials want parents to sign, saying they will not hold protests about collapsed schools.

A view of the wine production area of Château Figeac in St.-Émilion, where wines are re-classified every 10 years.

FRUITY TOUCH Boysenberries meet soft ice cream at Pizzeria Picco in Larkspur, Calif.

The legion of summer’s cinema superheroes, from left: Iron Man, Hancock and Batman. Expect more in 2009.

CASTING A WIDE NET Dwayne Spradlin, president of InnoCentive.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is right to demand a lot more accountability from the Air Force, in light of the recent revelations about comfort capsules.

POPPY FIELDS FOREVER A crop in Helmand Province in 2006. An unlikely coalition of corrupt Afghan officials, timorous Europeans, blinkered Pentagon officers and the Taliban has made poppy cultivation stubbornly resistant to eradication.