Henry the Intern is on sabbatical. The Daily Briefing isn’t, though it is a bit later than usual.

• President George W. Bush makes a surprise visit to Iraq to visit with new Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has just announced a new security plan for Baghdad. [NYT, WP]

• Karl Rove’s attorney announces to the media that his client will not be indicted in Patrick Fitzgerald’s Valerie Plame leak case. Rove is “delighted, obviously….” [WP, NYT]
• Israeli airstrikes kill 10 people in Gaza, hours after “hundreds of Palestinian police loyal to Abbas went on a rampage against the Hamas government.” [NYT]
• The FBI released the 2005 crime statistics, showing an overall nationwide rise in violent crime of 2.5 percent, fueled by a “a surge of killings and other attacks in many Midwestern cities.” Robbery was up 14.6 percent in DC, though rapes and murders were down. [WP]
• David H. Safavian becomes the first person to go to trial on charges related to the Jack Abramoff scandal, with prosecutors accusing him of “doing Jack Abramoff’s bidding” as a federal procurement officer. [WP]
• The EPA loosened a rule designed to keep groundwater near oil drilling sites clean after a well-connected Texas oilman wrote a letter to Karl Rove. Environmentalists are accusing the administration of “political payoff,” due to Rove’s forwarding of the letter to White House environmental advisors with a note reading “get a response ASAP.” [LAT]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, greets Palestinian Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Zahar, right, in Tehran, Iran. Sunday, June 11, 2006. (AP Photo) MORE »

Oh man, Olmert, we were going to ask you! Best we can come up with is a big-ass wall, but you’re well ahead of us on that one. MORE »

The major question facing our nation today is not immigration or war or abortion or how those motherfucking snakes got on that motherfucking plane — no, it’s whether political cartoonists will ever stop making jokes about Dick Cheney shooting a guy in the face. Though, uh, it’s not much of a question, as our resident cartoon expert The Comics Curmudgeon learns this week — the answer is pretty plainly “no.”

Still, though, Today’s Cartoons just really want you to like them. All the cross-hatched bloodshed, after the jump.

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OMG BEST WEBSITE EVER
It’s Hamas’ kids’ site. The best proof yet that they’re willing to act as a legitimate Governing body — just like ours! Obviously, we can’t read a word of this, but who needs to? There’s the cute li’l cowboy/mujahideen riding through an inexplicably American Western landscape to do battle with Infidels/Injuns, there’s big-eyed manga Palestinian girl with slinghot, there’s vintage animated gifs (’90s web design is back!), everything about this site is brilliant. We want to join the intifada right now! Maybe we can be in their Top 8! MORE »

• Senators, by vote of 79 to 19, pass a resolution marking next year as “a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty. . . thereby creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq.” Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.): “Staying the course will not do.” Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.): “It’s a continuation of the oversight we’ve been conducting for years in the United States Senate.” WP, NYT, WSJ, USAT]
• Senators from both parties “are demanding that the administration show that it has a strategy to turn the conflict over to the Iraqis and eventually bring U.S. troops home.” [WP]
• Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) defends critics of the war: “[T]he Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them. . . to not question your government is unpatriotic.” [WP]
• Oil executives did meet with Cheney’s energy task force in 2001. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.): “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force.” [WP]
• Alito tries to downplay conservative remarks from 1985. [WP, NYT, LAT]
• Rice reaches deal on access to the Gaza Strip. [WP, NYT, NYT, USAT]
• Lewis Libby plans to “seek testimony from journalists beyond those cited in the indictment and will probably challenge government agreements limiting their grand jury testimony.” [NYT]

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