Mark Memmott

Play begins this morning at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, where the best golfers from around the world have gathered for the U.S. Open.

ESPN and NBC are sharing the broadcasting duties (click here for a schedule). There's also going to be some live video streamed here.

Words escape us on this one:

During season one of HBO's Games of Thrones series, "one of the many heads on a spike decorating King's Landing belonged to ex-president George Bush," the science and science fiction website io9 reports (fair warning: if you click on that link you'll see what we're talking about, and it's graphic).

The number of unemployed Americans who filed first-time claims for jobless benefits rose by 6,000 last week from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration reported this morning.

It says there were 386,000 first-time filings, up from a revised 380,000 (earlier, the agency had estimated there were 377,000 first-time clams in the week ended June 2).

Rulings by Egypt's highest court to dissolve the country's parliament and keep a former aide to Hosni Mubarak on the presidential runoff ballot have thrown that country's already shaky democracy into chaos.

Much is still unclear about what was happening.

NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson tells our Newscast Desk that:

The attack helicopters heading to Syria from Russia likely aren't new purchases, The New York Times reports this morning.

Rather, they're "helicopters that Syria had sent to Russia a few months ago for routine repairs and refurbishing" that are now being returned, administration officials tell the Times.

Let's put the serious stuff aside for a moment to celebrate something fun.

Along with saying, again, that his bank "let a lot of people down" when it lost more than $2 billion, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon added this prediction during his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee this morning:

"It's likely that there will be clawbacks."

There are now at least 19 large wildfires burning in nine Western states U.S. Forest Service officials say.

Saying that his country is "not violating any international law," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today defended his country's sale of weapons to Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime. He said Russia is not supplying anything that "can be used in battles with peaceful demonstrators."

And, Reuters reports, he "accused the United States of supplying rebels with weapons to fight against the government" — a charge the U.S. has rejected many times.

The much-anticipated list of Internet domain names that might soon join such familiar suffixes as .com, .edu and .gov is now online.

As expected, the nearly 2,000 suffixes that have been requested include some from companies who think they can help brand themselves with web addresses that end with things such as:

-- .apple

-- .bananarepublic

-- .chevy

-- .google

-- .lamborghini

Wholesale prices fell 1 percent in May from April thanks to an 8.9 percent plunge in the price of gasoline, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The overall decrease is the largest in one month since July 2009.

Excluding the energy and sectors, prices at the wholesale level ticked up 0.2 percent.

There's grim news from Iraq this morning, where scores of people have been killed in coordinated attacks on Shiite Muslim pilgrims. As often happens when stories such as these are developing, different news outlets are reporting different death tolls. No matter which report you read, however, the news is disturbing:

In a race seen as "a testing ground for Democratic and Republican messages" that will be used from now through Nov. 6, Democrat Ron Barber won Tuesday's special election in Arizona to fill the remaining seven months of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' term.