Bidding on TV broadcast rights for the 2014 and 2016 Olympics will take place Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland, and there seems to be a decent chance that NBC — working without longtime NBC sports chief Dick Ebersol, who recently resigned after failing to reach terms with the leadership that came in when Comcast took over — won't be the winner, for the first time since CBS carried the Winter Games in 1998.

After nearly two years in prison on a gun charge, former New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress was released this morning.

Now, the watch is on to see if he plays in the National Football League again.

There is, of course, recent precedent to cite. After nearly two years in prison on a conviction related to dog fighting, quarterback Michael Vick, once a star with the Atlanta Falcons, returned to the league in 2009 and to stardom with the Philadelphia Eagles.

In what The Associated Press decribes as a "strong voice," former International Monetary Fund leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn this morning pleaded not guilty to the charge that he attempted to rape a maid at a Manhattan hotel last month.

As the AP adds, "the 62-year-old Strauss-Kahn is on house arrest under armed guard. The French politician resigned his IMF post after his May 14 arrest."

After a hiatus caused by traveling, royalty, and other inconveniences, the morning roundup returns.

In the beginning, God created light and dark, severed day from night, land from sea, and created all the birds of the air, fish of the sea, and plants and animals of the world. Then he created Adam and Eve in His very image and set humanity in dominion over all of creation.

We of the Abrahamic religions were, and many remain, enchanted. In the West, this enchantment lasted until the 16th century with the black and white magi. The former sought by occult magic to stand nature on her head and wrest their due.

The deaths of five American troops today in central Iraq makes for an awful milestone. It is "the single largest loss of life for the American military in Iraq in the past two years," The Associated Press notes.

And, "the deaths raised to 4,459 the number of American service members who have died in Iraq, according to an Associated Press count."

There's been a bit of a kerfuffle the past couple days over something Sarah Palin said about Paul Revere.

The former Alaska governor, 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, potential 2012 GOP presidential contender and Fox News contributor told reporters in New England that Revere "warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free."

Jack White is a regular contributor to The Root.

My old pal Paul Delaney, a fellow contributor to The Root, recently asked me what kind of speech I thought Barack Obama's Republican challenger would make to a mainstream black audience during next year's presidential campaign.

It's a good question because every four years, the GOP and its standard-bearer reaffirm their determination to go after every vote, including those of black America — and then proceed to prove their insincerity.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Jamie Holmes is a policy analyst at the New America Foundation.