It is not by any means clear, as we go to press, that Untitled Monument will be ready on time.
Walk right up to the monument, press your hand against the cool, smooth stone and listen, as if the obelisk were a giant radio needle receiving some riotous transmission from deep space.
The National Park Service, which invited members of the press to tour the monument before its reopening, said it concluded after the terrorist attacks that it would be unsafe to allow the public back inside the statue itself.
The Eiffel Tower was shut to tourists around midday, the monument's press service said.
The Newseum, he emphasized, is not meant to be a monument to the press, but to its freedom.
It is not by any means clear, as we go to press, that Rachel Whiteread's Untitled Monument - her cast of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square - will be unveiled on 4 June, as intended.
The family sneaked out in Washington on Sunday night for what Ms. Palin called an "incognito" tour of the national monuments, ditching the press after creating a news frenzy earlier in the day at the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally.
President Bush placed himself against the backdrop of one of the United States' most famous monuments today to press for Senate approval of a new Department of Homeland Security, even as Senator Tom Daschle, the Democrat from South Dakota who has stood in the way of the president's version of the plan, sat right up in front.
Murray, who sat alongside Clooney at a press conference for their new film The Monuments Men, said Britain "can take the lead on this sort of thing, letting art go back to where it came from".
Mr Putin made the comments at a press conference after he was asked about a monument to Stalin being put up in Moscow.
