Ten Words from Today's NY Times - June 20, 2012

CAIRO — Former President Hosni Mubarak’s health deteriorated rapidly and he was rushed to a military hospital on Tuesday.

In recent days, the generals had moved to seize the kind of uncontested authority that the former president wielded during his nearly three decades in power.

The confusion over his health injected new volatility into the country’s growing political and constitutional crisis.

His health had also declined rapidly after his sentencing, when he was flown by helicopter from the courthouse to a hospital ward in a notorious prison where his government’s political prisoners had served their sentences.

And in Trenton — which has already cut a third of its police force, hundreds of school district employees and at least 150 other public workers — the only way the city will forestall the loss of 60 more firefighters is if a federal grant comes through.

The losses appeared to be tapering off earlier this year, but have accelerated for the last three months, creating the single biggest drag on the recovery in many areas.

Public workers became a point of contention in the presidential campaign recently when Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, criticized President Obama for wanting to increase the number of government employees through stimulus measures.

On Saturday, the teachers union ratified an agreement to save more than 4,000 jobs by taking furlough days.

They were connoisseurs, this was their field of expertise, and a curator like Kirk Varnedoe, Mr. Elderfield’s predecessor at the Modern, would think nothing of offering his view of a drawing attributed to Rodin, his specialty.

The anxiety has even touched the supreme arbiter of the genuine and fake: the catalogue raisonné, the definitive, scholarly compendium of an artist’s work.