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You’d never know by looking at these photos that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had suffered a gunshot wound to the head five months ago. Two pictures of her were released on Facebook by her staff on Sunday, showing her with shorter, darker hair and flashing a big smile in both photos, which were taken on May 17.

Giffords spokeswoman Pia Carusone says the Congresswoman has come a long way since she survived a gunshot to the left side of her forehead in an assassination attempt in which six people were killed and 13 wounded on January 8. While Giffords’ recovery has been called “miraculous,” Carusone told the Arizona Republic that Giffords is still dealing with speech difficulties:

“She is borrowing upon other ways of communicating. Her words are back more and more now, but she’s still using facial expressions as a way to express. Pointing. Gesturing. Add it all together, and she’s able to express the basics of what she wants or needs. But, when it comes to a bigger and more complex thought that requires words, that’s where she’s had the trouble.”

Her doctors are pleased with her progress, and are said to be optimistic about her chances of making “a tremendously good recovery.” According to Carusone, Giffords’ doctors say she’s about halfway through the most important time for recovery from an injury such as this, where most progress is made in the first 12 to 14 months.

Join us in wishing the Congresswoman all the best.

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Admitting that he had “not been honest with myself, my family and my constituents,” Rep. Anthony Weiner has confessed at a press conference that he sent via Twitter the picture that has captivated Washington for the past week — and that he lied about his account being hacked.

“I regret not being honest about this,” Weiner said in a tearful statement. “I was embarrassed, I was humiliated. I was trying to protect my wife. I was trying to protect myself from shame.”

He claimed to have tweeted the picture on May 27 to Seattle student Gennette Cordova “as a joke” but then “panicked” and removed the tweet from his Twitter account. Cordova, however, doesn’t understand what joke that would be. “Am I the only one still confused?” she tweeted during the press conference.

“Once I realized I had posted it on Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said I’d been hacked,” Weiner explained.

Weiner said he has had “cursory direct message contact” with Cordova and that she was not one of the women he was having an online relationship with.

Weiner said he has had online relationships with six unnamed women on Facebook and his wife knew about them in general — but she did not know until this morning that he had lied about his Twitter account being hacked. He said he had never met the women in person and the relationships had been entirely based on conversations on the Internet, conducted from his home computer rather than a government machine. All the women had received inappropriate photos from Weiner. He claimed not to know the ages of the women and they had all claimed they were adults.

“It’s always true in social media that you are relying on those characterizations, and I took them at their characterizations,” he said.

“This was me doing a dumb thing, doing it repeatedly and then lying about it,” Weiner said. His wife was not standing by his side, and he broke down several times when mentioning her.

Weiner insisted that he would not be resigning and would be “fighting very hard” to persuade his constituents that he should be re-elected in 2012.

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Just one week after announcing Events grouping for photos, Twitpic is rolling out Face Tagging.

Just as you do on Facebook, you can now tag images of you and your friends and acquaintances on TwitpicTwitpic. Below the image in question, just click the blue link reading “Add/Edit Faces.”

When you tag your pics, you’ll also have the option to tweet out who you’ve tagged. You’ll be able to add real names and/or Twitter usernames to the pics, and others can see the tags when they mouse over the picture.

Users will be familiar with the Facebook-like interface. Here’s what the feature looks like on the site:

Last week, the service added the ability to group your photos based on the event at which they were taken. In practice, this feature works a lot like a FlickrFlickr set, letting users organize, define and showcase their pictures quickly and easily and making the discovery process easier for both humans and web crawlers.

Twitpic has also just reached its 10 million users mark and is gearing up for more group and geo-location features from this service. To get a better idea of where Twitpic might be heading in the months to come, you can check out this video interview with Twitpic founder Noah Everett on the future of Twitter-based photo sharing.

Are these new features going to make Twitpic more interesting, fun and useful for you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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