The Ledes

Saturday, September 28, 2024

Washington Post: “Rescue teams raced to submerged homes, scoured collapsed buildings and steered thousands from overflowing dams as Helene carved a destructive path Friday, knocking out power and flooding a vast arc of communities across the southeastern United States. At least 40 people were confirmed killed in five states since the storm made landfall late Thursday as a Category 4 behemoth, unleashing record-breaking storm surge and tree-snapping gusts. 4 million homes and businesses have lost electricity across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, prompting concerns that outages could drag on for weeks. Mudslides closed highways. Water swept over roofs and snapped phone lines. Houses vanished from their foundations. Tornadoes added to the chaos. The mayor of hard-hit Canton, N.C., called the scene 'apocalyptic.'” An AP report is here.

The Wires
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The Ledes

Friday, September 27, 2024

New York Times: “Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' to the acid-tongued dowager countess on 'Downton Abbey,' died on Friday in London. She was 89.”

The Washington Post's live updates of developments related to Hurricane Helene are here: “Hurricane Helene left one person dead in Florida and two in Georgia as it sped north. One of the biggest storms on record to hit the Gulf Coast, Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend area on Thursday night as a Category 4 colossus with winds of up to 140 mph before weakening to Category 1. Catastrophic winds and torrential rain from the storm — which the National Hurricane Center forecast would eventually slow over the Tennessee Valley — were expected to continue Friday across the Southeast and southern Appalachians.” ~~~

     ~~~ The New York Times' live updates are here.

Mediaite: “Fox Weather’s Bob Van Dillen was reporting live on Fox & Friends about flooding in Atlanta from Hurricane Helene when he was interrupted by the screams of a woman trapped in her car. During the 7 a.m. hour, Van Dillen was filing a live report on the massive flooding in the area. Fox News viewers could clearly hear the urgent screams for help emerging from a car stuck on a flooded road in the background of the live shot. Van Dillen ... told Fox & Friends that 911 had been called and that the local Fire Department was on its way. But as he continued to file the report, the screams did not stop, so Van Dillen cut the live shot short.... Some 10 minutes later, Fox & Friends aired live footage of Van Dillen carrying the woman to safety, waking through chest-deep water while the flooding engulfed her car in the background[.]”

Help!

To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Page Links
Wednesday
Nov232011

Thanksgiving Day

"Guernica," U.C. Davis Edition.... CW: I debated about posting this link, but the "reviewers" make some good points. For several reasons, this appears to be is a genuine amazon.com page, but I can't be sure. If it is the real deal, by the time you get to it, the page may have changed, causing you to wonder why I posted the link. ...

... Also, the reader who sent me the link said she found it on Brilliant at Breakfast. Jill of BoB has more on the science of pepper spray. plus video of Rachel Maddow's segment on the same.

President Obama's Weekly Address:

     ... The transcript is here.

CW: When he was an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama had a reputation as a pretty good poker player. It occurred to me a long while back that maybe he knew how to play a lousy hand when he let John Boehner back out of the debt ceiling deal. Ezra Klein, who's making a different point, also makes mine: "Imagine if the Democrats offered Republicans a deficit deal that had more than $3 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts, assigned most of those spending cuts to the Pentagon, and didn't take a dime from Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare beneficiaries. Republicans would laugh at them. But without quite realizing it, that's the deal Republicans have now offered to the Democrats." ...

... Matt Yglesias of Slate agrees with Klein's analysis: "It's possible that by refusing to agree to a relatively modest tax increase relative to current policy (i.e., relative to full extension of the Bush tax cuts) the congressional Republicans have locked into place a much more left-wing deal in which the majority of deficit reduction is done by tax hikes and a majority of spending cuts come on the national security side.... if Obama gets re-elected, [the Republicans will] have fumbled the policy substance in a catastrophic way and put in place a budget framework that's much more left-wing than the one Obama was begging them to agree to a few months ago." CW: this is why the 2012 election is so important, as Yglesias says.

The U.S. Financial Crisis, Explained in Irish (via Charles Pierce):

Mark Viera of the New York Times: "Local judges have recused themselves from handling the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse case, and lawyers for two Penn State officials who were indicted for perjury have begun to raise questions about the background of the prosecution’s chief witness, himself a Penn State assistant coach." There's a related AP story here. The Times also has an in-depth report on incidents involving Victim 1.

Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post: "Less than a week before U.N. negotiators convene in South Africa for a new round of talks aimed at forging a global climate pact, a hacker has released an apparent second round of e-mails from the University of East Anglia in Britain that seek to portray climate scientists in a negative light. ...

     ... Bryan Walsh of Time: "They've apparently got bupkis."

Nontheists. Kimberly Winston in the Washington Post: "... scores of ... atheists, young and old, have made ... videos for a new campaign designed to build community and support among nontheists around the world. Dubbed 'We Are Atheism,' the campaign was launched this fall by three students at the University of Kansas." ...

... Supertheists. Elizabeth Tenety in the Washington Post: this weekend, the Roman Catholic Church will begin using a new English translation of the liturgy. The article includes the Church's guide for the changes to the people's parts in the liturgy.

On the front page of the New York Times is a six-part video by food writer Melissa Clark with helpful advice on how to cook a turkey. For classic hints on fowl preparation, we turn to this old chestnut from "Julia Child":

... AND here's hoping your Thanksgiving goes better than Loudon Wainwright III's. "Thanksgiving" begins 3 minutes in. Another classic (P.S. If all does not go well, consider your family "normal"):


Right Wing World

"In His Own Words." Mitt Romney Endorses Obama in 2012. From Buzzfeed. For the backstory, see yesterday's Right Wing World. Plus, more from CBS News on Romney's "intentionally" deceitful ad. You can see the PolitiFact rating to the left.

Marc Ambinder of the National Journal: "During [Tuesday] night's debate, Newt Gingrich moved in a direction that is decidedly orthogonal to the party's conservative base on immigration. Whether Newt stays in his new position is to-be-determined. But if he does, it might produce from the probable Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, the type of reaction that President Obama's campaign advisers would relish." The post includes the text of the Gingrich-Romney exchange. And here's a DNC video on topic:

From last Thursday, Jon Stewart sums of the Republican race for president:

... AND Steve Stromberg of the Washington Post sums up Tuesday night's debate: "Romney and Gingrich won. Romney because he is still the putative frontrunner and the likely nominee, and he did not mess up tonight. Gingrich because he held his own in the spotlight, unlike some of the previous anti-Romneys in this primary campaign. Otherwise, Perry still looked tired, Bachmann still sounded kooky, Huntsman was still too moderate, Ron Paul was still Ron Paul, and Cain still gave no sense he belonged on stage, even among this cast of characters.

If you want to know how bad guys look when they dress up in suits to have their portraits made, the photo that accompanies Ezra Klein's post (linked above) answers that burning question:

The GOP Congressional leadership, in April. Bloomberg photo.

News Ledes

AP: "Los Angeles and San Francisco are seeking long-term solutions to the entrenched encampments by anti-Wall Street protesters, hoping to end the drain on resources and the frayed nerves among police and politicians. Officials in both cities have considered providing protesters with indoor space that would allow the movement to carry out its work in more sanitary, less public facilities." ...

     ... Oops! Missed this one: Yahoo! News: "More than a dozen news organizations are demanding a meeting with the NYPD after as many as 10 journalists were arrested--and dozens of others harassed -- while trying to cover last week's raid on Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park. The New York Times is helping coordinate the news organizations' complaints with the NYPD."

New York Times: "Two Egyptian generals offered an unusual apology on Thursday for the killings of protesters in Tahrir Square, the iconic landmark of the country’s revolution, as violence around the huge plaza eased decisively after five days of intense clashes between security forces and protesters demanding an end to military rule. On what had been the front line of the confrontation, army troops in black helmets and visors replaced the police — reviled by many protesters...." Al Jazeera story here, with video. ...

     ... AP Update: "Egypt's military rulers said Thursday that parliamentary elections starting next week will he held on schedule despite spreading unrest. The military also rejected protesters' demands that it im mediately step down...."

Reuters: "France pressed Germany on Thursday to let the European Central Bank act decisively to halt a stampede out of euro zone government bond markets that has raised doubts about the survival of the single currency. French President Nicolas Sarkozy met German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti in Strasbourg, seeking a trade-off between EU treaty change to impose greater fiscal discipline on euro zone states, demanded by Germany, and more emergency help from the central bank."

It isn't Thanksgiving in the country from which the pilgrims fled, so the Leveson inquiry into tabloid hacking goes on. The Guardian's liveblog is here, and it has star power.

Reuters: "Prospects for the $39 billion sale of Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA unit to AT&T darkened after the U.S. telecoms giant said it would take a $4 billion charge in case of failure and the pair gave up on one avenue of regulatory approval. The companies have not given up hope of sealing the deal but analysts said it now looks less likely than ever."

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