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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."

Contact Marie

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Page Links
Monday
Apr252011

The Commentariat -- April 26

The comments page for David Brooks is up on Off Times Square. Karen Garcia & I have posted our comments -- hours before you'll see them (if ever) on the New York Times site. Post your own. Update: Garcia & I have made the NYT cut, but Akhilleus, who now has posted on Off Times Square, has not.

My favorite definition of a humanist: 'One who strives to behave decently and honorably with no expectation of eternal rewards or punishments.' -- David Clark, commenting on Off Times Square on Ross Douthat's column

The Guantánamo Files page in the Guardian provides a pretty handy way to review the newly-released WikiLeaks documents. ...

... New York Times Editors: "The internal documents from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, published in The Times on Monday were a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released." ...

... Scott Shane & Benjamin Weiser of the New York Times: "The newly revealed assessments ... have revived the dispute, nearly as old as the prison, over whether mistreatment of some prisoners there and the prison’s operation outside the criminal justice system invalidate the government’s conclusions about the detainees. Hina Shamsi, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the assessments 'are rife with uncorroborated evidence, information obtained through torture, speculation, errors and allegations that have been proven false.'"

... Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times: "Fresh and often chilling portraits of [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed and the other most-prized 'high value' detainees at Guantanamo emerged from the latest release of classified material by WikiLeaks...." ...

... Glenn Greenwald: "How could anyone possibly justify prosecuting WikiLeaks for disseminating classified information while not prosecuting these newspapers who have done exactly the same thing?" Greenwald goes on to contrast U.S. (New York Times & Washington Post) coverage with British stories on the files. Link to the Guardian stories Greenwald highlights here. ...

... Yesterday, I linked this WashPo article on why President Obama failed to close Gitmo. Marcy Wheeler zeroes in on the important take-aways from the Post's reporting.

A friend sent me this video on how to deal with a racist someone who makes a racist remark:

What the Ryan/Republican budget plan really means:

By Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Thanks to A. Friend for sending it my way.

Like the odds of typing monkeys eventually keying in the complete works of Shakespeare, there's a chance Donald Trump will get something right. He just did:

The seniors are afraid. The plan Paul Ryan put forth has made the Democrats so happy. -- Donald Trump 

Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post: "The state funds that pay pension and health-care benefits to retired teachers, corrections officers and millions of other public workers faced a cumulative shortfall of at least $1.26 trillion at the end of fiscal 2009, according to a new report. The study, to be released Tuesday by the Pew Center on the States, found that the pension and health-care funding gap increased by 26 percent over the previous year. Pew officials said the growing shortfall was driven by inadequate state contributions, an aging population and market losses that accompanied the recession." ...

... Michael Cooper & Mary Williams Walsh of the New York Times: "Conventional wisdom and the laws and constitutions of many states have long held that the pensions being earned by current government workers are untouchable. But as the fiscal crisis has lingered, officials in strapped states from California to Illinois have begun to take a second look, to see whether there might be loopholes allowing them to cut the pension benefits of current employees." ...

... Paul Krugman debunks the "zombie" claim that "there has been a huge expansion in the federal government under Obama.... What we’re seeing isn’t some drastic expansion of Big Government; we’re seeing the government we already had, responding to a terrible economic slump."

Steve Mufson & Jon Cohen of the Washington Post: "The Post-ABC poll shows that 60 percent of independents who say they’ve been hit hard by surging gas prices also say they definitely won’t support Obama in his bid for reelection. In a hypothetical matchup with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the top GOP performer in the Post-ABC poll, Romney wins by 24 points among the independents who have taken a severe financial hit because of gas prices, and the president is up 7 percentage points among other independents.

Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic: "Former Solicitor General Paul Clement took quite the parting shot at his former Washington law firm Monday when he announced that he would leave King & Spalding so that he could continue to represent House Republicans in their effort to defend the Defense of Marriage Act." Read Cohen's whole post.

Nate Silver "on the largely irrelevant news about Haley Barbour not running for President." CW: an interesting post in which Silver explains why Barbour appears to be shrewder than the Serious People. ...

... Karen Garcia is not joining the Obama campaign. Here's the video that Garcia found so unconvincing. It's a snoozer:

Fox "News" Shocker! President Obama Didn't Tell You Sunday Was Easter. Steve Benen: "Fox News today slammed President Obama for not issuing a proclamation acknowledging Easter. (Somehow, Christians managed to hear about the holiday anyway.) Conservative activists quickly followed suit.... It's a garbage story, even by the standards of GOP media.... President Obama hosted an Easter prayer breakfast; the Obamas attended Easter services; and the White House hosted a big Easter Egg Roll for families today. No proclamation was issued, but no other modern presidents -- from either party -- have issued Easter proclamations, either."

After auditing the Obamas' tax return, Stephen Colbert assesses the Republican field of presidential candidates, with emphasis on the Donald:

... Hooray! More Conspiracy Theories from the Donald. Beth Fouhy of the AP: "... Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump ... offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate. 'I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?' Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records." ...

... PLUS ... CNN: Trump claims Barack Obama's birth certificate is "missing." Too bad that "CNN's Gary Tuchman also interviewed the former director of the Hawaii Department of Health, who said she has seen the original birth certificate in the vault at the Department of Health." ...

... AND ... Fox "News": "Donald Trump slammed Robert De Niro Monday, following the Oscar-winner’s criticisms of him this weekend, telling Fox News that the actor is 'not the brightest bulb on the planet.'"

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker makes a gross misstatement about Medicaid, which he wants to dismantle. CW: It's always hard to know when Walker is out-and-out lying and when he just doesn't know WTF he's talking about.

* Where facts never intrude.

News Ledes

Politico: "The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times – disclosures that Bush denounced as a breach of national security and that stoked a congressional debate about whether the government had overstepped its authority.... The decision not to prosecute former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm means it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged for the disclosures that led to the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005...." Update: the New York Times story is here.

New York Times: "Federal investigators said Monday that they had discovered flaws in the riveting of the roof of the Southwest Airlines plane that tore open in flight on April 1, a finding that experts said probably showed manufacturing defects.

Still Playing Chicken. Politico: "Speaker John Boehner won’t guarantee a vote on raising the debt limit, the latest threat in an increasingly high stakes game of chicken with the White House over whether Congress will inch closer to letting the nation default on its credit."

AP: "A recall effort targeting two Democratic state senators has fallen short at the deadline. Organizers had until Monday afternoon to turn in petitions to recall Sen. Lena Taylor of Milwaukee and Sen. Fred Risser of Madison. But the organizers failed to meet the deadline."

AP: "Gunfire reverberated Tuesday in the southern Syrian city of Daraa where the dead still lay unclaimed in the streets a day after a brutal government crackdown on the popular revolt against President Bashar Assad, residents said." ...

... Al Jazeera Update: "As the Syrian government intensifies its crackdown against pro-democracy protesters, the international community steps up its pressure on president Bashar al-Assad to stop the bloodletting. In a session on Tuesday, members of the UN Security Council discussed the uptick in violence, but failed to issue a collective statement. Still, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, condemned the violence against 'peaceful protesters' and called on the Syrian government to respect the people's rights to freedom of expression."

New York Times: "The Ford Motor Company reported on Tuesday its largest first-quarter profit since 1998, despite a shift in sales to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars."

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