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[.]”

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The Ledes

Thursday, September 26, 2024

The New York Times:' live updates of Hurricane Helene developments today are here. “Hurricane Helene was barreling through the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday en route to Florida, where residents were bracing for extreme rain, destructive winds and deadly storm surge ahead of the storm’s expected landfall. The storm could intensify to a Category 4, if not higher, before making landfall late Thursday, and forecasters warned Helene’s anticipated large size could make its impacts felt across an extensive area. Areas as distant as Atlanta and the Appalachians are at risk for heavy rains.... Many forecast models show the storm making landfall late Thursday near Florida’s Big Bend Coast, a sparsely populated stretch....” ~~~

     ~~~ The Washington Post has forecasts for some cites in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina & Tennessee that are in or near the probable path of Helene. ~~~

     ~~~ This morning, an MSNBC weatherperson said Tallahassee (which is inland) would experience wind gusts of up to 120 m.p.h. and that the National Weather Service said expected 20-foot storm surges near the coast would be “unsurvivable.”

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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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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Thursday
Aug042011

The Commentariat -- August 5

** There's no Off Times Square today; because of a software glitch that has yet to be fixed, a significant number of commenters (including significant me) can't post comments. If I post a page later, it will be on Krugman's column. If you want to e-mail me your comments, I'll post them in the order received when I get up & running again. My e-mail address is ConstantWeader@gmail.com (Clicking on the link will bring up an e-mail form.) ...

... Paul Krugman: "It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery." ...

... "The Second Coming of Herbert Hoover":

... Floyd Norris of the New York Times on the Great Recession II: "It has been three decades since the United States suffered a recession that followed on the heels of the previous one. But it could be happening again. The unrelenting negative economic news of the past two weeks has painted a picture of a United States economy that fell further and recovered less than we had thought." ...

... Low-Information, No-Plan Legislators. Ezra Klein: "A dramatic gap has opened between the economy as Washington sees it -- and wants to intervene in it -- and the economy that actually exists.... Where will the recovery come from? The problem is that no one has an answer. And as one hopeful hypothesis after another is dashed, the markets are beginning to panic.... Today there's more stability, but we seem to have stabilized into an era of high unemployment, low growth and endless risk. Rather than recovering from the crisis, it is almost as if we have settled into it."

Nate Silver: "... the economy is struggling, and that’s a gigantic problem for Mr. Obama.... The stock market is among the least of a president’s worries.... The past few weeks have probably been bad for the re-election efforts of almost everyone in Washington, and today won’t have made them better." ...

... Here's something President Obama can worry about: Torey Van Oot of the Sacramento Bee: "The California Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus marked the commander-in-chief's 50th birthday by releasing a resolution that supports exploring a potential primary challenge in 2012 to the first-term Democratic president. The resolution, approved at a caucus meeting last weekend, criticizes Obama for 'negotiating away Democratic Party principles to extremist Republicans,' and cites entitlement cuts on the table in the recent budget negotiations, the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and 'disregard of his promises to the Labor movement' as some of many grievances the caucus has with Obama's performance so far." The post includes a copy of the full resolution.

** Mark Bittman of the New York Times: from tainted turkey to taxes. Essential reading for our conservative friends.

CW: an academic study confirms & quantifies what I've been saying for years. Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times: "The decline in organized labor’s power and membership has played a larger role in fostering increased wage inequality in the United States than is generally thought, according to a study published in the American Sociological Review this month. The study ... found that the decline in union power and density since 1973 explained a third of the increase in wage inequality among men since then, and a fifth of the increased inequality among women."

Just ten days after President Obama was sworn into office, Tom Brandt -- or his headline writer -- of the Eastern Echo (Ypsilani, Michigan) explained why Republicans would have such a confrontational relationship with Obama:

CW: the other day, Al Sharpton mentioned on-air that the rural airports for which the House bill cut funding were mostly in states with key Democratic Senators. I thought he might be exaggerating. But if you read Dana Milbank you'll see just what John Mica (R-Fla.), chair of the House transportation committee, was up to when he wrote the bill cutting funding. This idiot and his Congressional collaborators cost us taxpayers a billion dollars or so & put 80,000 Americans out of work for two weeks. Mica's real goal, BTW: weakening unions.

Jeremy Scahill of The Nation on "water treatment" at Guantanamo -- a sickening horror story:

Harold Cook, a Texas Democrat writing in the Texas Tribune, sure came up with a lot of reasons Gov. Rick "Perry Shouldn't Run for President."

Right Wing World

CW: some while back an Obama-hating leftie called me out, in print, for asserting that, among other things, Obama would be better than Mitt Romney on gay rights; ergo, it was okay for progressives to vote for the Republican presidential candidate. So there's this from Ben Smith: "Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has joined Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Sen. Pennsylvania Rick Santorum in signing a pledge to oppose same-sex marriage on a number of specific fronts." Read the terms of the pledge & see if you think Obama would sign it. ...

... Mystery Money. Michael Isikoff of NBC News: "Two campaign reform groups are asking the Justice Department to investigate a mysterious $1 million contribution to a political committee backing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney from an obscure company that shut down shortly after making the donation. The contribution to Restore Our Future, a so-called 'super PAC' formed by three former Romney political aides, drew scrutiny following an NBC News report on Thursday . The firm that gave the money, called W Spann LLC, was formed in March – with no listed officers or directors — made the contribution in April, then dissolved itself in July...."

Like Rep. Steve King (RTP-Iowa), Stephen Colbert is outraged by Obamacare's wanton new policy of providing reproductive health coverage for women:


This is hard to fathom. It came up on TimesWire (see the middle entry):

     ... CW: When I clicked on the link, I got a slightly raunchy "op-ed" with a NYT Web address that belittles Tom Friedman (oh no!). The writer is ID'd as a co-producer of "The Daily Show." Extremely strange.

News Ledes

AP: "With tens of thousands of jobs, more than $1 billion and their reputations on the line, Senate Democrats gave way Friday to a power play by House Republicans in order to end a partial two-week shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration. With lawmakers scattered for Congress' August recess, the consent of only two senators was required to pass a bill restoring the FAA's operating authority through Sept. 16. President Barack Obama signed it into law hours later."

New York Times: "In a verdict that brought a decisive close to a case that has haunted this city since most of it lay underwater nearly six years ago, five current and former New Orleans police officers were found guilty on all counts by a federal jury on Friday for shooting six citizens, two of whom died, and orchestrating a wide-ranging cover-up in the hours, weeks and years that followed." Read the whole article. Times-Picayune story here. Related videos here.

President Obama spoke about efforts to prepare veterans for the workforce this morning. Reuters: "President Barack Obama on Friday will propose a $120 million package of new tax credits for businesses that hire U.S. veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan...."...

     ... Update: here's a post-event AP report. See video above.

Bloomberg News: "Employers added more jobs than forecast in July, the jobless rate fell and wages climbed, easing concern the U.S. economy is grinding to a halt.Payrolls rose by 117,000 workers after a 46,000 increase in June that was more than originally estimated...."

Al Jazeera: "Syrian troops have killed at least 45 civilians in a tank assault to occupy the centre of Hama, according to an opposition activist, as President Bashar al-Assad seeks to crush a five-month-old uprising against his rule. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has said that Washington believes President Bashar al-Assad's government was responsible for more than 2,000 deaths in the crackdown, repeating that Washington believes Assad has 'lost his legitimacy to govern the Syrian people'."

Al Jazeera: "A Libyan rebel spokesman has claimed that a NATO airstrike on the western city of Zlitan has killed Khamis Gaddafi, one of the sons of Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi."

Al Jazeera: "European markets have plunged on deepening fears regarding a debt crisis in the European Union and concerns about US economic growth. London's FTSE-100, Paris' CAC-40 and Frankfurt's DAX indices all opened down over 3 per cent on Friday.... Earlier, Asian markets also tumbled, after heavy losses in European and US trading through the day on Thursday."

AP: "A jury convicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs of child sexual assault, in a case stemming from two young followers he took as brides in hat his church calls 'spiritual marriages.' ... Jeffs, who acted as his own attorney, stood mostly mute for his closing argument, staring at the floor, for all but a few seconds of the half hour he was allotted."

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