The Ledes

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

The New York Times is live-updating developments in the progress of Hurricane Helene. "Helene continued to power north in the Caribbean Sea, strengthening into a hurricane Wednesday morning, on a path that forecasters expect will bring heavy amounts of rain to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and western Cuba before it begins to move toward Florida’s Gulf Coast."

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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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Page Links
Friday
Jun102011

The Commentariat -- June 11

I have an Open Thread up on Off Times Square.

The President's Weekly Address:

Joe Nocera writes his first useful column in months -- a full-throated defense of Elizabeth Warren.

Charles Blow covers the report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which concluded that: “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." Blow adds, "As the A.C.L.U. pointed out last week, 'The racial disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.'” The White House's response? -- Really, we're doing a great job. ...

... Here's a related Democracy Now story from March 2010 -- an interview of legal scholar Michelle Alexander, whose book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, documents the way the war on drugs has been used to create a black underclass. "... today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870." The transcript is here.

Thom Shanker & Steve Erlanger of the New York Times: "In his final policy speech before he steps down, [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates issued a dire and unusually direct warning that the United States, the traditional leader and patron of [NATO], was exhausted by a decade of war and its own mounting budget deficits and simply might not see NATO as worth supporting any longer.... The White House made clear on Friday that in the tough tone of his remarks, Mr. Gates was speaking for the Pentagon, not necessarily for the administration.... But a White House official did say that Mr. Gates’s speech raised 'legitimate concerns' about whether NATO was providing enough resources for the war and that the Obama administration fully expected the alliance to meet its challenges."

David Sirota covers the ten top stories you missed while you were reading wall-to-wall coverage of Weinergate.

Paul Krugman posts a graph illustrating "Why I Don't Believe in the American People." The title is satirical. The graph illuminates one reason Tim Pawlenty "has turned out to be a much bigger fool than I or, I think, anyone imagined." ...

... AND Krugman does the math & finds that "there’s a very good case to be made that austerity now isn’t just a bad idea because of its impact on the economy and the unemployed; it may well fail even at the task of helping the budget balance." CW: That the jokers in the White House can't get this, or more accurately, refuse to get this, is a scandal.

Dana Milbank: "With [Council of Economic Adviser chief Austan] Goolsbee returning to Chicago, it will be that much more difficult for Obama to resist the political pressure to be rash."

Natalie Wolchover of Live Science: "La Niña and global warming are both partly responsible for some of the episodes of wild weather, experts say. However, natural atmospheric variability has also come into play this year; to some extent, the pile-on of wild weather is random chance."

A Feel-Good Story with Bipartisanship, too. James Cullum of the Huntington-Belle Haven (Virginia) Patch: "Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack kicked off the 'Virginia No Kid Hungry Campaign' to an audience of hundreds on Tuesday at Barcroft Elementary School in Arlington. Their goal: to end childhood hunger in Virginia by 2015."

The Epistolary Palin

Jim Rutenberg & William Yardley had the unenviable task of writing the New York Times story on the release of e-mails written to & from Sarah Palin for the brief time she was governor of Alaska. ...

... You can "explore" the Palin e-mails on this New York Times interactive page. Here's the lede: "A collection of e-mails between Sarah and Todd Palin and Alaska public officials during Ms. Palin's first 22 months as governor. The messages were originally requested under state public records laws in 2008. The documents were released on Friday, June 10, at 9 a.m. Alaska time. E-mails are organized by the date of each conversation. The New York Times has redacted some documents to remove offensive language." The page also provides the facility for you to alert the Times of any e-mails "of interest."

Here's the Washington Post lead story, by Dan Eggen & Robert O'Harrow, on the Palin e-mails. ...

... You can also read the e-mails beginning on this Washington Post page, which doesn't look quite as user-friendly as the Times format. There are also links on the page to related stories, some of which might be interesting & probably none of which I'll read.

Sean Cockerham & Erika Bolstad of the Anchorage Daily News: "A massive trove of emails released Friday from Sarah Palin's time as governor show a chief executive who was engrossed with countering her critics and increasingly upset at news coverage as she vaulted into international celebrity." Page includes links to related stories.

Becky Bohrer of the AP: "Much of the country was taken by surprise when Sarah Palin became the Republican vice presidential candidate in August 2008, but newly released emails make it clear that the little-known Alaska governor was angling for the slot months before Sen. John McCain asked her to join him on the GOP ticket. Earlier that summer, Palin and her staff began pushing to find a larger audience for the governor, wedging her into national conversations and nudging the McCain campaign to notice her."

Dave Weigel provides a short list of e-mail troves he wants to read more than Palin's.

Right Wing World *

Matt Browner of AmericaBlog:"Media Matters reports 'Thursday night on Fox Business, John Stossel used about seven minutes of his show to host a "debate" between former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and an actor who impersonates President Obama.' It's a fairly embarrassing video to watch, both in terms of how insignificant it makes Gary Johnson look and how absurd Stossel's program is." CW: this could not have been more ridiculous if Fred Armisen of SNL had appeaed as Obama:

The Man of (Absurd) Ideas. Washington Post political reporters provide a play-by-play of how the Gingrich campaign disintegrated. CW: My favorite sentence: "Gingrich became convinced that one of the keys to his winning in Iowa was in targeting the Chinese community living in the state."

* Is batshit crazy.

News Ledes

New York Times: "The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, on Saturday called on Representative Anthony D. Weiner to resign, underscoring the growing concern among Democrats that his online exchanges with women had become a distraction for the party." ...

     ... Story has been updated with new lede: "Defying forceful demands for his resignation, Representative Anthony D. Weiner of New York said on Saturday that he was entering a psychological treatment center and seeking a leave of absence from the House to deal with a pattern of reckless online behavior with women."

New York Times: "The International Monetary Fund, still struggling to find a new leader after the arrest of its managing director last month in New York, was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "A coalition of union groups active in state Senate recalls now advocates that Democrats field fake Republican candidates to run in primary elections against GOP state senators -- just as Republicans are fielding fake Democrats to run against those who challenging GOP incumbents. Friday evening, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin issued a statement that neither endorsed nor ruled out the idea, saying the party will 'review the options available.'"

New York Times: "The government issued warnings on Friday about two materials used daily by millions of Americans, saying that one causes cancer and the other might. Government scientists listed formaldehyde as a carcinogen, and said it is found in worrisome quantities in plywood, particle board, mortuaries and hair salons. They also said that styrene, which is used in boats, bathtubs and in disposable foam plastic cups and plates, may cause cancer but is generally found in such low levels in consumer products that risks are low."

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