The Ledes

Thursday, September 19, 2024

New York Times: “A body believed to be of the suspect in a Kentucky highway shooting that left five people seriously injured this month was found on Wednesday, the authorities said, ending a manhunt that stretched into a second week and set the local community on edge. The Kentucky State Police commissioner, Phillip Burnett Jr., said in a Wednesday night news conference that at approximately 3:30 p.m., two troopers and two civilians found an unidentified body in the brush behind the highway exit where the shooting occurred.... The police have identified the suspect of the shooting as Joseph A. Couch, 32. They said that on Sept. 7, Mr. Couch perched on a cliff overlooking Interstate 75 about eight miles north of London, Ky., and opened fire. One of the wounded was shot in the face, and another was shot in the chest. A dozen vehicles were riddled with gunfire.”

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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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The Commentariat -- June 5, 2016

Presidential Race

Chas Danner of New York: "Nearly 18 million Californians are now registered to vote, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced on Friday, the most voters ever registered in advance of a state primary there. 98 percent of the almost 650,000 new voter registrations occurred over the final 45 days of registration, which ended on May 23, and 76 percent of them were for the Democratic Party. That may be welcome news for Bernie Sanders...." CW: As Dan Balz points out in the article linked below, Trump has "wasted time" in California because he thinks he can win the general election there. A Republican has not won the California presidential election since 1988.

Democrats are holding their primary in Puerto Rico today.

AP: "Hillary Clinton scored a sweeping win in the US Virgin Islands on Saturday, picking up all seven pledged delegates at stake as she inched tantalizingly close to the Democratic nomination. She is now just 60 delegates short of the 2,383 needed to advance to the November general election. The party said Clinton won 84.2% of the vote, while Bernie Sanders earned 12.2%. Under Democratic National Committee rules, a candidate must win at least 15% of the vote to be eligible to receive delegates." -- CW

Ken Thomas of the AP: "Nearing the end of the primary season, a defiant Bernie Sanders predicted Saturday that the Democratic presidential process would lead to a contested summer convention against Hillary Clinton, pushing back against the likelihood that the former secretary of state will soon declare victory." CW: Good luck with that, Bernie.

Amy Davidson of the New Yorker: (Also linked below.) Clinton has made plenty of bad moves with regard to her e-mail server. The pressure that is on her as a result cannot all be ascribed to her enemies, and if she ignores that she will only help them. It is, for example, unfathomable that she and her campaign allowed her decision not to cooperate fully with the State Department's Inspector General to come as a surprise to the public when his report was issued last month, in contradiction with the campaign's public message. That was entirely within her team's control." -- CW

Louis Nelson of Politico: "Donald Trump is an 'insecure moneygrubber,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren told the assembled Democrats of Massachusetts at the state's party convention Saturday. He is also, according to Warren's prepared remarks: Scary, loud, outrageous, offensive, small, a failure and fraudster-in-chief. Those are just a handful of the bombs Warren hurled Trump's way in her Saturday afternoon address, after which she told reporters that she doesn't believe in the superdelegate process, and has 'no timetable' for making an endorsement in the Democratic race." -- CW

The Not-Ready-for-Prime Time Player. Dan Balz of the Washington Post: "It's been almost five weeks since Donald Trump's victory in Indiana made him the presumptive Republican nominee. Here's what's happened since: He's wasted time, proved to be a sore winner and veered sharply off message. He's put a higher premium on settling scores than finding a script that will appeal to a wider, general-election audience.... Trump can't seem to let go of any perceived slight or grievance. He can't accept the idea of winning graciously. He still feels disrespected, by fellow Republicans and especially the media. He feels he hasn't gotten all the credit he deserves." -- CW

I was told to do one thing. And that one thing was . . . to show up to teach, train and motivate people to purchase the Trump University products and services and make sure everybody bought. That is it. -- James Harris, a Trump "University" instructor

... Fraudster-in-Chief. Tom Hamburger, et al., of the Washington Post: "Trump University would be a noble endeavor, [Donald Trump] said [when he introduced the venture], with an emphasis on education over profits. It was a way for him to give back, to share his expertise with the masses, to build a 'legacy as an educator.'... Trump University was not a university. It was not even a school. Rather, it was a series of seminars held in hotel ballrooms across the country that promised attendees they could get rich quick but were mostly devoted to enriching the people who ran them....

The focus on Trump University also reignited a controversy in Texas over the decision there by the state attorney general not to file a fraud case against the business. Newly disclosed documents reported by Texas media show that investigators had probed the company for seven months and recommended a lawsuit. The inquiry was shut down when Trump University closed up shop in the state. Trump later gave $35,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott. ...

... CW: This is really an indictment of Trump. Trumpbots who read it will turn in their "Make America Great Again" chapeaux.

Matt Viser of the Boston Globe: "Donald Trump has paid men on his campaign staff one-third more than women, while Hillary Clinton has compensated men and women equally, according to a Globe analysis of payroll data for both campaigns. Trump's campaign staff is also far less diverse than that of his likely Democratic opponent. Only about 9 percent of his team are minorities, compared with nearly a third of Clinton's staff." -- CW

No, Donaldo, These People Are Not "Your African-Americans." David Mack of BuzzFeed: "On Saturday morning, Donald Trump shared a tweet from a supporter that purported to show a black family on the 'Trump Train.'" The family pictured, however, are not on the "Trump Train." They don't support Trump, & the photo was originally published in "an article from Cincinnati, Ohio station WCPO about the Midwest Black Family Reunion in August." -- CW

Amy Davidson of the New Yorker: (Also linked above.) "'The only reason she's been dragged so far left, believe me, is that she [Hillary Clinton] doesn't want to go to jail over the e-mails.'... 'If I win,' Trump said, then ... muttered something about statutes of limitations and what he would tell his Attorney General to do.... The idea that Presidents can use prosecutors to protect or attack their enemies, and that winning elections can make legal problems -- fraud allegations, perhaps -- go away may say more about why the job looks so good to Trump than it does about the e-mail story. It adds to the list of alarms about the disregard for the rule of law with which he might govern.... He added a line that he has used, in one form or the other, for months: 'The fact that they even allow her to participate in this race is a disgrace to the United States. It's a disgrace to our nation.'.... 'She should not be allowed to run' is an attack on Clinton's legitimacy as a candidate. Similarly, birtherism, of which Trump was the braying champion, was an attack on Obama's legitimacy...." -- CW

Donald Who? Andrew Restuccia & Tony Romm of Politico: "Republican Party leaders are courting Beltway insiders to help write a platform that wins over the special interests that Donald Trump regularly trashes on the campaign trail.... The Republican National Committee is barely talking about Trump as it meets with virtually every Republican-leaning business interest in town.... The RNC has organized as many as 10 closed-door huddles with business lobbyists to discuss the party's platform -- and not incidentally, engage the business establishment, many of whom feel alienated by a candidate who calls for ripping up trade agreements and boycotting companies such as Apple and Carrier that run afoul of his positions." -- CW

Senate Race

Sorry, GOP. Jennifer Medina of the New York Times: The two top contenders in California's Senate race are the state's attorney general Kamala Harris & Rep. Loretta Sanchez. Both are Democrats. "And their competition says as much about California as it does about the candidates. In a state with one of the most diverse electorates in the nation, where Latinos are the largest ethnic group, a victory by either woman would be a milestone: Ms. Harris would be the first black woman in the United States Senate since Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois Democrat who served from 1993 to 1999, and Ms. Sanchez would become the first Latina elected to the Senate." -- CW

Other News & Views

David Remnick of the New Yorker: "... Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supreme athlete, an uncanny blend of power, improvisation, and velocity; a master of rhyming prediction and derision; an exemplar and symbol of racial pride; a fighter, a draft resister, an acolyte, a preacher, a separatist, an integrationist, a comedian, an actor, a dancer, a butterfly, a bee, a figure of immense courage." CW: Remnick has written a book on Ali. ...

... Charles Pierce: Ali "embodied the country, in all its historic, inherent contradictions, in all its promises, broken and unbroken, and in all of its lost promises and hard-won glories. He insisted on the rights that the country said were his from birth and, in demanding them, freed himself to enjoy them, and freed the country, if only for a moment, to be something more than even the Founders thought it would be." -- CW (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Steve M. uncovers shocking news! Headline: "Muhammad Ali gave Muslin prayer book to the President!" You see, you see, Obama was a Muslim just as the wingers said. Oh, wait. The president Ali gave the prayer book to was Ronald Reagan. Never mind. We all know Saint Ronald of Reagan was no secret Muslim.-- CW (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

American "Justice," Ctd. Dayna Evans of New York: "Brock Allen Turner, the former Stanford swimmer who was discovered raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster on campus in January of last year, will be sentenced to six months in county jail and probation. Prosecutors had recommended that Turner receive a sentence of six years, but judge Aaron Persky determined that Turner's age -- 20 -- and lack of criminal history warranted him a much shorter sentence. 'A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him,' Persky said at Turner's sentencing on Thursday." CW: Because it's not so bad if a nice blue-eyed, blond Stanford boy rapes you. ...

... Amy Nutt of the Washington Post: "In an online survey about sexual activity and attitudes, more than half the men who played an intramural or intercollegiate sport reported coercing a partner into sex. Of the sexually coercive behaviors listed on the survey, including 'I used threats to make my partner have oral or anal sex,' almost all met the legal definition of rape." -- CW

Jason Leopold, et al., of Vice report that, contrary to NSA Claims, documents obtained via the FOIA show that Ed Snowden did try to tell numerous NSA oversight officials about his concerns re: abuses of privacy before he released a trove of documents to reporters. CW: The story is dense, difficult reading; Marcy Wheeler is one of the co-authors, & it has her convoluted style written all through it.

Way Beyond the Beltway

Elisabetta Povoledo of the New York Times: "A year after approving the creation of a new tribunal to discipline bishops who covered up child sex abuse by priests, Pope Francis scrapped that plan on Saturday and issued new guidelines to oust those who have been 'negligent' in handling such cases. Under the new guidelines, issued in an apostolic letter, Roman Catholic bishops who have failed to properly handle sex abuse cases will be investigated by four Vatican offices. If the bishops are found to have betrayed their mission, they will be removed 'to protect those who are the weakest among the persons entrusted to them.'" -- CW

News Lede

NPR: "David Gilkey, an NPR photojournalist who chronicled pain and beauty in war and conflict, was killed in Afghanistan on Sunday along with NPR's Afghan interpreter Zabihullah Tamanna. David and Zabihullah were on assignment for the network traveling with an Afghan army unit, which came under attack killing David and Zabihullah." -- CW

Comments Off

Reader Comments (6)

A little comic relief from fires and flaming ass wipes! I do think
this dude may be the new Charlie Chaplin!

Gives a Bizarrely Brilliant Performance on 'America's Got Talent'
3 days ago ... He is 'the boy with tape on his face' His name is Jarred Fell.

www.pleated-jeans.com/.../tape-face-gives-a-bizarrely-brilliant-performance- on-americas-got-talent/

June 5, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterKate Madison

@Kate Madison: Couldn't get the link to work, but the video is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O70Ww9vzjvg

Marie

June 5, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterMarie Burns

Ignoring MoDo today, are we? Usually, I would as well...but, boldly decided to go where no one else wanted to go!

Status report: Hillary BAD, Trump (just) Nutty?

But, did learn a new word, which when I looked up the definition seemed so aptly applicable to MoDo herself.

"Jejunosity."

Callow.

June 5, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterMAG

@MAG: I read MoDo the minute her column came up, made a comment about its false equivalency & -- not to my surprise -- the moderators tossed it. They now toss my comments more often than not, so I try not to waste more than 5 minutes writing them.

Marie

June 5, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterMarie Burns

@Marie: Wondered why you were 'missing'—particularly on topics that your take would be among the highest clickables. Hard to figure, I don't understand the Times methodology for how they choose those that make it.

Geez! not to make the cut among 1018 MoDo comments! Loser!

The system was WAY, WAY BETTER when comments were numbered and on pages you could easily return to for reading follow-up comments. The green check-boxed commentators seem to be a select few —and how some of them achieved that status is mystifying. It is tiresome that the same commentators' opinions appear in regular order. Then there are the inexplicable out-of-nowhere others who seem to be able to post multiple comments easily and throughout the comments section. Today, someone named Marian is certainly having her way voicing her many opinions.

June 5, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterMAG

Thank you so much, Marie, for putting up the correct link to "Tape Face," our present day Charlie Chaplin.

I hope some of you listened to him and thought he was half as creative and hysterical as did I.

June 5, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterKate Madison
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