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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Sunday
Jun052011

The Commentariat -- June 6

Paul Krugman explains the difference between demagoguery and telling the truth to people who don't know the difference. ...

... I put up a Krugman page on Off Times Square, but you may comment on Douthat or anything else within reason. (Hmm. Did not mean to suggest here that Douthat was reasonable; he is not.)

CW: More later. Perhaps. I'm now living in a McDonald's somewhere in Pennsylvania. It's freezing and they're playing really loud music. BUT they have a WiFi hotspot AND an outlet to plug in my laptop. They will be throwing me out in a few hours. The lives of the unconnected are pitiful indeed.

Okay, here's more:

Dean Baker: "... Welcome to the Second Great Depression."

Sara Murray of the Wall Street Journal: "At least half the states have begun to rein in safety-net programs that swelled during the downturn, even as high unemployment and slow job growth persist. States offer a range of assistance programs such as tax credits for the working poor, unemployment benefits for the jobless and cash for low-income mothers and children. Governors from both parties have begun to make or propose cuts to these programs as they face another year of yawning budget gaps."

Thom Shanker of the New York Times: "President Obama’s national security team is contemplating troop reductions in Afghanistan that would be steeper than those discussed even a few weeks ago, with some officials arguing that such a change is justified by the rising cost of the war and the death of Osama bin Laden, which they called new 'strategic considerations.' These new considerations, along with a desire to find new ways to press the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to get more of his forces to take the lead, are combining to create a counterweight to an approach favored by the departing secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, and top military commanders in the field."

"Headwinds." Karen Garcia: President Obama has a new word & the court stenographers have got it down pat. She is having trouble distinguishing among Obama, Romney & Huntsman. Same policies: just different pretenses to shore up their bases..

Lisa Mascaro & Noam Levey of the Los Angeles Times suggest Democrats & Republicans will kick the deficit debate down the road & "resolve" the debt ceiling standoff by essentially doing nothing till after the 2012 election. No kidding.

Nathan Schwartz of the New York Times: "Bank stocks took another tumble late last week after Moody’s, the credit rating firm, warned it might downgrade the debt of giants like Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo as the government eases back on support for the sector. Even as the market absorbed that news, reports that Goldman Sachs had been subpoenaed in an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney further unnerved investors, and sent that giant investment’s bank’s shares sinking."

Another Lesson from Alan Greenspan on How to Say, "I Fucked up," without Saying "I Fucked up." Phil Izzo of the Wall Street Journal: "Alan Greenspan, a high-profile proponent of President George W. Bush's tax cuts, now says the U.S.'s debt troubles have become so worrisome that he would support going back to Clinton-era tax rates. 'The fact that I'm in favor of going back to the Clinton tax structure is merely an indicator of how scared I am of this debt problem that has emerged and its order of magnitude,' said the former chairman of the Federal Reserve in an interview Friday on CNBC."

James Surowiecki of the New Yorker: Elizabeth Warren may be both the best loved & most hated person in Washington. "Given the intensely partisan nature of Washington these days, the demonization of Warren and the C.F.P.B. is all too predictable. But it’s profoundly misguided, because Warren is far from the anti-capitalist radical that her critics (and some of her supporters) suppose. Indeed, an empowered C.F.P.B. could actually be a boon to business."

John Burns of the New York Times: "... Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, returning from a brief visit to the rebel headquarters in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, hinted at concern in Western capitals about what might come after the toppling of Colonel Qaddafi. Mr. Hague said he had pressed the rebel leaders to make early progress on a more detailed plan for a post-Qaddafi government that would include sharing power with some of Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists."

Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker: "President Obama named some of the country’s most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration. But any hope that he might take the lead on global warming has faded."

Right Wing World *

Art by Boing Boing via Little Green Footballs.Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs: "Man, you’ve gotta almost admire the sheer blind dedication of Sarah Palin’s wingnut acolytes. Now they’re trying like crazy to edit the Wikipedia page for 'Paul Revere' to make it match Palin’s botched version of history." (Paul Revere artwork by Boing Boing is here.) CW: this is taking Right Wing World to a whole new dimension. ...

... Jeff Spross of Think Progress: in a Fox "News" Sunday appearance, Palin herself insists she got the Revere story right. Of course, she botches it again. With video of our Historian Laureate re-explaining history.

* Sorry, can't help it.

News Ledes

New York Times: "At a news conference in Midtown Monday afternoon, Representative Anthony D. Weiner tearfully confessed to sending a photo of himself in his underwear to a woman via Twitter and then lying about it. Mr. Weiner said the indiscretion was part of a pattern of sending inappropriate and at times explicit photos and messages to women he met over the Internet." CNN's print story is here. ...

     ... Update: the Times has a more expansive story here.

New York Times: "Peter A. Diamond said Monday he was withdrawing his name from consideration for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, issuing a sharply worded broadside that criticized Senate Republicans for blocking his nomination. Mr. Diamond, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel Prize laureate for his work on labor markets, had waited more than a year for a Senate vote, a step that Republicans refused to allow."

AP: "Five American troops serving as advisers to Iraqi security police in eastern Baghdad were killed Monday when rockets slammed into the compound where they lived. The deaths were the largest single-day loss of life for American forces in two years."

Reuters: "Israel accused Syria on Monday of orchestrating lethal confrontations on the once-quiet ceasefire line between the two countries as a distraction from Damascus's bloody crackdown on an 11-week-old revolt."

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, another Republican who will not be POTUS, says he'll run anyway. WashPo story here.

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