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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
Saturday
May142011

The Commentariat -- May 15

I've posted an Open Thread on Off Times Square for Sunday, & I've added a couple of my own comments.

** Nicholas Kristof reveals what Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, who died last December, really thought about American policy in Pakistan & Afghanistan. It's a must-read, especially for the slew of lefties who held low opinions of Holbrooke, a few of whom demanded or asked that I link to anti-Holbrooke essays while his body was still warm. (I didn't.)

Maureen Dowd: "Some of the new fall TV shows will take you back to a time when the only threat women posed was ruining your martini."

Paul Krugman has a longish article in the New York Times Magazine about the two-tiered international economy. "... The biggest danger for the United States ... is ... that we’ll get confused by all the crisscrossing signals in the global economy and end up focusing on the problems we don’t have while ignoring the problems we do... I’m worried that Ben Bernanke may end up being bullied into raising interest rates when he should do no such thing. There will eventually come a day when the Federal Reserve Board should tighten — but that day is years away.... Our economic policy should be concerned with jobs, jobs and jobs."

"For He's an Unpleasant Fellow." Andrew Goldman interviews Larry Summers for the New York Times Magazine. Here's the takeaway. Summers may have made mistakes in the Clinton years but they weren't his fault & Bush would have fucked up anyway. He's probably right about that last part.

John Hightower in the Colorado Springs Independent: Hedge fund billionaire John "Paulson could've worked one single hour in 2010 and hauled off a paycheck equal to what a typical household gets for a lifetime of work. Now guess who gets the lower tax rate.... Thanks to a loophole..., billionaire hedge fund dealers like Paulson escape the usual 35 percent tax rate, instead paying (at most) 15 percent. That's ... immoral. In Washington, Wall Street-backed Congress critters are working fervently to kill Medicare and defund everything from education to environmental protection — all on the grounds that the only way to cope with the growing federal deficit is to bulldoze programs that Americans count on. But ... if just the 25 [biggest hedge fund deals] were taxed at the 35-percent rate, Congress would have an additional $4 billion this year to use for filling the deficit hole, rather than gleefully throwing sick seniors into it."

HUD, Where Your Tax Dollars Go Directly down the Rabbit Hole. Debbie Cenziper & Jonathan Mummolo of the Washington Post: The federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them. Nationwide, nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million have been idling for years, a Washington Post investigation found. Some have languished for a decade or longer.... The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the nation’s housing fund, has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals...." There's a slideshow & link to an interactive map here.

Karen DeYoung & Karin Brulliard of the Washington Post: "Two weeks after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration remains uncertain and divided over the future of its relationship with Pakistan, according to senior U.S. officials.... Some officials, particularly in the White House, have advocated strong reprisals [against Pakistan], especially if Pakistan continues to refuse access to materials left behind by U.S. commandos who scooped up all the paper and computer drives they could carry during their deadly 40-minute raid on bin Laden’s compound."

Mark Mazzetti & Emily Hager of the New York Times: "... a secret American-led mercenary army [is] being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the" United Arab Emirate. "The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest or were challenged by pro-democracy demonstrations in its crowded labor camps or democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year."

Edward Cody of the Washington Post: "Whatever its outcome in the courts, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest seemed likely to change the political landscape in France. The longtime Socialist Party figure and former finance minister has been cited in opinion polls for months as the strongest potential challenger to President Nicolas Sarkozy in presidential elections scheduled a year from now." ...

... This story by Colleen Long of the AP, which includes details of the alleged assault, makes the same point as Cody's story. ...

... NEW. Katrin Bennhold & Liz Alderman of the New York Times: "For months, France has been buzzing with speculation that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the popular chief of the International Monetary Fund, would quit his job in Washington to take on President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s presidential elections. But on Sunday, French politicians and media met news of his arrest in New York for alleged sexual aggression with stunned disbelief and expressions of national humiliation."

David Neiwert of Crooks & Liars weighs in on Mike Obama-Is-an-Indonesian Huckabee's announcement that he won't be running for president & his chat with Donald Obama-Is-a-Kenyan Trump. Wth video I couldn't bring myself to watch. ...

... Ben Smith of Politico: "Mike Huckabee's announcement this evening that he wouldn't run for president -- along with forcing much of the nation's political class to watch his show through for the first time, a kind of mass hostage-taking -- kicks off Republican candidates' efforts to ingratiate themselves to him."

Bill Maher: "You're Not a Christian if ...."

Lawrence O'Donnell talks to Michael Isikoff about "those" bin Laden videos. My favoite bit -- Isikoff says finding pornographic videos among the effects of terrorists is not unusual, and the CIA has been "studying them to find out if the vids contained any hidden message." Yeah, I'll bet the guys (and it's the official position of this Website that they were guys) who were "investigating" the porn videos hated that job:

CW: I missed Adam Nagourney's profile of California Gov. Jerry Brown that appeared in the New York Times Magazine last week, but it's a pretty interesting, easy read.

News Ledes

New York Times: "Israel’s borders erupted in deadly clashes on Sunday as thousands of Palestinians — marching from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank — confronted Israeli troops to mark the anniversary of Israel’s creation. More than a dozen people were reported killed and scores injured."

Atlanta Journal Constitution: "First Lady Michelle Obama spoke about community service, helping others and overcoming obstacles when she addressed 550 Spelman College graduates Sunday in College Park." AP story here.

Times-Picayune: "In a historic action designed to minimize the risk of catastrophic flooding in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has begun opening the Morganza Floodway to divert water from the rain-swollen Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya basin." Washington Post story here.

New York Times: "Pakistan stepped up its condemnations of the United States as Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime emissary to Pakistan in times of crisis, was preparing to land in Islamabad. He was arriving with a list of actions — and some offers from Washington to ease tensions — that he finalized in meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and other top American security officials."

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