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 -- October 4

AP: "Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware said in a 2006 debate that China was plotting to take over America and claimed to have classified information about the country that she couldn't divulge." CW: later O'Donnell revealed that the CIA sends her classified information via coded radio transmissions which her teeth pick up. (Perhaps I made that last bit up.) ...

     ... the ever-so-level-headed Jim Fallows of The Atlantic: "... the 'privy to classified information' riff ..., to anyone who knows anything about the world of politics, instantly signals, 'I am completely insane.'" ...

     ... Steve Benen: "even for a Senate candidate who's lied repeatedly about her educational background, is suspected of campaign embezzlement, is suspected of tax fraud, rejects modern science, hates gays, has crusaded against masturbation, has talked about stopping Americans from having sex, and embraces a hysterically extreme political worldview, this is pretty extraordinary." More on O'Donnell on the Delaware page.

** Robbing from the Bereaved & the Taxpayer to Give to -- Prudential. David Evans of the Washington Post: "... Prudential [Financial] is investing - and profiting from - death benefits owed to service members' families, using money provided by the government.... The government has paid Prudential $1.7 billion for these benefits since 2003, when the war in Iraq began." Prudential holds & invests money due to survivors, setting them up with "quasi-checking accounts" while Prudential retains profits on the remaining balance for itself rather than for the survivors. 

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) writes a great op-ed in USA Today: "... rage on the right should not be confused with populism. The far right attacks government regulation as it feeds Wall Street and the insurance companies. It rails against government spending for the least privileged as it lavishes tax cuts favoring the most privileged." Read it all. ...

... ** Paul Krugman writes a terrific column about how Rupert Murdoch's Fox "News" & the billionaires club have co-opted the Republican party for their own gain. ...

... "A Spending Frenzy Conducted Largely in the Shadows." T. W. Farnam & Dan Eggen of the Washington Post: "Interest groups are spending five times as much on the 2010 congressional elections as they did on the last midterms, and they are more secretive than ever about where that money is coming from. The bulk of the money is being spent by conservatives, who have swamped their Democratic-aligned competition by 7 to 1 in recent weeks. The wave of spending is made possible in part by a series of Supreme Court rulings...." ...

... AND Ben Smith found out why Rupert Murdoch sent $1 million each to the Republican Governors' Association & the anti-Obama Chamber of Commerce, thus putting the last nail in the coffin of the "fair & balanced" pretense:

A person close to News Corp. told me this week the company didn't realize its $1 million to the RGA would become public. And the $1 million to Chamber of Commerce was supposed to be secret as well.

Philosopher J. M. Bernstein applies a Hegelian model to the Wall Street fiasco. Hegel explained why Dodd-Frank should have been a lot stronger. Fairly easy-to-follow.

In his New Yorker Commentary, Steve Coll reads Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars & paints a portrait of a President who brings "realism & intelligence" to the Afghan-Pakistan conundrum. ...

... Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post: "Obama has chosen a sensible middle course in Afghanistan, trying to devote significant time and resources to that country, degrading the Taliban but also letting the U.S. military know that this is not an unlimited engagement and that America has other interests in the world.... Americans are chronically disappointed by the way their wars end. This is because while waging wars, Americans refuse to think through the political and military tradeoffs needed to get to a reasonable outcome."

Richard E. Cohen of Politico: "In an unprecedented letter to all congressional candidates in both parties, more than 130 former members of Congress" urged the current crop ... "to find common ground to solve problems” & show some "decency and respect toward opponents."

Kathleen Hennessey in the Los Angeles Times: Democrats are throwing some Republican candidates off-message, "Rarely has a set of candidates given opponents so much to work with."

The Republicans have lost their standards, they’ve lost their principles.... Really that’s why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me.... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government. -- Nevada Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle, in a closed-door meeting with a tea party opponent

Scoop! Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun obtained a tape of a meeting among Sharron Angle, her Tea Party of Nevada opponent Scott Ashjian, & their minions. Pretty raw stuff. Includes audio of the meeting. ...

     ... Update from Shira Toeplitz of Politico: "Nevada Tea Party candidate Scott Ashjian admitted Sunday that he secretly recorded a conversation with Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle, at a meeting in which she asks him to get out of the race, and that he leaked the tape to a journalist." The recording, according to a Harvard Law professor, was illegal. ...

     ... Update: or maybe Ashjian isn't a teabagger at all. Here's an  the Tea Party Express produced:

     ... AND Christiana Bellantoni of Talking Points Memo adds, "Cleta Mitchell, a top Republican lawyer representing Sharron Angle's Senate bid in Nevada, told TPM ... that the meeting [with Ashjian] ... was 'a setup.'" See more on the Nevada senatorial race on the Nevada page.

Barry Friedman & Dahlia Lithwick in Slate: how the Roberts Court has used deft magicians' tricks to shove the law to the right without the public's noticing it. ...

... Half-Time Justice. Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: Elena "Kagan's old job as solicitor general - the '10th justice' - is initially making it hard to do her new job as the ninth justice. Kagan, 50, has recused herself from 25 of the 51 cases the court has accepted so far this term, all as a result of her 14-month tenure as solicitor general, the government's chief legal representative in the Supreme Court and the nation's lower appellate courts."

** Here's the Huff Post's sign-up sheet for bus rides from New York City to Washington, D.C. for Jon Stewart's "Sanity Rally." The deadline for sign-up is this Friday, October 8.

News You Can Use (Maybe):

Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: "As some of the nation’s largest lenders have conceded that their foreclosure procedures might have been improperly handled, lawsuits have revealed myriad missteps in crucial documents." ...

... Ylan Mui of the Washington Post: 675 colleges & a pricey credit card company collaborate to fleece students in a deal that falls outside reform legislation. ...

... Candice Choi of the AP: "... a federal study last year found that about one in four U.S. households skirts banks and relies on services such as check-cashing and payday loans. Many of these households bring in less than $30,000 a year." Choi, who tried living in the non-bank world herself, found it to be both costly & fustrating.

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