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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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Saturday
Sep062014

The Commentariat -- Sept. 7, 2014

Defunct videos, photo removed.

"Stop & Seize." Michael Sallah, et al., of the Washington Post: "After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America's highways.... The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found.... Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of 'highway interdiction' to departments across the country.... A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network's chat rooms and sharing 'trophy shots' of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities." ...

     ... CW: Of course there couldn't possibly be any racial profiling here.

Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Among undocumented immigrants and activists working on their behalf, President Obama's decision to wait until after November's elections to make promised changes to immigration policy provoked raw anger. One group called the president's decision 'an affront' to migrant families. Another said Obama had 'prioritized politics over reform.'"

Dan Roberts of the Guardian: "As the US military returned to combat in Iraq this summer, a group of jurors in Washington DC were hearing arguments over a dark chapter of the last war. Though some elements of the 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad road junction by Blackwater private security guards remain shrouded in mystery even after a trial that lasted 10 weeks, prosecutors provided overwhelming evidence that the tragedy was one of the most one-sided encounters of the US occupation."

Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post: "The Justice Department released two decade-old memos Friday night, offering the fullest public airing to date of the Bush administration's legal justification for the warrantless wiretapping of Americans' phone calls and e-mails -- a program that began in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The broad outlines of the argument -- that the president has inherent constitutional power to monitor Americans' communications without a warrant in a time of war -- were known, but the sweep of the reasoning becomes even clearer in the memos written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who was head of President George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel." ...

... The memos are here & here.

Manny Fernandez of the New York Times: Texas state senator Wendy Davis, the Democratic nominee for governor, "has revealed her own deeply personal abortion story, writing in a memoir that in addition to the ectopic pregnancy in 1994, she ended a second pregnancy for medical reasons in 1997. Ms. Davis's descriptions of the abortions -- she and her then husband named the second unborn child Tate Elise Davis, who had a severe brain abnormality and to whom Ms. Davis dedicates the book in part -- have rallied Texas Democrats to her campaign."

 

It Takes a Village Idiot to find something to complain about in President Obama's brief side trip to Stonehenge. (As I recall, you can drive there from Newport, Wales, the site of the NATO meeting, in less than two hours.) I give you ...

... Maureen Dowd goes to a screening of the first episode of the upcoming season of Showtime's "Homeland." The first thing she thinks of: "The murderous melee that ensues [in the "Homeland" story] is redolent of President Obama's provocative remark at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in New York, talking about the alarming aggressions flaring up around the world and alluding to the sulfurous videos of the social-media savvy ISIS fiends beheading American journalists." It's a shame she has such a whiney voice. Otherwise, she would have been perfect for Chuck Todd's new panel of petty pundits.

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Whatever Happened to Jason Blair? Edition. Caroline Bankoff. of New York: "Just a little over a month after being fired for at least 41 instances of plagiarism, former BuzzFeed viral politics editor Benny Johnson has been hired as the National Review's first-ever social media director. He'll begin his new job on Monday.... The National Review also just happens to be one of the many publications Johnson plagiarized from while he was at BuzzFeed. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!"

News Ledes

AP: "The U.S. military said Sunday it launched airstrikes around Haditha Dam in western Iraq, targeting Islamic State insurgents there for the first time in a move to prevent the group from capturing the vital dam. The strikes represented a broadening of the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State militants, moving the military operations closer to the border of Syria, where the group also has been operating."

New York Times: Serena Williams won her 18th Grand Slam singles tennis title today. "The top-ranked Williams defeated Caroline Wozniacki, 6-3, 6-3, to capture her third United States Open final in a row and sixth over all."

New York Times: "The United States launched a fresh series of airstrikes against Sunni fighters in Iraq late Saturday in what Defense Department officials described as a mission to stop militants from seizing an important dam on the Euphrates River and prevent the possibility of floodwaters being unleashed toward the capital, Baghdad."

Guardian: "Ukraine's ceasefire was breached repeatedly on Sunday as shelling was audible in the port city of Mariupol, and loud booms were also heard in the regional centre Donetsk. The ceasefire, agreed on Friday, held for much of Saturday, but shelling started overnight."

Guardian: "A doctor who became infected with Ebola while working in Liberia is sick, but in stable condition at the Nebraska Medical Center, officials said Friday. Dr Rick Sacra, 51, is being treated at the largest of the United States' four special isolation units. It was built to handle patients with highly infectious and deadly diseases, according to Dr Mark Rupp, chief of the infectious diseases division at the center."

Comments Off

Reader Comments (4)

Andy Borowitz heplfully points out that McCain is unhappy because Obama didn't bomb Stonehenge. That may be Dowd's problem too.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/mccain-rips-obamas-failure-bomb-stonehenge

September 6, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJames Singer

I learned an interesting bit of history today reading the obituary of Lillian Gobitas Klose, who as a young student in 1935 refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her public school classroom. As a result of her actions, her family - Jehovah's Witnesses - were persecuted. The story is fascinating, especially in light of events happening right at that time in Nazi Germany, where the Jehovah's Witnesses were among the first people to be sent to concentration camps for refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi state. This is a fascinating and courageous story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/lillian-gobitas-klose-90-dies-stood-against-mandatory-pledge.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

I am not a Jehovah's Witness, but I have refused to say the pledge since high school. First of all, I like to think for myself. Secondly, I've often wondered how seriously people consider the words "with liberty and justice for all." Certainly not when they attack children for not reciting the pledge! And teach their own children to hate nonconformists.

An interesting aside is that the author of the pledge was a . . . . socialist!

September 7, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJanice

I notice there is a link under "Infotainment" to the very amusing "musical impressions off" featuring Adam Levine and Jimmy Fallon, which has already gotten 8 million hits on YouTube. A few days later, Fallon featured Meghan Taylor sing her hit song "It's All About That Bass" with the Roots and Jimmy playing school instruments. It has already received over 3 million hits and I confess to re-watching it when the news gets me down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc9MzCcmNCU
(I've watched it a lot!)

September 7, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterVictoria D.

In case anyone thought the omnipresence of John McCain on the Sunday morning shows was a figment of the imagination - au contraire:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/upshot/looking-for-john-mccain-try-a-sunday-morning-show.html?_r=1&abt=0002&abg=0

September 7, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterVictoria D.
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