The Ledes

Friday, September 27, 2024

New York Times: “Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' to the acid-tongued dowager countess on 'Downton Abbey,' died on Friday in London. She was 89.”

The Washington Post's live updates of developments related to Hurricane Helene are here: “Hurricane Helene left one person dead in Florida and two in Georgia as it sped north. One of the biggest storms on record to hit the Gulf Coast, Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend area on Thursday night as a Category 4 colossus with winds of up to 140 mph before weakening to Category 1. Catastrophic winds and torrential rain from the storm — which the National Hurricane Center forecast would eventually slow over the Tennessee Valley — were expected to continue Friday across the Southeast and southern Appalachians.” ~~~

     ~~~ The New York Times' live updates are here.

Mediaite: “Fox Weather’s Bob Van Dillen was reporting live on Fox & Friends about flooding in Atlanta from Hurricane Helene when he was interrupted by the screams of a woman trapped in her car. During the 7 a.m. hour, Van Dillen was filing a live report on the massive flooding in the area. Fox News viewers could clearly hear the urgent screams for help emerging from a car stuck on a flooded road in the background of the live shot. Van Dillen ... told Fox & Friends that 911 had been called and that the local Fire Department was on its way. But as he continued to file the report, the screams did not stop, so Van Dillen cut the live shot short.... Some 10 minutes later, Fox & Friends aired live footage of Van Dillen carrying the woman to safety, waking through chest-deep water while the flooding engulfed her car in the background[.]”

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The Ledes

Thursday, September 26, 2024

The New York Times:' live updates of Hurricane Helene developments today are here. “Hurricane Helene was barreling through the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday en route to Florida, where residents were bracing for extreme rain, destructive winds and deadly storm surge ahead of the storm’s expected landfall. The storm could intensify to a Category 4, if not higher, before making landfall late Thursday, and forecasters warned Helene’s anticipated large size could make its impacts felt across an extensive area. Areas as distant as Atlanta and the Appalachians are at risk for heavy rains.... Many forecast models show the storm making landfall late Thursday near Florida’s Big Bend Coast, a sparsely populated stretch....” ~~~

     ~~~ The Washington Post has forecasts for some cites in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina & Tennessee that are in or near the probable path of Helene. ~~~

     ~~~ This morning, an MSNBC weatherperson said Tallahassee (which is inland) would experience wind gusts of up to 120 m.p.h. and that the National Weather Service said expected 20-foot storm surges near the coast would be “unsurvivable.”

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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
Sep102011

The Commentariat -- September 11

Maureen Dowd writes what we've all been saying: "When the president stays insulated with his little circle that doesn’t know how to push his messages, and he lets the nihilist Republicans go unchallenged in their crazy claims to be saving the country they’re hurting, he sets the stage for Rick Perry. It’s still impossible to sum up what Obama’s presidency is about right now, except saving his own job." ...

... I've posted a comments page on Dowd's column on Off Times Square. Write on this or something else.

Paul Krugman: "What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons."

President Bill Clinton on the heroes of Shanksville Flight 93. CW: try not to tear up:

     ... President Bush's speech is here. Vice President Biden's speech is here. ...

... Peter Kaplan of New York Magazine on New Yorkers, before and after 9/11.

Alexander Cockburn of Nation of Change: "You can find America's future in blueprints minted in business-funded think tanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-liberal age: destruction of organized labor, attrition of the social safety net, erosion of government regulation and a war on the poor that will be fought without mercy at every level. Last year, the New York police stopped and questioned 601,055 people — predominantly blacks and Hispanics — and those numbers were up 13 percent for the first six months of this year.... Whoever the Republican presidential candidate may be, they face in Obama an opponent who agrees with at least half of what they say. In 40 years, I've not seen a gloomier political landscape."

Alexander Bolton of The Hill: Economists say President Obama's jobs plan could help the economy; Wall Street was unimpressed. ...

... Motoko Rich of the New York Times: "The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan — while welcome — will change their minds any time soon." ...

... Frank Rich and Adam Moss of New York Magazine assess President Obama's jobs speech. ...

... George Packer of the New Yorker: the night Obama faced off against the nihilists. ...

... Rick Hertzberg: "... Lincoln didn't have to deal with so many of the sort of people of the type we would today call 'Republicans.'”

Gory Videogame Producers Get Bog Tax Breaks. David Kocieniewski of the New York Times: "Those tax incentives — a collection of deductions, write-offs and credits mostly devised for other industries in other eras — now make video game production one of the most highly subsidized businesses in the United States.... Video game developers receive such a rich assortment of incentives that even oil companies have questioned why the government should subsidize such a mature and profitable industry."

Right Wing World

Andy Borowitz: "The Department of Homeland Security said today that it was studying several 'credible threats' made to the United States government in a two-hour broadcast Wednesday night from a location believed to be the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.... In reviewing the two-hour tape, Homeland Security officials said they found threats to some of the most essential functions of the US government, from Social Security to the Federal Reserve.... But the most terrifying moment in the tape came when [one] speaker received thunderous applause from the audience after threatening to execute people." For reference, see the Commentariat of September 8 and 9; thanks to reader Bonnie for the link. ...

... That was funny. This is not -- and as unbelievable as it seems, it's true. Judd Legum of Think Progress: on the eve of the September 11 anniversary, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced that in order to offset the costs of Hurricane Irene emergency relief, Republicans have written a bill that, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) explains: "slashes funding for grants to equip and train first responders by 40 percent. This is on top of the 19 percent cut in FY 2011. The House defense appropriations bill provides $12.8 billion to train and equip troops and police in Afghanistan — yet the House provides only $2 billion for first responders here at home." CW: No, they have no shame.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs: The wingnut blogosphere went nuts because PBS "edited" a transcript of President Obama's jobs speech -- yeah, they dild when the White House sent them an "as-delivered" update. AND PBS "edited" the speech to remove an embarrassing Obama "gaffe" about Abraham Lincoln 's founding of the GOP -- a remark which was not only accurate, it's a fact that Republicans have long embraced. Johnson writes, "The multi-level idiocy of this latest wingnut freakout is impressive. Not only did PBS have a perfectly good reason for changing their transcript, the wingnuts are completely wrong about Lincoln, too."

News Ledes

Al Jazeera: "The Taliban government in Afghanistan offered to present Osama bin Laden for a trial long before the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the US government showed no interest, according to a senior aide to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban’s last foreign minister, told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview that his government had made several proposals to the United States to present the al-Qaeda leader, considered the mastermind of the 2001 attacks, for trial for his involvement in plots targeting US facilities during the 1990s."

U.K. Telegraph: "A group of Muslim protesters set fire to an American flag outside the US embassy in London during a minute's silence to mark the moment that the first hijacked airliner hit the World Trade Center 10 years ago." With video.

NBC has a nice panoramic image of the September 11 Memorial in New York City.

See the Live Feeds above & the President's Calendar below for the public appearances of President Obama First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Biden & Dr. Jill Biden today.

The New York Times' September 11 memorials story is here. I expect it will be updated throughout the day. ...

... Here's a New York Times liveblog. ...

... New York Times: "Amid all the dignitaries who gather Sunday on the site of the World Trade Center to pay tribute to those who died there 10 years ago, two will inevitably stand out: President Obama and former President George W. Bush, whose terms in office are bookends for considering how America has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly in its response to terrorism."

... The Washington Post story is here.

AP: "A decade after 9/11, the day that changed so much for so many people, the world's leaders and citizens paused to reflect Sunday. But there were also those — including a former Malaysian prime minister — who reiterated old claims that the U.S. government itself was behind the attacks."

Washington Post: "Two Afghans were killed and nearly 80 NATO soldiers were wounded after a truck packed with explosives hidden under firewood rammed into the entrance of a military base in eastern Afghanistan, military officials said Sunday. The Taliban took responsibility for the attack. In a statement on the 10-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the militant group said Afghans became the biggest victims of response to the attacks."

New York Times: "Cliff Robertson, the ruggedly handsome actor who won an Oscar for 'Charly' but found himself frozen out of jobs for almost four years after he exposed a prominent Hollywood studio boss as a forger and embezzler, died Saturday on Long Island. He was 88 and lived in Water Mill, N.Y."

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