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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
Oct152023

The Conversation -- October 15, 2023

Alabama. Driving While In Labor. Bracey Harris of NBC News: "By the end of the month, two Alabama hospitals will stop delivering babies. A third will follow suit a few weeks later. That will leave two counties -- Shelby and Monroe -- without any birthing hospitals, and strip a predominantly Black neighborhood in Birmingham of a sought-after maternity unit.... People in Monroe County ... could face drives between 35 to 100 miles to a labor and delivery department. Trekking that far to give birth is not unheard of in Alabama, in which more than a third of the counties are maternity care deserts.... The state has one of the highest fewer than half of rural hospitals have labor and delivery services...." MB: This is not a developed country.

~~~~~~~~~~

Jordan Bullies the Holdouts. Karoun Demirjian of the New York Times: "Representative Jim Jordan and his allies have begun a right-wing pressure campaign against Republicans opposed to electing him speaker, working to unleash the rage of the party's base voters against any lawmaker standing in the way of his election.... Lawmakers and activists close to him have taken to social media and the airwaves to blast the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to victory and encourage voters to browbeat them into supporting Mr. Jordan.... The strategy is reminiscent of the bullying tactics that Mr. Jordan and his allies have used over the past decade to pull the G.O.P. further to the right, and borrows a page from ... Donald J. Trump, who is backing Mr. Jordan. It is also an approach that helped propel the House G.O.P. into its current leadership crisis." MB: Jordan will make a great speaker, loved & admired by all. ~~~

     ~~~ A related Politico story by Rachel Bade is here. It's almost as if Jordan is not a pleasant person.

Devlin Barrett, et al., of the Washington Post: "As prosecutors and lawyers for Donald Trump spar over the former president's public statements, Trump the candidate keeps saying things that could hurt Trump the defendant's chances in court.... On the campaign trail, the former president has attacked the prosecutors, witnesses and alleged evidence against him in ways that seem to have only strengthened his wide lead atop the GOP field.... But the bombastic diatribes are also giving prosecutors new material that could be used at trial to prove elements of the criminal charges against the former president. If special counsel Jack Smith succeeds in his quest for a gag order on Trump, prosecutors could lose one of their best sources of incriminating information -- Trump's mouth.... [For instance,] 'I don't think this has ever been told,' he said to the rally hosted by Club 47, a group trying to get him reelected. 'They'll say, "Oh, it's classified information." Maybe it is, but I don't think so.'... [He] then proceeded to tell a story about a U.S. operation in 2020 that killed Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's Quds Force.... Whether Trump's Soleimani story is true or not, the comments could easily be used by prosecutors at trial to show Trump's intentions and state of mind, and argue to a jury that even after his indictment, the former president shows a willful disregard for protecting national security secrets."

Dareh Gregorian of NBC News: "The judge presiding over the upcoming damages trial against Rudy Giuliani said Friday she will tell jurors that the former Trump lawyer intentionally hid financial documents and other records in defiance of court orders. In a five-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said the move was necessary given 'Giuliani's continued and flagrant disregard of this Court's August 30 Order that he produce financial-related documents concerning his personal and his businesses' past and present assets' and other pertinent information. That means jurors deciding how much Giuliani should pay two Georgia election workers he defamed will be told they can assume the worst about why the former New York City mayor has failed to turn over the court-ordered records. 'The jury will be instructed that it must, when determining an appropriate sum of compensatory, presumed, and punitive damages, infer that defendant Giuliani was intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery about the Giuliani Businesses' finances for the purpose of shielding his assets from discovery and artificially deflating his net worth,' the judge wrote." (Also linked yesterday.)

Presidential Race 2024. It seems the New Hampshire Republican party was so afraid of 15-year-old journalist/blogger Quinn Mitchell that they called the cops, who frog-marched Mitchell out of a presidential candidates' forum. It's no wonder. During a June town hall, Mitchell respectfully asked magna cum laude Yale grad & Harvard Law cum laude alum Ron DeSantis a straightforward question, and DeSantis blew it. New Hampshire Republicans later said they were very, very sorry, & Mitchell was welcome to come back. Neil Vigdor of the New York Times reports. MB: If you can't stand up to a polite teenager, how you gonna stand up to Putin & Xi?

~~~~~~~~~~

Louisiana Just Got a Little Worse. Sara Cline of the AP: "Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican backed by ... Donald Trump, has won the Louisiana governor's race, holding off a crowded field of candidates. The win is a major victory for the GOP as they reclaim the governor's mansion for the first time in eight years. Landry will replace current Gov. John Bel Edwards, who was unable to seek reelection due to consecutive term limits. Edwards is the only Democratic governor in the Deep South.... Landry has been in the spotlight over his involvement and staunch support of Louisiana laws that have drawn much debate, including banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, the state's near-total abortion ban that doesn't have exceptions for cases of rape and incest, and a law restricting youths' access to 'sexually explicit material' in libraries, which opponents fear will target LGBTQ+ books." The New York Times story is here.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Washington Post's live updates of developments Sunday in the Israel/Gaza war are here:"Hundreds of thousands of people in northern Gaza are fleeing in buses, cars and on foot, crowding onto narrow roads leading south after Israel's evacuation warning. The Israeli military said it is preparing a 'wide range' of offensive plans 'for the next stages of the war, with an emphasis on significant ground operations,' though it has not provided a concrete indication of when the assault would start. A U.S. evacuation deal to allow American citizens to leave Gaza via the Rafah border into Egypt during a small window on Saturday faltered after Palestinian and Egyptian officials failed to communicate, The Washington Post reported. The humanitarian situation in Gaza is 'fast becoming untenable,' U.N. relief head Martin Griffiths warned Saturday, adding that 'the worst is yet to come.'" ~~~

     ~~~ CNN's liveblog is here.

Matthew Lee & Lolita Baldor of the AP: "President Joe Biden on Saturday spoke with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging the leaders to allow humanitarian aid to the region and affirmed his support for efforts to protect civilians. The weekend calls in Washington came ahead of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's announcement that the U.S. was moving up a second carrier strike group in support of Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken intensified diplomatic outreach across the Middle East and beyond to rally an international response to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from expanding. The broad U.S. efforts reflect the international concern about the number of civilians at risk and the potential ramifications of a prolonged war as Israel told Gaza residents to move south and Hamas urged people to remain in their homes. The Biden administration has not publicly urged Israel to restrain its response after the Hamas attack a week ago, but has emphasized the country's commitment to following the rules of war."

News Lede

New York Times: "Piper Laurie, who escaped the 1950s Hollywood starlet-making machinery to become a respected actress with three Oscar nominations and an Emmy Award, died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91."

Comments Off

Reader Comments (4)

Herr Donald found the perfect treat on Friday to go with a cup of
covfefe: a "STOLLEN" election.
He claims the Hamas attack wouldn't have happened if the last
election hadn't been STOLLEN. He would never have let it happen
with his magnificent statesmanship.
Now I know why our local Aldi store puts out their German Christmas
bread on November 5th. It's to celebrate the STOLLEN 2020 election.
https://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-blames-hamas-attack-
181431577.html

October 15, 2023 | Unregistered CommenterForrestMorris

Only in Alabama (and dozens of other states).
Alabama public library system mistakenly flags a children's book as
'sexually explicit' because of the author's name: Marie-Louise Gay.
I'll bet they blame it on a computer glitch, or artificial intelligence,
which is still better than no intelligence at all.
https://www.cnn.org/2023/10/11/us/alabama=library-marie-louise-
gay-reaj/index.html

October 15, 2023 | Unregistered CommenterForrestMorris

A couple weeks ago we were talking about Mitt Romney's interview where he was discussing all his colleagues that were too afraid to convict TFG for his insurrection attempt. Now Jordan and his allies are using those same fears and threats of violence to get his fellow GOPers to give him the power of the speakership. It would be a shame if something were to happen to you or your family. They know exactly what they are doing and fires they are playing with.

October 15, 2023 | Unregistered CommenterRAS

Reuters
"Israel’s communications minister said on Sunday he was seeking a possible closure of Al Jazeera’s local bureau, and accused the Qatari news station of pro-Hamas incitement and of exposing Israeli soldiers to potential attack from Gaza."

Axios
"Israel resumed on Sunday the water supply to the southern Gaza Strip after strong pressure from the Biden administration, two Israeli officials told Axios. Israel’s decision to completely stop the water supply to Gaza exacerbated the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, with aid groups warning water supplies were quickly running out."

October 15, 2023 | Unregistered CommenterRAS
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