The Ledes

Monday, June 30, 2025

It's summer in our hemisphere, and people across Guns America have nothing to do but shoot other people.

New York Times: “A gunman deliberately started a wildfire in a rugged mountain area of Idaho and then shot at the firefighters who responded, killing two and injuring another on Sunday afternoon in what the local sheriff described as a 'total ambush.' Law enforcement officers exchanged fire with the gunman while the wildfire burned, and officials later found the body of the male suspect on the mountain with a firearm nearby, Sheriff Robert Norris of Kootenai County said at a news conference on Sunday night. The authorities said they believed the suspect had acted alone but did not release any information about his identity or motives.” A KHQ-TV (Spokane) report is here.

New York Times: “The New York City police were investigating a shooting in Manhattan on Sunday night that left two people injured steps from the Stonewall Inn, an icon of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement. The shooting occurred outside a nearby building in Greenwich Village at 10:15 p.m., Sgt. Matthew Forsythe of the New York Police Department said. The New York City Pride March had been held in Manhattan earlier on Sunday, and Mayor Eric Adams said on social media that the shooting happened as Pride celebrations were ending. One victim who was shot in the head was in critical condition on Monday morning, a spokeswoman for the Police Department said. A second victim was in stable condition after being shot in the leg, she said. No suspect had been identified. The police said it was unclear if the shooting was connected to the Pride march.”

New York Times: “A dangerous heat wave is gripping large swaths of Europe, driving temperatures far above seasonal norms and prompting widespread health and fire alerts. The extreme heat is forecast to persist into next week, with minimal relief expected overnight. France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are among the nations experiencing the most severe conditions, as meteorologists warn that Europe can expect more and hotter heat waves in the future because of climate change.”

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To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

Marie: Sorry, my countdown clock was unreliable; then it became completely unreliable. I can't keep up with it. Maybe I'll try another one later.

 

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts. 

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. -- Magna Carta ~~~

~~~ New York Times: “Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946. That is about to change. Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties. It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.... A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.... First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore. He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.”

NPR lists all of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners. Poynter lists the prizes awarded in journalism as well as the finalists in these categories.

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Friday
Jul192013

The Commentariat -- July 19, 2013

Another day with no postings, although it's possible I'll be able to do something very late today. Sorry about that. -- Not-So-Constant Weader ...

... I will leave you with this "reason to smile":

Karen Bates of NPR: "In late July 1973, Joseph Crachiola was wandering the streets of Mount Clemens, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, with his camera. As a staff photographer for the Macomb Daily, he was expected to keep an eye out for good feature images — 'those little slices of life that can stand on their own.' The slice of life he caught that day was a picture of five young friends in a rain-washed alley in downtown Mount Clemens. And what distinguishes it are its subjects: three black children, two white ones, giggling in each others' arms." Crachiola posted the photo on his Facebook page Sunday, after the Zimmerman verdict. It has gone viral.

News Lede

New York Times: "After a long-running investigation into insider trading at the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, an inquiry that has produced several guilty pleas and a record $616 million civil penalty, the government on Friday brought a case for the first time against the fund’s billionaire owner, Steven A. Cohen."

Comments Off

Reader Comments (6)

Marie,

Just a note to express continuing thanks for what you do daily. I hope your day is pleasant and uneventful.

Jack

July 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterJack Mahoney

It appears Obama is flirting with the idea of replacing the head of Homeland Security with the King of racial profiling and secret data collection. Great timing there guys!

Racial Profiling Comes to the White House
http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/

July 19, 2013 | Unregistered Commentersafari

Great picture. I wonder what the Zimmerman supporting profilers would make of this? They'd probably want to warn the white kids that their pockets were being picked by gangsters-in-training.

But it also reminds us that people don't start out as racist pigs. They need exposure to that old time bigotry to turn out like George Zimmerman or Newt Gingrich (or Richard Cohen).

The other day Safari posted a wonderful video of kids reacting to a Cheerios spot which depicted a bi-racial family acting like a normal family. The kids were completely unperturbed, blasé even. Wingnuts and the usual suspects not so much. Biracial families are not normal in the racist corners of right-wing world. They are an abomination second only to same sex couples raising children, presumably, to worship Satan and push the "gay agenda".

For those, like Gingrich, and all the commentators both from the mainstream to the scorched earth of the extreme right blogosphere and talk radio, who are demanding that everyone shut up already about race, that there is no racism anymore, we have only to ask why George Zimmerman assumed the mere presence of a black kid was a danger that needed to be put down with murderous violence? Why does a famous celebrity chef dream of a wedding featuring black slaves dressed in finery to serve de white folks (like they used to)? Why a young white woman on the reality show Big Brother has attained enormous notoriety for her regular racist and homophobic outbursts? Why states that had previously needed oversight for their regular schemes to disenfranchise black voters rushed to cement those schemes--and worse ones--the second the racist supporters on the Supreme Court told them it was okay to discriminate again? And why certain elements of the right erupted with such fury over the depiction of a biracial family in a cereal commercial?

Now tell me again how racism is a figment of the past that we've "taken care of"?

All of those bigots however started out, presumably, like the kids in that picture. Just happy to be together. It takes only a certain type of ideology to turn them into monsters.

And run for seats in congress.

Kids who just don't get racism. What's wrong with them!?

July 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

...but on the other hand...

Here's Rush Limbaugh doing his best to not divide people along racial lines.

Right...

Limbaugh, in the wake of George Zimmerman's murder of an unarmed black kid thinks it's okay to say the N word because, according to him, it's not racist as long as he puts an "a" on the end of it. Special bonus, Rush speaks to his many Asian and Asian/American fans in a voice he's sure they'll understand.

Because this is how the right rolls

July 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus

Those kids are the same color, poor, and they know it.

July 19, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterJames F Traynor

@ Traynor
Actually they don't know it, They are kids having fun. They have not yet been imprinted with their parents silly notions about skin color, wealth, social status, personal power.

July 20, 2013 | Unregistered CommenterRoger Henry
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