Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Henry Rollins: Worried About the NSA? What About Google? (LA Weekly)
I have a feeling (no hard data) that the habits and communications of 99.9 percent of America's population hold little to no interest for American intelligence-gathering agencies. I do not lose any sleep over aspects of my life being the topic of discussion at the NSA.
Ted Rall: Editorial Cartooning, R.I.P.
A Powerful Form of Journalistic Commentary Falls Victim to the Digital Dark Ages.
Interview by Elizabeth Day: "Susan Sarandon: 'Feminism is a bit of an old-fashioned word'" (Guardian)
Susan Sarandon on portraying strong women, the dearth of young Susans - and her recipe for barbecued chicken.
Dalya Alberge: Orson Welles' criticisms of fellow actors and directors found on lost tapes (Guardian)
Welles lavished praise on actors he admired such as Joseph Cotten, his co-star in The Third Man ("brilliant") and John Wayne ("some of the best manners of almost any actor I've ever met in Hollywood"). But at others he hurled insults.
Stephanie McMillan
Comics. Illustration. Writing.
Mikhaela Reid and Masheka Wood: Don't Cause Rape (Cartoon)
What causes rape, and what doesn't.
Wired Magazine: What's Actually Inside An Average Cup of Coffee (YouTube)
Coffee is the lifeblood of most of our mornings, but do you know what's actually inside that cup of coffee you're drinking each day? You'd be surprised.
Photo: My Boyfriend Came Home with This Stupid Tattoo
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Reader Suggestion
Glastonbury 2013
Glastonbury 2013: Night of the living dead as Rolling Stones rock the festival | Mail Online
Thanks, Sally!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Hot & humid.
Finally Reopening
Statue of Liberty
Months after Superstorm Sandy swamped her little island, the Statue of Liberty will finally welcome visitors again on Independence Day.
Sandy made landfall one day after the statue's 126th birthday, flooding most of the 12 acres that she stands upon with water that surged as high as 8 feet. Lady Liberty herself was spared, but the surrounding grounds on Liberty Island took a beating.
Hundreds of National Park Service workers from as far away as California and Alaska spent weeks cleaning mud and debris. In recent months, all mechanical equipment was moved to higher ground as workers put the island back in order.
The damage to Liberty Island and neighboring Ellis Island cost an estimated $59 million. Some repairs to brick walkways and docks are still underway, but on July 4 visitors will arrive via ferry boats once again to tour the national landmark.
Statue of Liberty
Israeli Puppeteers Protest
Hakawati Theater
Puppeteers from the Israeli version of Sesame Street protested Monday against Israel's closure of a Palestinian children's puppet festival, arguing that puppet theater poses no threat to Israeli security.
Ariel Doron, the voice of Elmo on the Israeli version of the popular children's television show, and Yousef Sweid, who plays an Arab Muppet on the show, created a Facebook group named Puppets4All calling on Israel to permit the festival. Two other Israeli Sesame Street puppeteers, along with a number of fellow Israeli actors, uploaded photos to the Facebook group holding puppets and signs protesting the closure.
Sesame Street, while steering clear of politics, has promoted messages of peace and tolerance in local versions of the show on Israeli and Palestinian television. Sesame Workshop, the American producer of the children's television show, re-launched the local programs in 2007 after the original versions went off the air due to lack of funding.
The new Israeli version of "Rechov Sumsum" includes a Muppet of Arab origin, as well as characters representing Israel's diverse Jewish immigrant population.
"Sharaa Simsim," the Palestinian counterpart, has sought to offer positive role models to Palestinian children. The show went off the air last year after the U.S. government cut funding, one of many Palestinian programs affected by a funding suspension aimed at punishing the Palestinians for a unilateral appeal to the U.N. for statehood.
Hakawati Theater
American Library Association
Carnegie Medals
Richard Ford and Timothy Egan, winners of literary medals presented by the American Library Association, both credit libraries for making their work possible.
Ford and Egan are this year's recipients of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence for the best works of fiction and nonfiction. Ford was cited for the novel "Canada," narrated by the teen son of bank robbers. Egan won for "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher," a biography of photographer Edward Curtis, who compiled an encyclopedic archive of North American Indians.
Egan, a prize-winning author and reporter for The New York Times, noted in a recent interview that libraries were a vital part of his research for the Curtis book. Curtis, who died in 1952, had compiled a 20-volume set of his Indian photographs. Few copies exist today, but Egan managed to look through the pictures at the University of Washington library in Seattle.
Ford and Egan each will receive $5,000, and finalists each receive $1,500. In fiction, they were Junot Diaz for "This Is How You Lose Her" and Louise Erdrich for "The Round House." In nonfiction: David Quammen for "Spillover" and Jill Lepore for "The Mansion of Happiness." The Carengie medals were established in 2012 and are funded through a grant by the Carnegie Corporation.
Carnegie Medals
Joins Al Jazeera America
Soledad O'Brien
Former CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien will be contributing reports to the new Al Jazeera America network when it debuts in August.
The network said Monday that O'Brien will report for the network's prime-time magazine series, "America Tonight." Al Jazeera has also made a deal with O'Brien's production company to produce hour-long documentaries.
O'Brien is pioneering a new model since leaving CNN this spring. She's actively building up her company, Starfish Media Group, in making deals with different media outlets. She has also signed on to HBO's "Real Sports" as a reporter for the sports-oriented newsmagazine and is contracted to continue making some documentaries for CNN.
Soledad O'Brien
Acquiring 19 TV Stations
Tribune
Tribune Co. said Monday that it reached a deal to buy Local TV Holdings LLC's 19 TV stations for $2.73 billion in cash, significantly boosting its television business as it looks to sell its newspaper operations.
Tribune currently owns 23 TV stations and cable network WGN America, along with the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. The deal will give it 42 stations, making the Chicago-based company one of the nation's top TV station owners. Tribune said it will be the No. 1 commercial TV station group in the country based on its broadcast reach into more than 50 million homes.
The deal reshapes the broadcast media landscape and follows two recent broadcast acquisition deals by companies whose roots are in newspapers. These companies are trying to acquire additional television stations at a time when the newspaper industry is faltering.
Last month, Gannett Co., the publisher of USA Today, announced plans to buy TV station owner Belo Corp. for about $1.5 billion. The acquisition will nearly double Gannett's portfolio of stations from 23 to 43, reaching nearly one-third of U.S. households. The company said the deal will give it access to what it said are some of the fastest-growing television markets, including Dallas, Houston and Seattle.
Tribune
Judge Tosses 3 Lawsuits
Kevin Clash
Three lawsuits brought by men who said former Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash sexually abused them when they were underage were tossed out by a judge who said in a decision published Monday that the men waited too long to sue.
U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl said the claims must be barred because they came more than six years after the men reasonably should have realized that the physical and emotional injuries they're suing over were caused by alleged encounters with Clash. The judge also noted that each man had been over the age of 18 for more than three years before the lawsuits were filed.
Clash was the man behind Elmo, the popular furry red monster, for 28 years.
Attorneys for the men promised an appeal while Clash said through his lawyer that he hoped the ruling would help him recover personally and professionally.
Kevin Clash
No Class-Action Status In Book Case
Google
Google Inc. got a friendly ruling Monday from a federal appeals panel that stripped a group representing authors of class-action status as the search engine defends itself against claims that its plan to create the world's largest digital library will violate copyrights.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it was too early for authors to be considered as a group in a lawsuit brought against the Mountain View, Calif.-based company by the Authors Guild.
A three-judge panel of the Manhattan court said a judge presiding over the 8-year-old case must consider fair use issues before deciding whether to consider authors as a class. A judge last year granted class-action status to the Authors Guild, which is seeking $750 in damages for each copyrighted book Google copied. Google has said such a payout would cost the company more than $3 billion.
The appeals court said Google's argument that the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs cannot fairly represent the interests of hundreds of thousands of authors because some of the authors will benefit from Google's digital library "may carry some force."
Google
Settles With Unpaid Interns
Charlie Rose
PBS talk show host Charlie Rose and his production company will pay roughly $110,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by former unpaid interns, under an agreement approved by a New York state judge.
The victory, another win on the wages front for interns, comes amid a wave of lawsuits that followed a June 11 ruling by a federal judge in Manhattan that former production interns for the 2010 film "Black Swan" were de facto employees of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
In the so-called glamour industries of film, publishing and other media, unpaid internships are standard. The cost-saving practice has spread to other businesses, prompting experts to predict that litigation in more traditional fields could be next.
In the Charlie Rose case, former intern Lucy Bickerton filed a class-action lawsuit in March 2012 alleging that she and other interns of the Charlie Rose Show worked without pay for an average of six hours a day for several of days a week over the course of a semester.
The settlement, approved on Friday, grants each eligible intern who submits a claim form $110 for each week worked up to a maximum of 10 weeks, the average length of an academic semester internship.
Charlie Rose
None So Blind...
Yoga
Yoga in a public school's fitness program does not amount to teaching children religion because despite its roots in Hindu philosophy it is part of American culture, a California judge ruled on Monday.
The ruling denied a request by a family in a San Diego suburb to ban the local school district from including yoga in physical education, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and separation of church and state.
"Yoga as it has developed in the last 20 years is rooted in American culture, not Indian culture," San Diego Superior Court Judge John Meyer said. "It is a distinctly American cultural phenomenon. A reasonable student would not objectively perceive that Encinitas school district yoga advances or promotes religion."
Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock and their two children sued the Encinitas school district earlier this year. Their lawyer, Dean Broyles, said the judge's ruling was part of a broader bias against Christianity.
The lawsuit, which had not sought monetary damages, objected to eight-limbed tree posters the Sedlocks said were derived from Hindu beliefs, the Namaste greeting and several of the yoga poses that they said represent the worship of Hindu deities.
Yoga
Mine Viewer Data
U.S. TV Operators
U.S. cable companies and satellite TV providers, locked in battle with broadcasters and online sites for advertising, are taking a page from Google Inc by using data on their subscribers' tastes to serve up tailored commercials.
In Los Angeles, a 35-year-old female DirecTV subscriber with a cat might get a spot promoting cat food, while the satellite provider would beam a car advertisement to her next door neighbor, a bachelor watching the same channel.
DirecTV combines data it collects from viewing habits from its customers' digital video recorders with information from third-party market researchers in categories such as income, gender, age and buying habits. This is how it figures out how to send the right ad to the person on the other end of the pitch.
DirecTV said it keeps this data anonymous and in "aggregate form" so it does not invade its customers' privacy.
Dish Network Inc and cable providers Comcast Corp and Cablevision Systems Corp also let advertisers create "addressable" ads, using third-party data on demographics and buying patterns to aim for certain types of subscribers.
U.S. TV Operators
1900s Aerial Photography Archive
George R. Lawrence
In 1893, photographer George R. Lawrence inherited a camera studio and launched his new company with the motto, "The Hitherto Impossible in Photography is Our Specialty."
Lawrence was particularly interested in aerial photography, according to the Library of Congress, and in 1901 he began using a series of creative approaches that eventually led to capturing images from thousands of feet above Earth.
Lawrence first turned to wooden ladders, but he wanted to go higher, so he started using balloons to get his unique photographs. Airplanes were not an option, because it was still more than two years before the Wright Brothers' maiden flight in 1903.
A near-death experience inspired Lawrence to move away from balloons. During one flight, the cage Lawrence was riding in tore free from the balloon, sending him falling to the ground hundreds of feet below. His life was saved when the cage's fall was broken by telephone lines. Amazingly, Lawrence walked away from the incident unharmed.
That incident also pushed Lawrence's photography to new heights. He began experimenting with using kites, even stringing 17 of them together to lift a 50-pound camera an estimated 2,000 feet into the air.
George R. Lawrence
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