Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Laudan Aron: Why Is the United States So Sick? (Slate)
The director of a massive new study says: "It's almost everything."
Ted Rall: I Hate Celebrities
No-Talent Hacks Suck Up Millions, Degrade Culture.
Interview by Michael Hogan: "Christopher Guest: 'Spinal Tap are talking about something for next year'" (Guardian)
The Spinal Tap creator on his new TV sitcom Family Tree, the art of improvisation - and the chances of a Tap reunion…
Ask a grown-up: can the police arrest the Queen? (Guardian)
Metropolitan police commander Nick Ephgrave answers seven-year-old Maisie's question.
Henry Rollins: Jetlagging (LA Weekly)
I am now sitting at my desk, fairly marveling at the temperature outside. L.A. swallows me up so quickly, I feel as if I never left; the shows seem about a year old. The combination of jet lag, sleep deprivation, the almost ceaseless light and the pressure of performance makes it all seem like a weeklong daydream. I'll take this over real life anytime.
Dave Astor: Unlike Rowling, They Were Denied Literary Fame (Huffington Post)
J.K. Rowling tried to go under the radar by using a pen name for The Cuckoo's Calling, but many other great authors spent all or part of their careers involuntarily missing out on the literary cachet and cash they deserved.
Hillery Alley: 4 People Filing Lawsuits For Their Own Dumb Mistakes (Cracked)
#4. A Billionaire Sues a Casino Because He Sucks at Gambling
uspn: A White Night in Northern Norway (Imgur)
"A White Night is when the sun only dips a bit below the horizon and then comes back up. This happens in midsummer in places that are near the Arctic Circle. Redditor uspn took this photograph at 1AM local time, and explained that dusk and dawn are at the same time, so the night never got completely dark. The lake is named Lysvatnet, on the Norwegian island of Senja. The original photograph is much larger." - Neatorama
The Answer is No (Neatorama)
The answer is no. What do you think the question is?
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and humid.
Fight Against Horse Slaughter
Robert Redford
Robert Redford and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on Monday joined the divisive debate against a return to domestic horse slaughter, announcing the formation of an animal protection foundation to fight the opening of plants in New Mexico and Iowa.
The Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife's first act was to join a federal lawsuit filed by The Humane Society of the United States and other groups to block the planned Aug. 5 opening of the first horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. to operate in more than six years.
On Friday, New Mexico Attorney General Gary King also filed a motion to intervene on behalf of horse slaughter opponents.
"Horse slaughter has no place in our culture," Redford said in a statement. "It is cruel, inhumane, and perpetuates abuse and neglect of these beloved animals."
A lifelong horse lover, Richardson said he is committed to do "whatever it takes to stop the return of horse slaughterhouses in this country and, in particular, my own state."
"Congress was right to ban the inhumane practice years ago, and it is unfathomable that the federal government is now poised to let it resume," he said.
Robert Redford
Health Care
White House
President Barack Obama is enrolling some star power to promote health care.
Obama stopped by a private White House meeting Monday with celebrities including singer Jennifer Hudson and actors Amy Poehler, Michael Cera and Kal Penn.
The White House says Obama told the artists they could help reach young uninsured Americans who will be vital to his signature law's success. Insurers need healthy young customers to help offset the costs of older, sicker consumers.
The group also included representatives for Oprah Winfrey, Alicia Keys and Bon Jovi. Also in attendance were officials with Internet video makers YouTube and Funny or Die, which are working on promotions featuring comedians.
White House
Named Al-Jazeera America President
Kate O'Brian
Al-Jazeera America said Monday it will bring in a quartet of veteran U.S. television news executives, led by ABC's Kate O'Brian as president, to run the new cable news network and pinpointed Aug. 20 as the launch date.
Ehab Al Shahibi, executive director for international operations for Al-Jazeera and the man who has overseen development of the American outlet, is the interim chief executive officer.
Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, formed in 1996, has expanded quickly around the world but struggled to gain access to U.S. cable and satellite systems. At the beginning of this year, it bought former Vice President Al Gore's Current TV, giving the company access to some 50 million homes initially, and began to set up a network specifically for the U.S. audience.
Al-Jazeera has announced that a handful of familiar names to American viewers - Sheila MacVicar, Ali Velshi and Soledad O'Brien - will be doing on-air work for the network. The network also has said it will air a regular newsmagazine, "America Tonight," on weeknights.
Kate O'Brian
Preserves Ancient Library
St. Catherine's Monastery
Just as they have done for 17 centuries, the Greek Orthodox monks of St. Catherine's Monastery in Egypt's Sinai desert and the local Jabaliya Bedouins worked together to protect the monastery when the 2011 revolution thrust Egypt into a period of uncertainty. "There was a period in the early days of the Arab Spring when we had no idea what was going to happen," says Father Justin, a monk who has lived at St. Catherine's since 1996. Afraid they could be attacked by Islamic extremists or bandits in the relatively lawless expanse of desert, the 25 monks put the monastery's most valuable manuscripts in the building's storage room. Their Bedouin friends, who live at the base of Saint Catherine's in a town of the same name, allegedly took up their weapons and guarded the perimeter.
The community's fears of an attack were not realized, but the monks decided they needed a new way to protect their treasured library from any future threats. Last year, they began a program of digitally copying biblical scripts with the help of multispectral imaging specialists from around the world, while simultaneously renovating and modernizing the library itself. The Sinai library houses 1.8 million pages of script, including essential texts that document the early church. St. Catherine's ranks high among the world's preeminent Christian text collections: their Greek manuscripts are second in number only to the Vatican's and their hallmark Arabic and Turkish scrolls document the interaction between the monastery and the surrounding world of Islam over the centuries. The monastery's project will create a digital library for scholars around the world. "The technology, the conservation - they are our protection. Many people are concerned about the safety of what we have here, so we have to make them sure that we are protecting our materials and appreciating our responsibility," says Father Justin, the monastery's librarian.
Security concerns are once again at the forefront after the July 3 military ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi and the violence that came in the wake of the change in the country's leadership. Two days after Morsi's ouster, the Egyptian army declared a state of emergency in Sinai after Islamist gunmen opened fire on the region's el-Arish airport and several military checkpoints, killing several police officers and a soldier. St. Catherine's is geographically vulnerable at the best of times, positioned as it is on a peninsula plagued by a security vacuum. Crimes like human trafficking and kidnappings along the Egypt-Israel border make Sinai one of Egypt's most dangerous regions.
St. Catherine's Monastery
Amnesty International
Pussy Riot
Amnesty International says that more than 100 leading musicians are calling for release of jailed members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot.
Amnesty said Monday that Adele, U2, Madonna, Yoko Ono, Radiohead, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Ke$ha, Sir Paul McCartney and Sting were among those who signed an open letter organized by the group.
The musicians say in the letter that the impact of Pussy Riot's "shockingly unjust trial and imprisonment has spread far and wide, especially among your fellow artists, musicians and citizens around the world."
They urged the Russian authorities to free 23-year old Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and 25-year-old Maria Alekhina, who received 2-year sentences last August for an irreverent punk protest against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow's main cathedral. Their parole appeal hearings are due this week.
Pussy Riot
Short-Sighted White Men In Action
House
House Republicans Monday proposed slashing cuts to environmental programs and funding for the Smithsonian Institution and the arts as they unveiled the latest legislation to implement the second year of budget cuts required under so-called sequestration.
The $24 billion spending measure would gut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency with a one-third cut and cuts the National Endowments for the Arts by almost half. Overall, the measure funding the Interior Department, EPA, national parks and federal firefighting efforts is cut by 19 percent below funding approved in March.
It takes a more modest approach to the national parks with a slight increase over levels mandated by sequestration, the across-the-board cuts forced by Washington's failure to strike a bipartisan budget accord. And firefighting efforts would benefit from $1.5 billion in "emergency" funds on top of the spending limits set by the GOP's austere budget plan.
The measure is the latest of 12 spending bills for the almost one-third of the federal budget funded each year by Congress in the form of day-to-day operating budgets for government agencies. Such budgets are hit the hardest by sequestration.
House
Artworks Destroyed
Romania #1
Romanian experts believe that three out of seven paintings stolen last year from a Dutch museum, a haul that included works by Picasso and Monet, have been destroyed by fire, the team's head told Reuters on Monday.
Their findings appeared to back testimony by the mother of a Romanian suspected of leading the robbery that she had burnt the paintings to protect her son as police closed in.
"We gathered overwhelming evidence that three (of the seven) paintings were destroyed by fire," said Gheorghe Niculescu, head of the team from Romania's National Research Investigation Center in Physics and Chemistry, which has been examining ashes found in the police investigation.
However, he could not say which of the seven paintings had been destroyed and did not explain how he was certain that the remains originated from works stolen from Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum last October, rather than other paintings.
He said nails used to fasten the canvases to their wooden frames, recovered from the ashes in Dogaru's house, had been a crucial piece of evidence. "Their shape, the way in which they were manually manufactured and the metals they were made of, lead us to our conclusions," he said.
Romania #1
Suspect's Mom Recants
Romania #2
The mother of a man charged with stealing works by Picasso, Monet and Matisse has apparently backtracked on a confession that she burned the paintings in order to protect her son.
Olga Dogaru told a Bucharest court Monday that she did not burn the paintings in her stove, contradicting earlier statements, news agencies reported. The court was ruling on whether to keep her under arrest. Her lawyer, Catalin Dancu, said in televised statements that he did not believe that the paintings - stolen in a daring heist in the Netherlands - were burned. He could not be reached for comment.
Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania's National History Museum told The Associated Press that he did not believe Dogaru's latest reported comments, saying museum scientists found "a large amount of paint, canvas and nails" in ash from Dogaru's stove.
Romania #2
Launches Historic Whaling Ship
Mystic Seaport
Mystic Seaport in southeastern Connecticut launched a historic whaling ship on Sunday, celebrating the maritime past of Connecticut, New England and the United States.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy tied the state's tourist slogan, "Still Revolutionary," to the Charles W. Morgan, a National Historic Landmark and the world's last surviving wooden whaling ship celebrated on the 172nd anniversary of its original launch in New Bedford, Mass.
Documentary maker Ric Burns, who filmed "Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World," compared the sunny afternoon ceremony to a "Fourth of July on steroids."
"Having taken in and cared for and lovingly provided a home for the Charles W. Morgan, the last and only whale ship in the world since 1949, you've now done something even more extraordinary: You've given her back her wings, made it possible for her to sail again and given her back to the sea," he said.
Sarah Bullard, the great-great-great granddaughter of Charles Waln Morgan, one of the original owners, christened the vessel, smashing a bottle containing ocean water.
Mystic Seaport
In Memory
Dennis Farina
Dennis Farina, a onetime Chicago cop who as a popular character actor played a TV cop on "Law & Order" during his wide-ranging career, has died.
Death came Monday morning in a Scottsdale, Ariz., hospital after Farina suffered a blood clot in his lung, according to his publicist, Lori De Waal. He was 69.
For three decades, Farina was a character actor who displayed remarkable dexterity, charm and toughness, making effective use of his craggy face, husky frame, ivory smile and ample mustache. He could be as dapper as Fred Astaire and as full of threat as Clint Eastwood. His gift has been described as wry, tough-guy panache, and audiences loved him for it.
Farina's many films include "Saving Private Ryan," (1998), "Out Of Sight" (1998), "Midnight Run" (1988), "Manhunter" (1986), and his breakout and perhaps most beloved film, "Get Shorty" (1995), a comedic romp where he played a Miami mob boss.
He recently completed shooting a comedy film, "Lucky Stiff."
Among his numerous TV roles was Detective Joe Fontana on "Law & Order" during the 2004-06 seasons, replacing longtime cast member Jerry Orbach in the ensemble.
Also on TV, Farina was a regular in the star-studded though short-lived 2011-12 HBO horse-track drama "Luck."
He starred in the 1980s cult favorite "Crime Story," and his stylish private-eye drama "Buddy Faro" (1998) was warmly received if little-watched. He followed that up with a 2002 sitcom flop, "In-Laws."
Born Feb. 29, 1944, Farina was raised in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago, the seventh child of Italian immigrants.
After three years in the U.S. Army, he served with the Chicago Police Department for 18 years, both as a uniformed officer (he was there for the 1968 Chicago riots) and a burglary detective, before he found his way into acting as he neared his forties.
His first film was the 1981 action drama "Thief," directed by Michael Mann - a future collaborator on numerous projects as recently as "Luck" - whom he had met through a mutual friend.
He continued to work as a detective while taking occasional dramatic roles, and even took a leave of absence from the Chicago police to star in "Crime Story," before he made the full-time acting plunge.
Farina is survived by three sons, six grandchildren and his longtime partner, Marianne Cahill.
Dennis Farina
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