KARL MUELLER, bass player and founding member of Soul Asylum, died Friday morning in his Minneapolis home, apparently of complications from esophageal cancer. He was 41.
RAY DAVIES will release his long-in-the-works, as-yet-untitled solo debut in September.
DIAMOND NIGHTS: In the L.A. Weekly, Alec Hanley Bemis writes, “Diamond Nights combine cheesy keys, cock-rock guitar and 'emotional' falsetto vox — and the results don’t suck!” You can download “Destination Diamonds” from from the band's site.
JERRY LEE LEWIS gets divorced for the sixth time. The Killer was married to Kerrie Lynn McCarver Lewis for just over 20 years. Outside the courthouse, Lewis said: “It's been a long day and it's been an expensive day.”
SIOUXSIE SIOUX IS AN ICON: In a readers' vote, Susan Dallion beat T. Rex's Mark Bolan, John Lydon, David Bowie and The Ramones to take Mojo magazine's Icon award. Paul Weller took the songwriter award, beating Brian Wilson, Van Morrison, Kate Bush and Damien Rice. Madness took the Hall of Fame award, The Magic Numbers were named best new act and rock band Gang of Four took the inspiration prize, beating the Pixies, Tom Waits, Morrissey and Neil Young. The Mojo awards are a big deal in the UK: Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, The Edge and Sinead O'Connor were among the presenters at the ceremonies. And if Pate fans want to feel old, consider that the Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and The Lash was named the classic album of the year.
LIVE 8: Bob Geldof is fuming after discovering mobile phone con artists are scamming money out of fans desperate for tickets to the London charity concert. The Scotsman notes that Ozzy Osbourne, Meat Loaf, Mötley Crüe, the Spice Girls and Status Quo were among 65 bands rejected by organizers. Britain's biggest rail union, while supporting the Make Poverty History campaign, has called a strike day to coincide with the Hyde Park Live 8 concert, Wimbledon ladies' tennis final, Gay Pride and the NatWest cricket final at Lords. FWIW, Matt Drudge claims that Geldof has ordered show organizers and producers to redouble all efforts to keep Live 8 performers focused on the plight of Africa's poor — and not fall into cliched Bush bashing and global warming rhetoric.
BULLETTE, who I've mentioned before, gets favorable blogage for her freely downloadable album from Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Daniel Rubin.
OASIS: Noel Gallagher explains how to write a classic song.
RUSH GUITARIST ALEX LIFESON claims he was tortured by Collier County Sheriff’s Deputies in Florida.
LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS: The girl with kaleidoscope eyes has passed away at age 47 after a two-year battle with breast cancer.
ALBERT EINSTEIN is set to rock the Glastonbury music festival?
BATMAN BEGINS tops the weekend box office and has made about 71 million since it opened last Wednesday.
ANN ALTHOUSE blogs three sentences about Borders and cracks me up. I must have been in just the right mood.
HARRY SHEARER answers the question, “What Is A Journalist?”
OPRAH WINFREY makes the questionable claim that she is a member of South Africa's Zulu nation, adding, “I'm crazy about the South African accent. I wish I had been born here.” Sure, growing up under Apartheid would have virtually guaranteed that Oprah would not have become a billionaire media mogul, but that accent just can't be learned.
CELEBRITY KABBALAH: Here's part two of Radar magazine's series examining “Kabbalah Centre founder Philip Berg, insurance salesman-turned- guru, and his second wife, who conceived the idea of dumbing down Jewish mysticism and selling it to the masses.”
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Gallery of the Absurd delivers “The Devil and Miss Holmes.” Katie may have fallen for it, but Tom Cruise’s sci-fi seduction technique scared the bejeezus out of Scarlett Johansson, a source close to the actress says. After striking out with Johansson, Cruise reportedly turned his attentions to 24-year-old Jessica Alba, 22-year-old Kate Bosworth, and 18-year-old Lindsay Lohan, before settling on the 26-year-old Holmes. Bookies are offering even money that Cruise and Holmes will have a baby in 2006, 5:1 odds of a divorce. CourtTV reminds us that “both of the above” is also a possibility. And Cruise got squirted by a prankster on the red carpet.
KATE BOSWORTH is reportedly engaged to Orlando Bloom, which would be another good reason to turn down Cruise.
WELCOME TO THE O.C: The 21st century version of Beverly Hills, 90210 can make an unknown hugely popular overnight, which is why I noticed this Suicide Girls interview with O.C. music producer Alexandra Patsavas.
VOTER FRAUD TRIAL in East St. Louis, IL heats up as defense lawyers prepare for new prosecution witnesses who say they were actually paid by city Democratic Party Chairman Charles Powell Jr. to vote in the November 2nd election.
NICARAGUA: Tens of thousands of supporters of Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolaños marched through the streets of Managua on Thursday, protesting the constitutional crisis fomented by the unholy alliance of two former Presidents: Daniel Ortega, the chief of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and Arnoldo Aleman, who still heads the rightist Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC) even though he has been serving a sentence under house arrest for corruption.
LI-LO UPDATE: La Lohan is wanted by 50 Cent and P. Diddy, among others. And even in the midst of her own personal problems, she mocks Tom Cruise on The Tonight Show!
RALPH NADER is dropping the N-bomb; the Rev. Al Sharpton is not happy. Nader was complaining that Democratic Party powerbrokers had kept him off the ballot in such Southern states as Georgia and Virginia – which reminded him of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that denied African-Americans equal rights.
POLAND MAY ELECT IDENTICAL TWINS as the country's new president and prime minister. The BBC asks, “If they are elected, will voters be able to tell them apart?” That's easy. Lech adores a minuet, the Ballet Russes, and crepe suzette; Jaroslaw loves to rock and roll, a hot dog makes him lose control… what a wild duet!
SEN. DICK DURBIN issued a non-apology for comparing Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulag and the reign of the Khmer Rouge. If you want to read my take, you can click the “Read more” link at the conclusion of today's links.
SEN. ROBERT BYRD (D-WV) is having his memoirs published today. The Washington Post reports that “Byrd's book offers a truncated description of his days with the (Ku Klux) Klan that does not completely square with contemporaneous newspaper accounts and letters that show he was involved with the Klan throughout much of the 1940s, and not merely for two or three years.” Byrd's Klan past became an issue again when he joined with other southern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Byrd filibustered the bill for more than 14 hours as he argued that it abrogated principles of federalism. He criticized most anti-poverty programs except for food stamps. And in 1967, he voted against the nomination of Thurgood Marshall, the first black appointed to the Supreme Court.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Angelina Jolie has denied having an affair with Brad Pitt while filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but the ever-reliable Sun quotes her as saying, “I have always developed deep ties with actors who have played alongside me. I always fall in love.” Pitt and Jolie's ex, Billy Bob Thornton, hooking up.
KANYE WEST uses a new remix of Late Registration's first single, “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” to rap about the horrific civil war in the small, diamond-rich African country, which has been raging since 1991. There's blood on that bling!
WHOSE HOUSE? Reverend Run of RUN-DMC is doing a reality show for MTV to replace The Osbournes called Run's House.
WAYANS' WORLD: Comedic brothers Keenan Ivory, Damon, Shawn and Marlon Wayans want to open a theme park and movie studio on the site of California's old Oakland Army Base.
BOBBY BROWN was told there would be a 45-minute wait for a seat upstairs… at The Olive Garden. Ouch.
MENA SUVARI: A month after filing for divorce from her husband of five years, the American Beauty, whose last role was as a lesbian art student on HBO's Six Feet Under, appears to have developed a preference for female company. Here's a bigger photograph of Mena leaving a bar in Venice Beach, L.A. mainly known as a gay hangout with her arms around a short-haired woman with whom she seems to have struck a close friendship. And she's now wearing bangs to cover her enormous alien forehead.
NANO-MEDICINE: University of Michigan scientists have created the nanotechnology equivalent of a Trojan horse to smuggle a powerful chemotherapeutic drug inside tumor cells – increasing the drug's cancer-killing activity and reducing its toxic side effects. Scientists at Calfornia research centers have received funding to develop nanomachines to clear arterial plaque.
GIANT LASER COMPLEX being built to simulate the explosion of a hydrogen bomb is threatened by budget cuts. The National Ignition Facility is located at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab in Northern California. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), complains that ballooning costs on the project, are a drain on other programs; New Mexico is home to the nation's two other nuclear weapons labs, Sandia and Los Alamos.
THE LANCET, Britain's premier medical journal, is accused of scaremongering on a number of issues by 30 of the country’s leading scientists, two of whom are Nobel laureates.
IOWA: Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa announced Friday that he would restore voting rights for all felons who have completed their sentences.
EDU-BLOGGING: The nineteenth edition of The Carnival Of Education is online.
CULT OF THE iPod: Queen Elizabeth II joins the cult, snapping up a silver 6 GB model; kinda hip for 79 years old. Prince Andrew was reported to be behind the move. DataWhat shows us some obsessive playlisting techniques.
PODCASTING: on Sunday, Brian Ibbott posted his 100th “Coverville” show; he talks to C|Net about dealing with the Recording Industry Association of America and individual copyright holders to try to make music podcasting easier and unambiguously legal.
IRAQ: The U.S. military launched Operation Spear on Friday, as 1,000 Marines and Iraqi soldiers fanned out to track down insurgents and foreign fighters in the part of the Anbar province bordering Syria. The Iraqi government announced Sunday it had arrested Abu Younis, a man it claimed was responsible for building car bombs and carrying out more than 60 bombings around the capital. Michael Yon, blogging from Baghdad, wants the real story from enlisted soldiers, and may get it from Jeffrey Mellinger, the Command Sergeant Major for Coalition Forces. In The New York Times, John F. Burns looks at competing views within the U.S. military over the proper troop levels in-country.
IRAN: How rigged was the Iranian election? Even Mehdi Karroubi — who The New York Times calls “moderate” but who is chairman and a founding member of the Militant Clerics Society party — is complaining. Christopher Hitchens, formerly of The Nation, reports from the holy city of Qom that the grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeni is a strong supporter of the United States intervention in Iran, and takes a political line not dissimilar to that of Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq. But there's plenty more in the full article.
ETHIOPIA: Gateway Pundit rounds up disturbing stories as the election results (probably fraudulent) are due to be announced on July 8th.
KYRGYZSTAN: Following to ouster of Askar Akayev, tensions flare among various factions. Really no surprise, as this has happened in other countries after a united opposition loses its common foe.
BRITNEY SPEARS denies actress Sally Kirkland's claim that Spears has breast implants that could harm Brit's baby should she breast-feed.
LEO DiCAPRIO was hit with a bottle while attending a Hollywood party given by Rick Salomon, the dude who videotaped himself in the French Hotel.
THE MICHAELANGELO CODE: Two Brazilian doctors and amateur art lovers believe they have uncovered a secret lesson on human anatomy hidden by Renaissance artist Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.
HOME THEATER: A poll for the Associated Press and AOL News reveals that only 22 percent of people preferred to see movies in a movie theater. In other findings, 47 percent think movies are getting or worse; 69 percent of respondents see movie stars as negative role models for children. RELATED: Guesting at GlennReynolds.com, Prof. Ann Althouse wonders whether movies are in decline because Hollywood underestimates us.
FOUR YEAR-OLD SCALDED AND BEHEADED for a ritual sacrifice in India.
THE UNITED NATIONS: A task force headed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell –politically strange bedfellows indeed — have issued a report on proposed reforms for the United States Institute of Peace.
CANADA: A government opinion poll obtained by the National Post shows that Canadians believe President Bush is almost as great a threat to their national security as Osama bin Laden.
GIANT CATFISH were released into the Mekong River last week after seven years of captivity in hopes of boosting the population of the endangered species, which has fallen sharply in the last two decades.
CATS AND DOGS: Two Amur tiger cubs rejected by their mother have been adopted by a dog whose owner answered a Russian zoo's appeal for a foster parent. Denise Flaim of Newsday writes about polydactyl cats. And the latest Carnival of the Cats is online.
SQUIRRELS MENACE the Lower East Side of NYC.
GAY PENGUINS: The mayor and city council clerk of Bremerhaven, Germany, were petitioned to stop homosexual Humboldt penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo from being seduced by Swedish lady-penguins: “Although the gay penguins in your city’s zoo are not entitled to vote, please protect them from this organized and coercive harassment by means of feminine seductive arts…”
BAMBI MENACES Southern Illinois University's main campus, sending several to the hospital.
GEEP: The first recorded surviving cross of a sheep and a goat in the U.K. has been born on the Isle of Islay.
SEN. DICK DURBIN (D-IL) issues a statement regarding his prior comparison of alleged incidents of detainee abuse at Camp X-Ray to the practices of Nazi death camps, the Soviet glag and the Khmer Rouge: “I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings: our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and total support.” However, Durbin also told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “If there’s a lesson to be learned here it’s not that my remarks were wrong or that there’s any need for apology. It’s the fact that they have successfully twisted them out of context.”
Even if that was true, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch goes on to quote Robert Goldman, a former U.N. expert on protecting human rights while combating terrorism, that Durbin and Amnesty International “undermine their cause by gratuitously giving… ammunition to those who frankly do not want to have scrutiny on these policies.” But the real problem with Durbin’s statement is that Camp X-Ray is simply not anywhere in the ballpark of the Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulag or the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. The Anti-Defamation League doesn’t think so. The International Comittee of the Red Cross, the only independent group that been allowed to visit terror suspects detained in Guantanamo Bay, doesn’t think so. The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars don’t think so. Gulag survivor Natan Sharansky doesn’t think so. Pavel Litvinov, who was beaten and exiled to Siberia for protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in Red Square, doesn’t think so. Retired Navy Commander Paul Galanti, who spent seven years as a prisoner-of-war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, doesn’t think so. State Democratic Party Chairs in Idaho, New Mexico and Arizona don’t think so. But you don’t have to take their opinions at face value: The Jump Blog reprints Durbin’s statement, followed by descriptions of what occurred in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, so you can reach your own conclusions.It should be noted that Sen. Durbin was reading from an e-mail sent by an FBI agent investigating alleged abuse, so it might have occurred to him that this sort of investigation wasn’t being done in Auschwitz. As for the substance of the agent’s e-mail, it describes treatment of detainees that reminds me much more of past abuses at Area Two Police Headquarters in Chicago and the Cook County jail. And the incidents described are not the electrical shock torture, weeks-long floggings, total sensory deprivation and steady stream of killing discovered in just one torture house run by insurgents in Iraq put out of business by U.S. troops in the last couple of days.None of which is to say that alleged abuses at Camp X-Ray shouldn’t be investigated (as they are by the FBI) and any guilty parties punished. It is to say the Sen. Durbin’s statement is not being taken out of context, it is an extreme overstatement — it is “ammunition” given not only to those who want to avoid the alleged abuses at Gitmo, but also to terrorists to use as propaganda and thereby increase the risk to U.S. troops who have nothing to do with any alleged abuses.