The Full Belmonte, 5/5/2024
Police officers enter a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA.
“As colleges turn to police to clear their campuses of protests over Israel’s assault on Gaza that continue to ripple across the nation, the response by law enforcement is under heightened scrutiny. Some demonstrators interrupted graduation ceremonies this weekend. Follow live updates.
Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas and his wife were charged with accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities, according to an indictment in federal court in Texas. They were released on a $100,000 bond.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the operations of Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera will be closed in the country. The decision follows the passage of a sweeping law allowing the government to ban foreign networks perceived as posing a threat to national security.
Three men were arrested and charged in Canada for allegedly murdering a prominent Sikh separatist, according to police, in a case Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has previously linked to the Indian government, drawing vehement protests from New Delhi.
Mystik Dan won the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby in a dramatic three-horse photo finish at Churchill Downs in Louisville. Mystik Dan edged out Sierra Leone and Forever Young to capture the first leg of horse racing's Triple Crown.” [CNN]
THE LATEST NEWS
Israel-Hamas War
“Two Israeli men who were thought to have been taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 were actually killed during the attacks, according to the Israeli authorities.” [New York Times]
“A doctor from Gaza who was detained by Israeli forces and held for four months has died in Israeli custody, Palestinian officials said.” [New York Times]
“Iran says it has released the crew of an Israeli-linked container ship that its forces had seized last month.” [New York Times]
Campus Protests
In Ann Arbor, Mich. Nic Antaya/Getty Images
“The police arrested at least 25 people yesterday at the University of Virginia and took down an encampment on campus.” [New York Times]
“Pro-Palestinian supporters briefly interrupted a commencement ceremony at the University of Michigan. And at Indiana University, protesting students walked out of a ceremony, some shouting ‘free, free Palestine’ as they left.” [New York Times]
“At Vassar, protesters dismantled their encampment after the college agreed to review a divestment proposal.” [New York Times]
“The protests are the latest in a tradition of student-led, left-leaning activism dating back at least to the 1960s.” [New York Times]
“Tensions appear to be spreading to campuses in several countries, including France, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied a building at Science Po, an elite university.” [New York Times]
War in Ukraine
At a morgue in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Nicole Tung for The New York Times
“The families of some Ukrainian soldiers say they have spent months trying to get official death confirmations. The military, they say, is overloaded with casualties.” [New York Times]
“Russia’s army is recruiting more women to fight in the war. That effort clashes with Vladimir Putin’s conservative agenda.” [New York Times]
More International News
“Voters in Britain appear hungry for change after 14 years of Conservative government. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak seems unable to persuade them otherwise.” [New York Times]
“Xi Jinping has chosen France, Serbia and Hungary — nations that, to varying degrees, embrace China’s push for a new global order — for his first trip to Europe in five years.” [New York Times]
“Months after a coup in Niger, its deposed president is still imprisoned in the presidential residence without access to his phone or his lawyers, members of his inner circle said.” [New York Times]
Politics
“Florida banned the production and sale of lab-grown meat, a move considered by other states.” [New York Times]
Israeli cabinet to close Al Jazeera news network in the country
“Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that the operations of Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera will be closed in the country.
The decision comes a month after Netanyahu vowed to shut down the television channel in the country following the passage of a sweeping law allowing the government to ban foreign networks perceived as posing a threat to national security.”
Read More at CNN
In a stunning photo finish, Mystik Dan wins the Kentucky Derby
At 18-1 odds, Mystik Dan edged Sierra Leone and Forever Young in the 150th edition of the race Saturday in Louisville.
“LOUISVILLE — As a riveting gathering of three colts saw their fates converge at the wire of the Kentucky Derby, of all places, and as human emotions prepared to sway based on horse noses, the trio bunched together as a diverse batch for the race’s 150th occasion.
On the outside charged Sierra Leone, the track intellectuals’ pick and second choice at 9-2 whose regal beauty fetched $2.3 million at the Fasig-Tipton New York Saratoga select yearling sale in 2022. In the middle barged Forever Young, the 7-1 shot who fetched 107.8 million yen in Japan (about $780,000) and who tried to quell the long-standing Derby doldrums of Japanese entries and UAE Derby winners, none of whom had hit the board. And nearest the rail — key words there — fought 18-1 shot Mystik Dan, a homebred from a beloved mare named Ma’am, a third-place finisher in the Arkansas Derby, a leader for much of the stretch and then, upon review, the Kentucky Derby champion Saturday by a nose over Sierra Leone, then another nose over Forever Young.
‘Three jumps before the wire, I didn’t see them at all,’ Brian Hernandez Jr., Mystik Dan’s expert jockey, said of Sierra Leone and Forever Young. ‘And then right at the wire, they surged, and I was like, ‘Oh, God, did we just win the Kentucky Derby?’ ‘ He, like Kentuckian trainer Kenny McPeek, Arkansan owners Lance and Sharilyn Gasaway and the 156,710 in attendance, had to wait to make sure.
A long, tiring slog had ended in a tepid 2 minutes 3.34 seconds yet hadn’t ended just yet — video study would occur for the first time since 1996, when Grindstone caught Cavonnier by the tiniest and most agonizing of margins. It had ended after Hernandez’s ground-saving trek near the rail. It had ended with 3-1 favorite Fierceness, trainer Todd Pletcher’s 65th Derby entry across 24 years, fading to a stunning 15th after he appeared to have ample space to show himself while bobbing along the backstretch near the lead. Yet the ending caused only more waiting, and so, playing off the old slogan of ‘the most exciting two minutes in sports,’ Hernandez dubbed it ‘the longest two minutes in sports.’
Then they all resumed breathing and commenced pinching themselves. Chad Brown, the esteemed Sierra Leone trainer whom the Derby has tantalized, said, ‘You get beat by a nose in the Kentucky Derby — it’s a tough one.’ McPeek, 61, exulted in not only his first Derby win in 10 tries and not only a career Triple Crown, counting the 2002 Belmont Stakes with long-shot Sarava and the 2020 Preakness Stakes with Swiss Skydiver, but also a deeply rare double deeply meaningful at Churchill Downs. He became the first trainer since the legendary Ben Jones in 1952 to win the big stuff both Friday and Saturday, with the celebrated Kentucky Oaks for 3-year-old fillies (Thorpedo Anna) and the even more celebrated Kentucky Derby for 3-year-old everybodies….” Read more at Washington Post
May 5, 2024
Good morning. Today my colleague Joe Drape explains the troubled state of horse racing in the U.S. — David Leonhardt
At Churchill Downs in Kentucky. Jon Cherry for The New York Times
Human error
By Joe Drape
“He has covered the Kentucky Derby for 25 years.
It was a thrilling finish: A long-shot named Mystik Dan held off a late charge by Sierra Leone and a colt from Japan named Forever Young on Saturday to win the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, America’s oldest major continuing sporting event, bringing to a close a much-needed casualty-free week of thoroughbred racing.
It was a welcome conclusion for the multibillion-dollar sport imperiled by frequent racing fatalities, reckless breeding, dodgy doping practices and the old-fashioned greed of veterinarians, trainers and owners.
Last year, 12 horses perished at Churchill Downs in the days surrounding the famous race. It only got worse. Two weeks later, a horse trained by one of the sport’s most recognized trainers died at Pimlico Race Course. At the historic Saratoga Race Course in New York a few months later, another 13 horses died while racing and training at the sport’s signature summer meet, including two that seemed poised to win their races before they broke down near the finish line on nationally televised broadcasts.
Ambulances rumbled onto the track, emergency workers erected privacy screens and, behind them, vets euthanized the horses with injections. All of it put the social acceptability of one of America’s oldest sports at risk.
The root of the problem
Ahead of the race. Audra Melton for The New York Times
Why do racehorses die? As beautiful as a thoroughbred is in full flight, the legs that seemingly rarely touch the ground are fragile. Ankles the size of a Coke bottle and hooves the size of a crystal ashtray propel a 1,200-pound thoroughbred at speeds up to 35 miles per hour.
Over the past 12 months, my colleague Melissa Hoppert and I analyzed confidential documents and covert recordings made by law enforcement authorities to report on why so many horses, supposedly in peak physical condition, were breaking down. (Our investigation, which you can read here, also became a documentary, ‘The New York Times Presents: Broken Horses,’ which is streaming on Hulu.)
As is so often the case, money is the root of the problem. Trainers push horses too hard, sometimes giving them illegal performance-enhancing drugs. That’s because owners know that a signature win will turn their million-dollar investment into a multimillion-dollar A.T.M. in the breeding shed. Do the math: Sierra Leone can be retired tomorrow and enter a life where he mates twice a day, to 155 mares, potentially earning $31 million annually over a breeding career that can last 10 years or more.
Even at the more modest levels of the sport, trainers sometimes rely on illegal drugs. More often, though, the problem is overuse of legal corticosteroid medications that mask pain and allow at-risk thoroughbreds to run until they perish. Among the cluster of 13 deaths at Saratoga, for example, 11 were the result of injuries to a fetlock joint, which can be weakened by injections. Three of the 11 received corticosteroid injections within 30 days of racing. Another three had been declared unsound by veterinarians before their breakdowns, though their owners and trainers still managed to get them into competition.
In short, the humans failed the horses.
Most people involved in the sport have put their horses first, and they were integral in creating the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, the federal body that now polices the sport. But if that group does not do its job, horse racing could be in trouble. It is at risk of losing its core audiences, including horse lovers, who do not want to see animals die, and gamblers, who now have many other options for betting on sports.
Along with a multibillion-dollar economy, an important part of American history and its soul would be lost.” [New York Times]
The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby. Audra Melton for The New York Times
Frank Stella, influential American artist, dies aged 87
His constantly evolving works have been hailed as landmarks of the minimalist and post-painterly abstraction art movements
“Frank Stella, a painter, sculptor and printmaker whose constantly evolving works are hailed as landmarks of the minimalist and post-painterly abstraction art movements, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, who spoke with Stella’s family, confirmed his death to the Associated Press. Stella’s wife, Harriet McGurk, told the New York Times that he died of lymphoma.
Born 12 May 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella studied at Princeton University before moving to New York City in the late 1950s.
At that time many prominent American artists had embraced abstract expressionism, but Stella began exploring minimalism. By age 23 he had created a series of flat, black paintings with gridlike bands and stripes using house paint and exposed canvas that drew widespread critical acclaim.
Over the next decade, Stella’s works retained his rigorous structure but began incorporating curved lines and bright colors, such as in his influential Protractor series, named after the geometry tool he used to create the curved shapes of the large-scale paintings.
In the late 1970s, Stella began adding three-dimensionality to his visual art, using metals and other mixed media to blur the boundary between painting and sculpture.
Stella continued to be productive well into his 80s, and his new work is currently on display at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City. The colorful sculptures are massive and yet almost seem to float, made up of shining polychromatic bands that twist and coil through space.
‘The current work is astonishing,’ Deitch said on Saturday. ‘He felt that the work that he showed was the culmination of a decades-long effort to create a new pictorial space and to fuse painting and sculpture.’” [The Guardian]
MONDAY
“It's shaping up to be another eventful week on Capitol Hill as GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says she will force a vote over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s ouster sometime this week, a move that comes after Democrats said they will vote to kill the effort and ensure Johnson doesn’t lose his job. Many Republicans oppose the push to oust Johnson and do not want to see the House GOP Conference devolve into disarray as it did after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted in a historic and unprecedented vote last year.
After years of delays and setbacks, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to make its inaugural crewed launch. NASA hopes to launch astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from Florida's Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station, marking what could be a historic and long-awaited victory for the beleaguered Starliner program.
Columbia University, the site of a large pro-Palestinian protest and a campus building takeover that was cleared by police in riot gear last week, will announce the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists via livestream. Each year, the Pulitzer Board awards prizes in 23 categories across journalism, books, drama and music.
The first Monday in May means it's time for the annual Met Gala, when celebrities, designers, athletes and politicians show off their themed costumes on the carpeted steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Learn more about this year's theme, “The Garden of Time.”
And it's the beginning of National Nurses Week.
TUESDAY
President Joe Biden will deliver the keynote address at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance ceremony on Capitol Hill. He will also discuss the need to combat the ‘rising scourge of antisemitism’ and his administration’s work to implement the first National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.
Apple will host an online event that it teased with the tagline "Let Loose." Given that the event's invitation shows a drawing of a hand holding an Apple Pencil, new iPads are likely in the offing.
Voters head to the polls in Indiana's primary elections.
WEDNESDAY
House Republicans are calling on National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher to appear before a subcommittee hearing following a now-former NPR staffer’s allegations of left-wing bias in the radio broadcaster's news coverage. Uri Berliner, who wrote a scathing online essay claiming NPR had ‘lost America’s trust’ by embracing a ‘progressive worldview,’ resigned in April. NPR's editor-in-chief and other staffers have pushed back against Berliner’s characterization of the outlet. As to whether Maher will attend the hearing, information on NPR's website indicates that the outlet has a board of directors meeting all day on May 8.
FRIDAY
The Port of Baltimore plans to open a limited access channel at a depth of 45 feet following the expected removal of the cargo ship Dali, which crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, crippling the structure and killing six workers repairing potholes on it. Closer to the Midwest than any other port on the East Coast, Baltimore is a major hub for vehicles, containers and commodities.” [CNN]