Saturday, September 3, 2011

End of an era, no Jerry on Labor Day, Russian rowers embrace nude statute banned by Stalin, Gadhafi & CIA have been pals for years

Image: Jerry Lewis

Good Morning Humboldt County!

Thanks for stopping by this Labor Day weekend. Grab a cup of Joe, get comfortable, and we’ll check out three stories from the headlines:

Jerry Lewis: MIA this Labor Day

Labor Day this year promises to be bland by comparison, with the 85-year-old Lewis now banished from the annual rite he built from scratch and molded in his image.

As if deflated by the absence of its larger-than-life host, "The 46th Annual MDA Labor Day Telethon" will fill just six hours (Sunday from 6 p.m. to midnight in each time zone; check local listings for station), rather than the grueling 21½-hour endurance contest that Lewis used to churn through with his viewers in tow.

On Aug. 3, with no elaboration, MDA announced that Lewis had "completed his run" as national chairman, and that he would not be appearing on the telethon, as promised earlier.

Lewis has provided no insight into the matter. But it's hard to imagine how wronged he must feel after bonding with the telethon for so long. As Levy writes in "King of Comedy," Lewis "had conflated America's charitable instincts with love for himself as a public figure and even as one more lonely child."

Image: A copy of the 'Girl With an Oar' statue has been returned to Moscow after the original was banned by Stalin

Too sexy for Stalin: Russian rowers embrace oar girl statue

The artist may have been a favorite of Stalin, but Ivan Shadr's statue "Girl With an Oar" proved too sexy for the Soviet dictator.

The 23-foot nude statue, sculpted in 1934, was banished from pride of place in Moscow's Gorky Park to Ukraine in 1936 and replaced with a less sensual version, The Wall Street Journal reported.

However, a copy of the original was due to be unveiled Saturday on the bank of the Moskva River in the park at the finish line of an international regatta course, the paper said.

The model for the statue, Vera Voloshina, was captured and killed by German forces, the WSJ reported.

 

Documents reveal close CIA ties to Gadhafi spy unit

Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.

Photo: CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson recruited Gadaffi in 1977, and the CIA shipped Libya over 2000 pounds of explosives," says former CIA agent Lester Coleman.

Time to walk on down the road…

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