News from Around the World

This reminds us of a Chinese fortune cookie we read recently:

Watching Live & Direct this week, it’s been hard to get a sense of what Rita was hired to bring to MSNBC. The aftermath of a devastating hurricane is not really a Rita Cosby kind of story; for one thing, there’s no one to blame for it. (I suppose you could rant bitterly against God, as if He were Robert Blake or Joran van der Sloot, but that might lose you a few viewers, especially from the Fox camp.) Cosby seems much more at home with stories like the disappearance of Olivia Newton-John’s boyfriend, Patrick McDermott (I loved her attempt last week to pump some juice about this case out of a visibly nonchalant private investigator, who suggested, “I would say two words: Las Vegas, OK? Look in Las Vegas. He’s probably hanging out there”), and of course, the Natalee Holloway story. This week, Cosby was supposed to be reporting live from Aruba, and she actually did broadcast the show from there, but God had thrown a wrench in MSNBC’s plans to steal some of the Natalee Holloway fire away from Fox: Hurricane Katrina. There was something bitterly amusing in watching Cosby try to justify her presence in Aruba (”As you know, I just arrived here in Aruba, which was not hit by the storm, but is dealing with the fury of the Natalee Holloway investigation”) before devoting the rest of the hour to long-distance coverage of the mega-disaster happening back in her own country.