Loretta Swit, the Emmy-winning actress who made the high-strung and relentlessly militaristic Maj. Margaret Houlihan human, dignified and, against all odds, sympathetic on the acclaimed television series “M*A*S*H,” died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

Her death was announced by her publicist, Harlan Boll.

In the Oscar-winning 1970 film “M*A*S*H,” directed by Robert Altman, Major Houlihan (whose blatantly sexist nickname was Hot Lips) was played by Sally Kellerman. When the movie became a CBS series, Ms. Swit stepped into the role and made it her own, adding heretofore unseen nuance. She was nominated 10 years in a row for the Emmy Award for best supporting actress in a comedy series, and she won twice, in 1980 and 1982.

“M*A*S*H,” which aired from 1972 through 1983 on CBS, was, like the movie that inspired it, set at a mobile Army hospital during the Korean War. Major Houlihan spent the first five seasons distracted by her open secret of an affair with the sniveling, very married Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville).

Around the time Major Burns returned to the United States, she married a handsome officer whom she had met in Tokyo. But he proved unfaithful, and she was soon divorced and newly dedicated to her career as the unit’s head nurse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/arts/television/mash-50th-anniversary.html

Throughout history, atrocities have usually been committed under cover of darkness. The perpetrators know that what they are doing is wrong. They hide it. They deny it. They speak in euphemisms. But what happens when they no longer feel the need to hide? What happens when they say the quiet part out loud?

This is what is happening in Gaza today. The mask has come off.

Ethnic cleansing has become the official policy of Israel. The nation’s leaders are admitting it, without apology. There was barely a pretense before. But now there’s not even that. And these admissions, combined with mass killing on the ground, point to something even more horrific: genocide.

On May 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers that Israel’s war on Gaza is intended to render large parts of the territory uninhabitable, forcing Palestinians to flee: “We are destroying more and more homes. They have nowhere to return to.” Even the Trump administration — which is, or at least was, about as pro-Israel as you can get — understands what is happening. As President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff recently said, “Israel is not ready to end the war. Israel is prolonging the war, even though we do not see where further progress can be made.”

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“In the aftermath of the Pahalgam terrorist attack, what has caught the attention of strategic experts and left them perplexed is the U.S. President’s repeated obsession with Kashmir — his fixation on resolving a “1000-year-old dispute” and constant references to mediation have raised many eyebrows. This signals one thing clearly: Kashmir is once again emerging as the geopolitical epicenter of South Asia.

As two nuclear powers in South Asia indulge in military skirmishes, political messaging from the U.S. appears not only ambiguous but also contradictory. On one hand, there is an effort to center the Kashmir dispute as an issue of global relevance by hyphenating India and Pakistan together; on the other, the U.S. is leveraging trade tariffs to extract concessions from India — even discouraging companies like Apple from manufacturing goods there.

In the early days of globalization, the U.S. cultivated India as a key ally and an emerging power to contain China. It was widely believed that China wanted India confined within the subcontinent box — a position the U.S. actively resisted. But what has now transpired to reverse that position? Why is the U.S. attempting to relegate India back into the subcontinent box, even as it leads efforts to internationalize the Kashmir issue?”

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(A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle. Book depicts an aging president whose family and aides enabled his quixotic campaign for a second term.)

The result is a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s original sin: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; the attacks on journalists (like Thompson) who deigned to report on worries about Biden’s apparent fatigue and mental state; an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

This blistering charge is attributed to “a prominent Democratic strategist” who also “publicly defended Biden.” In “Original Sin,” the reasons given for saying nice things in public about the president are legion. Some Democrats, especially those who didn’t see the president that often, relied on his surrogates for reassurance about his condition (“He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine”); others were wary of giving ammunition to the Trump campaign, warning that he was an existential threat to the country. Tapper and Thompson are scornful of such rationales: “For those who tried to justify the behavior described here because of the threat of a second Trump term, those fears should have shocked them into reality, not away from it.”

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