A wave of supportive reaction greeted the surprising confession by Angelina Jolie on Monday night that she had had a double mastectomy earlier this year to lower her chances of cancer.

In a striking opinion piece in the New York Times, Jolie wrote:

"My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

Also read:...

The lawyer in the case against Variety owner Jay Penske by a Beverly Hills marketing executive called to set me straight.

Lawyer Steven Morris said Penske refused to honor a joint venture signed last year between Variety and his client, Beverly Hills Media Group, before Penske bought the trade from Reed Elsevier. And so Penske just cancelled it, after first trying to negotiate different terms.

BHMG said: No can do. (Read it here)

BHMG sued Penske first, on April 30, for breach of contract. Penske countersued for fraud the next day, May 1, as the court documents confirm. Duly noted. (Our first story had the order wrong, as did Deadline.)

Also read:...

One of the biggest jobs in media is a new position and a high-risk opportunity: running Al Jazeera America.

The job running the Qatar-based network recently bought from Current TV has high visibility and no doubt a high salary attached. But it also bears the burden of building an audience in mainstream American with the name of a Middle Eastern brand unfamiliar to most U.S. viewers and probably off-putting to some.

TheWrap has learned of several of the candidates that Al Jazeera has contacted for a job that needs to start ASAP for the network to get on the air and running this year, as is planned. As it happens, there are a goodly number of experienced TV news professionals available at the moment. But who will it be?

...

From the annals of Weird Hollywood comes the unmasking of a leading Hollywood Republican I’ve never heard of named David Stein. The news is that it turns out he’s actually David Cole, a Jewish Holocaust denier (above) who fell off the right-wing map in the 1990s.

You don’t often get to say “Jewish Holocaust denier,” so let’s take a moment.

According to media reports, especially a lengthy, breathless piece in The Guardian, David Stein has been a fixture in right-wing Hollywood circles in recent years, bringing together “right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures …for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs....