Harper Lee, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ author, has died at 89
Harper Lee, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ author, has died at 89
NEW YORK (AP) — Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died. She was 89.
Lee died peacefully Friday, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement. It did not give any other details about how she died.
“The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to — in private — surrounded by books and the people who loved her,” Michael Morrison, head of HarperCollins U.S. general books group, said in the statement.
For most of her life, Lee divided her time between New York City, where she wrote the novel in the 1950s, and her hometown of Monroeville, which inspired the book’s fictional Maycomb.
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, is the story of a girl nicknamed Scout growing up in a Depression-era Southern town. A black man has been wrongly accused of raping a white woman, and Scout’s father, the resolute lawyer Atticus Finch, defends him despite threats and the scorn of many.
Pentagon says US bombed IS training camp in Libya
WASHINGTON (AP) — American F-15E fighter-bombers struck an Islamic State training camp in rural Libya near the Tunisian border Friday, killing dozens, probably including an IS operative considered responsible for deadly attacks in Tunisia last year, U.S. and local officials said. The strike did not appear to mark the beginning of a sustained U.S. campaign in Libya but a Pentagon spokesman said “it may not be the last.”
The spokesman, Peter Cook, said the U.S. is determined to stop the Islamic State from “gaining traction” in Libya. Cook said the training camp was “relatively new,” and that the U.S. has identified similar Islamic State training camps elsewhere in Libya, suggesting potential future strikes in defense of regional and U.S. national security interests.
In Libya, local officials estimated that Friday’s U.S. attack killed more than 40 people with more wounded, some critically. Up to 60 people were believed to be at the camp, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence-related information.
Political chaos in Libya has allowed the Islamic State to expand across the northern coast of the oil-rich North African country, which is just across the Mediterranean from Italy and has also become a major conduit for African migrants heading to Europe. IS controls the central city of Sirte and a number of oil installations.
Adding to the concern in Washington and Europe is evidence that the number of Islamic State fighters in Libya is increasing — now believed to be about 5,000 — even as the group’s numbers in Syria and Iraq are shrinking.
Arabic version of Saturday Night Live hits the Middle East
CAIRO (AP) — “From Cairo…it’s Saturday Night!”
An Arabic version of Saturday Night Live is airing across the Arab world for the first time this weekend, offering a Middle Eastern twist on the hit U.S. comedy show.
In a newly renovated theatre in the Egyptian capital, the live audience laughed their way through the shooting of the first episode on Tuesday. The host was Donia Samir Ghanem, one of Egypt’s top female comedians, who cracked jokes at her own expense, and sent up stereotypes of different Arabic countries. All the elements of SNL were there: a celebrity guest, music performances, live sketches, videos and parody news — but when it comes to politics, they’re playing it safe.
The writers of “Saturday Night Live in Arabic” are treading lightly after Egypt’s sharply satirical version of “The Daily Show” had to go off air in 2014. Its star, the country’s most popular satirist Bassem Youssef — known overseas as “Egypt’s Jon Stewart” — said he believed the political climate was no longer conducive to satire.
Youssef’s TV show was cancelled the month Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, took office after winning elections. El-Sissi led the 2013 popularly-backed overthrow of a former Islamist president, and then jailed thousands of Islamists before broadening the crackdown on dissent to include secular activists.
Britain’s future, migrant split reveal growing EU divide
BRUSSELS (AP) — Britain is thinking of leaving. Greece feels isolated. Austria and Denmark are pushing controversial measures for coping with asylum-seekers despite what their neighbors think.
Tensions between European Union leaders at this week’s summit in Brussels have highlighted a gnawing lack of confidence that the bloc of 28 nations can provide timely answers to Europe’s challenges.
Rarely has the EU seemed as fragmented and impotent as on Friday, when leaders grappled with a possible British exit and tried to find a united response to the refugee emergency.
“The fact that every policy being discussed is strongly contested is fueling doubts as to whether the EU and its members will be able to match their rhetoric with concrete actions by cooperating more closely,” Janis Emmanouilidis at the European Policy Centre think-tank wrote in an analysis.
Still barely recovering from an economic crisis that rivalled the Great Depression, Europe is now struggling with its biggest refugee crisis in well over half a century.
Thousands pay respects to late Justice Scalia
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bidding farewell to their longtime colleague, the eight remaining Supreme Court justices joined family members, former law clerks and members of the public Friday in paying their respects to Antonin Scalia in a tradition-laden, solemn day at the marble courthouse atop Capitol Hill.
The Rev. Paul Scalia, the justice’s son and a Catholic priest, said traditional prayers at a private ceremony before thousands of people filed through the court’s Great Hall, where Scalia’s casket lay on a funeral bier first used after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
“You have called your servant Antonin out of this world. Release him from the bonds of sin and welcome him into your presence,” the sixth of the justice’s nine children said.
Outside the court, meanwhile, a makeshift memorial was set up featuring jars of applesauce, a pile of fortune cookies and paper bags, items that figured in the outspoken conservative Scalia’s sharp dissents in recent cases.
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama planned to pay respects later Friday, while Vice President Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden were to attend Saturday’s funeral Mass.
Last of ‘Angola Three’ inmates released, thanks supporters
ST. FRANCISVILLE, La. (AP) — The last inmate of a group known as the “Angola Three” pleaded no contest Friday to manslaughter in the 1972 death of a prison guard and was released after more than four decades in prison.
Albert Woodfox and two other men became known as the “Angola Three” for their decades-long stays in isolation at the Louisiana Penitentiary at Angola and other prisons. Officials said they were kept in solitary because their Black Panther Party activism would otherwise rile up inmates at the maximum-security prison farm in Angola.
Woodfox consistently maintained his innocence in the killing of guard Brent Miller. He was being held at the West Feliciana Parish Detention Center in St. Francisville, about 30 miles north of Baton Rouge. He was awaiting a third trial in Miller’s death after earlier convictions were thrown out by federal courts for reasons including racial bias in selecting a grand jury foreman.
Woodfox, who turned 69 on the same day he was released from custody, spoke to reporters and supporters briefly outside the jail before driving off with his brother. Speaking of his future plans, he said he wanted to visit his mother’s gravesite. She died while he was in prison, and Woodfox said he was not allowed to go to the funeral.
As to whether he would have done anything differently back in 1972, Woodfox responded: “When forces are beyond your control, there’s not a lot you can do. Angola was a very horrible place at the time and everybody was just fighting to survive from day to day.”