‘House of Cards’ canceled as fallout continues for Spacey
NEW YORK (AP) — The fallout facing Kevin Spacey widened Monday following an accusation that he allegedly made sexual advances on a teen boy, with Netflix pulling the plug on his hit show “House of Cards” and “deeply troubled” producers of the political thriller arriving on set to comfort cast mates.
Executives from Netflix and the show’s producer, Media Rights Capital, said they arrived in Baltimore, where the show is shot, on Monday afternoon to make sure actors and crew “continue to feel safe and supported.” Spacey was not scheduled to be on set on Monday.
Though the decision to end the series was announced on Monday, the decision to end the series was made several months ago, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the decision.
Spacey is the latest Hollywood man to be named in widening allegations of sexual harassment and abuse in entertainment, media and other industries. The avalanche of allegations began earlier this month after the New York Times published a story alleging that producer Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed numerous women.
On Monday, NBC fired political journalist Mark Halperin after multiple allegations of sexual harassment, and The New Republic said it had launched an investigation after publisher and president Hamilton Fish was accused of harassing women.
Trump vows justice as US captures key Benghazi militant
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. special operations forces captured a militant in Libya accused of playing an instrumental role in the Benghazi attacks, officials said Monday, in a high-stakes operation designed to bring the perpetrators to justice five years after the deadly violence.
President Donald Trump identified the militant as Mustafa al-Imam and said his capture signified that the four Americans who died “will never be forgotten.” Justice Department officials were escorting al-Imam by military plane to the United States, where he’s expected to be tried in federal court.
“Our memory is deep and our reach is long, and we will not rest in our efforts to find and bring the perpetrators of the heinous attacks in Benghazi to justice,” Trump said.
The Navy SEAL-led raid marked the first publicly known operation since Trump took office to target those accused of involvement in Benghazi, which mushroomed into a multiyear political fracas centered on Republican allegations of a bungled Obama administration response. Those critiques shadowed Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the attacks, through her presidential campaign.
U.S. forces captured al-Imam just before midnight local time Sunday in Misrata, on Libya’s north coast, U.S. officials said. He was taken to a U.S. Navy ship at the Misrata port for transport by military plane to Washington, where he’s expected to arrive within the next two days, one of the officials said.
Canada seeks to compensate indigenous taken from families
TORONTO (AP) — Colleen Cardinal often wondered why her parents turned bright red in the sun but she grew dark along with her sisters. The puzzle was solved when she was a young teen, and the woman she had thought of as her mother disclosed that she had been picked out of a catalog of native children available for adoption.
Cardinal was one of thousands of indigenous children taken from their birth families from the 1960s to mid-1980s and sent to live with white families, who officials at the time insisted could give them better care. Many lost touch with their original culture and language.
It echoes the history of residential schools in Canada. Some 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families over much of the last century and put in government schools, where they were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.
The government has since apologized and offered compensation for the victims of residential schools, and now it’s paying compensation for what is known as the “Sixties Scoop” in which children were essentially scooped up from reservations and their native families. But many say the settlement is too little, too late.
Cardinal says it won’t undo what was for her a traumatic experience. She was taken from her Plains Cree family in Alberta and sent to a home about 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) away alongside a lake in rural Ontario, where she said her two older sisters were sexually abused.
Doctors: Global warming is taking a toll on people’s health
WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming is hurting people’s health a bit more than previously thought, but there’s hope that the Earth — and populations — can heal if the planet kicks its coal habit, a group of doctors and other experts said.
The poor and elderly are most threatened by worsening climate change, but there remains “glimmers of progress” especially after the 2015 Paris agreement to limit heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new big study published Monday in the British medical journal Lancet.
Comparing the report to a health checkup, four researchers and several outside experts described Earth’s prognosis as “guarded.”
“There are some very severe warning signs, but there are some hopeful indicators too,” said co-author Dr. Howard Frumkin, a professor of environmental health at the University of Washington. “Given the right treatment and aggressive efforts to prevent things from getting worse, I think there’s hope.”
The report highlighted health problems stemming from more frequent heat waves, disease spread by insects, air pollution and other woes. While the disasters have been costly, deaths haven’t been increasing because society is doing a better but more expensive job adjusting to the changing conditions, the researchers noted.
Utilities warn that power could be out for days in Northeast
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A storm packing hurricane-force wind gusts and soaking rain brought trees and power lines crashing down early Monday, knocking out power for nearly 1.5 million homes and businesses and forcing hundreds of schools to close in New England.
Thousands of trees were toppled, some falling onto houses and cars. In New Hampshire, floodwaters swept away a house. In Maine, the state’s largest utility warned residents to be prepared to be without electricity for up to a week.
New England bore the brunt of the storm, which brought sustained winds of up to 50 mph in spots. A gust of 130 mph was reported at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire, while winds hit 82 mph in Mashpee on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
“It was really terrifying,” said Rachel Graham, who described pine trees crashing nearby as she rode out the storm with her husband and their 2-year-old daughter in a yurt in Freeport, Maine. “It was a lot of crashes and bangs.”
Miraculously, no serious injuries were reported.