Day: June 8, 2017

A jury that heard seven hours of testimony from a woman who says Bill Cosby drugged and assaulted her may soon hear from Cosby himself — even if he doesn’t take the stand.

Prosecutors are expected to show jurors an earlier deposition in which Cosby said that he routinely gave women pills and alcohol before sexual encounters and gave at least one of them quaaludes, a now-banned sedative. 

The suburban Philadelphia jury on Wednesday heard trial accuser Andrea Constand offer her most direct denial yet that any of their earlier meetings were romantic.

Wasn’t ‘romantic’

“It wasn’t a romantic time, no,” Constand, 44, of Toronto, said of an earlier fireside dinner with Cosby, a trustee at Temple University, where she directed the women’s basketball team.

The jury also heard Cosby’s voice on a 2006 telephone call, offering Constand money for graduate school after her mother called to confront him about the encounter at his home a year earlier.

“She could go to school,” he said. “If she wanted to do that, then I would be willing to … pay for the schooling.”

Cosby, now 79, acknowledges in the deposition from Constand’s related lawsuit that he gave her three blue pills before fondling her breast and penetrating her with his fingers. The only question for the jury is how to interpret the encounter. Prosecutors say she was too impaired to give consent.

The defense lawyer sought to show that Constand changed her mind about the date of the alleged assault. But Constand perhaps blunted the attack by saying she got confused and initially thought the episode happened in March 2004.

“I was mistaken,” she said, unflustered.

Gianna Constand, who followed her daughter to the stand, sounded alarmed at the thought Andrea had been drugged, and angry that they still don’t know what type of pills Cosby gave her. Andrea Constand said the pills left her paralyzed and unable to stop Cosby from penetrating her with his finger and putting her hand on his genitals. She said she was still woozy when she woke up six hours later.

Cross-examination

The defense spent hours on cross-examination trying to suggest the sexual encounter with Cosby was consensual, based on Constand’s previous visits to his home and continued contact afterward.

Cosby arrived at a courthouse Thursday accompanied by fellow actors and comedians Joe Torry and Lewis Dix. On Wednesday, actress Sheila Frazier and her hairstylist husband, John Atchison, arrived with Cosby. Earlier in the week, Cosby was supported by Keshia Knight-Pulliam, who played the youngest daughter, Rudy, on The Cosby Show.

Constand’s case is expected to get to the jury sometime next week. Prosecutors, before then, plan to call an expert in the behavior of sexual assault victims to explain why some remain in contact with their abusers and wait before lodging a complaint.

The defense may call a memory expert to cast doubt on the accuracy of testimony about long-ago events. Cosby was arrested in 2015 after his deposition became public and prosecutors reopened an earlier 2005 investigation that ended with Cosby not being charged.

“She has said the same thing from Day One. She’s always said he drugged her. She’s always said she didn’t consent. She’s always said it was digital penetration,” Constand lawyer Dolores Troiani told The Associated Press when Constand finished her testimony Wednesday afternoon.

Some 60 women have come forward to say Cosby sexually violated them, but the statute of limitations for prosecution had run out in nearly every case. Constand’s case is the only one in which Cosby has been charged. The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.
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For a country that takes pride in even the smallest successes of its international celebrities, the debut of Wonder Woman has sparked an Israeli lovefest for homegrown hero Gal Gadot.

A huge billboard overlooking Tel Aviv’s main highway is tagged with a provincial “we love you” greeting, her Hebrew-accented appearances in the international media are reported upon daily and throngs of fans cheer wildly upon seeing her on the big screen. Even Lebanon’s ban of the film hasn’t dampened the mood in Israel, where Gadot’s superhero status has been embraced as a national treasure.

“It’s so cool that someone from here is succeeding and is famous overseas. Everyone in the theater was so excited,” said 20-year-old Ela Hofshi of Jerusalem, who watched the movie on opening night. “I think all the enthusiasm here is very supportive and encourages her to keep growing in the world and representing us.”

Eager for diversions from politics and conflict with the Palestinians, Israelis often rejoice when one of their own breaks through on the international stage, whether it’s Omri Casspi in the NBA, medal-winning Olympic athletes or big-name model Bar Refaeli. But Gadot’s ascendance to stardom has entered a whole new stratosphere as she has assumed the identity of Wonder Woman in a box-office smash that raked in more than $100 million in its first weekend in theaters.

The role has instantly transformed Gadot into arguably the world’s most famous Israeli and the country’s most high-profile ambassador. In contrast to Refaeli, whose aloof demeanor, refusal to perform her compulsory military service and a tax-dodging scandal have alienated many Israelis, Gadot has been widely embraced. In interviews, she often speaks in accented English of her military service, a rite of passage for most Israeli Jews, which has made her even more beloved at home.

“She bears the burden of being Israeli with grace and you can see that fame hasn’t changed her,” said Ariel Oseran, 27. “She represents the `good Israeli’ and does us a great service. When she talks about the army, it shows that serving in the military is not a bad thing. It’s something inspiring. It makes every one of our female soldiers seem like Wonder Woman.”

Gadot grew up in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rosh Haayin and somehow stumbled into stardom. She was chosen Miss Israel in 2004 at the age of 18 and represented the country in the Miss Universe pageant that year. She then put off her modeling career to enlist in the military, where she served two years as a combat fitness instructor. In 2007, she took a part in the Maxim photo shoot “Women of the Israeli Army.”

After a year of law school, a casting director invited her to audition for a James Bond movie. She didn’t get the part, but it led to her big Hollywood break in 2008 when she was cast in the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise as Gisele Yashar, an ex-Mossad agent.

She first portrayed Wonder Woman in last year’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” before headlining this weekend’s release of “Wonder Woman,” the first Hollywood film exclusively devoted to the DC Comics heroine.

In promoting the film, Gadot made the rounds of American talk and late night shows, charming the hosts with her down-to-earth personality. In an interview with ABC’s morning show, Gadot, who recently gave birth to her second child, joked that being pregnant as Wonder Woman was harder than being a soldier in the Israeli army.

Gadot, who performs her own stunts, has attracted fans with a public image that empowers women. For the film’s Los Angeles premiere, she showed up in $50 flats from Aldo rather than pricey heels. When asked, she responded “it’s more comfortable.”

Her mother, Irit Gadot, a former gym teacher, said that’s just who her daughter is.

“She has a certain personal charm, a certain simplicity,” she told Israel’s Channel 10 TV. “What she is is what you see.”

In Israel, she has avoided the types of scandals that often plague celebrities and has been showered with love. Theaters have erupted into cheers when she appears on screen, and some fans even broke into tears of joy on opening weekend.

Locals excitedly noted how Gadot’s Israeli accent was mimicked by her co-stars as the supposed dialect of Wonder Woman’s idyllic Amazonian island of Themyscira.

Haaretz film critic Uri Klein praised her performance, which he said was “likely to contribute to the pleasure for those who want to envelop the viewing experience in national Israeli pride.”

Her identity has also made her a target of anti-Israel boycott activists who attacked her on Twitter as a “Zionist” and pushed to have the film banned in Lebanon. Opponents noted Gadot had praised Israel’s military on Facebook during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, sending prayers to soldiers “who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas.” The military, while defending its actions as a response to Hamas rocket fire, nonetheless draw heavy international criticism for the heavy Palestinian civilian death toll.

Michal Kleinberg argued in a column on the Nana10 website that Gadot represented far more than mere national pride.

“This is not one of ours who managed to squeeze into a fashion show or an important competition, it’s one of ours in the most leading role a woman can get in a Hollywood film,” she wrote. “Gadot is objectively [really!] perfectly cast for the role. It’s not that Hollywood has a shortage of beautiful, fit, athletic brunettes, but an Israeli actress has something a Hollywood one doesn’t. As much as it sounds cliche, she offers a sort of chutzpah, spice and relatability.”
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Of all the supernatural forces slung in Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy (and, believe me, there are a lot), none can compete with the spectacle of Tom Cruise, at 54.

He and his abs are almost creepily ageless. So it’s almost fitting that in one of the typically bonkers scenes in The Mummy, Cruise awakes naked and unscathed alongside cadavers in a morgue, where he bewilderedly removes the tag attached to his toe. Indefatigable and un-killable, Cruise really is the undead. He’s like the anti-Steve Buscemi.

Yet Cruise and The Mummy — the opening salvo in Universal’s bid to birth its Dark Universe monster movie franchise — are a poor fit, and not the good kind, like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

There’s plenty of standard, cocky Tom Cruise leading-man stuff here: running, swimming, daredevil airplane acrobatics, more running. But his relentless forward momentum is sapped by the convoluted monster mishmash that engulfs The Mummy, a movie conceived and plotted like the monster version of Marvel. Increasingly, Cruise — like big-budget movies, themselves — is running in circles.

Tomb unearthed

He plays Nick Morton, a roguish Army sergeant who plunders antiquities from Iraq with his partner Chris Vail (Jake Johnson). In a remote village they, along with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), unearth a giant Egyptian tomb bathed in mercury.

In it lies the Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who was mummified alive (imagine that wrapping job) after trying to unleash the evil Egyptian god of Set while killing her Pharaoh father, his second wife and the newborn baby that would deny her the throne. Naturally, she’s going to get loose.

Hers and other backstories are shown as The Mummy stumbles out of its grave, vainly trying to organize the story around two burial sites (the other is in London), the strange visions that begin plaguing Morton, and a quixotic (or merely capitalistic) gambit to stitch together a unifying principle for the Dark Universe. Mysterious apocalyptic happenings (a swarm of crows, a horde of rats, occasional ghouls) prompt a series of helter-skelter chase scenes that eventually lead Morton and Halsey to Prodigium, a stealth organization led by the dapper Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) that controls monstrous outbreaks, including those of its schizophrenic leader.

Prodigium would seem to be the connecting tissue for Universal’s shared universe, with plans for Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Creature From the Black Lagoon and more in the works. Much of The Mummy hinges on Boutella’s vengeful and vaguely misogynistic monster (she for some reason needs a man — Morton, it turns out — to really do damage). But much of the film endeavors to set up the characters — maybe even famous phantoms — to come.

Why the universe?

Where these films could be fun is in seeing a talented star play a big, theatrical character that would honor the ghosts of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp are already lined up, so who knows? But the desperate need to graft them into a larger comic-book-like “world” — and a thinly conceived one, at that — suggests there won’t be much room for any actor to breathe.

For now we’re cursed with The Mummy, a messy and muddled product lacking even the carefree spirit of the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy. There are moments of humor in the script by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman, but Cruise isn’t the one (maybe Chris Pratt?) to pull off aloofly referring to the mummy as “the chick in the box.”

Almost to the degree that he was in The Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise is put through the ringer. A spiraling cargo plane spins him like laundry. He careens through a double-decker bus. His rib cage is yanked. Cruise remains, as ever, eminently game. But he, like us moviegoers, might have to start wondering: What god have we angered?

The Mummy, a Universal Pictures release, is rated PG-13.
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The remains of a major Aztec temple and a ceremonial ball court have been discovered in downtown Mexico City, shedding new light on the sacred spaces of the metropolis that Spanish conquerors overran five centuries ago, archaeologists said on Wednesday.

The discoveries were made on a nondescript side street just behind the city’s colonial-era Roman Catholic cathedral off the main Zocalo plaza on the grounds of a 1950s-era hotel.

The underground excavations reveal a section of what was the foundation of a massive, circular-shaped temple dedicated to the Aztec wind god Ehecatl and a smaller part of a ritual ball court, confirming accounts of the first Spanish chroniclers to visit the Aztec imperial capital, Tenochtitlan.

“Due to finds like these, we can show actual locations, the positioning and dimensions of each one of the structures first described in the chronicles,” said Diego Prieto, head of Mexico’s main anthropology and history institute.

Archaeologists also detailed a grisly offering of 32 severed male neck vertebrae discovered in a pile just off the court.

“It was an offering associated with the ball game, just off the stairway,” said archaeologist Raul Barrera. “The vertebrae, or necks, surely came from victims who were sacrificed or decapitated.”

Some of the original white stucco remains visible on parts of the temple, built during the 1486-1502 reign of Aztec Emperor Ahuizotl, predecessor of Moctezuma, who conquistador Hernan Cortes toppled during the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Early Spanish accounts relate how a young Moctezuma played against an elderly allied king on the court and lost, which was taken as sign that the Aztec Empire’s days were numbered.

The building would have stood out because of its round shape among the several dozen other square temples that dominated the Aztecs’ most sacred ceremonial space before the 1521 conquest.

Aztec archaeologist Eduardo Matos said the top of the temple was likely built to resemble a coiled snake, with priests entering though a doorway made to look like a serpent’s nose.

Once excavations finish, a museum will be built on the site, rubbing shoulders with modern buildings in the capital.

Mexico City, including its many colonial-era structures with their own protections, was built above the razed ruins of the Aztec capital, and more discoveries are likely, Matos said.

“We’ve been working this area for nearly 40 years, and there’s always construction of some kind … and so we take advantage of that and get involved,” he said.
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