Day: July 6, 2017

Entertainer Bill Cosby will be retried on charges of sexually assaulting a former employee of his alma mater in November, five months after his first trial on those charges ended in a hung jury, a Pennsylvania judge ruled on Thursday.

Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Steven O’Neill said the 79-year-old comedian would be tried again beginning on Nov. 6. He is accused of the sexual assault of Temple University administrator Andrea Constand in his Philadelphia-area home in 2004.

Cosby built a long career on a family-friendly style of comedy exemplified by the 1980s TV hit “The Cosby Show” before dozens of women came forward to accuse him of sex assault in a series of incidents dating back to the 1960s.

The vast majority of those alleged incidents were too old to be the subject of criminal prosecution, but Cosby has faced one criminal trial because prosecutors in Pennsylvania charged him in December 2015, just days before the statute of limitations was to run out on Constand’s claim.

The jurors who heard Cosby’s first trial in Norristown, Pennsylvania, who were bused in from Pittsburgh, 300 miles (480 km) away, failed to reach a unanimous verdict last month after 52 hours of deliberations that often stretched late into the night.

Cosby has long denied any criminal wrongdoing and has said that any sexual contact he had with his accusers was consensual.

His spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, hailed the hung-jury outcome as a victory for Cosby, who has not performed to a paying audience for more than two years.

Cosby is also awaiting two trials over civil lawsuits filed against him by accusers, with both scheduled for the summer of 2018.
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Director Franco Zeffirelli’s art works and personal library have been moved from his Roman villa to his native Florence to fill a museum honoring his life’s work.

The museum and performing arts center will display around 500 sketches of production sets that Zeffirelli made during his vast career, make available his 10,000-volume library and incorporate artistic activities.

His son, Pippo Zeffirelli, said at a presentation Thursday in Rome “the project was born from the maestro’s desire to leave all his artistic treasures” intact and accessible. Zeffirelli was expected to attend, but his son said he was feeling unwell because of a heat wave.

The film, TV and opera director, who is 94, also will be honored at La Scala with a revival of his 1963 production of “Aida.”
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Madonna says the children’s wing at a hospital in Malawi she has been building for two years completed its first surgery last week and will officially open July 11.

The Mercy James Institute for Pediatric Surgery and Intensive Care, located at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in the city of Blantyre, had a soft opening and is the first of its kind in Malawi. It was built in collaboration with the Malawian Ministry of Health.

“When you look into the eyes of children in need, wherever they may be, a human being wants to do anything and everything they can to help, and on my first visit to Malawi, I made a commitment that I would do just that,” Madonna said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“I’d like to thank everyone who has joined me on this unbelievable journey. What started out as a dream for Malawi and her children has become a reality, and we couldn’t have done it without your support,” she added.

Madonna adopted four children, David Banda, Mercy James, Stelle and Estere from Malawi. The children’s wing was named after 11-year-old Mercy.

The pop star’s charity, Raising Malawi, has built schools in Malawi and has funded the new pediatric unit, which began construction in 2015. Madonna, 58, visited the site last year.

The children’s unit includes three operating rooms dedicated to children’s surgery, a day clinic and a 45-bed ward. It will enable Queen Elizabeth hospital to double the number of surgeries for children and will provide critical pre-operative and post-operative care. It also includes a playroom, an outdoor play structure and murals curated by Madonna and other artists.

Sarah Ezzy, executive director of Raising Malawi, said the charity has been working with Queen Elizabeth hospital since 2008, helping the hospital’s chief of pediatric surgery, Dr. Eric Borgstein, develop a training program.

“Pediatric intensive care is not something that has formally existed in Malawi. There hasn’t been any training on it. It’s not part of the curriculum in nursing school [or] medical school. People had to leave the country to train … now people don’t have to leave the country to train,” Ezzy said in an interview. “This facility is attached to the college of medicine and nursing so it will be a learning, teaching hospital.”

Trevor Neilson, who works at Charity Network and has been advising Madonna’s philanthropic efforts for the last six years, said “only someone like Madonna could do this. If you weren’t Madonna, you would have given up a long time ago.”

“Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives will be saved by the hospital in the course of it operating,” added Neilson, who has worked on charity projects with Bill Gates, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Bono and others.

Madonna founded Raising Malawi in 2006 to address the poverty and hardship endured by Malawi’s orphans and vulnerable children.

“Malawi has enriched my family more than I could have ever imagined. It’s important for me to make sure all my children from the country maintain a strong connection to their birth nation, and equally important to show them that together as humans we have the power to change the world for the better,” Madonna said.
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The first time a new country songwriter named Kacey Musgraves saw one of her songwriting heroes, John Prine, she had an unusual proposition when she approached.

“I said, ‘Hey, my name is Kacey and I am a really big fan. I don’t want to offend you or anything, but is there any way you might want to burn one with me?”’ Musgraves recalled saying after one of his shows in Nashville, Tennessee.

Musgraves, who would later go on to win two Grammy Awards for her 2013 major label debut album, was hoping to fulfill a fantasy of smoking a joint with Prine. It was also the premise of an unreleased song she had written that somehow ended up on Prine’s desk.

Prine, who has survived a couple of bouts of cancer, politely declined.

“He says, ‘Well, I don’t do that anymore, but if I did, I would with you,”’ Musgraves, who is now 28, recalled.

This 70-year-old former mailman from Chicago is the hippest writer in Nashville and still in demand. Prine has become an affable songwriting guru for many of Nashville’s talented young artists, including country rebel Sturgill Simpson, Americana darlings Jason Isbell and his wife, Amanda Shires, and rocker Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.

All those artists have lined up to open for Prine, when they are easily selling out their own venues as headliners.

“I have met some really great people in the last five years that it’s easy to see that music in general is in good hands,” Prine said in an interview from his office, which is decorated year round with Christmas lights and a white Christmas tree.

Prine published his first book in April, a songbook called “Beyond Words,” which features guitar chords, family photos, handwritten or typed lyrics with his editing marks and witty musings alongside some of his most well-known songs, from “Sam Stone,” “Angel from Montgomery,” “Paradise,” and “Hello in There.”

Prine’s reinvigorated career came after neck cancer in the late ’90s left him with a much lower and grittier voice. After his recovery, he just moved his songs to lower key.

“Some of my oldest songs that I used to perform every night became brand spanking new just because I changed the key,” Prine said.

He started his own record label Oh Boy in Nashville in the early ’80s, which sold his CDs by direct mail to fans. He enjoys his independence from major labels, even if it has meant fewer sales. He says his only advice to young songwriters is don’t give up their publishing rights in a record deal.

“I am not a big one for advice,” Prine said. “I will tell them stories about things I have failed at or places I have stumbled and hope they take it as a parable. And maybe apply it to themselves and maybe not.”

Auerbach and Prine wrote several songs together, including the title track for Auerbach’s new solo album, “Waiting On a Song.”

“It was like having a conversation really,” the 38-year-old singer said of writing with Prine. “And I think for me, that’s what John does so well with his music. It’s not over your head. He uses simple language to convey big meaning.”

The Grammy-winner has taken on heavy topics including coal mining on Appalachia, the treatment of Vietnam veterans and the loneliness of growing old, and earned praises from Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Kris Kristofferson, who helped Prine get his first record deal. But he also likes to write with humor, as evidenced by another popular duet with Iris Dement “In Spite of Ourselves,” that contains some of his best one-liners about love and marriage.

“I think John is very youthful at heart,” Musgraves said. “He’s a big kid. So naturally he gets along with people that are younger than him. But also he probably recognizes himself in a lot of the up-and-coming songwriters that respect him.”

Even a trip to the grocery store is an opportunity for aspiring writers to pitch him. “I used to leave Kroger with cassettes in my pockets because people would drop CDs and cassettes because they want John Prine to hear it,” Prine said.

His last album in 2016 was a collection of classic country duets with artists like Musgraves, Alison Krauss and Miranda Lambert. He hasn’t released an album of new songs in 12 years, but his wife and manager, Fiona, and his son, Jody, who runs his label, convinced him it was time again.

He’s going back in the studio in July to record new music and he’s also been nominated for artist of the year at this year’s Americana Honors and Awards show held in September.

“I like the scene in Nashville,” Prine said. “I am not particularly happy with modern country music, but it’s part of a tradition. It will come and it will go, but it will always revert back to what country was before. I can see it coming around again. I am going to stick around Nashville and see what happens.”
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In prehistoric times, millions of bison roamed North America, but by the late 1800s, they were nearly extinct. Through conservation efforts, they can now be found in all 50 states, including national parks, private lands and even on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. As VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports, the story of how the bison crossed 45 kilometers of ocean to get to Catalina Island is right out of a Hollywood movie.
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A newly discovered photograph may provide the answer to one of the 20th century’s greatest unsolved mysteries — the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

The legendary American pilot vanished 80 years ago this month somewhere over the Pacific. She was attempting to be the first woman to fly around the world.

What is known is that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan radioed on July 2 that they were in trouble between Papua, New Guinea, and Howland Island.

U.S. investigators quickly gave up the search, concluding they crashed into the ocean and formally pronounced them dead in 1939.

There have been numerous theories of what happened to Earhart and Noonan.

But a new television documentary shows a previously lost photograph of a woman resembling Earhart and a man who experts say is almost certainly Noonan on a dock somewhere in the Pacific.

The woman has her back to the camera and is looking to her right. She has the short hair style and men’s-style pants Earhart was known to favor.

A barge in the background appears to be towing an object that looks like the same size as Earhart’s plane.

The man in the foreground has the same hairline and prominent nose as Noonan’s.

The photo was misplaced in a box at the National Archives in Washington and the filmmakers found it by accident.

Possibly seen as spies

They theorize that Japanese forces captured Earhart and Noonan, believing them to be spies and held them prisoner in the Mariana Islands.

It is unknown when or how they died.

The producers believe someone spying for the U.S. against Japan took the photograph.

They say that may be the reason why the United States hastened to give up looking for Earhart and Noonan.

Shawn Henry, a former assistant director of the FBI and Earhart aficionado, hosts the documentary. He says the aviator was abandoned by her own government and “may very well be the first casualty of World War II.”

The documentary, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” premiers Sunday night on The History Channel.
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