Day: August 23, 2018

Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Hudson and country singer Faith Hill will sing at the funeral of Aretha Franklin in Detroit next week, her publicist said Thursday.

They will be joined by R&B singers Chaka Khan, Ron Isley, Fantasia and Yolanda Adams at the funeral for the late Queen of Soul, publicist Gwendolyn Quinn said in a statement.

Franklin, 76, died last week of pancreatic cancer in her Detroit home. Her Aug. 31 funeral will be held at Detroit’s 4,000-seat Greater Grace Temple, which was the venue for the 2005 funeral of civil rights activist Rosa Parks.

The funeral will be limited to family, friends, dignitaries and special guests.

Thousands of members of the public are expected to pay their respects to Franklin during three days of viewing of her casket at Detroit’s Museum of African-American History, and at the New Bethel Baptist Church where a teenaged Franklin sang in the gospel choir.

The 18-time Grammy-winning singer of hits like “Chain of Fools” and “Respect” was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but grew up in Detroit and retained strong links to the city.

Her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, was a minister at the New Bethel Baptist Church for more than 30 years and Franklin honed her singing skills in the church choir.

Franklin’s second son, Edward Franklin, will also sing at the funeral, along with the Aretha Franklin Orchestra and the Aretha Franklin Choir, Quinn said.

Detroit news media on Thursday reported plans by Greater Grace Temple church leaders to bring in dozens of pink Cadillacs to line the streets for next Friday’s service. Franklin sang about cruising joyously in a pink Cadillac in her 1985 hit “Freeway of Love.”
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George Clooney can raise a glass, even if he’s not starring in any hit movies.

The 57-year-old tops the 2018 Forbes’ list of highest-paid actors with $239 million in pretax earnings. Forbes credits up to $1 billion that a British conglomerate said it would pay for Casamigos Tequila, which Clooney co-founded in 2013 with two entrepreneurs. The actor’s wealth also includes additional earnings from endorsements and older movies.

The rankings include on-screen and outside earnings.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson ranked second with $124 million pretax. Forbes says a huge social media following helped Johnson nearly double his 2017 earnings because he’s able to negotiate an extra seven figures over his standard contract for promotion.

Robert Downey Jr. was third with $81 million, followed by Chris Hemsworth with $64.5 million and Jackie Chan’s $45.5 million.

 
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A best-selling author and Newsweek correspondent has a book coming out on President Donald Trump and the women in his life.

Gallery Books announced Thursday that Nina Burleigh’s “Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women” will be published October 16. Burleigh, Newsweek’s national political correspondent, will draw on investigative journalism and feminist analysis, according to Gallery Books. She will write about Trump’s mother, his three wives, his sisters, daughters and female employees. She will also write about the more than a dozen women who have alleged harassment or other sexual misconduct – allegations he has denied.

Burleigh’s previous books include “The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox” and “Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt.”

 
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Shaki was 18 when she died, too young given the life expectancy of a giraffe. Ruth the rhinoceros was recovering from an infection until she fell, was stuck for hours in thick mud and then died.

The recent deaths have fueled charges by conservationists that an attempt by the Buenos Aires’ government to turn a 140-year-old zoo into a less intensive “eco-park” and relocate most of its 1,500 animals to sanctuaries has been a poorly planned disaster.

A coalition of more than a dozen environmental and veterinary groups has issued a letter denouncing a “state of abandonment” at the site, where about 200 animals have died since 2016. And more recently, a former zoo director filed a complaint demanding an investigation into the deaths of Shaki and Ruth, arguing that a lack of resources and the stress from nearby construction work contributed to their demise.

“A year ago, I said that this institution was not Noah’s Ark, but the Titanic on its course to be shipwrecked,” said Claudio Bertonatti, ex-director of the Buenos Aires zoo and consultant for the Fundacion Azara non-governmental organization. “Today, we’ve crashed into an iceberg.”

​Opened in 1875

The zoo was inaugurated in 1875 on what was then a quiet patch on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It was later a favorite haunt of Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges, who was fascinated by the tigers and wrote about them in his books. But as the megalopolis grew, the zoo became surrounded by an urban sprawl of busy avenues with honking buses and screeching cars near the animal enclosures, where on a recent day a solitary lion spent his time chasing his tail in circles.

The antiquated enclosures were widely considered inhumane by modern standards, as were the noisy environment and pollution, and pressure from animal rights groups grew to close the zoo.

“The situation of captivity is degrading for the animals, and it’s not the way to take care of them,” said Buenos Aires Mayor Horacio Rodriguez Larreta when he announced the zoo’s closure in 2016.

But the task remained to find new homes for the animals, hundreds of which still remain behind bars at the site in noisy limbo two years later.

Improvements made

Developers of Eco Park, as the site is now called, say there have been improvements to the enclosures and the 45-acre (18-hectare) site has been closed to the public, reducing the stress on the animals. Some 432 of them have been transferred so far, including two grizzly bears sent to The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado, three alligators to Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary in Georgia and a Fiji crested iguana to the San Diego Zoo.

City officials acknowledge that the process of closing the zoo has proved more difficult than they originally thought. Legislation had to be enacted to set standards and authorize the transfers. Experts feared that many animals were so zoo-trained that they would die if moved, even to wild animal preserves. Other animals were not transferred because of difficult logistics — they were too large or too tall to travel.

Shaki and family

That was the case of the giraffes: Shaki, her partner Buddy and their calf, Ciro. Nothing, however, indicated that Shaki was at risk of death. Giraffes in the wild live to about 25 years.

“The truth is that she was an adult female, but she had many years ahead of her,” said Guillermo Wiemayer, a veterinarian who has worked at the former zoo for more than a decade.

Shaki began showing signs of what appeared to be abdominal pain around 9 a.m. on July 24. Six hours later, the giraffe was dead. The necropsy found an ulcer in the wall of the animal’s stomach that ultimately led to peritonitis.

Ruth’s death

It occurred just 10 days after Ruth died following an infection in her vulva that later spread. Wiemayer said the rhinoceros had been breathing heavily and had diarrhea. She also suffered what he said were some “scratches” after she was attacked by a male rhinoceros. But overall, Ruth’s condition had improved.

Then, the enclosure flooded, she slipped and got stuck in the mud. For more than six hours, her keepers made a desperate attempt to rescue her using four-wheel-drive vehicles and other machinery. By the time they got Ruth out, she was too weak.

Wiemayer denied that the deaths of the animals were related to changes in their food or stress from construction near their enclosures, saying that the work had ended months before.

“While they’re under our care, we try to give them the best quality of life possible,” he said near Ciro, while the young orphaned giraffe extended its long dark-grey tongue during feeding time.

“But we know that unfortunately, we live with life and death.”

Complaint filed

The complaint filed by Bertonatti to a special unit of prosecutors that deals with environmental matters includes video showing rats and cockroaches in the enclosures of some of the park’s animals.

The park’s developers acknowledged that the footage was shot inside the park, but said it was years before city officials took it over in 2016. Rodents, they said, are inevitable since food is often out on the open, but they have hired a company and also gotten advice from a university to help them deal with infestations.

“Until the deaths of the giraffe and the rhino, there had never been criticisms in regards to the well-being of our animals,” said Gonzalo Pascual, deputy secretary of the environment and public spaces, who is in charge of the Eco Park project, which will have interactive learning modules, green spaces and the animals that can’t be transferred.

“We have more than 130 people focused on the well-being of the animals,” he said. “Nowhere in the world do you have the amount of professionals per animal that we have here at the Eco Park.”
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The southeast African country of Malawi has no film schools and no cinemas. But self-taught Malawi directors have still won international prizes for their films, seven of which are nominated for the African Movie Academy Awards this September in Rwanda. As Lameck Masina reports from Blantyre, Malawi’s filmmakers are working hard to build their own “Mollywood” film industry.
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Ohio State Wednesday night suspended head football coach Urban Meyer three games for mishandling domestic violence accusations, punishing one of the sport’s most prominent leaders for keeping an assistant on staff for several years after the coach’s wife accused him of abuse.

The move followed a two-week investigation into how Meyer reacted to accusations that former Buckeyes assistant Zach Smith abused his ex-wife, Courtney Smith. Zach Smith was fired last month after she asked a judge for a protective order.

Courtney Smith alleged her husband shoved her against a wall and put his hands around her neck in 2015. The university put Meyer on paid leave and began its investigation after Courtney Smith spoke out publicly, sharing text messages and photos she traded in 2015 with Meyer’s wife, Shelley Meyer. Shelley Meyer is a registered nurse and instructor at Ohio State.

“I followed my heart and not my head,” Meyer said, quickly reading a written statement to reporters during a news conference after his punishment was announced. “I should have demanded more from him and recognized red flags.”

Trustees discussed the decision to punish Meyer in a marathon meeting of more than 12 hours Wednesday while Meyer awaited the decision. Athletic director Gene Smith, who is not related to Zach or Courtney Smith, was also suspended from Aug. 31 through Sept. 16. Both the athletic director and Meyer apologized and said they accepted the punishments.

“I should have done more and I am sorry for that,” Meyer said.

Meyer will miss Ohio State’s first three games against Oregon State, Rutgers and No. 16 TCU.

The investigation prompted Meyer to insist he followed proper protocols after learning of the 2015 accusations. But he also acknowledged lying to reporters a week earlier when he said he hadn’t heard of the incident until shortly before he fired Zach Smith. 
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