The University of Minnesota will award the late rock star Prince an honorary degree to recognize his influence on music and his role in shaping his hometown of Minneapolis.

 

University President Eric Kaler and Regent Darrin Rosha will present the school’s highest honor, the Doctorate of Humane Letters, to Prince’s sister, Tyka Nelson, in a ceremony on campus Wednesday evening. The university had been preparing to present it to Prince himself before he died of an accidental painkiller overdose in 2016.

 

Students from the university’s School of Music will be joined by guest artists Kirk Johnson, Jellybean Johnson, St. Paul Peterson, Cameron Kinghorn and a surprise guest in paying tribute to Prince by performing music associated with his career.

 

While the event is free, it’s already booked to capacity.
…

Like a scene out of a high-octane action movie that he would star in, Will Smith celebrated his 50th birthday Tuesday by successfully bungee jumping from a helicopter near the Grand Canyon.

 

Cameras, which captured the stunt for a livestream on YouTube, showed the actor hooked to a harness and bungee cords dangling over a gorge in northeastern Arizona.

 

“This is some of the most beautiful stuff I’ve ever seen in my life,” Smith said while still swinging over the chasm.

 

He described the experience as going “from pure terror to absolute bliss.”

 

The entire event had the feel of a polished episode of reality TV. Camera crews showed Smith, wife Jada Pinkett Smith and his three children being greeted by dozens of relatives and friends on a platform. His “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” co-star, Alfonso Ribeiro, served as a host interviewing Smith and others before and after.

 

The stunt was billed as a leap “in the heart of the Grand Canyon.” But the jump was outside Grand Canyon National Park on the Navajo Nation. The tribe’s reservation borders the east rim of the national park.

 

A Navajo medicine man gave Smith a blessing and thanked him for coming to the reservation.

 

Smith said the bungee jump was a challenge from Yes Theory, a YouTube channel that makes videos of people doing activities outside of their comfort zone. But the event also raised money for charity through an online lottery for a chance to watch the jump in person. The proceeds will benefit access to education for children in struggling countries.

 

 
…

Bill Cosby spent his first night in prison alone, in a single cell near the infirmary, as he began his three-to-10-year sentence for sexual assault.

Corrections officials announced Wednesday that Cosby – now known as Inmate No. NN7687 – will serve his sentence at SCI Phoenix, a new state prison about 20 miles from the gated estate where a jury concluded he drugged and molested a woman in 2004. The $400 million lockup opened two months ago and can hold 3,830 inmates.

Cosby will meet with prison medical staff, psychologists and others as the staff assesses his needs. Under prison policy, the 81-year-old comedian will be allowed phone calls and visits and will get a chance to exercise.

The prison’s long-term goal is to place Cosby in the general population, officials said.

“We are taking all of the necessary precautions to ensure Mr. Cosby’s safety and general welfare in our institution,” Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said in a statement.

As Cosby began adjusting to life behind bars, his family and publicists vowed he’ll appeal his conviction on three felony sexual assault counts after the first celebrity trial of the (hash)MeToo era.

Calling Cosby “one of the greatest civil rights leaders in the United States for over the past 50 years,” spokesman Andrew Wyatt on Tuesday decried the trial as the “most sexist and racist” in the country’s history.

The judge, prosecutor and jury saw it differently.

“No one is above the law. And no one should be treated disproportionately because of who they are, where they live, or even their wealth, celebrity or philanthropy,” Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill said in sentencing Cosby to an above-average sentence.

Cosby’s defense team has raised the racial issue before, in 2016, before quickly scrapping it.

“We prosecute where the evidence takes us and that was done in this case,” District Attorney Kevin Steele said Tuesday.

After his first trial ended in a hung jury, Cosby was convicted in April of drugging and sexually assaulting Temple University women’s basketball administrator Andrea Constand. He has faced a barrage of similar accusations from more than 60 women over the past five decades, but Constand’s case is the only one that went to trial.

In a statement submitted to the court, Constand, 45, said the assault and Cosby’s subsequent attacks on her character had crushed her spirit, adding: “We may never know the full extent of his double life as a sexual predator, but his decades-long reign of terror as a serial rapist is over.”

Prosecutor Kristen Feden said Constand told her she was happy with the sentence.

“I always look for my strength in the victims, and Andrea Constand was amazing,” Feden said on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday. “Her courage and her strength was enough for me to say, ‘Let’s keep going.'”

Women’s advocates hailed Cosby’s sentence as a landmark (hash)MeToo moment.

“Bill Cosby seeing the inside of a prison cell sends a strong message that predators – no matter who they are, from Hollywood to Wall Street to the Supreme Court – can no longer be protected at the expense of victims,” said Sonia Ossorio, president of the National Organization for Women of New York.

Cosby’s lawyers asked that he be allowed to remain free on bail while he appeals his conviction, but the judge ordered him locked up immediately, saying that “he could quite possibly be a danger to the community.”

Cosby – who is legally blind and uses a cane – removed his watch, tie and jacket and walked out in a white dress shirt and red suspenders, his hands cuffed in front of him.

Cosby must serve the minimum of three years before becoming eligible for parole.

Cosby’s punishment, which also included a $25,000 fine, came at the end of a two-day hearing at which the judge declared him a “sexually violent predator” – a designation that subjects him to monthly counseling for the rest of his life and requires that neighbors and schools be notified of his whereabouts. A psychologist for the state testified that Cosby appears to have a mental disorder characterized by an uncontrollable urge to have sex with women without their consent.

Constand testified that Cosby gave her what she thought were herbal pills to ease stress, then penetrated her with his fingers as she lay immobilized on a couch. Cosby claimed the encounter was consensual, and his lawyers branded her a “con artist” who framed the comedian to get a big payday – a $3.4 million settlement she received over a decade ago.

The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they come forward publicly, which Constand and other accusers have done.

Five other accusers took the stand at the trial as part of an effort by prosecutors to portray Cosby – once known as America’s Dad for his role on the top-rated “Cosby Show” in the 1980s – as a serial predator.

Constand went to police a year after waking up in a fog at Cosby’s estate, her clothes askew, only to have the district attorney pass on the case. Another DA reopened the file a decade later and charged the TV star after stand-up comic Hannibal Buress’ riff about Cosby’s being a rapist prompted other women to come forward, and after a federal judge, acting on a request from The Associated Press, unsealed some of Cosby’s startling, decade-old testimony in Constand’s related civil suit.

In his testimony, Cosby described sexual encounters with a string of actresses, models and other young women and talked about obtaining quaaludes to give to those he wanted to sleep with.
…

When Irishman Michael Kelly was a boy, he loved nothing more than gazing at planes taking off and landing at his nearest airport.

Now 67, after more than half a century building what he believes is the world’s largest private collection of model aircraft, he has donated the lot to Shannon Airport, where his lifelong passion for aviation began.

“I always used to love the noise of the aircraft going over my house in Limerick city and I was very curious,” Kelly said after cutting the ribbon on the airport’s new aviation gallery which now houses his collection in rows of display cases.

“When I made my first holy communion I asked my mum and dad to take me to Shannon airport. So I got to see the beautiful aircraft and from that day on I was hooked.”

While he would have loved the opportunity to have become a pilot, sourcing rare model aircraft still took the Limerick man around the world. None of his 2,300 planes were produced in Ireland.

A friend said Kelly has spent 10,000 euros ($12,000) a year amassing the record haul.

The collector’s favorite? A Boeing KC Tanker, one of only 10 made around the world.

Living alone in his renovated farmhouse, Kelly said there were exhibitors on the other side of the world “that would do anything” to have the collection. Instead, he donated it closer to home.

“I think it’s testament to the work he’s done over the last 60 years and we are delighted that he has entrusted us to look after it for the next 100-years plus,” said Niall Maloney, operations director at Shannon Airport.

($1 = 0.8499 euros)
…

The important thing to rock climber Alex Honnold is that the movie screen be big. IMAX, whatever. But big.

It’s shortly before the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of Free Solo, the documentary that chronicles Honnold’s legendary, ropeless ascent up Yosemite’s El Capitan, a 3,000-foot wall of sheer granite and possibly the world’s most fabled rock face. Honnold has just come from free soloing — climbing without safety gear — a 69-story luxury apartment building in Jersey City, New Jersey.

From a hotel window he scans the Toronto skyline but doesn’t see anything much appealing. “It has to be inspiring aesthetically,” he says.

Honnold, 33, is widely acknowledged as the greatest free-solo climber in the world. And in a sport that demands absolute perfection from its strivers — death is the only alternative — Honnold’s feat on El Cap is his masterpiece. An almost unfathomable climbing achievement, the four-hour climb is still spoken of in hushed reverence. The New York Times called it “one of the greatest athletic feats of any kind, ever.”

But whether scaling El Cap was Honnold’s greatest challenge is an open question. Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Free Solo, in theaters Friday, not only chronicles Honnold’s famed ascent, and the months of preparation and anguish leading up to it, but also an arguably steeper challenge for the 33-year-old Honnold: moving out of his van and maintaining a long-term relationship.

“Anybody, if you took two years of their life, you would see some growth, hopefully,” Honnold says. “But it’s easy to see growth when you’re starting at zero.”

After settling whether Free Solo would screen on IMAX (it wouldn’t), Honnold was joined by Sanni McCandless, his girlfriend of several years. Just as Chin and Vasarhelyi, the filmmaking couple of the celebrated Meru, were beginning their film three years ago, McCandless slipped Honnold her number at a book signing. The exceptionally dedicated but goofy and boyish Honnold (in the film, he sums up the fearsome specter of El Cap with the phase “I mean, dude”) is at first almost comically inept at making room for someone else in his life.

“When we started he was online dating, or on-phone dating, on his book tour. And then he met her. We were not expecting that,” says Vasarhelyi.

‘Extremely painful’

The two make an appealing and revealing match. McCandless, articulate and assertive, pushes back against the less mature, bluntly honest Honnold, long a bachelor adventurer. Vasarhelyi shakes her head. “It’s painful at times,” she says, smiling. “Extremely painful.”

Case in point: When Honnold, shortly after meeting Sanni, is shown saying that she will come and go like previous girlfriends. Later, they buy a place in Las Vegas and are seen refrigerator shopping.

“How do you feel about that line, Sanni?” Honnold asks.

“How do YOU feel about that line?” she retorts. 

“That’s just one of many lines in the film I’m slightly horrified to hear back,” says Honnold. “That’s kind of the nature of two years of filming. They just have so much material of me saying terrible things.”

What makes Free Solo so fascinating is how these developments influence Honnold just as he preparing to take his biggest risk as a climber. Just the slightest distractions can be potentially lethal for a free soloist, making both the onset of love and the presence of film cameras unpredictable factors in a zero-sum game.

“Soloing always come from some kind of particular mental space. And it has taken some effort to cultivate the right space for a relationship, the right space to still climb at a high level and just try to balance it,” says Honnold.

‘Glorious’ climb

The high stakes also transferred to the film crew. Chin, himself an expert climber, estimates that he and the team of veteran climbers spent more than 30 days rigging and shooting on El Cap. The danger is very real. Many renowned solo climbers have died; just in June, two experienced climbers, Jason Wells and Tim Klein, fell to their death while “simul-climbing” El Cap with ropes.

“You’re a pro, but when you have that much exposure and you’re moving that much equipment and you’re filming on top of it and thinking about your friend, it’s a tremendous amount of physical and mental exertion,” says Chin. “The crew was tortured by the idea that maybe you’ll be filming your friend’s death.”

Vasarhelyi says the tension was highest when Honnold made his first, aborted soloing attempt of El Cap despite a recent injury. She felt he wasn’t prepared.

“But I don’t think our role as filmmakers was to tell him not do it,” she says. “And that’s weird, right? Especially when there’s a life on the line.”

McCandless has also had to come to terms with Honnold’s obsessive pursuits.  

“I don’t think I ever wished that he wouldn’t do it. I wanted him to not want it, but I never wanted him to not to do it,” she says. “Knowing that he does want it, you realize he’s going to be so bummed if he never brings it to fruition.”

Free Solo in some ways demystifies soloing which, to some, can sound like lunacy. Honnold’s preparation is extreme. He doesn’t go until he’s thoroughly mapped out every foot hold of a climb. Also worth noting: A brain scan revealed that Honnold barely registers fear.

“It’s a crazy-seeming thing. I get that,” he says. “I just think: Why does anybody seek out anything challenging? Humans do so many interesting and difficult things.”

Honnold calls his El Cap solo the best climbing experience of his life. “Glorious,” he says. For all their months of anxiety, witnessing the climb left the filmmakers mesmerized.

 “I remember standing in the meadow being totally terrified, trying to get myself under control,” says Vasarhelyi. “Then there was a certain moment where I was like: This is absolutely beautiful. It’s exquisite.”
…

His Hollywood career and good-guy image in ruins, an 81-year-old Bill Cosby was sentenced Tuesday to three to 10 years behind bars for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, becoming the first celebrity of the #MeToo era to be sent to prison.

 

The punishment all but completed the dizzying, late-in-life fall from grace for the comedian, former TV star and breaker of racial barriers.

 

“It is time for justice. Mr. Cosby, this has all circled back to you. The time has come,” Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill said. He quoted from victim Andrea Constand’s own statement to the court, in which she said Cosby took her “beautiful, young spirit and crushed it.”

 

Cosby declined the opportunity to speak before the sentence came down, and afterward he sat smiling, laughing and chatting with defense team. His wife of 54 years, Camille, was not in court. Constand smiled broadly upon hearing the punishment and was hugged by others in the courtroom.

 

Cosby’s lawyers asked that he be allowed to remain free on bail while he appeals his conviction, but the judge appeared incredulous over the request and turned it down, saying that even considering Cosby’s age and blindness, “he could quite possibly be a danger to the community.”

 

Cosby was also fined $25,000.

 

Former model Janice Dickinson, who was among the 60 or so women who have come forward to accuse Cosby of drugging and violating them over the past five decades, looked at Cosby and said: “Here’s the last laugh pal.”

 

The punishment came at the end of a two-day hearing at which the judge declared Cosby a  “sexually violent predator” — a modern-day scarlet letter that subjects him to monthly counseling for the rest of his life and requires that neighbors and schools be notified of his whereabouts.

 

The comic once known as America’s Dad for his role on the top-rated “Cosby Show” in the 1980s was convicted in April of violating Constand, Temple University women’s basketball administrator, at his suburban Philadelphia estate in 2004. It was the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.

 

Cosby faced a sentence of anywhere from probation to 10 years in prison. His lawyers asked for house arrest, saying Cosby — who is legally blind — is too old and vulnerable to do time in prison. Prosecutors asked for five to 10 years behind bars, saying he could still pose a threat to women.

 

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele rejected the notion that Cosby’s age and infirmity entitle him to mercy. “He was good at hiding this for a long time. Good at suppressing this for a long time. So it’s taken a long time to get there,” Steele said.

 

The sentencing came as another extraordinary #MeToo drama unfolded on Capitol Hill, where Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh stands accused of sexual misconduct more than three decades ago.

 

The Cosby case “really raised awareness of the pervasiveness of … sexual misconduct against subordinates and against women of relatively less power,” said Daniel Filler, dean of Drexel University’s law school. “For jurors, I think it’s inherently changed the credibility of the accusers.”

 

The judge ruled on Cosby’s “sexually violent predator” status after a psychologist for the state testified that the entertainer appears to have a mental disorder that gives him an uncontrollable urge to have sex with women without their consent. When the ruling came down, a woman in the courtroom shot her fist into the air and whispered, “Yessss!”

 

In a statement submitted to the court and released Tuesday, Constand, 45, said that she has had to cope with years of anxiety and self-doubt. She said she now lives alone with her two dogs and has trouble trusting people.

 

“When the sexual assault happened, I was a young woman brimming with confidence and looking forward to a future bright with possibilities,” she wrote in her five-page statement. “Now, almost 15 years later, I’m a middle-aged woman who’s been stuck in a holding pattern for most of her adult life, unable to heal fully or to move forward.”

 

She also wrote of Cosby: “We may never know the full extent of his double life as a sexual predator, but his decades-long reign of terror as a serial rapist is over.”

 

The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they come forward publicly, which Constand and other accusers have done.

 

Constand went to police a year after waking up in a fog at Cosby’s gated estate, her clothes askew, only to have the district attorney pass on the case.

 

Another district attorney reopened the file a decade later and charged the TV star after stand-up comic Hannibal Buress’ riff about Cosby being a rapist prompted more accusers to come forward and after a federal judge, acting on a request from The Associated Press, unsealed some of Cosby’s startling, decade-old testimony in Constand’s related civil suit.

 

In his testimony, Cosby described sexual encounters with a string of actresses, models and other young women and talked about obtaining quaaludes to give to those he wanted to sleep with.

 

Cosby’s first trial in 2017 ended with a hung jury. He was convicted at a retrial that opened months after the #MeToo movement had taken down such figures as Hollywood studio boss Harvey Weinstein, NBC’s Matt Lauer, actor Kevin Spacey and Sen. Al Franken.

 

Constand said Cosby gave her what she thought were herbal pills to ease stress, then penetrated her with his fingers as she lay immobilized on a couch. Cosby claimed the encounter was consensual, and his lawyers branded her a “con artist” who framed the comedian to get a big payday — a $3.4 million settlement she received over a decade ago.

 

Five other accusers took the stand at the trial as part of an effort by prosecutors to portray him as a predator.

 

Cosby, whose estimated fortune once topped $400 million, broke barriers in the 1960s as the first black actor to star in a network show, “I Spy.” He went on to superstardom as wise and understanding Dr. Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” a sitcom that showed America a new kind of black TV family: a warm and loving household led by two professionals, one a lawyer, the other a doctor.

 

He also found success with his Saturday morning cartoon “Fat Albert,” appeared in commercials for Jello-O pudding and became a public moralist, lecturing the black community about young people stealing things and wearing baggy pants. He won a Presidential Medal of Freedom and countless Emmys, Golden Globes and Grammy awards.

 

As the allegations mounted, his career all but collapsed, “Cosby Show” reruns were taken off the air, and one college after another stripped him of his honorary degrees.
…

Egypt says archaeologists have discovered a “massive” ancient building in the town of Mit Rahina, 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, south of Cairo.

The Antiquities Ministry says Tuesday archaeologists also uncovered an attached building that includes a large Roman bath and a chamber likely for religious rituals.

Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, says the building is likely part of the residential block of the area, which was the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis.

Memphis, founded around 3,100 B.C., was home to Menes, the king who united Upper and Lower Egypt.

Egypt hopes such discoveries will spur tourism, partially driven by antiquities sightseeing, which was hit hard by political turmoil following the 2011 uprising.

 
…

Bill Cosby faces a good chance of being sent to prison Tuesday, when a judge is expected to sentence the TV star who was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in 2004.

 

Cosby, 81, will have the opportunity to speak in court before he is sentenced.

 

The once-beloved actor and comedian, dubbed “America’s Dad” for his role as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on the top-ranked, 1980s-era “Cosby Show,” faces anything from probation to 10 years in prison for drugging and molesting Andrea Constand, a Temple University basketball administrator, at his estate near Philadelphia. She went to police a year later, only to have a prosecutor turn down the case.

In the years since Constand first went to police in 2005, more than 60 women have accused Cosby of sexual misconduct, though none of those claims have led to criminal charges.

 

Cosby is the first celebrity of the (hash)MeToo era to go on trial, and the first to be convicted.

 

It’s a reckoning that accusers and prosecutors say has been decades in the making.

 

“The victims cannot be un-raped. Unfortunately, all we can do is hold the perpetrator accountable,” said Gianna Constand, the trial victim’s mother, who testified Monday that her daughter’s buoyant personality was forever changed after the attack.

 

The hearing is set to conclude Tuesday after testimony from a defense psychologist who believes Cosby is no longer a danger, given his age, and should not be branded a “sexually violent predator.”

 

Defense lawyer Joseph Green Jr. urged the judge ignore the protests and activism surrounding the case, and send Cosby home on house arrest.

 

“The suggestion that Mr. Cosby is dangerous is not supported by anything other than the frenzy,” Green said, as demonstrators gathered outside the suburban Philadelphia courthouse.

 

Being labeled a sexually violent predator would make him subject to mandatory lifetime counseling and community notification of his whereabouts.

 

On Monday, Kristen Dudley, a psychologist for the state of Pennsylvania, testified that Cosby fits the criteria for a sexually violent predator, showing signs of a mental disorder that involves an uncontrollable urge to have nonconsensual sex with young women.

 

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said Cosby would no doubt commit similar crimes if given the chance, warning that the former TV star seemingly gets a sexual thrill out of slipping women drugs and assaulting them.

 

“To say that he’s too old to do that — to say that he should get a pass, because it’s taken this long to catch up to what he’s done?” Steele said, his voice rising. “What they’re asking for is a `get out of jail free’ card.”

 

Cosby, he said, has shown repeatedly that he feels no remorse over his actions. And he said the sentence should send a message to others.

 

“Despite bullying tactics, despite PR teams and other folks trying to change the optics, as one lawyer for the defense put it, the bottom line is that nobody’s above the law. Nobody,” the district attorney said.

 

He urged a five- to 10-year prison sentence .

 

After testifying for several hours at two trials, the first of which ended in a hung jury, Constand spoke in court Monday for just two minutes.

 

“The jury heard me. Mr. Cosby heard me. Now all I am asking for is justice as the court sees fit,” said Andrea Constand, who submitted a much longer victim-impact statement that wasn’t read in court.

 

The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they come forward publicly, which Constand and other accusers have done.

 

Cosby’s side didn’t call any character witnesses, and his wife of 54 years, Camille, was not in court.

 

Cosby became the first black actor to star in a prime-time TV show, “I Spy,” in 1965. He remained a Hollywood A-lister for much of the next half-century.

 

Monday’s proceedings took place as another extraordinary (hash)MeToo drama continued to unfold on Capitol Hill, where Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh faces allegations of sexual misconduct from more than three decades ago.

 

 

 
…