PHILADELPHIA — A man who spent 26 years in solitary confinement despite a history of mental illness can sue Pennsylvania prison officials for alleged cruel and unusual punishment, a U.S. appeals court said in reviving the man’s lawsuit. Roy Lee Williams spent nearly all of his time alone from 1993 until 2019, when a legal … Read more
NEW YORK — If you think Latin American history starts with Christopher Columbus, John Leguizamo would like to have a word. He points out there were great empires and civilizations during the thousands of years before 1492 — like the mighty Incas, Aztecs and Maya, whose great strides in medicine, engineering and science echo today. … Read more
WASHINGTON — American drivers might universally wince or brace themselves at the sight and sound of flashing red and blue lights and blaring sirens, but all drivers have constitutional rights when pulled over on the road. The question of one’s responsibility to comply with all instructions given by a law enforcement officer recently came up … Read more
“The barn… is long and narrow with sliding doors in the middle,” writes Wright Thompson in ‘The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.’ “Nobody knows when it was built exactly but its cypress-board walls were already weathered in the summer of 1955.” What happened inside the barn on Aug. 28, 1955, changed … Read more
Watching “La Haine” nearly 30 years ago, there was a sense of something inexorable about violence in the French suburbs. French director Mathieu Kassovitz’s critically acclaimed black-and-white film opens with video images of news footage of urban riots. The film then follows three friends — Hubert, Vinz and Saïd — over the course of 24 … Read more
NAIROBI, Kenya — Rwanda has started a vaccination campaign against mpox with 1,000 doses of the vaccine it obtained from Nigeria under an agreement between the two countries, the African health agency said Thursday. The vaccinations started Tuesday targeting seven districts with “high risk populations” who neighbor Congo, Dr. Nicaise Ndembi from the Africa Centres … Read more
KAVUMU, Congo — Health authorities have struggled to contain outbreaks of mpox in Congo, a huge central African country where a myriad of existing problems makes stemming the spread particularly hard. Last month, the World Health Organization declared the outbreaks in Congo and about a dozen other African countries a global health emergency. And in … Read more
Becoming a parent is life changing. Raymond Antrobus’ third poetry collection, “Signs, Music,” captures this transformation as he conveys his own transition into fatherhood. The book is split between before and after, moving from the hope and trepidation of shepherding a new life into the world to the sleeplessness and shifted perspective of being a … Read more
NEW YORK — Some public figures are honored with namesake buildings or monuments. Veteran broadcaster Connie Chung has a strain of marijuana and hundreds of Asian-American women as legacies. Chung was contacted five years ago by a fellow journalist, Connie Wang, whose Chinese immigrant parents gave her the chance as a preschooler to pick an … Read more
LEADVILLE, Colo. — Rust-colored piles of mine waste and sun-bleached wooden derricks loom above the historic Colorado mountain town of Leadville — a legacy of gold and silver mines polluting the Arkansas River basin more than a century after the city’s boom days. Enter a fledgling company called CJK Milling that wants to “remine” some … Read more
