Peruvian Ex-president Asks Appeals Court to Free Him from Jail
LIMA â€"Â
Peru's former left-leaning president Ollanta Humala and his wife asked an appeals court on Monday to free them from jail where they have been ordered to spend up to 18 months before a trial over allegations they took illegal funds from Brazilian builder Odebrecht.
Humala and former first lady Nadine Heredia denied having any intent to evade or interfere with a money laundering probe and said a lower court's ruling to jail them before trial violated due process.
Humala and Heredia turned themselves in to authorities after the lower court's July 13 decision, which marked the second time that a former Peruvian president has been ordered jailed since Odebrecht admitted last year that it bribed local officials over three presidencies.
Ex-President Alejandro Toledo, believed to be in the United States, has refused to turn himself in.
"We ask this courtroom for a just decision because we stayed in our country and we plan to face this process in our country," Humala told the appeals court from jail via videoconference.
Prosecutor Rafael Vela said Humala should not be given special treatment for being a former president.
Unlike Toledo, Humala is not accused of taking bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for lucrative contracts. Instead, prosecutors allege that Humala and Heredia took $3 million in campaign funds from Odebrecht that the company had obtained illicitly and that the couple used for personal enrichment.
The couple denies taking any money from Odebrecht, said defense attorney Wilfredo Pedraza, who added that if they had it would be an electoral infraction but not a criminal defense.
The three-member appeals panel is expected to decide whether to overturn the lower court's ruling this week.
Freeing Humala and Heredia would mark a rare reversal in Peru's judicial system that has preventively detained at least five people so far in connection with Odebrecht.
So-called preventive prison before trial is somewhat common in Peru and has been criticized by some as overused or unfair.
In Brazil, pre-trial detention has been used to secure confessions from dozens of suspects in the Car Wash graft scandal involving Odebrecht.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who once championed Humala, has been sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison for graft but is free on appeal.
Toledo denies wrongdoing and is not sought for arrest in the United States because authorities there have asked Peru for more evidence.
Kaley, 14, was chatting with a friend about Korean pop group BTSÂ
She said one member was 'so beautiful I could shove a hammer in my mouth'
Her friend challenged her to prove it, so Kayley fit the tool inside her mouth
Luckily she managed to remove it after ten minutes of wrangling
By Luke Barnes For Mailonline
Published: 10:17 BST, 31 July 2017 | Updated: 12:52 BST, 31 July 2017
A teenager has shot to viral fame after getting a hammer stuck in her mouth - and now her mother has had to 'hide the toolbox'.
Kaley, 14 from Louisiana, was chatting with her friend about Korean boy band BTS.
She described one of the pop stars as 'so beautiful I could shove a hammer in my mouth'.
Kaley posted the picture on Twitter with the caption: 'how do u tell ur mom that u got a hammer stuck in ur mouth' Â
Naturally, her friend called her bluff and Kaley suddenly found herself with a hammer lodged between her lips.
She posted the bizarre image on Twitter with the caption: 'how do u tell ur mom that u got a hammer stuck in ur mouth'.
Luckily after around ten minutes she was able to get it out, but not before the picture had proceeded to go viral on Twitter.
People were split about why exactly the teen had decided to pull such a bizarre prank.
Kaley told Buzzfeed News she got 'a little hyper' when chatting with her friend about the K-pop group.
It took around ten minutes of fidgeting for Kaley to remove the hammer - and now her mother says she has to 'hide the toolbox'
She added: 'I was sending her pictures of one of them, [and] he's good-looking. So I sent it and said, 'He's so beautiful I could shove a hammer in my mouth.
'It was a little too big to fit in my mouth in the first place, but getting it out was even more of a problem.'
Despite her struggle to wrangle the hammer loose, she has admitted to putting it back in her mouth a few times since to show her friends.
She added: 'There are ways to channel your excitement, and shoving a hammer in your mouth probably isn't the best.'Â
Kaley's mom said she was worried that she was now going to be known as 'the Hammer Girl's mother'. Â
Kaley was chatting with her friend about the members of Korean boy band BTS (pictured)
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The EU supports poorer regions. Will the Tories abandon them after Brexit? | Molly Scott Cato | Opinion
In delivering the refrain: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,†Joni Mitchell provides us with an unlikely Brexit anthem. From the freedom to travel and work to the knowledge that you can eat safe food or use your phone abroad without paying roaming charges, we’re beginning to notice how much of what we have come to expect as citizens of a civilised society is provided or supported by the EU. As we struggle our way through the increasingly chaotic process of Brexit, we are left asking ourselves just what will survive our leaving.
Today, it is funding for the regeneration of our regions that is the focus of attention, with Kevin Bentley of the Local Government Association calling on the government to guarantee that it will match the £8.4bn local authorities received during the present EU funding round. It’s a call to protect the vulnerable people they represent and echoes the same plea they made this time last year, straight after the referendum. Rather than reassurance, the country’s poorer regions face continuing uncertainty.
Can we really expect governments that have allowed the UK to become increasingly unequal and more unbalanced towards its capital than almost any other country in Europe to continue to employ the EU’s principle of regional redistribution? Our contributions to the EU budget are returned to a number of groups and areas that might have otherwise found it incredibly difficult to make a case for funding to a government that has ensured the poorest areas of the country have paid the highest price for austerity â€" and that has cut funding to local authorities in England by 27% in recent years.
In my European parliamentary constituency of the south-west, the local area most clearly at risk is Cornwall; it has benefited from the highest level of EU funding (which was reserved for post-industrial areas) over several decades. Arguments made by increasingly desperate Cornwall council representatives during the referendum fell on closed ears. Cornwall voted leave by 56.5% to 43.5%. The local chat focused on allegations of corruption and an idea that money was ending up with the wrong people. No evidence was brought forward in support of this argument, but the distant spectre of Brussels was definitely to blame, the argument went. Discussion of the EU funding that has enabled Cornwall to become a world leader in renewable technologies was absent from these conversations.
The south-west currently receives around £729.3m of public investment of EU money every year. Since the abolition of regional development associations in 2012, much of the innovative regeneration and business support across the region has been funded from Brussels, rather than Westminster. Take, for instance, the National Composites Centre, based at the Bristol and Bath science park, which was developed with European regional development funding of £9m to put the UK at the forefront of composites technology. The centre is a purpose-built research and development facility that brings together companies and academics to develop technologies supporting the design and rapid manufacture of composites â€" lightweight, high-performance materials that are transforming the design and manufacture of components used in the aerospace and automotive industries, and marine and renewable technologies.
Another recipient is the Poole-based charity the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which received funding to develop a system for decommissioning lifeboats and reducing the carbon footprint of the organisation. And there is the north Dorset-based company that was awarded funds under the Life programme (supporting environmental and nature conservation projects) to develop an environment-friendly repair system for leaking sewage and rainwater/surface drainage pipes, while Dorset county council received funding for a collaborative project focused on coastal zone management and the development of a strategy for an open coast. And so we could go on, lauding the achievements of the sort of projects funded by the EU that are now at risk.
Cornwall has six MPs, all of them Tories and all but one of them a Brexiteer. Boris Johnson famously launched his Vote Leave battle bus from Cornwall, brandishing pasties and promises. We must now hope that the local councillors hoping to catch the ear of Tory ministers in Westminster won’t be told to go whistle. It’s a long way back to Cornwall, even in the back of a big yellow taxi.
Sam Shepard, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor, dies at 73
Sam Shepard, paragon playwright of the American West, was born to roam.
With a father who was an Army officer and sometime farmer and a mother who was a teacher, Shepard â€" born in 1943, the oldest of three â€" spent his childhood bouncing around the heartland. This would later inform his writing, which often explored the fringes of society and the failure of the nuclear family.
Shepard eventually found a home in California â€" in Duarte, where he would graduate high school, and in Chico, where he worked as a stable hand. But eventually his roaming would take him east, to New York City and the stage that would make him a legend.
Shepard died Thursday, surrounded by family at his home in Kentucky, of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was 73.
Chris Boneau, a spokesman for Shepard’s family, confirmed Shepard’s death to The Times in a statement. “The family requests privacy at this difficult time,†he said.
Shepard made his earliest impression on the New York theater scene in 1966, when he took home Obie Awards for three plays: “Chicago,†“Red Cross†and “Icarus’ Mother.†The playwright would go on to win 10 more Obie Awards in his distinguished career.
In 1969, Shepard married actress O-Lan Jones, with whom he had one son, Jesse Mojo Shepard, in 1970. As Shepard continued to write, he also began acting, appearing as the charming land baron known only as “The Farmer†in Terrence Malick’s 1978 classic film “Days of Heaven.â€
That same year, Shepard wrote his crowning achievement, “Buried Child.â€
Centering around a family haunted by the past as it comes together in an aging Illinois farmhouse, the play reflects shades of Shepard’s own relationship with his father, whom the playwright described as alcoholic.
Although often described as avant-garde, Shepard’s relationship with the past would define future plays as well.
“For Shepard, love is a repetition of the past,†wrote Times theater critic Charles McNulty in a review of a 2015 revival of “Fool for Love,†“the family drama reenacted against our will as we ricochet between the desire to be connected and the need to be autonomously alone.â€
Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for “Buried Child.†That year a Times review of a Los Angeles production called the play “creepy and shadowed,†noting that Shepard’s story unspools like a dream meant to be divined, not parsed. The review for a South Coast Repertory production in Costa Mesa seven years later noted jus t how viscerally the play explored the wreckage of an American family: “It's up to the artist to put us face to face with the inexplicable, the fated, the curse signed into being by one's own hand.â€
In 1982, Shepard starred in “Frances†alongside Jessica Lange and began a decades-spanning romantic relationship. After divorcing Jones in 1984, Shepard had two children with Lange â€" Hannah Jane Shepard in 1986 and Samuel Walker Shepard in 1987. The couple stayed together for more than 20 years.
Shepard starred in his most celebrated role in 1983, portraying pilot Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff.â€
“The most righteous right stuff is the private property of Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager, played by Sam Shepard in a manner guaranteed to fill the gap created when Gary Cooper left us,†Times film critic Sheila Benson said o f Shepard’s easy masculinity in her original review of the film.
Shepard’s performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
This vacillation between artistic interests and latent embodiment of the long-lost cowboy would come to define Shepard throughout his career.
“No one knows better than Sam Shepard that the true American West is gone forever,†then-New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote of the 1983 debut of “Fool for Love,†“ but there may be no writer alive more gifted at reinventing it out of pure literary air,†adding a year later in a contemplation of “True West†that “Mr. Shepard, as much as any contemporary American playwright, gives our theater its claim to seriousness and its connection to other art.â€
That ability to conjure a time or a mindset long gone, if indeed it had ever existed, fueled his work both in front of the camera and behind it.
"I still think it all comes from the same place, but it's great to be able to change it up," Shepard told The Times in 2011. "It would be like riding the same horse all the time.
“To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing," Shepard concluded.
It was that same interview with The Times, conducted by phone, that had to be delayed when Shepard, quite literally, had to see a man about a horse.
“I was at a horse sale yesterday, and it was just all-consuming,†Shepard said.
He went on to explain that he didn’t fly when traveling around the contine ntal United States, preferring instead to explore the open road.
Though that may sound idyllic, Shepard was not an artist who shied from the ugliness of the world.
In his 2004 play “The God of Hell,†Shepard tackled a post-9/11 country besieged in equal parts by patriotism and fascism, sometimes disguised as the same thing.
“We've never known who we are as a country, only how we'd like to define ourselves: idealistic, good, positive, saving the world for democracy, right?" Shepard told The Times in 2006 before the show opened at the Geffen Playhouse. "We have this inability to face what has become of us so all we get is this propaganda ... the lies, the evasions, the refusal to tell the truth.â€
But all hope was not lost, according to Shepard.
"The hopeful part is that at least they see things as they really are and don't attempt to disguise it in other forms. And the more people see things as th ey are, the more hope there may be to bring about something different,†he said.
Shepard was not without his own demons, however.
In 2009, he was arrested for drunk driving in Illinois and was sentenced to 24 months probation, alcohol education classes and 100 hours of community service. In 2015, he was arrested for aggravated drunk driving in New Mexico, though charges were later dismissed, despite Shepard failing a field sobriety test.
Shepard remained active in the twilight of his career, publishing the play “A Particle of Dread,†his take on Oedipus, in 2014, and appearing in Netflix’s “Bloodline†throughout the show’s three-season run.
Survivors include his children, Jesse, Hannah and Walker Shepard, and his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.
Funeral arrangements remain private. Plans for a public memorial have not been determined.
UPDATES:
11:15 a.m.: This story has been updated throughout with Times staff reporting.
The first version of this story was published at 8:25 a.m.
An earlier version of this article cited an incorrect year of birth for Hannah Jane Shepard. It was 1986, not 1985.
The United States has imposed sanctions on Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, over what it called his "illegitimate" election of an assembly to rewrite the constitution.
All of Maduro's assets in the United States are frozen and Americans are forbidden from doing any business with him.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced the sanctions Monday in Washington, calling Maduro a "dictator" who ignores the will of the Venezuelan people.
"By sanctioning Maduro, the United States makes clear our opposition to the policies of his regime and our support for the people of Venezuela, who seek to reform their country to a full and prosperous democracy."
Maduro showed his apparent indifference to the sanctions late Monday, calling them a sign of President Donald Trump's "desperation and hate."
"I will not obey imperial orders. I do not obey any foreign governments. I'm a free president," Maduro declared. "Why the hell should we care what Trump says? We care about what the sovereign people of Venezuela say," he shouted Monday to a crowd of supporters in Caracas.
The sanctions against Maduro follow those imposed last week on a number of current and former senior Venezuelan officials.
Mnuchin would not comment on future sanctions, including a ban on Venezuelan oil exports. He said the U.S. will monitor the situation, but that "our objective is not to do anything to hurt the people of Venezuela."
Peru has called for a meeting of Latin America foreign ministers in Lima next week to discuss the crisis in Venezuela.
The European Union also says it will not recognize the assembly, along with Canada, Spain, and nearly every Latin American country.
Maduro is defying the global condemnation, especially from what he regards as Venezuela's arch enemy, the United States.
Maduro presses ahead
The Maduro government appeared determined to go through with forming the 545-member constituent assembly, even before it releases final results of the election.
The government said more than 8 million people cast ballots; the opposition, which boycotted the vote, said the turnout was much lower. Reporters on the ground in Caracas said dozens of polling places were almost deserted Sunday.
If 8 million people voted, that would be less than half of all registered voters. Pre-election polls showed more than 70 percent of all Venezuelans opposed the assembly.
Details on what is likely to be included in a new constitution are unclear. Maduro has said it is the only way to pull Venezuela out of its severe economic and social crisis and stop the seemingly endless violence.
The opposition said the measure would bring on a socialist dictatorship. It contended the vote was rigged, in order to pack the assembly with Maduro supporters who could dissolve the opposition-controlled national assembly and fire officials who disagree with the government. Maduro's opponents are demanding early presidential elections.
Violent protests
Sunday's election was the bloodiest day in four months of anti-government protests, with at least 10 people killed in clashes around the country. More than 120 have died since early April.
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin on Monday accused the Venezuelan government of "deliberately and repeatedly" using violence to repress the opposition.
The drop in global energy prices, together with political corruption, have destroyed oil-rich Venezuela's economy. Gasoline, medicine, and such basic staples as cooking oil, flour and sugar are scarce, and many Venezuelans cross into neighboring Colombia and Brazil to buy food.
Maduro has blamed the country's woes on what he calls U.S. imperialism and its supporters inside Venezuela. He has warned against intervention by the Organization of American States, saying that would surely lead to civil war.
Smokey's owners are worried fire crews will not reach him on the branch
The poor cat has been stuck 60ft up the tree for four days in abysmal weatherÂ
Concerned owner Lee says Smokey is now clinging on with his front legs
By Stewart Paterson For Mailonline
Published: 11:09 BST, 31 July 2017 | Updated: 11:47 BST, 31 July 2017
A family are desperate to save their pet cat which has been stuck up a tree - for four days.
Lee Throne, 34, and Sara Pattinson, 31, fear firefighters may struggle to reach their cat Smokey which is 60ft up on a branch.
Lee said that even the RSPCA were concerned about the firefighters' access to the top of the tree - where the cat is 'clinging on'.
The father-of-three, from Brownshill in Stroud, Gloucestershire, said: 'The tree is 60ft high and the cat has got all the way to the top and is clinging on with his front legs.
Lee Throne, 34, and Sara Pattinson, 31, fear firefighters may struggle to reach their cat Smokey which is 60FT up on a branch
Poor Smokey has been stuck of the tree for four days now. His owner Lee says he is 'soaking wet and it is windy'
'His back legs are dangling. He is soaking wet and it is windy. I have a six, eight and 12-year-old and they are very upset.'Â
Lee added that Smokey went out on Thursday and didn't come home - and the family think their 'lovely cat' has been stuck up the tree since then.
A spokesperson for Gloucestershire Fire & Rescue Service said: 'We have received reports from the RSPCA of a cat in a tree in Chalford.
'We are sending officers out to assess the situation.'Â
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