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Bill Cosby's downfall from "America's Dad" to convicted felon will reach its final chapter in a Pennsylvania courtroom on Monday, when a judge will begin deciding whether to sentence the 81-year-old comedian to prison for sexual assault. Cosby, who was found guilty in April, is the first celebrity to be convicted since the start of the #MeToo movement, the national reckoning with sexual misconduct that has brought down dozens of powerful men in entertainment, politics and other fields. Cosby, who once had a family-friendly reputation as the 1980s television comedy "The Cosby Show," was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a former administrator at his alma mater Temple University, at his Philadelphia-area home in 2004.

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 09:26:18 -0400

Floodwaters of 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 m) are expected to inundate Georgetown and surrounding communities by late this week as the Pee Dee and Waccamaw rivers overurn their banks along the low-lying tidal flats where they converge at Winyah Bay, which flows into the Atlantic. The potential flood zone encompasses some 3,500 homes in Georgetown, which lies at the confluence of the two rivers at the top of the bay, and the coastal resort community of Pawleys Island, she told Reuters. The county plans to open emergency shelters at 7 a.m. on Monday, and hotels outside the flood zone in nearby Myrtle Beach are offering discounts for evacuees.

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 03:04:46 -0400

By Koh Gui Qing and Lawrence Delevingne MINNEAPOLIS/NEW YORK (Reuters) - With the Chinese billionaire Richard Liu at her Minneapolis area apartment, a 21-year-old University of Minnesota student sent a WeChat message to a friend in the middle of the night. She wrote that Liu had forced her to have sex with him. “I was not willing,” she wrote in Chinese on the messaging application around 2 a.m. on August 31. “Tomorrow I will think of a way to escape,” she wrote, as she begged the friend not to call police. “He will suppress it,” she wrote, referring to Liu. “You underestimate his power. ...

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 01:32:27 -0400

The agreement for Christine Blasey Ford to testify came just hours before the New Yorker magazine published an article in which a second woman, identified as Deborah Ramirez, described another instance of alleged sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh, also in the 1980s, when both attended Yale University. Ford's agreement to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee came a week after she went public in an interview in the Washington Post with her allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in 1982 when both were high school students in Maryland.

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 00:57:11 -0400

A wind-blown wildfire that has forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes south of the resort town of Jackson, Wyoming, prompted officials on Sunday to close 50 miles of a key highway traveled by tourists to reach Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. The Roosevelt fire has scorched nearly 40,000 acres of drought-parched landscape and destroyed at least four structures, including two dwellings, since erupting Sept. 15 in the Bridger-Teton National Forest about 30 miles south of Jackson. Scores of additional residences were placed on standby for evacuation at a moments notice, according to sheriff's Sergeant Travis Bingham.

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 23:42:51 -0400