More and more stories are emerging that are contradicting Bill Cosby’s reputation as a genial and avuncular person. It has been hard for most people to swallow, given the overwhelmingly positive public image he has had. I had never watched his hit TV shows or seen his comedy routines so perhaps had not fallen under his spell as much as others and so the allegations did not seem as unbelievable to me.
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I always liked Gregory Peck. Although he was sometimes criticized for having a somewhat wooden acting style, there was no question that he had an impressive on-screen presence where he seemed to ooze integrity and the viewer was confident that he would do the right thing. I haven’t seen all his films of course, but as far as I am aware, there were very few in which he played a villainous character, one being Joseph Mengele in The Boys From Brazil.
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I earlier gave step-by-step directions for how to parallel park perfectly every time that I found on the internet that seem to work as advertised. But Han Yue just broke the world record for parking in the tightest spot that had just 8 cm clearance.
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On November 19 I tuned in to the radio news program The World and a story was already in progress. In it a voice with a British accent was describing his treatment at the hands of his captors. He described being tortured, stripped naked and beaten, threatened with execution, and heard the sound of a woman screaming in the next room and was told that it was his wife being tortured.
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I don’t think I ever saw the late Joan Rivers actually perform her standup comedy routine except for very short bits but her presence could be felt everywhere in the media and so I knew about her indirectly. I knew that she was a pioneer, entering the field of standup comedy when it was almost exclusively a male field and that she had to fight her way to make it.
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Veteran investigative reporter John Pilger gives an update on the status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London since 2012 that is guarded round the clock by police to ensure that he does not slip out of the country. Pilger says that even the British government that, like the US, hates Assange with a passion and would hand him over to the US in a minute to be tortured, is getting frustrated with Sweden’s intransigence and unwillingness to take any steps towards resolving this impasse.
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The independent socialist senator from Vermont appeared on The Colbert Report and gave his take on what the state of the nation is. Being a socialist, he has little difficulty talking about class and the oligarchy. His condemnation of the way that the very rich have taken over the country and his call for a single-payer system of health were both wildly cheered by the audience.
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Just recently we heard about Jian Ghomeshi and the many women he is alleged to have abused and the conspiracy of silence that protected him for so long. Now we have allegations that Bill Cosby drugged women and then had sex with them.
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Samantha Power, the current US Ambassador to the UN, is one of those ‘liberal interventionists’, people who like to think of themselves as liberals but are always on the look out for ‘good’ wars to wage to show how tough they are, a disease that many Democrats suffer from. It does not seem to bother them that all the other military interventions have been disastrous, not least for the people at the receiving end of our military largesse.
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