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Claire Foy still made less than Matt Smith on ‘The Crown’
In an interview with Al Arabiya, actress Claire Foy said that, contrary to reports, she never received back pay for being compensated less than her co-star on “The Crown,” Matt Smith.
“I’ve never mentioned anything about it and neither have the producers,” Foy told the news outlet. “The fact that that is ‘fact’ is not quite correct.”
Foy found out about the pay discrepancy along with the rest of the world: At a panel discussion in March, producers revealed that Foy, who played Queen Elizabeth II for two seasons, made less than Smith, who portrays Prince Philip. Public outcry ensued, and Foy found herself in “an odd place.”
“I realized early on that me being quiet about it or me not thinking about it in any way, and not associating myself with it, would be harmful to me and also lots of other people,” the actress told Al Arabiya. “It’s taught me a lot, and I’m still learning about it. I have not come out the other side and know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Land O’Lakes chief executive makes history
Land O’Lakes has named Beth Ford as its new president and chief executive, the company announced last week. When Ford assumes the position on Aug. 1, she will become the first openly gay woman to run a Fortune 500 company.
Palestinian activist released from Israeli prison
On Sunday, Palestinian activist and protest icon Ahed al-Tamimi, 17, was released from an Israeli prison after serving an eight-month sentence on charges of incitement and assault. Late last year, al-Tamimi was indicted by a military court after a video of her kicking and slapping two armed Israeli soldiers outside her home went viral on Facebook. Her mother, Nariman, who posted the video of her daughter on social media, served a similar sentence for incitement.
Al-Tamimi has become a symbol of the protest movement against Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Her arrest also drew more attention to Israel’s detention of Palestinian minors. According to statistics released by Israeli rights group B’Tselem earlier this month, 291 Palestinian minors were held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners.
Somalia will prosecute first female genital mutilation case
In mid-July, Deeqa Dahir Nuur, 10, died from complications of a female genital mutilation procedure in Somalia. Last week, Somalia’s government announced it will prosecute whoever is responsible for her death, marking the first time Somalia will take on an FGM case. FGM often includes the removal of the clitoris and some parts of the labia.
“This cannot be happening in our country in the 21st century,” deputy prime minister Mahdi Mohamed Guled said, according to CNN. “It is not part of our religion, and it will not be part of our culture.”
New Zealand passes law to support victims of domestic violence in the workplace
On Wednesday, New Zealand passed a law that will require employers to grant victims of domestic violence 10 days of paid leave, giving them time to leave their partners, find new housing and protect themselves and their children. Companies must also provide flexible work schedules and other support for victims when they return to work.
A 2017 report in the New Zealand Herald found that the country had the “worst rate of family and intimate-partner violence in the world.” Researchers estimated that 525,000 New Zealanders are hurt each year. Eighty percent of domestic abuse probably goes unreported, the Herald found.
Honduran teen temporarily escapes detention center
On Friday, a 15-year-old Honduran girl being held at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in South Florida fled while being transported to an eye exam with other children. She ran, stopping at an auto shop about five miles away. Frank Gonzalez, the shop owner, said she was crying. Although Gonzalez said no one at his shop called the police, he later pointed officers in the right direction as police vans circled the area. Police say the girl was returned to the detention center without incident, and a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it could not comment on the escape.
The Homestead shelter houses an estimated 1,200 immigrant children, including children who were separated from their parents at the border as part of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. After a federal judge issued a court order in June, the government reunited 1,820 families, but hundreds of children remain separated from their parents, according to court documents reported by BuzzFeed News.
CBS chief executive accused of sexual harassment
Six women told the New Yorker that CBS chairman and chief executive Leslie Moonves sexually harassed them or used intimidation tactics against them over the course of three decades. Some said their careers at CBS were derailed after they rejected Moonves’s advances. Actress and writer Illeana Douglas, for example, was cast in “Queens,” a show on CBS. When she met privately with Moonves in his office to discuss her performance in 1997, he began “violently kissing” her, Douglas said. The actress was later fired.
In a statement to the New Yorker, Moonves, who has supported the #MeToo movement and once said CBS has a “zero-tolerance policy toward discrimination or sexual harassment,” said he “may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances” but denied intentionally hindering anyone’s career.
Former CBS employees told the New Yorker that Moonves’s actions set the tone at the company, which has faced scrutiny over the past year after former anchor Charlie Rose and “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager faced allegations of sexual harassment. “It’s top down, this culture of older men who have all this power and you are nothing,” one veteran producer told the New Yorker. “The company is shielding lots of bad behavior.”
Fager denied allegations that he tolerated harassment and sometimes protected men accused of misconduct. In a statement to the New Yorker, Fager said some people had “an axe to grind.” He also cited the number of women who work in senior positions at “60 Minutes.”
Before the New Yorker article was published online Friday evening, the CBS board of directors announced it would investigate Moonves. According to the New York Times, the board will meet Monday to discuss how to proceed.
This Friday at Acts Full Gospel Church in Oakland, Calif., people will gather to remember Nia Wilson, an 18-year-old woman who was the youngest of six sisters and two brothers.
On July 22, she was stabbed to death at the MacArthur BART station. Her sister, Lahtifa Wilson, was also stabbed. She sustained injuries but survived the attack. “I’m her protector, and I feel like I didn’t protect her,” she told ABC 7. Last week, authorities arrested and charged John Lee Cowell, 27, with murder and attempted murder.
At Cowell’s arraignment hearing on Wednesday, Nia Wilson’s father, Ansar Muhammad told reporters that his daughter was “beautiful” and “inspirational.”
“I’m supposed to be planning her graduation, not her funeral,” he said. “All I want is justice for my daughters.”
Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga’s quest for reparations
On Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga’s graduation day in 1942, she did not celebrate with her high school class. Instead, the honors student spent the day at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Independence, Calif. It was a dust-blown “prison camp,” Herzig Yoshinaga later recalled.
The American-born daughter of Japanese immigrants, Herzig Yoshinaga, who died at 93 on July 18, spent decades trying to forget the time she spent at an internment camp during World War II. But when she was in her 50s, the anti-Vietnam War movement gave her a new political sensibility. She began visiting the National Archives, searching for information on internment. In the early 1980s, she uncovered evidence suggesting America’s World War II internment policy had racist motives. It was not, as the Pentagon officials claimed, a result of “military necessity.”
Herzig Yoshinaga’s findings helped persuade Congress to pass the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted $20,000 in reparations to each survivor of the camps and a formal apology from President Ronald Reagan. They also proved instrumental in a 1983 legal effort to overturn the criminal conviction of Fred Korematsu — a welder who had defied orders to report to an internment center. Similar convictions for two other Japanese Americans, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, were subsequently cleared with the help of Herzig Yoshinaga’s research.
In 2009, she published a dictionary of internment terms, which called for words like “internment camp” to be replaced with “gulag” or “concentration camp,” in an effort to accurately describe what happened during the war.
“For 40-plus years I’ve used the word ‘evacuation,’ because I was brainwashed to,” she told The Washington Post in 1988. “I’m trying very hard to use words like ‘banishment,’ ‘exile,’ ‘forced removal.’ In the camps, they called us ‘resident colonists.’” She added: “We must learn to tell it as it happened.”
‘Happiness’ by Heather Harpham
I usually don’t go for nonfiction reads, but I binge-listened to Heather Harpham’s “Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After” over the weekend. It’s a memoir from the perspective of a mother raising a sick child while navigating life’s everyday challenges. Harpham narrates the audiobook, and hearing her read it made it feel like she was re-telling her story just for me. Her story is moving, intimate and told with such vivid imagery. I felt like I was there with her family.
—Aviva Loeb, Washington Post designer
