Francis calls clergy abuse summit as issue imperils papacy
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis summoned the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences Wednesday to a summit on preventing clergy sex abuse and protecting children, responding to the greatest crisis of his papacy with the realization that Vatican inaction on the growing global scandal now threatens his legacy.
Francis’ key cardinal advisers announced plans for the summit early next year the day before the pope meets with U.S. church leaders embroiled in their own credibility crisis from the latest accusations in the Catholic Church’s decades-long sex abuse scandal.
The meeting, scheduled for Feb. 21-24, would assemble more than 100 churchmen to represent every bishops’ conference. Its convening signals awareness at the highest levels of the Catholic Church that clergy sex abuse is a global problem, not restricted to some parts of the world or a few Western countries.
Victims’ advocates immediately dismissed the event as belated damage control, an action publicized hastily as allegations regarding Francis’ record of handling abuse cases — and accumulated outrage among rank-and-file Catholic faithful over covered-up crimes — jeopardize his papacy.
“There’s absolutely no reason to think any good will come of such a meeting,” given the church’s decades of failure to reform, David Clohessy, former director of the victims’ advocacy group SNAP, said.
Video shows Weinstein’s hands-on encounter with rape accuser
NEW YORK — A video of Harvey Weinstein aired on television Wednesday showing him boldly propositioning a woman who later accused him of rape and repeatedly touching her and stroking her arm and back during what was supposed to have been a business meeting.
Melissa Thompson, who sued Weinstein in June, said she made the recording, shown by Sky News, while demonstrating video technology for the movie mogul-turned-#MeToo villain at his New York City office in 2011.
Weinstein is seen on the video rejecting a handshake from Thompson and then hugging her instead and rubbing her back.
He then caresses her shoulder as they sit side-by-side in front of her laptop computer.
At one point he tells her: “Let me have a little part of you. Can you give it to me?”
‘60 Minutes’ chief Jeff Fager fired over policy violation
NEW YORK — CBS News on Wednesday fired “60 Minutes” top executive Jeff Fager, who has been under investigation following reports that he groped women at parties and tolerated an abusive workplace.
The network news president, David Rhodes, said Fager’s firing was “not directly related” to the allegations against him, but came because he violated company policy. A CBS News reporter working on a story about Fager revealed that he had sent her a text message urging her to “be careful.”
Fager is the third major figure at CBS to lose his job in the past year over misconduct allegations, following news anchor Charlie Rose last November and CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves on Sunday.
CBS News reporter Jericka Duncan said she received Fager’s message after she started to work on a story about him on Sunday, following the posting of a New Yorker story with fresh allegations that were denied by Fager.
“There are people who lost their jobs trying to harm me and if you pass on these damaging claims without your own reporting to back them up that will become a serious problem,” Fager wrote, according to Duncan.
Planned Parenthood picks Chinese-born doctor as new leader
NEW YORK — A Chinese immigrant who fled her native country when she was 8 was named Wednesday as Planned Parenthood’s new president, the first doctor to hold the post in five decades.
Dr. Leana Wen will assume the role Nov. 12, six days after midterm elections in which Planned Parenthood’s political wing plans to spend $20 million on behalf of candidates who support abortion rights.
Wen, who has been Baltimore’s health commissioner for since 2015, will be Planned Parenthood’s sixth president over a century of work providing millions of Americans with birth control, sex education and medical screenings.
The organization also is the largest provider of abortions in the U.S., making it a perennial target for anti-abortion activists. In recent years, its foes have been striving — thus far unsuccessfully — to halt the flow of federal funds that help Planned Parenthood provide some of its non-abortion services.
Wen succeeds Cecile Richards, who had been president since 2006 before resigning earlier this year.
Got $1,100? Apple shows off its most expensive iPhone yet
CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple unveiled three new iPhones on Wednesday, including its biggest and most expensive model yet, as the company seeks to widen the product’s appeal amid slowing sales.
CEO Tim Cook showed off the iPhone XS Max, which has a bigger screen than the one on last year’s dramatically designed model , the iPhone X. It’ll cost about $1,100, topping the iPhone X, which at $1,000 seemed jaw-dropping at the time. An updated iPhone X, now called the XS, stays at $1,000.
As with the iPhone X, both new phones have screens that run from edge to edge, an effort to maximize the display without making the phone too awkward to hold. The screen needs no backlight, so black would appear as truly black rather than simply dark. The Max model looks to be about the size of the iPhone 8 Plus, though the screen size is much larger.
The iPhone XS Max, which will be available on Sept. 21 — with orders open the week before — represents Apple’s attempt to feed consumers’ appetite for increasingly larger screens as they rely on smartphones to watch and record video and to take photos wherever they are.
By making more expensive iPhones, Apple has been able to boost its profits despite waning demand as people upgrade phones less frequently. IPhones fetched an average price of $724 during the April-June period, a nearly 20 percent increase from a year earlier.
‘Miraculous’: Boy survives after meat skewer pierces skull
HARRISONVILLE, Mo. — A 10-year-old Missouri boy is recovering after he was attacked by insects and tumbled from a tree, landing on a meat skewer that penetrated his skull from his face to the back of his head.
But miraculously, that’s where Xavier Cunningham’s bad luck ended. The skewer had completely missed Xavier’s eye, brain, spinal cord and major blood vessels, The Kansas City Star reports .
Xavier’s harrowing experience began Saturday afternoon when yellow jackets attacked him in a tree house at his home in Harrisonville, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) south of Kansas City. He fell to the ground and started to scream. His mother, Gabrielle Miller, ran to help him. His skull was pierced from front-to-back with half a foot of skewer still sticking out of his face.
Miller tried to reassure her son, who told her “I’m dying, Mom” as they rushed to the hospital. He eventually was transferred to the University of Kansas Hospital, where endovascular neurosurgery director Koji Ebersole evaluated the wound.
“You couldn’t draw it up any better,” Ebersole said. “It was one in a million for it to pass 5 or 6 inches through the front of the face to the back and not have hit these things.”