Variety production of the show’s sixth season, rewrite it to remove Spacey’s central character, and shorten it from 13 to eight episodes to meet deadlines, resulting in tens of millions in losses, according to court documents. (AP)
ANN ARBOR, Mich: Janice Bluestein Longone, who is credited with collecting thousands of items chronicling the culinary history of the United States, including cookbooks, menus, advertisements and diaries, has died at age 89.
Longone died Wednesday, according to Nie Family Funeral Home in Ann Arbor. The cause and location of death weren’t announced.
Longone’s collection formed the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where her husband, Daniel T. Longone, was a chemistry professor.
Longone said that she believed the collection showed how American agriculture and culinary practices defined regional customs and traditions. Her collection included cookbooks from the 1800s and early 1900s called “charity cookbooks” that were sold as fundraisers and immigrant cookbooks.
“Our hope is we have gathered materials that offer researchers access into a new way of looking at American history,” she said in a 2010 University of Michigan article. “That could be the rethinking of the role of women, who were publishing more than 150 years ago charity cookbooks, which often reflected the pressing issues of the day, or simply, the impact of refrigeration on American tastes and lifestyles.”
The collection included early US cookbooks, such as one printed in 1796, one published by an African American woman in 1866 and a Jewish cookbook published in America in 1871, according to the university. (AP)
LOS ANGELES:
A judge ruled that Kevin Spacey and his production companies must pay the makers of “House of Cards” nearly $31 million because of losses brought on by his 2017 firing for the sexual harassment of crew members.
The ruling from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mel Red Recana gives the force of law to the $30.9 award in favor of MRC and other companies that produced the Netflix series by a private arbitrator who heard the case against spacey.
Recana wrote that Spacey and his attorneys “fail to demonstrate that this is even a close case” and “do not demonstrate that the damages award was so utterly irrational that it amounts to an arbitrary remaking of the parties’ contracts.”
“We are pleased with the court’s ruling,” MRC attorney Michael Kump said
in an email to The Associated Press.
Spacey has denied the allegations through his attorneys and his spokesperson, who did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
The arbitrator found that spacey violated his contract’s demands for professional
behavior by “engaging certain conduct in connection with several crew members in each of the five seasons that he starred in and executive produced House of Cards,” according to a filing from Kump requesting the approval.
As a result, MRC had to fire Spacey, halt
MINEOLA, NY:
The driver in a hit-andrun crash that killed the father of rapper Nicki Minaj last year was sentenced to a year in jail, in keeping with a promise the judge made when the man pleaded guilty in May.
Charles Polevich, who pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and tampering with evidence in the crash on New York’s Long Island that killed Robert Maraj, was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and had his driver’s license suspended for six months.
Polevich’s lawyer, Marc Gann, suggested his client may have had a medical issue at the time of the crash and that he wasn’t fully aware of what had happened when he fled.
Polevich, 72, said in court that he’s “been heartsick since realizing the extent of the tragedy” and that there was “no excuse” for his behavior.
Maraj’s widow, Carol Maraj, said in court that Polevich had left her husband “like a dog on the street” and that sparing him a longer jail sentence was a “slap in the face for the family,” Newsday reported. (AP)