Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
• A body armor-wearing Prince Harry on Friday followed in the footsteps of his late mother, Princess Diana, whose walk through an active minefield in Angola years ago helped to lead to a global ban on the deadly weapons. The prince walked through a dusty minefield marked with skull-and-crossbones warning signs and was visiting the spot where Diana was famously photographed on a similar walk during her own Africa visit in 1997. That field in Huambo is now a busy street. The southern African nation is now years past a grinding civil war and hopes to be land mine-free by 2025, a goal of scores of countries around the world. “Land mines are an unhealed scar of war,” Harry said in the town of Dirico. “By clearing the land mines we can help this community find peace, and with peace comes opportunity.” He said retracing his mother’s path was “quite emotional.” Harry on his visit also remotely detonated a decades-old mine, met with mine-clearing teams and went to the orthopedic hospital his mother visited for her meetings with land mine explosion survivors. Ralph Legg, the Angola country director for mine-clearing organization The HALO Trust said Diana’s “willingness to visit an actual minefield, to place herself right in that context, provided great impetus” to efforts to clear minefields. Harry’s first official family tour with his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and their baby, Archie, will continue with stops in Malawi and further events in South Africa with a focus on problems including mental health and women’s empowerment.
• Former Fox News star Bill O’Reilly won’t have to face a lawsuit by an ex-producer who said he defamed her with comments that followed a New York Times report that five women got payments from the network to avoid litigation involving the host. Rachel Witlieb Bernstein sued O’Reilly in December 2017 claiming that the host, who was forced out at Fox over allegations of sexual harassment, defamed her when he said no Fox employees had used a company hot line to object to his behavior. She said there was no such hot line and that she had repeatedly complained to executives about him. According to the lawsuit, she agreed to settle in July 2002 claims she’d made against O’Reilly and Fox that included discrimination. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts in Manhattan dismissed the suit. O’Reilly assailed Bernstein as “politically motivated” and made other such comments, the judge said. But she called the comments “loose and hyperbolic” and noted that he didn’t accuse her of a crime or harm her in other ways. O’Reilly has said the settled claims were without merit. Lawyers for Bernstein didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment on the decision.