Strike-hit Emmys reset for MLK Day
LOS ANGELES -- The strike-delayed 75th Emmy Awards have a new date -- one that places them squarely within Hollywood's awards season.
Fox announced Thursday that the Emmys will air Jan. 15 -- Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- from the Peacock Theater at LA Live in downtown Los Angeles.
The timing means the Emmys, which honor the best shows on television, will air weeks before the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which honor film and TV actors. The Golden Globe Awards, which haven't been confirmed for a return to network television, and the Critics Choice Awards also are held in January.
The ceremony will happen roughly four months later than originally planned.
While the move is a bit of a throwback -- the first Emmys, where only six awards were handed out, were held in January 1949 -- the show traditionally airs in September, a slot that once heralded the fall TV season. But that timing dates back to when broadcast television dominated -- both in viewership and Emmys contenders -- in a way that has been effaced by cable TV and streaming services.
Biden: Open to aid for nuke-tied illness
BELEN, N.M. -- President Joe Biden said he's open to granting assistance to people sickened by exposure to radiation during nuclear weapons testing, including in New Mexico, where the world's first atomic bomb was tested in 1945.
Biden brought up the issue while speaking Wednesday in Belen, N.M., at a factory that produces wind towers.
"I'm prepared to help in terms of making sure that those folks are taken care of," he said.
The state's place in American history as a testing ground has gotten more attention recently with the release of "Oppenheimer," a movie about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the top-secret Manhattan Project. Biden watched the film last week while on vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Del.
Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico spoke of how the first bomb was tested on soil just south of where the event was. The senator also discussed getting an amendment into the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which gives payments to people who become ill from nuclear weapons tests or uranium mining during the Cold War.
"And those families did not get the help that they deserved. They were left out of the original legislation," Lujan said. "We're fighting with everything that we have" to keep the amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act.
Last month, the U.S. Senate voted to expand compensation. The provisions would extend health care coverage and compensation to so-called downwinders exposed to radiation during weapons testing to several new regions stretching from New Mexico to Guam.
4th person arrested in Alabama brawl
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Police in Alabama said Thursday that a fourth person has been arrested on a misdemeanor assault charge in connection with a riverside brawl that drew national attention.
Maj. Saba Coleman of the Montgomery Police Department said the 21-year-old woman turned herself in to be arrested. She is the fourth person charged with assaulting a Black riverboat crew co-captain in a riverside brawl in Alabama's capital city.
The melee, where sides largely broke down along racial lines, began Saturday evening when a moored pontoon boat blocked the city-owned Harriott II riverboat from docking in its designated space along the riverfront so more than 200 passengers could disembark.
The riverboat co-captain took another vessel to shore to move the pontoon boat and was attacked by several white people from the private boat, police said. Video showed him being punched and shoved. Riverboat crew members later confronted the pontoon boat party, and more fighting broke out, police said.
Video of the brawl circulated on social media and put a national spotlight on Alabama's capital city.
NYC escapee rappels 5 floors, hails cab
NEW YORK -- A prisoner getting medical treatment escaped from a New York City hospital by tying sheets together, rappelling from a fifth-floor window and hailing a taxi, police said.
The 44-year-old man escaped from Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital shortly after 4:30 p.m. Wednesday and was still at large Thursday, a police spokesperson said.
The man had been in custody since a July 31 arrest on drug possession charges and was brought to the hospital Aug. 4 for treatment of a medical problem, a spokesperson for the city Department of Correction said.
He was taken to the bathroom for a shower and managed to escape out the window using bedsheets, police said. He rappelled to a rooftop below and from there made it to the street, where he got into a taxi.