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Authorities hold a news conference on the latest in the kidnapping case involving three women held captive in a Cleveland home.
Watch the video, broadcast by NBC News and scheduled for 1 p.m. Eastern.
Watch Amanda Berry, special report broadcast by NBC News.
“Iron Man 3″ topped Chinese box offices five days after opening, state media reported on Tuesday, but the modified domestic version of the Hollywood blockbuster has raised some eyebrows.
The film starring Robert Downey Jr as the hero Tony Stark has earned 410 million yuan ($67 million) since last Wednesday, when it broke a national record with opening-day sales of 116 million yuan, Xinhua news agency said.
The Chinese release had four extra minutes, including the product placement of a local milk drink called Gu Li Duo touted as a source of Iron Man’s energy, the Hollywood Reporter said.
Also unique to the Chinese version was the appearance of “Dr Wu”, a character played by local actor Wang Xueqi, who in his limited screen time drinks a carton of Gu Li Duo and performs an operation on Stark.
Chinese viewers felt the added bits were “superfluous to the narrative”, the Hollywood Reporter said.
There was no immediate explanation for the additions. Chinese authorities normally cut foreign films, due to sexual and political sensitivities, rather than add to them.
In April the country’s cinemas abruptly cancelled all screenings of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” just as it was released, with one viewer adding that a showing was stopped after just one minute.
Nudity of the main character played by Jamie Foxx may have prompted the sudden censorship, the popular web portal Sina said at the time.
Scenes were also cut from the latest James Bond film “Skyfall”, including a killing in Shanghai, along with mentions of prostitution in Macau and torture by Chinese security agents.
A Minnesota judge dismissed a lawsuit on Thursday evening filed in November 2012 by an anti-choice couple “on behalf” of Minnesota taxpayers that sought to eliminate all state insurance coverage of abortion services.
The order, issued by District Court Judge Kathleen R. Gearin, found that Minnesota’s case law on this is actually quite strong. In a 1995 lawsuit, Doe v. Gomez, the Minnesota Supreme Court struck down a ban on state funding of abortion, ruling that that so long as Minnesota funded pregnancy care, it could not refuse to fund care related to “therapeutic abortion.”
Center for Reproductive Rights litigation director, Julie Rikelman, told Raw Story: “It’s a great ruling. It’s a great victory for poor women in Minnesota. … She said that the state has been doing exactly what it’s supposed to under the constitution by paying for these medically necessary procedures that poor women need and that she was dismissing the plaintiffs’ case because there was no reason to undo what the Minnesota Supreme Court had so carefully done.”
The plaintiffs, Rev. Brian Walker and his wife Denise Walker, argued that the Minnesota department of health is insufficiently scrutinizing whether taxpayer funding was going to only medically necessary abortions and that the state had illegally paid for more than 37,000 abortions since 1999. Gearin addresses this concern in her ruling, writing that Doe v. Gomez also held that the Minnesota constitution guarantees a right to privacy, and “the difficult decision whether to obtain a therapeutic abortion will not be made by the government, but will be left to the woman and her doctor.”
Rikelman explained, “The claim here was that it was unreasonable for the state to rely on doctors signing documentation saying that they had provided the procedure for medically necessary reasons, but of course states and insurance companies rely on doctors all the time. That’s the entire way the medical system works. We trust doctors to provide accurate information about why they’re providing medical treatment to women.”
The anti-choice group Alliance Defending Freedom filed the suit on the Walkers’ behalf, and they still have the prerogative to appeal the decision. Rikelman said she believes it’s likely they will. As a group with a mission to make all abortion illegal, “it seems hard to imagine that they will give up so quickly,” she said.
The Walkers, though they filed the suit “on behalf of” Minnesota taxpayers, are staunch anti-abortion advocates. In a video posted to YouTube, the Walkers can be seen at a 2011 West Coast March for Life rally, in which they talk about how they once had an abortion when Denise Walker became pregnant while they were engaged, but have since become anti-choice.
Brian Walker explained he was there to describe the “devastation abortion has had on my life. It does affect men as well.” Walker said when he discovered the pregnancy, “I copped out. I was a punk and I was a liar,” he said.
Denise Walker followed her husband’s speech, saying, “If God can forgive someone like me, someone who was absolutely bent on hell … and put three children to death on those thrones, if he could forgive somebody like me, if there’s anybody out there who needs forgiveness for anything, he will forgive you because he forgave me, praise God. I want you to know that my great-great-great grandmother was a slave and my great-great-great grandfather was a slave … and they knew what it was like to not be known as a person.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights and Minnesota-based non-profit Gender Justice filed a related motion in February as a preliminary effort to reaffirm the Doe v. Gomez decision when the Walkers filed their suit. The February motion was filed on behalf of Pro-Choice Resources, a Minnesota group that helps provide funding to low-income women seeking abortion and the same group that sued to prompt the Supreme Court’s decision in 1995.
“We are stepping in to stop the anti-choice ideologues who seek to stand between low-income women and the health care that is their right under the law,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a press release when the suit was filed.
It’s unclear if Judge Gearin will rule on the motion filed in February, since she dismissed the Walkers’ case.
Read Judge Gearin’s decision:
Watch the Walkers at the 2011 West Coast March for Life rally.
Two videos published Sunday and Monday by the anti-abortion group Live Action purport to show later-term abortion providers Washington Surgi-Clinic and Dr. Emily Women’s Health Center in the Bronx.
The videos depict one provider and several clinic counselors discussing the procedures of a late-term abortion. In the first video, allegedly secretly filmed at a Bronx clinic, a counselor tells the woman that because she is 23 weeks along in her pregnancy, she will be subject two a two-day procedure.
“It’s a sucking tool they hold, and it sucks it in,” the clinic worker says, describing what abortion providers refer to as a dilation and evacuation procedure, which is legal in New York state and typically performed in the second trimester of pregnancy (up to 26 weeks).
The video also shows what is says is a clinic employee discussing how the doctors deal with a live fetus during an abortion. “And then they put it in a — in a solution, and they send it to a lab, so they can measure everything to make sure that everything came out in you,” she said in the video.
In a follow-up interview with the Washington Post , the clinic explained that the delivery of a live fetus is extremely rare. “I have never had any fetus that was born alive,” she told the Post. “If my staff member or somebody had mentioned something [like that], it was something they didn’t understand.”
The clinic worker goes on to explain that the seaweed “sticks” inserted are “toxic” and if the woman doesn’t come back for the follow-up appointment her life could be at risk. The video, edited at that point, depicts the woman asking what happens if she has “labor pains.” The clinician tells her to call the clinic. After another edit cut, the woman asks “what if it pops out at home,” though it’s unclear if she’s referring to the seaweed “sticks” or the fetus. “If it comes out, then it comes out,” the clinic worker said. “Flush it. But you still have to come in.”
“Once you start this today, that’s it,” the clinic worker assured her. “We’re not gonna show you sonogram pictures.”
A second counselor explains what happens if the patient delivers a live birth during the procedure. “He cannot do a procedure once it’s outside the body, OK? He has to necessitate it. He has send it to the hospital. That’s the law.”
The second video allegedly shows Washington, D.C. abortion provider Cesare Santangelo, who tells the pregnant Live Action investigator that she is at 24 or 25 weeks.
When the investigator asks if it’s ever “alive” when it comes out, Santangelo explained, “That’s why I try and sever the umbilical cord first, and we wait for that to stop pulsing, and this way the fetus is expired first, so it doesn’t.”
“I mean, technically, you know, legally, we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive, but . . . it probably wouldn’t,” Santangelo said in the video. A clinician says later in the video unequivocally that they would take a live fetus birth to the hospital.
In a follow-up interview with the Washington Post, Santangelo said he was trying to reassure the woman. “What I said is, basically I wouldn’t do anything extraordinary. We would call EMS. We would call 9-1-1. But I wouldn’t do intubation or anything. . . . You let nature take its course,” he told the Post.
Live Action said it plans to release more videos and in the press release compared the providers in the two videos to “house of horrors” Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. But the videos don’t depict anything like the allegations detailed in Gosnell’s grand jury testimony, which alleged seven murders, though the court recently threw three of them out. And though Live Action published the two-hour video from the Bronx clinic, it has yet to do so for the D.C. clinic.
Live Action has also published similar videos in the past, alleging that providers failed to report statutory rapes or sex-selective abortions.
The group’s spokesperson, Lila Rose, began working with right-wing activist James O’Keefe, whose deceptively edited videos brought down the grassroots organizing group ACORN.
Meanwhile, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), has re-introduced a 20-week abortion ban in Washington, D.C., which is clearly unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade. Franks came under fire for pushing legislation that the residents of D.C. didn’t want and weren’t even given input on during a hearing. Mother Jones profiled a woman in 2011 who chose to have an abortion at 29 weeks due to massive defects in the fetus.
“I don’t have words to describe the agony of those days,” she told Mother Jones. “Knowing how sick the child was, I can’t imagine ever being forced to carry the baby to term.”
Requests for comment from the D.C. Abortion Fund and the National Abortion Federation were not returned by time of publication.
Watch the first video, published on Sunday to YouTube.
Full 2-hour video, also published to YouTube on Sunday.
Watch the second video, published on Monday to YouTube.
A Library of Congress film preservationist was indicted in Charlottesville on Wednesday posting fake Craigslist ads promising sex or pornography directing men to the home of his ex-girlfriend, whom he had previously harassed and stalked.
Kenneth Edward Kuban, 61, was arrested in March for violating a restraining order obtained by the complainant, identified only as L.M. in legal documents, in July 2011. L.M. said Kuban posted ads promising sex or pornographic videos that directed men to her house. She said there were sometimes as many as four men arriving at her house a week, and sometimes as many as six in a single day.
“Some of the men refused to leave L.M.’s property until she called law enforcement to remove them,” the complaint reads.
L.M. said Kuban began stalking and harassing her after their six-month relationship ended. The Daily Progress reported, “L.M. told federal authorities she had to change her phone number and have it unlisted after receiving five to six unwanted calls per day from Kuban over the span of the several months after the protective order was issued. A new court order issued in Fauquier in December stated Kuban had to avoid direct and indirect contact with L.M., ‘no exceptions.’”
The Library of Congress launched an investigation after L.M. reported the incidents in January, finding three different anonymous Craigslist accounts responded to the ads. Each of the accounts were found in the browsing history of Kuban’s work computer, the Library of Congress reported in an affidavit.
[Woman answering door via Shutterstock]
Senators Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., hold a news conference to discuss their agreement on background checks relating to guns.
Watch live, broadcast on NBC News on April 10.
Philadelphia police have ordered a manhunt for four men who reportedly picked up a LaSalle University student just off campus and gang raped her, according to NBC 10 Philadelphia.
The 20-year-old woman was told police she was walking about a mile from campus at 10 p.m. on Easter Sunday when she was abducted by four men who pulled up in a black van. NBC 10 reports that they then took her to a house and repeatedly raped her, then dropped her off at an unknown location and fled the scene.
The victim reported that the men were between the ages of 20 and 25 and that one of the perpetrators had “MM” tattooed on his face.
Despite the police investigation, the university did not inform the student body. University spokesperson Jon Caroulis said in a statement to NBC 10, “The university officials met with the student and her family and offered support.”
“I’m really … shocked, I guess,” said fellow student Karla Fernandez. “I’m really disappointed that this is the way I’m finding out.”
Watch this news report, broadcast by NBC 10 Philadelphia.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has pulled the firearms license from a gun store in East Windsor, Connecticut, that sold the gun used in the Newton, Connecticut massacre that killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, according to a Thursday report in The Journal News .
David LaGuercia, owner of Riverview Gun Sales, had his licence revoked on Dec. 20, and the 60-day timeframe to appeal the decision has now expired.
ATF spokesperson Deb Seifert declined to give specific reasons to the Journal for revoking the shop’s license, but just said, “It’s final at this point.”
The shop reportedly sold both guns used in the Newtown shooting as well as a 2010 mass shooting at Hartford Distributors Inc. that left nine dead.
At the time of the Newtown shooting, the shop’s owner LaGuercia, said in a statement, “There is nothing more devastating than the loss of a child, and I am absolutely appalled that the product that was sold several years ago would be used in this type of crime … We are cooperating with law enforcement in their efforts to get to the bottom of this senseless tragedy.”
[Middle aged man in gun store via Shutterstock]
President Barack Obama announces funding for a new research effort centered around enhanced understanding of the human mind.
Watch live, broadcast by NBC News on April 2.
The White House Easter Egg Roll takes place with people joining the first family on the South Lawn.
Watch live, broadcast via NBC News on April 1.
Watch the White House live stream, broadcast on April 1.
The Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on the future of drones in America with a focus on law enforcement and privacy considerations.
Watch live, broadcast via NBC News on March 20.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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