Beth Stroud sheds a tear pondering what reinstatement would mean 20 years after she was defrocked from her job as a United Methodist pastor in Philadelphia, Sunday, May 12, 2024, at Turning Point United Methodist Church in Trenton, N.J. Delegates at a United Methodist conference recently struck down longstanding anti-LGBTQ bans and created a path for clergy ousted because of them to seek reinstatement. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)
amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign. That inquiry, later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, would ultimately find that while Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump team welcomed the help, there was insufficient evidence to prove a criminal collaboration.NEW YORK (AP) — Joe Jonas’ sophomore solo album Work It Out” and John Krasinski and Natalie Portman searching for immortality in Guy Ritchie’s adventure movie “Fountain of Youth” are some of the new television, films, music and games
Also among the streaming offerings worth your time, as selected by The Associated Press’: Paul Reubens shines in the documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” Nicole Kidman returns as a shady wellness guru in “Nine Perfect Strangers” and Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping offers gamers a chance to test their de-duck-tive skills.— Matt Wolf’s two-part documentary
(out Friday, May 23 on Max and HBO) is one of the most intimate portraits of Paul Reubens, the man many know as Pee-wee Herman. Wolf crafted his film from some 40 hours of interviews conducted with Reubens before. In “Pee-wee as Himself,” Reubens discusses the ups and downs of his career, how he crafted the Pee-wee persona and how it came to dwarf his own self.
— Guy Ritchie’s adventure movie
(Friday, May 23 on Apple TV+) stars John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as a pair of siblings hunting for the fabled Fountain of Youth. The film, which also stars Eiza González, Domhnall Gleeson and Stanley Tucci, is the latest from the fast-working Ritchie, whose recent films include 2024’s, which spotlights the key numbers leading our coverage.
The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.Researchers have debated how the hobbits – named Homo floresiensis after the remote Indonesian island of Flores – evolved to be so small and where they fall in the human evolutionary story. They’re thought to be among the last early human species to go extinct.
Scientists don’t yet know whether the hobbits shrank from an earlier, taller human species called Homo erectus that lived in the area, or from an even more primitive human predecessor. More research – and fossils – are needed to pin down the hobbits’ place in human evolution, said Matt Tocheri, an anthropologist at Canada’s Lakehead University.“This question remains unanswered and will continue to be a focus of research for some time to come,” Tocheri, who was not involved with the research, said in an email.