Foxhole is one of my favourite games to read about, even if I don't play it. It's a massively multiplayer World War 2 game, viewed from above, where battlefield logistics matters as much as aiming and flanking. Its developers have just announced a major new update coming next summer, Foxhole: Airborne, which adds planes to the game for the first time.

Planes, in a topdown MMO? It makes a little more sense if you watch the trailer.

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Take-Two Interactive have sold their publishing label Private Division to an unnamed party, along with five of Private Division's "live and unreleased titles". The GTA 6 publisher have also finally confirmed that they have shut down OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome devs Roll7 together with Kerbal Space Program 2 creators Intercept Games, months after performing mass layoffs at both studios.

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When multiplayer fishing game Webfishing came out last month, it offered a relaxing hangout zone for cats and dogs. Everything revolves around catching, selling, and collecting the fish that gather in the rivers of a small island. It also lets you customise your character with clothing. Mostly simple hats and shorts, but some options let players celebrate their sexuality, such as a rainbow-adorned t-shirts, or titles that hang above your character which simply say "Trans" or "Bi". All this led one player to complain there was no "Straight" title. So, the developer added one. It costs 10 grand.

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Life simulation game Inzoi will launch on PC via Steam early access on 28th March 2025, publishers Krafton have announced. Billed as a potential Sims 4 usurper, and equipped with syrupy Unreal Engine 5 visuals, it was originally slated for launch this year.

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Sega are delisting several bundles of 'classic' games from digital stores, along with "select individual" games. On Steam specifically, this adds up to over 60 games in total, including several actual classics including the original Streets Of Rage trilogy, Crazy Taxi, and Jet Set Radio.

The games will be removed on December 6th but will remain playable to those who already own them.

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Roblox is making changes in an attempt to keep younger players safe in the online platform. Beginning later this month, children under the age of 13 will no longer be able to search, discover or play unrated experiences within Roblox, and will be unable to access social hangout experiences.

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I first played Taiko no Tatsujin in an arcade (in Japan, because I am very cool), where it's controlled by hitting a recreation of an actual taiko drum. It was fun enough that I wish there was a taiko drum peripheral available for PC now the series is on our platform.

Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival is out now via Steam, where it offers over 70 songs to drum through, and a subscription service through which to unlock over 700 more. Maybe I should try to get my Donkey Konga drums working on PC, but I'll probably settle for playing it with a gamepad.

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Nostalgia, when you think about it, is bollocks. There has never been a better time than right this second – averaged out, and despite repeated attempts to the contrary, humanity has never been healthier, freer, or more enlightened by knowledge. It’s true of games too. For every by-committee platter of passionless map markers, there are thousands of more personal, more creative, more interesting works, all adding to the decades' worth of great stuff we can still play today.

What isn’t bollocks is the emotional pull that nostalgia, for all its lack of cold, hard reason, still manages to wield inside our warm, squishy brains. Hence, the centrepiece of Apex Legends’ Season 23 update is a mode that recreates the battle royale FPS as it was back in 2019, defaulting back to the original map and weapon arsenal while cutting the 26-strong legend roster to the earliest ten. It’s a Fortnite-style rolling back of the clock, and a passably enjoyable one, but also a reminder that the good old days weren’t always that good.

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Could tower defence be the ultimate "it's Friday and I am here in body only" genre? I haven't really thought about it before, but Rift Riff's effusively laidback crowd control has me pondering those optimal moments in any tower defender when the incoming horde hits the flamer-MG triangle just right, and you can settle back comfortably into the role of clockwatcher.

Rift Riff encourages this behaviour by being nice to look at. Created by a trio of developers including Hidden Folks designer Adriaan de Jongh, it's a world of spacey, sun-carved mountains, forests and monoliths. The towers resemble the sacred architecture of Monument Valley, and the colour scheme and general ambience remind me of Cocoon. There's a demo, if you fancy it.

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GeForce Now, Nvidia’s PC-focused game streaming service, will begin calling time on its most muscular of power users. A post on the GFN subreddit announced the introduction of a 100-hour monthly cap (or "allowance"), effective from January 1st 2025 for anyone who signs up after that date. Existing streamists, or anyone who signs up by the end of 2024, will get a year’s grace period before the limit kicks in from January 2026.

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Amplitude Studios, developers of many a game with "Endless" in the name, have split with publisher Sega to become independent again, with ownership of the studio reverting to its original founders and "other members of the team". The developers say everyone is parting "on good terms" and that the last eight years of getting published under Sega has been "amazing". But there are other businessy reasons, of course. Namely, Sega have been trying to trim down their European studios for the past year, and Amplitude is just the latest bunch of devs affected by that.

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Palworld developers Pocketpair have finally revealed which patents Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are suing them about. It looks like they're focusing on the act of throwing capsular items to catch or release monsters, together with the usage of monsters as mounts.

If you've somehow yet to encounter Palworld, it's a bestselling survival game that takes hefty - some would say, scandalous - inspiration from Pokémon, with players poaching Pokésque critters using magic spheres, and deploying them as soldiers and minions.

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Alright everyone, let's put this new comments section through its paces. I want to hear deep and detailed roundups of everything you've been playing over the past two weeks this time! We're gonna make our tech team weep. Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

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My brain is still thawing for the comment freeze, and thus there is sadly no cool industry person to talk to us about books this week. I'm currently reading Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. Jia Tolentino wrote about it for the New Yorker. Jia Tolentino also writes very good books. But enough about books, tell me about books! One's you've read, preferably, but I will also accept books you've formed opinions on based on their covers, as is good and proper. Book for now!

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It was the 20-year anniversary of Halo 2 at the weekend, which saw the shooter's modern counterparts celebrating with classic multiplayer maps and long-lost levels. But also emerging from the dust of time are insights to the sequel's development back in 2004. Rolling Stone interviewed two key designers of the game and made a fun discovery. The Flood (the sickly pale alien infestation that briefly turns Halo into sci-fi horror) was partly inspired by a colourful and innocent children's book about a nice elephant.

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Great God Grove is, in a word, bonkers. I’ve stopped a small community from completing a blood ritual, played the role of matchmaker to a group of lonely hearts that involved organising a date with god, and plastered a statue with paint as part of a revolutionary movement to uplift the power of art. My time with GGG has been a pick n’ mix of colourful escapades, and together with its story of godly woes, striking art style, vacuum-based puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing puppet work, I’m now a die-hard LimboLane devotee.

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The developers who remade Half-Life as Black Mesa are working on a new roguelite co-op shooter. It will feature no physicists celebrating Bring Your Shotgun To Work Day, but instead let up to four players tactically breach oil rigs and airports occupied by corporate-sponsored mercenaries. In Rogue Point the richest CEO on earth has croaked it, causing various megacorps to compete in a violent bum rush for control of that wealth. Which is where your team of renegade shooterists come in. They don't want to win this contest, they just want everyone else to lose.

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Sin enjoyed the roguelike stylings of Dungeons of Blood and Dream when she played it in early access back in July, calling it a “baffling, bizarre thing that lives on the border of janky, retro, and punk”. As of yesterday, it’s now out for realsies, promising psychedelic dungeon crawling, the stabbing of assorted gribblies, and lots of little details that make you go “ooo, that’s nice. I’m glad they put that in there.”

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"Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed". As reported by Polygon, that's an argument put forth by a new lawsuit against Ubisoft, filed by two Californian players of The Crew. They're suing the company in a proposed class action lawsuit over shutting down the racing game's servers, rendering it unplayable.

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Here’s a Steam quote for you: ‘The Rise Of The Golden Idol is the best game I’ve ever played where I spent most of my time staring at the screen going “well what chuffing well is it, then?!” Fiendish but fair, this detective puzzler demands a heady mix of observation, deduction, and logic, but rewards you with a progressively engaging story, and steadily more infuriatingly brilliant puzzles. Despite teaching you everything you need to know in the tutorial, it still manages to introduce new wrinkles and twists on the formula with each fresh chapter. My verdict? Imagine me lying my floor, massaging my temple with one hand and giving a fat thumbs up with the other.

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The developers of hero shooter Overwatch 2 must have dropped a box full of old photographs while clearing the attic, spilling old snapshots of Route 66 onto the floor and getting snared in a nostalgic daze. The game is launching a "Classic" mode today that will let you play the first-person payload pusher as it (mostly) was back in 2016 when the first Overwatch launched. That means 6v6 fights, the original abilities of its heroes, and no limits to stop the entire team picking the same character.

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My strongest and most enduring memory of Grand Theft Auto will always be creasing into complete hysterics watching my mate pile into a crumpled police officer with a wooden baseball bat in GTA 3 after school one time. Young’uns these days just don’t appreciate how revolutionary it was to be able to hit a cop with a thing after he’d already fallen over. Suffice it to say I’ve got good memories of the open world series’ nascent forays into 3D, though never enough to tempt me into revisiting them, especially given the poor reception to Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. I can sympathise. I’m annoyed just having to type a semicolon and a dash in the same game name.

If you’re in a similarly non-fussed position (I will never not be annoyed that ‘nonplussed’ doesn’t mean what it sounds like it should mean) I can’t imagine a lighting update that’s been available on the mobile versions for a while is enough to tempt you back. But what is a reporter's job if not pathetically treading water between chunklets of Grand Theft Auto news, upon the publishing of which Graham presses the button to release the nutritious pellets on which we all wholly subsist? I hope he doesn’t read that last sentence. I don’t get my pellet if the syntax becomes too convoluted. Moving swiftly on.

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After nearly a year of public beta honing, the Nvidia App – Team Green’s new one-stop shop for desktop GPU management – is out in full. Not alongside the upcoming RTX 50 series, as rumoured, but right-now-today-this-minute. I’ve been testing out the launch version and while it’s not without some dud features, it does agreeably achieve its stated goal of combining the functions within Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience. And if installing it means never having to use the latter again, well, that’s 149MB well spent.

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"Where’s my Neo-Volkite pistol, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2?" was my perhaps slightly ungrateful reaction upon booting the action game up after the previous patch. "I didn’t even know what a Neo-Volkite pistol was until five minutes ago, but now this whole game is trash until I get one!." As promised in the roadmap, the last big update added a whole new Operations map, complete with a gargantuan new pseudo-boss in the form of a hierophant bio-titan. It did not, however, give me my beloved pistol. It’s fine. It’s in now, along with a few, less Neo-Volkite updates to other weapons.

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A grand jury has formally charged a 22-year-old man with capital murder and rape in the death of Nabra Hassanen, who was killed on her walk back to a Virginia mosque.

The Fairfax County Circuit Court indicted Darwin Martinez-Torres of Sterling, Virginia, on Monday on four counts of capital murder for killing Nabra, who was with friends while they had a meal before Ramadan services. Dozens of people had gathered outside the courthouse today, chanting “Justice for Nabra.”

Virginia law has specific conditions for pursuing the death penalty, but the Associated Press reported that the grand jury’s indictment described in graphic detail how Nabra’s killing was grounds for a death penalty against Martinez-Torres. The indictment appears to acknowledge for the first time that the 17-year-old Muslim teen was raped. Under state law, the combination of a rape charge with a premeditated murder charge means the death penalty can be pursued.

Police have said that Martinez-Torres, who is an undocumented immigrant, got into a confrontation on June 18 with a group of teens walking back to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society after grabbing a late meal. He is accused of returning later and beating Nabra with a baseball bat. Police said Nabra’s body was later discovered in a pond. A search warrant affidavit revealed that Martinez-Torres admitted to killing Nabra and had led authorities to where he dumped her body, AP reported.

Nabra’s parents and Muslim advocates have said that Nabra’s death was motivated by hate, but police has said that they will not treat the killing as a hate crime. Instead, police have said it was a road rage incident.

“The reason this guy he hit my daughter is because she’s Muslim,” Nabra’s father Mahmoud Hassanen told WAMU. “Why [didn’t he] hit the boy who bothered him?”

Nabra’s father added that he hoped for the death penalty, while her mother said she wanted Martinez-Torres to serve life in prison.

“I just want people to remember her, and don’t forget her,” Mahmoud told WAMU. “I think nobody can forget her too, for what she did in her life.”

A preliminary hearing for Martinez-Torres reportedly turned emotional on Friday, with Nabra’s parents both shouting at the suspect in court. Nabra’s mother Sawsan Gazzar apparently threw a shoe at Martinez-Torres during the proceedings.

READ MORE: D.C. memorial for slain Muslim teen was set on fire, officials say

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A 61-year-old San Antonio man pleaded guilty to two federal charges in the human smuggling incident that led to the deaths of 10 undocumented immigrants this summer.

James Matthew Bradley Jr., who appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge Monday, pleaded guilty to “one count of conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in death and one count of transporting aliens resulting in death,” according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.

The office added that Bradley’s “admission of guilt” meant he packed dozens of unauthorized immigrants into a tractor-trailer for financial gain, adding that the suspect confirmed that details from court documents were “factually correct.”

On July 23, San Antonio Police Department officers responded to a call from a Walmart employee shortly past midnight. Once officers arrived, they found 39 immigrants at the scene. Of those carried in the tractor-trailer, eight were found dead in the rear of the trailer, while two died later at nearby hospitals, the statement said.

Survivors of the incident said there was no air conditioning in the overheated trailer and had to take turns to breath through a hole in the back of the truck for air. Bradley also initially told investigators that he was unaware of the immigrants in the trailer until he had stopped at the Walmart in San Antonio for bathroom break.

The attorney’s office also said Bradley faces up to life in prison with the charges and that he is scheduled to be sentenced in January 2018. Immigrants said there were up to 200 people transported on the trailer and that different fees were quoted to them for the ride north from the U.S.-Mexico border, the statement added.

Jason Buch of San Antonio Express-News told the NewsHour earlier this year that Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, reported an uptick of immigrants using tractor-trailers to get pass checkpoints at the border.

“People are usually going on to major metropolitan areas or regions of the country that employ a lot of immigrant laborers, so, areas with large agriculture industries or construction booms,” Buch said.

The NewsHour’s John Yang learned more about the July human smuggling case and immigration politics from Jason Buch of San Antonio Express News.

Shane M. Folden, special agent in charge of homeland security investigations in San Antonio, said in the statement that the proceeding “helps to close the door on one of the conspirators responsible for causing the tragic loss of life and wreaking havoc on those who survived this horrific incident.”

“This case is a glaring reminder that alien smugglers are driven by greed and have little regard for the health and well-being of their human cargo, which can prove to be a deadly combination,” he added.

Bradley’s co-defendant Pedro Silva Segura was also indicted last month with faces two counts of conspiracy and two counts of transporting undocumented immigrants resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy.

Segura, 47, is an undocumented immigrant who resides in Laredo, Texas.

The post San Antonio truck driver pleads guilty in fatal human smuggling case appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s been almost a month since Hurricane Maria destroyed much of Puerto Rico and killed at least 48 people. The island and its residents are still coming to grips with the scale of the devastation.

William Brangham brings us the latest.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Many Puerto Ricans are still in the dark, without electrical power. Hundreds of thousands still have no access to running water, and the rebuilding of the countless damaged homes, roads and facilities is just beginning.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that almost half the sewage treatment plants on the island are still out of service, increasing the risk of contamination and disease.

I’m joined now by David Begnaud. He’s a correspondent from CBS News who’s been doing some very strong reporting there from since when the storm hit, and is just back from his latest trip to the island.

David, welcome to the NewsHour.

I wonder. We saw many of your reports and others of people still three weeks out from the storm who are still drinking from streams and creeks. You heard — I mentioned this AP report about fears of contamination.

Can you just tell us what is going on there? How are people getting water now?

DAVID BEGNAUD, CBS News: Well, let me tell you this.

The governor of Puerto Rico said this morning that he’s aware of those reports and that they’re looking into it. What’s concerning, William, is that three weeks after the storm and at least a week after the allegations first surfaced that people might be trying to drink from toxic wells at what’s known as Superfund sites, the governor of Puerto Rico is still saying, we’re looking into it and telling people to stay out of rivers where sewage may be spilling into the river.

And, he said, we want them to stay away from the coastal areas.

How are people doing? They’re still desperate to get water. No one seems to be able to figure out how to get enough water to every single person on that island who needs it. And as long as people need water, it’s still an emergency phase.

Nearly four weeks later, no one seems to be able to move from the emergency to the recovery.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, people who are — we see them drinking out of these PVC pipes that they have kind of rigged and sort of poked into the side of a creek.

People are just drinking that water straight, without purification, without boiling it; is that right?

DAVID BEGNAUD: Absolutely.

Look, they have got the PVC pipes tapped into the mountains so that it’s coming out of the stream that way. And they literally are — I saw a woman walk up to a potable water tank that the military had brought in, and she had a Clorox bottle.

And I said, “Ma’am, you’re putting drinkable water in a Clorox bottle?”

And she said, “It’s all I have got.”

Now, that was a good scenario. The other scenarios are people right now who are drinking from streams and creeks and rivers who have no water filters, who have nothing, right? They’re just taking this water.

Now, listen, the government got a million water-purifying tablets within the last week. It took almost three weeks to get those. Now there’s a large push to bring in water filters.

I have got to tell you, most of the water filters I’m seeing brought in are coming from the private sector, and civilian samaritans who are getting 1,000 or more from the mainland and flying them over to Puerto Rico and personally hand-delivering them.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That’s really incredible.

Medical facilities were another big — just a huge devastation on the island. I know you have been doing a lot of reporting on the USS Comfort.

DAVID BEGNAUD: Yes.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This is the huge Naval hospital that is now just offshore Puerto Rico.

But I understand it hasn’t been fully utilized. Can you tell us what your reporting has found there?

DAVID BEGNAUD: The two men running the ship told us that nearly 87 percent of the ship is empty. Sounds alarming, right? They have 200 beds, and 87 percent are empty.

Now, here’s what they said: We stand ready for whatever the government wants to do. We are waiting to be told by the government.

So, I went to the governor, and said exactly what’s happening. And he said: “Look, I’m not satisfied with what the protocol was from the beginning.”

He said, initially, they were prioritizing only the most critically ill patients go to the Comfort. And he said there was a layered process that was complicating things.

So, the governor, Ricardo Rossello, said: “I started to take out some of those layers, and I, said, listen, take people on the ship who may not be critically ill, but need good medical care and can’t get it at the hospital, where the lights are flickering and the A.C. is not running.”

That’s what the governor said.

Within a matter of hours, I got a tweet from a third-year medical student who said: “Let me tell you what a nightmare it has been to reach the Comfort.”

He said: “We have got a pediatric patient who desperately needs to get off this island, either to a hospital on the mainland or to the Comfort.”

And he said: “I went through Google and the local newspaper to find the number. I couldn’t find it.”

Now, here is how things work. Within about 30 minutes of that tweet going out and that medical student’s story being posted, the governor’s spokesperson responded with numbers that should be able to help.

The bottom line here, William, is that asking relentless questions and the good work of journalism is what’s making a difference there. It’s no one person. There’s no heroic work that’s being done by any journalist, other than people who are going back to the same officials and asking some of the same questions, relentlessly seeking the right answer that will make a difference.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: One of the other pieces of reporting that you did that was very early in the story was this backlog of supplies trapped in container ships on the ports in Puerto Rico.

I understand some of that — some of those supplies are now moving. Can you tell us, are they getting to where they need to be throughout the island?

DAVID BEGNAUD: So, the shipping containers you’re talking about, about 3,000 sitting in the Port of San Juan, have been moved out, not all of them, but a majority of them.

And they were intended for grocery stores around the island. Right? So, those were private companies that had brought in these shipping containers, paid for the supplies, but couldn’t move them because their truck drivers were either at home, because the home had been destroyed, or the road was impassable.

More and more supplies are getting out. But let me tell you, the grocery stores around the island, they have a lot of nonperishables, Pringles, candy, cookies, all on the shelf.

But when you go to the meat section, it’s nearly 75 percent empty at the stores we have been to, the produce section 90 percent empty. And finding bottled water there is almost like playing a game.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: David Begnaud, CBS News, thank you so much for your reporting. Thanks for your time.

DAVID BEGNAUD: You bet.

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WASHINGTON — After her Army son died in an armored vehicle rollover in Syria in May, Sheila Murphy says, she got no call or letter from President Donald Trump, even as she waited months for his condolences, wrote to him to say “some days I don’t want to live,” and still heard nothing.

In contrast, Trump called to comfort Eddie and Aldene Lee about 10 days after their Army son was killed in an explosion while on patrol in Iraq in April. “Lovely young man,” Trump said, according to Aldene. She thought that was a beautiful word to hear about her boy, “lovely.”

Like presidents before him, Trump has made personal contact with some families of the fallen, not all. What’s different is that Trump, alone among them, has picked a political fight over who’s done better to honor the war dead and their families.

He placed himself at the top of this pantheon, boasting Tuesday that “I think I’ve called every family of someone who’s died” while past presidents didn’t place such calls.

But The Associated Press found relatives of two soldiers who died overseas during Trump’s presidency who said they never received a call or a letter from him, as well as relatives of a third who did not get a call. And proof is plentiful that Barack Obama and George W. Bush — saddled with far more combat casualties than the roughly two dozen so far under Trump, took painstaking steps to write, call or meet bereaved military families.

The subject arose because nearly two weeks passed before Trump called the families of four U.S. soldiers who were killed in Niger nearly two weeks ago. He made the calls Tuesday.

READ MORE: Trump ignites furor with claim past presidents didn’t console military families by phone

Meanwhile, Rep. Frederica Wilson said late Tuesday that Trump told the widow of a slain soldier that he “knew what he signed up for.” Early Wednesday, the president called Wilson’s version of the conversation a fabrication.

The Florida Democrat said she was in the car with Myeshia Johnson on the way to Miami International Airport to meet the body of Johnson’s husband, Sgt. La David Johnson, when Trump called. Wilson says she heard part of the conversation on speakerphone.

When asked by Miami station WPLG if she indeed heard Trump say that she answered: “Yeah, he said that. To me, that is something that you can say in a conversation, but you shouldn’t say that to a grieving widow.” She added: “That’s so insensitive.”

Trump took strong issue with that recounting early Wednesday.

“Democrat Congresswoman totally fabricated what I said to the wife of a soldier who died in action (and I have proof). Sad!” he said on Twitter.

Sgt. Johnson was among four servicemen killed in the Niger ambush.

Wilson said that she didn’t hear the entire conversation and Myeshia Johnson told her she couldn’t remember everything that was said.

The White House didn’t immediately comment.

READ MORE: Trump’s claim about predecessors, fallen troops disputed

Trump’s delay in publicly discussing the men lost at Niger did not appear to be extraordinary, judging from past examples, but his politicization of the matter is. He went so far Tuesday as to cite the death of chief of staff John Kelly’s son in Afghanistan to question whether Obama had properly honored the war dead.

Kelly was a Marine general under Obama when his Marine son Robert died in 2010. “You could ask General Kelly, did he get a call from Obama?” Trump said on Fox News radio.

Democrats and some former government officials were livid, accusing Trump of “inane cruelty” and a “sick game.”

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq veteran who lost both legs when her helicopter was attacked, said: “I just wish that this commander in chief would stop using Gold Star families as pawns in whatever sick game he’s trying to play here.”

For their part, Gold Star families, which have lost members in wartime, told AP of acts of intimate kindness from Obama and Bush when those commanders in chief consoled them.

Trump initially claimed that only he among presidents made sure to call families. Obama may have done so on occasion, he said, but “other presidents did not call.”

He equivocated Tuesday as the record made plain that his characterization was false. “I don’t know,” he said of past calls. But he said his own practice was to call all families of the war dead.

But that hasn’t happened:

No White House protocol demands that presidents speak or meet with the families of Americans killed in action — an impossible task in a war’s bloodiest stages. But they often do.

Altogether some 6,900 Americans have been killed in overseas wars since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the overwhelming majority under Bush and Obama.

Despite the much heavier toll on his watch — more than 800 dead each year from 2004 through 2007 — Bush wrote to all bereaved military families and met or spoke with hundreds if not thousands, said his spokesman, Freddy Ford.

Veterans groups said they had no quarrel with how presidents have recognized the fallen or their families.

“I don’t think there is any president I know of who hasn’t called families,” said Rick Weidman, co-founder and executive director of Vietnam Veterans of America. “President Obama called often and President Bush called often. They also made regular visits to Walter Reed and Bethesda Medical Center, going in the evenings and on Saturdays.”

___

Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia. Jonathan Drew in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kristen de Groot in Philadelphia, Jennifer McDermott in Providence, Rhode Island, Michelle Price in Salt Lake City, and Hope Yen and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.

The post Trump and the new politics of honoring war dead appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Let’s turn to the continuing fallout and reaction to the Harvey Weinstein story.

Yesterday, Weinstein resigned from the board of his production company following numerous revelations of sexual harassment and several allegations of assault.

More than three dozen women have said Weinstein harassed them. While Weinstein has admitted to behaving inappropriately, he has said he didn’t physically assault anyone.

One of those women is Katherine Kendall. She was a 23-year-old actress who met Weinstein in 1993. She alleges that he invited her to his apartment in New York, where, she says, he took off his clothes and asked for a massage.

As other actresses began coming forward about their painful experiences, she also went public with her own story.

She joins me now from Los Angeles.

First, thanks for joining us.

And I don’t want to relive something that’s painful for you, but you are taking a public stance on it.

For people who don’t know your story, what happened?

KATHERINE KENDALL, Actress/ Photographer: Well, I was you know, a young actress, and I had had a formal meeting at the Miramax office earlier that day.

And then, at the end of the meeting, which I thought went really well, he invited me to come to screenings. He said: “Welcome to the Miramax family. You know, come to premieres, screenings, et cetera. In fact, there’s one this afternoon. Would you like to come?”

And I said, “Sure.”

And I ended up going to see a movie with him. It ended up just being a movie, not a screening, but the film “Red Rock West.” And, you know, that’s right when I had this sort of sinking feeling that something wasn’t going right.

And then, after the movie, we walked for a few blocks. And he said he needed to go up to his apartment to get something, and would I just come with him real quick? And I sort of said no, and we went back and forth on that for a minute. It was sort of a negotiation with him always, trying to sort of stand my ground, but then be convinced it was OK.

I did go into his apartment. Once there, we talked for a long time about art and movies. And I felt like he was treating me like an intellect.

And I felt like the meeting was going really well, and sort of continued. I didn’t feel unsafe once I was in there. And, at one point, then, he got up to go to the bathroom. And he came back in a robe and asked me to give him a massage.

And I was extremely uncomfortable. And I was like, oh, God, no, I’m not comfortable with that. And we went back and forth on that.

And then he went back to the bathroom again, and came back this time completely naked. And, you know, that changed it entirely for me, too. It just took it to the next place. It was completely disorienting. And I was scared, you know? I was really scared.

And then it became sort of a cat-and-mouse game of, like, how am I going to get out of there?

And I’m — it’s hard to make sense of what someone is trying to do to you when they’re fully naked, and they’re…

HARI SREENIVASAN: Yes.

KATHERINE KENDALL: You know, I’m 105 pounds. He’s a large man standing between me and the door.

And, I mean, I felt very resolute, like, I will definitely get out of here somehow. But I’m not — I’m not sure — I’m not sure what’s going to happen here. You know, a lot was going through my head.

And he said, well, if you won’t give me a massage, will you at least show me your breasts? And it was just — you know, it was, all in all, an extremely humiliating experience for me.

And even though I got away, I felt like something had still — like something horrible had just happened to me.

HARI SREENIVASAN: You know, in the immediate aftermath, did you tell someone about it? Because you have said before that you felt ashamed…

KATHERINE KENDALL: I did.

HARI SREENIVASAN: … even though you were the victim.

KATHERINE KENDALL: I did.

It’s really interesting how that happens. And I think — you know, I’m older now, and I have done some work on myself. And I have learned that a lot of people feel that way.

It’s — it’s not — it wasn’t just me. But the just me feeling that this is my fault, this must have only happened to me, there’s something wrong with me, is so common when someone perpetrates against you.

HARI SREENIVASAN: What were the…

KATHERINE KENDALL: And I did. I told my mom.

And I told some good friends. But, you know, one of the things that happened was, I didn’t want them to tell anybody. You know, people wanted to help me, but they didn’t know how, and I didn’t want them to try too hard, because I didn’t want it to backlash.

I was scared. And I think that it’s important to remember that we don’t really come from a culture that supports women in talking about sexual harassment, in my — in my experience, that is. And, you know, I just haven’t felt like it was something I was going to get support on…

HARI SREENIVASAN: You know, how long…

KATHERINE KENDALL: … in the bigger picture.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Yes.

How long did this feeling last? Or, I guess, what are the longer-term ripple effects here? Did it shake your confidence in your abilities?

KATHERINE KENDALL: I think it did. I think it did. I think it did.

I think it made me feel like, wow, you know, that was a wash. He wasn’t interested at all in what I had to say, or, you know, he didn’t see any talent there or intellect there. He was assessing the situation the whole time for something else.

And I think that — that did hurt. You know, I wish it didn’t.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Yes.

KATHERINE KENDALL: But he had produced so many movies that I thought were wonderful. And it was — it’s hard when someone has made art that you love, and how do you stay attached to liking their art, but feeling conflicted about them?

And, yes, I think it does have long-term effects. I think you tuck it away. And then, for me, also, I realized that it came back when I would see his name or see him in person. I would start to sort of tremble all over again.

I mean, I wouldn’t think about him on a daily basis or anything for years, and then I would see him, and I would think, oh, I don’t feel well. I got to get out of here.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Right.

KATHERINE KENDALL: You know, it would bring up so much emotion.

And the most recent one was the woman in New York, the Italian model. I felt so, so enraged when I saw what happened there, and that they sort of — the police had him, and that then he got away. And then she was being dragged through the press as somebody who just, you know, wanted a payout, et cetera.

HARI SREENIVASAN: You know, in the wake of that, there was — a friend of yours had tweeted, “At some point, all the women who have been afraid to speak out about Harvey Weinstein are going to have to hold hands and jump.” This was back in 2015.

And from your Twitter account, you said, “Agreed.”

It seemed like you almost had the opportunity to come forward.

What made you want to come forward now? Has this become a turning point in the industry?

KATHERINE KENDALL: This is a turning point. It’s a turning point.

There are so many times when I thought about it, and then felt like — there were times when I thought about it and said, well, I have nothing to lose, I will just do it. And then I thought, I — I just didn’t have the strength or the courage yet.

And I think somebody like Jodi Kantor doing the story for The New York Times, the fact that she thought it was a story at all was startling to me and made me feel like, wow, something is going to be done.

And I knew she had told me — I mean, they were looking for women that this had happened to, because they’d been hearing rumors for so long that it happened to so many people. And she had told me other people were coming out.

And I thought, I can’t — when I watched Rose McGowan or any of the other actresses come forward, I just — or Ashley Judd — I just thought, they look strong to me, and I don’t want to be the one that stays silent.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Well, Katherine Kendall…

KATHERINE KENDALL: I want to stand beside them.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Katherine Kendall, thank you very much for speaking with us.

And, hopefully, there are other people that are empowered by you coming forward.

KATHERINE KENDALL: I hope so. Thank you.

The post Escaping Harvey Weinstein was a ‘cat-and-mouse game,’ says Katherine Kendall appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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