Mackenzie Phillips On Oprah

Mackenzie Phillips On Oprah

Mackenzie Phillips on Oprah: My Dad Wasn't All Bad Her late father had an incestuous sexual relationship with her and possibly raped her. She also may have aborted his love child as a young woman. But Mackenzie Phillips' affair with John Phillips was not, she says, as simple as all the news headlines make it seem. Nor was it necessarily as bad. Her father was not a monster, and that 10-year “affair” Mackenzie is said to have had with him is not easily categorized, the troubled star told Oprah.

“My father was not a bad man. He was a very sick man,” she said. "If anyone out there can possibly separate [John Phillips'] body of work from his personal demons, I think that would be the honorable thing to do." Mackenzie Phillips, 49, added that her father - with whom she says she also did drugs - "didn't set out to hurt me. He did the best with what he had." She also reports that their relationship - which she details in her new book, High on Arrival - lasted 10 years until she ended it when she got pregnant. A pregnancy that ended with her aborting her father's love child.

"To call it a 10-year relationship is not correct," she said in another interview on Today. "It was a warped event, that occurred over time. At 18, I was molested. Maybe three years later, I started waking up with my pants around my ankles." She told Oprah Winfrey that she had an abortion, which her father paid for, "and I never let him touch me again" after dealing with the ramifications of that. Though she says she does not blame herself for her the incest, Mackenzie Phillips says, "I believe I have some accountability for what went down after." Some of her family is standing by her, including Mackenzie's half-sister Chynna Phillips, who says she first heard about this 11 years after it ended.

Census Worker Hanged

Census Worker Hanged

A part-time Census Bureau field worker was found hanged in Kentucky Sept. 12 with the word "fed" scrawled across his chest, according to a law enforcement source. Bill Sparkman, 51, who was white, was found at the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky, the Associated Press first reported Wednesday night. The FBI is assisting state and local police with their investigation, the law enforcement source told The Post's Spencer S. Hsu. The source was unsure of the cause of death.

It is a federal crime to attack a federal worker during or because of his federal job. "It’s a tragedy. Our hearts and our thoughts and prayers go out to the family of this worker," Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry said Thursday morning. He has spoken frequently about the denigration of federal employees. "I’m going to be closely following this law enforcement action. If this is an attack on a federal employee, I can assure you that no resources will be spared to find the perpetrators," Berry said. "We cannot tolerate essentially domestic terrorism, if that is what this is. But until we understand the law enforcement investigation, we don’t know."

Threats are more common than actual attacks on federal employees, Berry said. He noted that people regularly threaten federal judges and their families, IRS agents and federal law enforcement officers. "It’s also a reality for many categories of federal workers so we take any threat of violence seriously," he said. Sparkman, an Eagle scout, moved to southeast Kentucky to be a local director for the Boy Scouts of America, his mother told the AP. He most recently served as a substitute teacher in Laurel County and earned extra money as a Census field worker.

AIDS vaccines

AIDS vaccines

A new AIDS vaccine tested on more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand has protected a significant minority against infection, the first time any vaccine against the disease has even partly succeeded in a clinical trial. Scientists said they were delighted but puzzled by the result. The vaccine — a combination of two genetically engineered vaccines, neither of which had worked before in humans — protected too few people to be declared an unqualified success. And the researchers do not know why it worked.

“I don’t want to use a word like ‘breakthrough,’ but I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a very important result,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of the trial’s backers. Over the course of three years, 74 of 8,198 people who received placebo shots became infected with HIV, compared with 51 of 8,197 people who received vaccine. So the vaccine appeared to reduce the risk of being infected by 31%. The statement from NIH, one of the sponsors of the trial, called this a “modest preventive effect.”

Patients who received the vaccine and did get infected didn’t have lower levels of virus than patients who received placebo and got infected — a puzzling finding, given that a partially effective vaccine would be expected to help a patient’s immune system fight the disease. Still, previous AIDS vaccine trials have failed miserably. A Merck AIDS vaccine study was halted in 2007, after data showed the vaccine didn’t reduce the risk of infection and may actually have left some people more susceptible to the virus. The NIH subsequently canceled plans for another major AIDS vaccine trial that would have used a similar approach.