NEW YORK (AP) — A new generation of starting pitchers and a self-proclaimed Mr. Clean of the Steroids Era will be ushered into baseball’s Hall of Fame this summer. Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas were elected on their first ballot appearances Wednesday, when Craig Biggio fell just two votes short. Maddux and Glavine will join their former Atlanta Braves manager, Bobby Cox, at the July 27 induction along with Joe Torre and Tony La Russa, also elected last month by the expansion-era committee.
But Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and other stars whose accomplishments were muddied by accusations of steroids use lost even more ground, dropping below 40 percent in an election where 75 percent is needed. And on his first day as a member of baseball’s elite, Thomas said the living members among the 306 Hall of Famers don’t want those with sullied reputations.
“Over the last year, doing a couple of charity events with Hall of Famers that are in, they’ve got a strong stance against anyone who’s taken steroids. They do not want them in. They don’t care when they started or when they did it, they do not want them in,” he said. “I’ve got to take the right stance, too. No, they shouldn’t get in. There shouldn’t be cheating allowed to get into the Hall of Fame.”
Making their second appearances on the ballot, Clemens dropped from 37.6 percent to 35.4 in voting by senior members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, Bonds from 36.2 to 34.7 and Sosa from 12.5 to 7.2. Bonds, baseball’s career home run leader, is the only seven-time MVP in major league history. Clemens is the lone seven-time Cy Young Award winner. “As for what they did, I don’t think any of us will ever really know,” Thomas said. “But I can just tell you, what I did was real and that’s why I’ve got this smile on my face right now because the writers, they definitely got it right.”
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The White House has released a report discussing the most-recent unemployment numbers from theBureau Of Labor Statistics, and the African-American unemployment rate, is one of the groups to see a decrease. Even though long-term unemployment remains elevated, it has somewhat subsided for historically marginalized groups, with the African-American rate reportedly decreasing .5 percent from November (12.4 percent) to December (11.9 percent). Below is the unemployment decrease African Americans experienced for the year 2013:
Unemployment rates…declined over the course of 2013 for women (1.3 percentage points), teenagers (3.8 percentage points), African-Americans (2.1 percentage points), and Hispanics (1.2 percentage points). Similarly, since the overall unemployment rate peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2009, these rates have all shown marked declines.
The White House also reported that unemployment fell 5 percentage points between March 2010, when it was at a shocking 16.9 percent, to now. Included in the report are also five key points about the most-recent job market. The first one notes that America’s businesses have added jobs for 46 months in a row, with employment increasing by 8.2 million during that time frame. Private employment has also risen by an average of 177,000 jobs per month over the last three months. Still, the report notes:
Policymakers should be doing everything they can to speed job creation. The Council of Economic Advisers estimates that extending the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program through 2014 would lead to an additional 240,000 jobs over the course of the year, because the benefits sustain the purchasing power of recipients who support local businesses and their suppliers.
A judge has ruled that Marissa Alexander can remain free on bond after the Florida State Attorney filed a motion claiming that the defendant violated her release conditions numerous times, The Florida Times-Union reports. Circuit Court Judge James Daniel denied Assistant State Attorney Richard Mantei‘s request to revoke Alexander’s bail for “going out shopping for clothes, driving family members to the hair shop and airport, getting a new driver’s license, visiting the bank and seeing a sister-in-law.”
Mantei’s stated to the judge that Alexander, 33, was on home detention while performing her errands. The conditions of her detention prohibit her from leaving her residence except for court appearances, medical emergencies and to satisfy any requirements of her pretrial services program. She has been free on bond since Thanksgiving after getting a new trial in her aggravated assault case for firing a warning shot during an altercation with her husband, Rico Gray.
Alexander’s lawyer, Bruce Zimet, countered the state’s argument by saying that all of his client’s actions were approved by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which angered Judge Daniel. Zimet said the court ordered Alexander to speak with Jacksonville authorities before making her trips, which they approved without checking with the judge. Since Alexander did not knowingly violate the bond, Judge Daniel saw fit to allow her to remain in home detention.
April Wilson, an 18-year veteran of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, was present for Friday’s hearing. Wilson approved all of Alexander’s trips, stating in her tearful testimony that her understanding of the court order would allow for these brief stops she made while under house arrest. After today’s hearing, however, it appears that both sides understand Judge Daniel’s orders and will move forward from there. “I think it was handled how it needed to be handled. The judge is now aware and everybody else is now aware of what was going on. Things got brought out in the open that’s always a good thing,” said Mantei, as reported by Florida Times-Union.
If there’s ever been a greater advertisement for ditching meat and animal products in favor of a vegan lifestyle, we think we’ve found it.
Meet 78-year-old vegan male bodybuilder Jim Morris, who is PETA‘s most senior pin-up. And boy is he a picture of health. Jim posed as iconic statue ‘The Thinker’ for PETA while aged 77, which forms part of his brand-new campaign that ‘Think Before You Eat’.
The ad, which can be seen below, goes on to encourage viewers to “muscle your way to better health” – and a reduced risk of obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and strokes – by going vegan. Jim says that his health greatly improved after he retired from competitive bodybuilding in 1985 – which is all down to his decision to become vegetarian and, later, vegan.
“The protein in animal products is so laden with fats and chemicals and all sorts of stuff that’s harmful to you,” he told PETA in an interview.
“When I was competing and stuffing down all of that sort of stuff, I had lots of digestive problems. I was constipated and bloated and just miserable all the time. . . . I know as a fact I would not be here and I would not be in this condition now had I continued eating the way I was.”
After changing his dietary habits, he feels better than ever.
He encourages others to adopt the vegan lifestyle, so they can feel as good as he does.
“Milk is for babies”, he says. “Humans, as far as I know, are the only creatures that continue to drink milk once they’ve been weaned. … I think a lot of people don’t realise if they would stop drinking milk and [consuming] all of the milk products, they would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t realise I could feel this good’.”
PETA says: “People who go vegan don’t just help their own health – they also drastically reduce their carbon footprint and save animals from immense suffering on factory farms, in abattoirs and on the decks of fishing boats.”
article via huffingtonpost.co.uk
A new musical inspired by the rap songs of the late Tupac Shakur is heading to Broadway. Holler If Ya Hear Me is scheduled to open at the Palace Theatre in New York on June 19, with preview performances set to begin on May 26. Holler isn’t a biographical account of Shakur, who was killed at the age of 25 in 1996 following a shooting in Las Vegas. Rather, the musical production will use the rapper’s lyrics to tell a story of contemporary inner-city lives.
Among the producers of the musical are Afeni Shakur, the rapper’s mother; movie and TV producer Eric L. Gold; and Chunsoo Shin, the prominent Korean theater producer who recently collaborated with the La Jolla Playhouse on another musical, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Kenny Leon (Steel Magnolias, A Raisin in the Sun), will direct Holler, which will feature a creative team that includes Wicked choreographer Wayne Cilento. Rumors of the Shakur musical had been circulating for months, though no official announcement from producers had been made until Wednesday.
article by David Ng via latimes.com
According to Variety.com, Zoe Saldana has been hired to star in NBC’s four-hour miniseries remake of the classic 1968 horror film, Rosemary’s Baby. Saldana will play Rosemary, the iconic young wife and would-be mother who, with her husband, moves into a Paris apartment building that has a dark, storied past. After finally getting pregnant, she becomes increasingly suspicious that both her husband and their mysterious neighbors have ulterior motives about the future of her child.
NBC announced the Rosemary’s Baby miniseries in December, with Lionsgate TV attached to produce. Joshua Maurer, Alix Witlin and David Stern are executive producing with Saldana, Cisely Saldana and Mariel Saldana. “Zoe has proven that she is one of our most gifted actresses and we think she has the perfect combination of spirit and gravitas to take on the title role from Ira Levin’s infamous novel,” said Quinn Taylor, Executive Vice President, Movies, Miniseries and International Co-Productions, NBC Entertainment. “With Zoe leading the cast under the direction of Agnieszka Holland, this reimagined event mini-series is off to a great start.”
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
Amiri Baraka, the militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture, has died. He was 79. His booking agent, Celeste Bateman, told The Associated Press that Baraka, who had been hospitalized since last month, died Thursday at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
Perhaps no writer of the 1960s and ’70s was more radical or polarizing than Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), and no one did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts. He inspired at least one generation of poets, playwrights and musicians, and his immersion in spoken word traditions and raw street language anticipated rap, hip-hop and slam poetry. The FBI feared him to the point of flattery, identifying Baraka as “the person who will probably emerge as the leader of the Pan-African movement in the United States.”
Baraka transformed from the rare black to join the Beat caravan of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to leader of the Black Arts Movement, an ally of the Black Power movement that rejected the liberal optimism of the early ’60s and intensified a divide over how and whether the black artist should take on social issues. Scorning art for art’s sake and the pursuit of black-white unity, Barak was part of a philosophy that called for the teaching of black art and history and producing works that bluntly called for revolution.
“We want ‘poems that kill,’” Baraka wrote in his landmark “Black Art,” a manifesto published in 1965, the year he helped found the Black Arts Movement. “Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”
According to Variety.com, NBC sketch-comedy show Saturday Night Live added Leslie Jones and LaKendra Tookes, two comedians who recently auditioned for the program, as writers for the late-night series. Earlier this week, the show announced Sasheer Zamata, a veteran of improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, would begin as a featured player as of its January 18 broadcast.
The two new writers took part in auditions recently held in different parts of the U.S. with the express purpose of finding a female African-American to join the show’s cast of “Not Ready For Prime Time Players.”
While the current cast of Saturday Night Live includes two African-American men – Kenan Thompson and Jay Pharoah – it has not had an African-American woman in the cast since Maya Rudolph, a comic actress of mixed heritage, was in the cast between 2000 and 2007.
The show has not featured many women of color during its history. Yvonne Hudson, an African-American woman, was a featured player during the program’s 1980-1981 season. Danitra Vance, SNL‘s first African-American female full cast member, joined the show for its 1985-1986 season, part of show creator Lorne Michaels’ return to the program after an absence of several years. Ellen Cleghorne joined the cast from 1991-1995.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
The two new writers took part in auditions recently held in different parts of the U.S. with the express purpose of finding a female African-American to join the show’s cast of “Not Ready For Prime Time Players.”
While the current cast of Saturday Night Live includes two African-American men – Kenan Thompson and Jay Pharoah – it has not had an African-American woman in the cast since Maya Rudolph, a comic actress of mixed heritage, was in the cast between 2000 and 2007.
The show has not featured many women of color during its history. Yvonne Hudson, an African-American woman, was a featured player during the program’s 1980-1981 season. Danitra Vance, SNL‘s first African-American female full cast member, joined the show for its 1985-1986 season, part of show creator Lorne Michaels’ return to the program after an absence of several years. Ellen Cleghorne joined the cast from 1991-1995.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
In her first screen starring turn since the ferocious portrayal as an abusive mother in 2009′s Precious won her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, Mo’Nique has joined Isaiah Washington in the Patrik-Ian Polk-directed Blackbird, an adaptation of the novel by Larry Duplechan. Washington took the lead in this indie last fall off his starring role as the DC sniper in Blue Caprice earned him a Gotham Award nomination. The film just shot in Hattiesburg, MS.
Mo’Nique is also executive producer with her husband, Sidney Hicks, through Hicks Media. Newcomer Julian Walker plays the star singer in the church choir who feels like a misfit in his high school and struggles with his sexual awakening and the realization he is gay, something that doesn’t land well in a religiously conservative small Mississippi town. This coincides with his younger sister going missing and his parents splitting up. Mo’Nique plays another character who’s not going to win mother of the year awards: the youth’s heartbroken mom, who blames her son’s lifestyle revelation for his sister going missing. Washington plays his supportive father trying his best to help his son’s transition to manhood.
“Blackbird is a film about the choices people are forced to make as they struggle to figure out how to be themselves,” Hicks said. “And why should just being who you are be a struggle? Since Mo’Nique won the Oscar, we have received a flood of scripts, but nothing captured our attention until Isaiah — who we have a high level of respect for — sent us Blackbird. We became instant fans of Patrik-Ian Polk and knew we had to get behind this important film.”
Polk is producing through Tall Skinny Black Boy Productions, Keith Brown through Kbiz Entertainment, Washington through his Coalhouse Productions, and Carol Ann Shine. Terrell Tilford, Gary L. Gray, Kevin Allesee, Torrey Laamar, Nikki Jane and D. Woods round out the cast. Worldwide sales for the film are being handled by Hicks Media and attorney Ricky Anderson of Anderson & Smith.
article by Mike Fleming Jr. via Deadline.com
According to the Los Angeles Times, Steve McQueen, the 44-year-old British director, garnered his first Director’s Guild of American Award nomination for 12 Years a Slave, an unflinching look at slavery in the U.S. McQueen is only the second black director to have received a DGA nomination in this category. Lee Daniels was the first to earn a DGA nomination for feature film for 2009’s Precious. McQueen received best director honors from the New York Film Critics Circle and is nominated for Golden Globe and Independent Spirit awards.
Other nominees include Martin Scorsese, who earned his ninth DGA nomination for The Wolf of Wall Street, his controversial dark comedy starring Leonardo DiCaprio about a hedonistic stockbroker. Scorsese, 71, received his first DGA feature nomination for 1976’s Taxi Driver, and won the honor for his 2006 crime film The Departed, which also starred DiCaprio.
Alfonso Cuaron, like McQueen, is also a first-time nominee, for his lost-in-space blockbuster Gravity. Cuaron, 52, was named best director by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. for the thriller and is nominated for a Golden Globe Award. British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, 58, was nominated for Captain Phillips, a fact-based thriller about a container ship hijacked by Somali pirates. Greengrass is also nominated for a Golden Globe for his direction of the film. Rounding out the DGA feature nominees is David O. Russell for his Abscam-influenced con-comedy American Hustle. Russell, 55, was nominated in this category for 2010’s The Fighter. He is also nominated for a Golden Globe.
The winner will be announced at the 66th awards dinner on Jan. 25 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
Alfonso Cuaron, like McQueen, is also a first-time nominee, for his lost-in-space blockbuster Gravity. Cuaron, 52, was named best director by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. for the thriller and is nominated for a Golden Globe Award. British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, 58, was nominated for Captain Phillips, a fact-based thriller about a container ship hijacked by Somali pirates. Greengrass is also nominated for a Golden Globe for his direction of the film. Rounding out the DGA feature nominees is David O. Russell for his Abscam-influenced con-comedy American Hustle. Russell, 55, was nominated in this category for 2010’s The Fighter. He is also nominated for a Golden Globe.
The winner will be announced at the 66th awards dinner on Jan. 25 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson