A man named Tupac Shakur was arrested in Tennessee for meth possession, other charges
Police in Tennessee arrested a man named Tupac A. Shakur, 40, after they say he pulled a knife on them and was found with meth.
Officers with the Johnson City Police Department, about 25 minutes from Bristol, received calls Friday about Shakur who had active warrants for his arrest from another department, according to a news release from Johnson police.
When officers arrived at the scene, they saw a car with Shakur inside. Officers attempted to arrest Shakur, but he pulled away and reached for his waistband, the release said.
Shakur then turned toward officers with a knife before officers took him down. Officers found a syringe and baggies of methamphetamine on Shakur, the release said.
Shakur was charged with aggravated assault, simple meth possession and having unlawful drug paraphernalia. He is being held at the Washington County Detention Center on a $18,000 bond. He is set to be arraigned Monday, the release said.
It was not clear Sunday whether Shakur has legal representation.
Shakur shares the same name, even the same middle initial, as the late rapper Tupac Shakur who was killed in September 1996 at age 25.
Photo Credit: cnn.com
This ridiculous 3-hour trailer shows off every TV show and movie coming to Disney+
If there’s any streaming service that can legitimately compete with the juggernaut that is Netflix, it’s Disney+. Set to launch in just a few weeks, Disney+ will not only be extremely affordable at $7 a month, it will offer subscribers an absolute avalanche of media content. From beloved animation films of old to any Star Wars title you can think of, Disney+ will undoubtedly come out of the gate strong and will likely garner an impressive subscriber base in a relatively short period of time.
Earlier this week, the official Disney+ Twitter account started tweeting out a list of all the movies and TV shows set to arrive on the streaming service in early November. And seeing as how Disney has been making movies since 1937, some of the titles Disney highlighted were so incredibly bizarre that it left many people wondering if Disney was trying to troll us. You’d be forgiven, after all, for thinking that titles like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Barefoot Executive were completely made up.
Not to fear, all of the titles Disney tweeted out over the past few days are very much real.
If anything, some of the titles and their accompanying trailers are so absurd that it almost makes Disney+ that much more appealing as a streaming service, if only to watch and laugh at how bad some of these old movies are. All that said, Disney a few days ago published a comprehensive video on YouTube which highlights a large percentage of the titles coming to Disney+:
Now, I can’t imagine anyone is actually going to sit down and watch the full 3-hour trailer, so to save you some time, here are a few trailers highlighting a few of the more obscure movies — including one about a horse that plays football — set to land on Disney+ when it launches on November 12.
Article via BGR
Cemetery cancels Halloween movie night after criticism by families
A cemetery in North Carolina has canceled a Halloween-themed movie night after receiving criticism by families of loved buried there.
Lafayette Memorial Park in Fayetteville, N.C. planned a free, kid-friendly film night with snacks scheduled for Oct. 26, according to a Facebook event post. The post said that the movie night was being held in honor of the late grandparents of Heather Bosher, the owner of the park. Bosher wrote in the post that her grandparents enjoyed going to the movies.
The post asked people to vote on which movie should be shown for the event. The choices were: “The Addams Family,” “Beetlejuice,” “Coco,” “Halloween Town,” “Hotel Transylvania,” “Monsters Inc.,” “The Witches” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.”
But the idea did not sit well with some families of those buried in the cemetery.
Veteran Sam Simpson and his family told WTVD-TV that they didn’t like the thought of crowds of people sitting around, possibly mistreating gravestones or leaving trash.
Though Bosher told the TV station that she received positive feedback about the event, the cemetery decided to cancel it.
The cemetery posted a statement to Facebook saying, “ Our only wish was to provide a family friendly event in a way that was safe and free to the public much like our other events that bring joy and peace to those that are grieving. No disrespect was intended, only a alternative way to share a positive evening with our loved ones that are no longer here.”
Another cemetery in Worcester, Mass. had similar plans this summer to hold a movie series on the burial grounds, but those plans were canceled after cemetery trustees and lot-owners complained.
But one high-profile cemetery, the Hollywood Forever cemetery in Los Angeles, often hosts movie nights or cultural events, according to Fox News.
Article via TribLive
How meme culture changed the PSAT
Thank you for coming and welcome to the College Board’s Preliminary SAT and National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, the Internet Age edition. You must bring two No. 2 pencils, a photo ID, and an approved calculator. You must not smuggle in a protractor, or scarf down a sandwich, or post memes on Twitter that reveal test content. No, really: the penalty for such illicit memes could be the cancellation of your test score. And now, an inspiring message from Youth Icon, former boy band member, and British person Harry Styles:
All over the US, high school juniors and sophomores are now taking the PSAT, which has been the norm for the past half-century. The contemporary trouble for test administrator the College Board is that the test’s ubiquity, the age of participants, and the high emotional stakes these days make the details of the exam guaranteed meme fodder—and, well, standardized tests are standardized. Posting memes about them could lead to teens getting hints about their contents. So the organization has taken to Twitter to try to salvage some semblance of their normal testing conditions. Teens are, as always, unimpressed.
The College Board has been on meme watch for years. The earliest signs of PSAT meme movements likely date back to 2014, when users on subreddit r/teenagers decided to “illegally discuss the PSAT,” and others took to Twitter and Tumblr to post their own reactions to test questions. The College Board has made it clear that it disapproves, sometimes posting stern messages warning test takers about the potential consequences and making frequent requests for students to delete tweets pertaining to the test.
Mostly though, they’ve made a habit of annually offering up their own memes about not memeing to discourage memeing, which is a curious strategy and interesting window into autumns past.
The College Board’s efforts are a bit of bizarro, “how do you do, fellow kids?” corporate memeing—not much better than the cringey clunkers people have come to expect from fast food companies’ Twitter accounts. The posts are no deterrent for test takers, who have flooded Twitter with #psatmemes this week. Truthfully, none of the students’ memes seems like it’s an especially helpful covert cheat sheet. If this year’s PSAT were a movie, I’d remain unspoiled—all I know is that mathematical constants and ambiverts came up, that somebody named Ruth read Nao’s diary, and that babies will get dirty if their mothers leave the house to vote. (That last one seems very weird out of context, College Board. What are you making the teens read?)
As someone not employed by the College Board, it’s hard to begrudge the teens their fun as long as they’re not explicitly handing out answers. Nationwide teenage levity at the expense of a dull standardized test (that potentially reinforces economic disparity) is quite a bit better than other teenage trends, like slurping Tide Pods or bullying their peers. It’s almost a little hopeful—an example of the internet bringing people together for casual fun in a time of stress, rather than creating new areas for public cruelty.
Besides, the youngsters show no signs of stopping. The savviest teens already know how to ensure their scores remain uncanceled: Just hide the memes from prying adult eyes by annually blocking @CollegeBoard on Twitter.
Article via Wired
Hilary Duff Admits She Struggles to Help Son With Homework: ‘I Stopped Going to Real School in Third Grade’
Hilary Duff is keeping it real.
The former Disney Channel star took to Instagram on Saturday to share a shout-out to her 7-year-old son, Luca, while revealing that she struggles helping him with his homework. Duff’s career as a child star with roles in Casper Meets Wendy and Lizzie McGuire prevented her from attending a brick-and-mortar school when she was around Luca’s age.
“This guy with his spirit and kindness?Homework is already no joke in 2nd grade. I stopped going to ‘real’ school in 3rd grade so I’m actually doomed,” Duff captioned a photo of herself with her son. “I am left scratching my head alll the time looking at his homework and I’m terrified for next year! Although Singapore math is the sh*t….also learned a lot about tick birds this week. #rhinosbegrateful.”
While Duff tries to help her son with his homework, he’s also learning more and more about his mom’s untraditional childhood. The Younger star recently revealed that she screened The Lizzie McGuire Movie for Luca and his little sister, 11-month-old Banks, and during an August interview with ET, she said Luca was a bit of a Lizzie fan.
“He’s seen some clips on YouTube, and I think he’s getting into it,” Duff said at D23, admitting “he’s still a little young” and very into Marvel these days.
“I don’t think I could even tell him that I’m here, if I took pictures with all of these Marvel stars,” she added. “But he thinks I’m pretty cool and I think he likes seeing me at an age closer to him.”
Duff will be reprising her role as Lizzie McGuire for Disney+. See more in the video below.
Article via Yahoo News
Alice Walker: Antigay Actress as Color Purple’s Celie Is ‘Betrayal’
Acclaimed author Alice Walker says it would be a “betrayal” for a homophobic actress to play the role of Celie Johnson in a musical adaptation of Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple.
Oluwaseyi Omooba, who was set to portray Celie in a production of the musical that ran earlier this year at the Leicester Curve and then the Birmingham Hippodrome in England, was fired from the show after actor Aaron Lee Lambert shared a 2014 Facebook post in which Omooba called homosexuality a sin, saying it’s “legal” but not “right,” according to the New York Daily News. She also stated her belief that people are not born gay.
Lambert said Omooba would be a “hypocrite” if she played Celie, who finds love with a woman after having been abused by men, while holding homophobic views.
Last month Omooba said she plans to sue the Leicester Curve over her firing and the Global Artists Agency for dropping her as a client. The daughter of a prominent British anti-LGBTQ activist, Omooba contends she has suffered discrimination because of her Christian beliefs.
Walker had been silent on the matter until last week, when she sent a letter to Color Purple producer Scott Sanders and authorized him to share it on Facebook. She expressed “heartfelt compassion” for Omooba, then explained how she came to create Celie.
Celie “is based on the life of my grandmother, Rachel, a kind and loving woman brutally abused by my grandfather. … It is safe to say, after a frightful life serving and obeying abusive men, who raped in place of ‘making love,’ my grandmother, like Celie, was not attracted to men,” Walker wrote.
“She was, in fact, very drawn to my grandfather’s lover, a beautiful woman who was kind to her, the only grown person who ever seemed to notice how remarkable and creative she was. In giving Celie the love of this woman, in every way love can be expressed, I was clear in my intention to demonstrate that she too, like all of us, deserved to be seen, appreciated, and deeply loved by someone who saw her as whole and worthy.”
Walker, who has had relationships with both men and women, said she believes “sexual love can be extraordinarily holy, whoever might be engaging in it,” and that she urges readers to question the scriptures of all religions. “Love, however it may be expressed, is to be honored and welcomed into the light of our common survival as a consciously human, race.”
“Playing the role of ‘Celie’ while not believing in her right to be loved, or to express her love in any way she chooses, would be a betrayal of women’s right to be free,” she concluded. “As an elder, I urge all of us to think carefully about what I am saying, even as you, Oluwaseyi Omooba, sue the theatre company for voiding your contract. This is just an episode in your life; your life, your work, and your growth, will continue, in the real world. A world we must make safe for women and children, female and male. And the greatest freedom of all is the freedom to be your authentic self.”
The Color Purple was adapted into a 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg, in which Whoopi Goldberg was Oscar-nominated for playing Celie. The first Broadway production of the musical, in 2005-2006, brought a Tony Award to LaChanze for portraying Celie, and Cynthia Erivo won a Tony in 2016 for playing the role in a revival.
Article via Advocate
How Bitcoin transactions were used to track down the 23-year-old South Korean operating a global child exploitation site from his bedroom
For almost three years, “Welcome To Video” was a covert den for people who traded in clips of children being sexually assaulted. There, on the darknet‘s largest-known site of child exploitation videos, hundreds of users from around the world accessed material that showed the sexual abuse of children as young as six months old.
Then it all began to unravel.
On Wednesday, the United States’ Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed how it had followed a trail of bitcoin transactions to find the suspected administrator of the site: A 23-year-old South Korean man named Jong Woo Son.
But the case is much bigger than just one man. Over the almost three years that the site was online, users downloaded files more than one million times, according to a newly unsealed DOJ indictment. At least 23 children in the US, Spain and the United Kingdom who were being abused by the users of the site have been rescued, the DOJ said in a press release. “Children around the world are safer because of the actions taken by US and foreign law enforcement to prosecute this case and recover funds for victims,” said Jessie K. Liu, an attorney for District of Columbia where the US case was filed. “We will continue to pursue such criminals on and off the darknet in the United States and abroad, to ensure they receive the punishment their terrible crimes deserve.”
In total, 337 people from at least 18 countries who used Welcome To Video have been arrested and charged, the DOJ said. And in a statement Thursday, South Korea’s National Police Agency (NPA) said 223 of them were South Korean.
Many Welcome To Video users likely thought they were untraceable.The site was on the darknet, the underbelly of the deep web which cannot be accessed by a regular browser. According to authorities, some customers paid for the explicit images of child sexual abuse in bitcoin, a digital currency that can be spent without users disclosing their true identity.But the downfall of Welcome To Video shows that bitcoin isn’t as private as some cybercriminals might have thought.
At the time, bitcoin still wasn’t a widely used payment method. The non-profit Internet Watch Foundation, which works to remove images and videos of child sexual abuse from the web, found that some of the most prolific commercial child sexual abuse sites first started accepting bitcoin as payment in 2014. According to the DOJ, Welcome To Video was “among the first of its kind to monetize child exploitation videos using bitcoin.” Bitcoin can be attractive for people hoping to slip under the radar. Bitcoin is decentralized, meaning there is no company or official bank which oversees transactions. Users store their bitcoin in a virtual account — known as a digital wallet — without having to prove their real identity, as they might for a regular brick-and-mortar bank. From about June 2015 to March 2018, Welcome To Video received at least 420 bitcoin through 7,300 transactions with users in numerous countries including the US, the UK and South Korea, the indictment released Wednesday shows. Those transactions were worth over $370,000 at the time. Some of those transactions would ultimately help bring about the site’s collapse.
How authorities brought down Welcome To Video
To get on the site at all, users had to have special software. Because Welcome To Video was hosted on the darknet, it couldn’t be accessed by browsers like Google Chrome or Safari. Users needed to download software — such as Tor — that concealed their Internet Protocol address (IP address), a unique number assigned to every device connected to the internet. But in September 2017, authorities did something simple, according to the indictment: they right-clicked on Welcome To Video’s homepage and selected “view page source.” When they did that, they discovered an unconcealed IP address. That IP address and another found in the same way October 2017 were both traced to a residential address in South Korea — Son’s alleged home. At the same time, US investigators were carrying out an undercover operation. Once in September 2017 and twice in February 2018, an undercover agent sent bitcoin to an account provided by Welcome To Video. Each time, the funds were later transferred into another bitcoin account — in Son’s name, and registered using Son’s phone number and email, US authorities alleged in the indictment.
In March 2018, authorities searched Son’s house and found the server for Welcome To Video was hosted in Son’s bedroom. Authorities also seized eight terabytes containing 250,000 sexual assault videos. In total, 45% of the videos analyzed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children contained images not “previously known to exist.” From there, authorities were able to track down other suspects. “(This case) involved a lot of cooperation between a lots of different people,” said Urszula McCormack, a partner at the King and Wood Mallesons law firm in Hong Kong who specializes in blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin. “Often it’s those weak links that expose the whole.”Data from the server was shared with law enforcement officials around the world, who used it to track down and prosecute customers of the site in 18 countries, according to a DOJ statement. In March 2018, Son was arrested in South Korea, and found guilty of producing and distributing child pornography, a charge that carries a possible 10 year jail term under South Korean law. In May this year, he was sentenced to 18 months in jail, South Korea’s NPA said. But Son could still face more prison time.In August of last year, Son was indicted on a number of child pornography charges in the US, including advertising child pornography which carries a possible 30 year sentence. In order for him to face those charges, Son would need to be extradited to the US — which has an extradition treaty with South Korea. He could be arrested if he travels there of his own accord. One of the reasons the US is interested in prosecuting Son is that the content was accessed in the country. CNN has reached out to the DOJ to ask if they will request an extradition. South Korean police told CNN they haven’t received an extradition request from the US — and while he’s in prison, Son cannot be affected by the US indictment.
Read more via CNN
Three young children who went missing in Missouri in 2017 found in Texas with their mother
Three young children who were abducted in Missouri in 2017 have been found safe in Texas and their mother has been taken into custody.
Shawn Rodriguez and offspring Daniel, David and Ariana Olivera were found at a home in Arlington on Thursday. The 42-year-old Rodriguez is expected to be extradited back to Missouri.
The father of the kids was given full custody earlier this year, according to TV station KSHB. The children were taken from Saline County, and a warrant was issued for the mother’s arrest for parental kidnapping in August, according to KCTV.
Authorities allege that Rodriguez took the children two years ago. The Saline County Sheriff’s Office asked for help from National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the U.S. Marshal became involved, according to KSHB.
Investigators came to believe that Rodriguez had traveled with the kids to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The children were all under the age of eight when they were taken, according to KCTV.
The children are under the supervision of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services “while they wait to be reunited with their father,” The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said.
Article via NYDailyNews
