Rapper 2 Milly considers legal action against Epic over Fortnite dance emote
Rapper 2 Milly hopes to sue Epic Games over Fortnite‘s ‘Swipe It’ emote, which is based on his Milly Rock dance.
“They actually sell that particular move. It’s for purchase. That’s when I really was like…oh nah, this can’t go on too long,” he told CBS.
Swipe It was one of the emotes available to unlock as part of the paid-for Battle Pass in Fortnite Season 5, which ended in September. You can no longer unlock it but players can still use it in-game.
The emote is one of many based on real-life dance moves by hip hop artists, as Vikki outlined here. 2 Milly says he doesn’t want to “bash [Epic] for all the millions. It’s not really like that. I just feel like I have to protect what’s mine.”
As to whether legal action from 2 Milly would be successful, it’s hard to say. He’s venturing into uncharted territory, according to business and entertainment lawyer Merlyne Jean-Louis, who CBS quotes in its report. “There’s a lot of case lawsuits surrounding the copyright of music. Lyrics. Sounds. There’s a full body of case law related to that. But regarding choreographic works, that does not exist,”
In July, Chance the Rapper said that Epic should at least play the songs that inspire the emotes when players use them.
In case you missed it, Fortnite won Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards this week.
Article via PCGamer
Tyler Perry announces tour dates for Madea farewell stage play
Last month, Tyler Perry announced he would be saying goodbye to his beloved Madea character, and now, he’s revealed dates for her final performances.
“Madea’s Farewell Play Tour,” which will kick off next year in January, marks the filmmaker’s 21st play and the end of the Madea franchise.
“I just don’t want to be her age [still] playing her,” he joked during an interview in October.
The character Mabel Earlene “Madea” Simmons, played by Perry himself, first appeared as a 68-year-old in the 1999 stage play “I Can Do Bad All by Myself,” followed by the play and film, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.”
According to Vanity Fair, Madea has appeared in dozens of productions since — and her films alone have grossed upwards of $500 million globally.
Perry wrapped up on the last series film, “Madea Family Funeral,” two years ago. The movie is set to premiere in March 2019.
Tickets for the January shows of “Madea’s Farewell Play Tour” are on sale now, with additional dates slated for announcement in coming weeks. Take a look below to find out which cities are on the schedule so far.
- Jan. 18-20, 2019 – Oakland, CA at Paramount Theatre
- Jan. 22, 2019 – Phoenix, AZ at Comerica Theatre
- Jan. 23-26, 2019 – Los Angeles, CA at Dolby Theatre
- Jan. 27, 2019 – Las Vegas, NV at Planet Hollywood at Zappos Theater
Article via WBSRadio
Bow Wow Threatens To Leak An Erica Mena Sex Tape
Bow Wow and Erica Mena turned into sworn enemies after their relationship fell apart.
Bow Wow is the latest celebrity to cross the line of socially acceptable conduct, by issuing an idle threat to his ex-lover, Erica Mena. The ex-lovers have been embroiled in a bitter war of words ever since going their separate ways. Mena, who came to the decision on both their behalves, is now facing a potential breach of privacy, with Bow Wow threatening to leak a sex tape they allegedly filmed while they were still a couple.
Mena is primarily known for her “acting” in various Love & Hip Hop spinoffs. She broke off her engagement with Bow Wow in 2015, after spending the better part of a year combing through bridal packages. Speaking of which, Mena once suggested that Shad Moss lacked the foresight to make sensible electoral decisions, because and I quote, he has a small “you know what.”
Revenge porn is a serious offense, and though most of the legislation is flawed, Bow Wow may soon live to regret this Twitter outburst. Cooler heads, svp.
Article via HotNewHipHop
Thousands Have Signed Petition Asking Maroon 5 to Cancel Super Bowl Show to Support Kaepernick
Thousands of people are asking the members of Maroon 5 to stay away from the Super Bowl.
Months after a source confirmed to PEOPLE in September that Maroon 5 is slated to perform at the halftime show, more than 47,000 people have added their names to a Change.org petition asking the band to back out.
The petition says that Maroon 5 should exit the show to support Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who started the #TakeAKnee movement in 2016 to protest police brutality and other racial injustices.
“Kaepernick risked his career to take a knee for equality, and the NFL punished him for it,” the petition reads. “Until the league changes their policy and support players’ constitutional right to protest, no artists should agree to work with the NFL. Join me in asking Maroon 5 to drop out of the 2019 Super Bowl halftime show.”
“Colin Kaepernick has sacrificed his NFL career to call out violent racism in America, and players across the country have followed his lead,” the petition continues. “Maroon 5: Americans look to artists and celebrities as leaders, and you have huge opportunity to use your influence to take a stand.”
On Friday, lead singer Adam Levine quipped, “What the hell are you talking about?” when his Super Bowl gig came up on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“It’s a rumor. I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this rumor. It’s definitely a rumor. And the rumor is a rumor that everyone seems to be discussing,” he said.
“It’s the Super Bowl. It’s a great event, and there’s going to be a band performing or an artist of some kind at halftime,” he said, jokingly crossing his fingers. “Whoever is lucky enough to get that gig probably is gonna crush it. … Whoever does it is probably equal parts nervous and excited. This is all speculative because I don’t know who I’m talking about.”
The petition mentioned Rihanna, who reportedly turned down the opportunity to perform at the Super Bowl.
“Yes, they asked her, and yes, she declined,” a source told PEOPLE in October, noting that her choice was likely intended to support Kaepernick.
After the news broke, Amy Schumer posted on Instagram in October, “Wouldn’t it be so cool if @adamlevine and @maroon5 stepped down too? What do you guys think?”
The following day, Schumer wrote, “I think it would be cool if @maroon5 backed out of super bowl like @badgalriri Did. I personally told my reps I wouldn’t do a Super Bowl commercial this year. I know it must sound like a privilege a— sacrifice but it’s all i got. Hitting the nfl with the advertisers is the only way to really hurt them.”
Democrat’s ex-mistress says she’s rebuilt her life since tabloid scandal, now focus of film
Donna Rice Hughes’ reputation was shattered when she was accused in 1987 of having an affair with Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart.
But Hughes has managed to rebuild her life in the last several decades, the now-60-year-old told the State of Columbia, S.C.
DONNA RICE HUGHES: ONE WOMAN’S CASE FOR DONALD TRUMP
During the 1988 presidential campaign, the Miami Herald reported that Hughes, a then-29-year-old model-actress, was photographed cavorting with Hart aboard “Monkey Business,” a yacht owned by a pal of Hart, then a U.S. senator from Colorado. The story set off a media frenzy and derailed Hart’s candidacy. The scandal broke after Hart denied he was having an extramarital affair, and even challenged skeptical reporters to follow him if they did not believe him.
“I was blindsided and thrown into a media feeding frenzy. I kept saying, ‘I just wanna go home.’ … The media fixated on me for the next 18 months.”
Hughes says she stayed out of the public spotlight for nearly 10 years. She testified before Congress in 1995 to speak out against pornography on the Internet. Hughes also founded “Enough Is Enough (EIE), a non-profit organization that raises awareness about internet pornography, sexual predators and cyberbullying.
President Trump during the 2016 election signed the EIE’s Children’s Internet Safety Presidential Pledge which called upon the future president to pledge to enforce existing federal laws designed to prevent the sexual exploitation of children online.
Hughes is also a mother and grandmother. She is reportedly working on a biography to tell her side of the 1987 debacle.
“[T]he movie is not my story,” she said.
The story is now the subject of the new film “The Front Runner,” starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.
Article via FOXNews
N.J. couple en route to their wedding killed in fiery chain-reaction crash in Pa.
A New Jersey couple on their way to get married in Pittsburgh were killed in a fiery chain-reaction crash last week on Interstate 78 in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Kathryn M. Schurtz, 35, and Joseph D. Kearney, both of Jersey City, died in the collision Wednesday afternoon in Windsor Township.
Their car was struck from behind by a tractor-trailer and pushed into another tractor-trailer, according to Pennsylvania State Police. Three other tractor-trailers were also involved.
Kearney is originally from Pittsburgh, according to his Facebook profile.
Schurtz is a 2001 graduate of Union Catholic High School who grew up in Fanwood. She earned her bachelor’s degree at George Washington University according to an obituary published Sunday.
Schurtz went onto receive a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Notre Dame. She worked as the head of platform partnerships for Oracle Data Cloud in New York.
Schurtz is survived by her parents Joseph and Karen as well as a sister, brother-in-law and nephew. Visitation will be held Monday at Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church in Scotch Plains from 4 to 8 p.m. Monday and 10 to 11 a.m. Tuesday.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Kathryn M. Schurtz Scholarship Fund at Union Catholic High School in Scotch Plains.
Article via NJ.com
Azealia Banks Praises Russ For Fingering Technique: “DJ Fingerblast” Is Still “Corny AF”
She claims to understand the reason for the “F*ck Russ” trend.
Azealia didn’t leave her fans hanging in terms of the identity of this person. The female emcee some details through text posts shortly after her spoken rant which seemed to link Russ to the previous uploads to her stories. After being upset about his alleged attempt to “play her,” Azealia had both positive and negative things to say about him.
Her nicknaming him “DJ Fingerblast” is a testament to her claim of his being a “finger popping champion.” Regardless of his sexual prowess, Azealia still thinks the “Zoo” rapper deserves to be the subject of ridicule through “F*ck Russ” chants.
Article via HotNewHipHop
Former Ohio judge who brutally beat wife arrested after she is stabbed to death
Lance Mason served just nine months in prison for assault
A former Ohio judge who served just nine months in prison for brutally beating his wife four years ago has been arrested after she was found stabbed to death.
Aisha Fraser’s body was discovered in the driveway of her home in the city of Shaker Heights on Saturday.
Lance Mason, her estranged spouse, was initially taken to hospital after crashing into a police car at the scene and is now being held in custody.
In 2014 Mason punched Fraser around 20 times after the couple argued while returning from a relative’s funeral.
He repeatedly slammed her head into the dashboard, armrest and passenger window of a car and bit her on the face during the attack.
The couple’s six- and four-year-children were in the vehicle at the time, according to NBC News.
Mason also broke Fraser’s orbital bone and left her with injuries so severe that she required reconstructive surgery, according to WKYC.
He was removed from his position as a judge shortly afterwards and pleaded guilty in 2015 to attempted felonious assault and domestic violence.
The former judge was sentenced to 24 months in prison for the assault, yet served just nine.
After Mason was released from prison he was hired in 2017 by Cleveland mayor Frank G Jackson, subsequently serving as the director of Cleveland’s minority business development.
Aisha Fraser was killed on Saturday (Shaker Heights Teachers Association )
Mr Jackson fired the former judge on Saturday, after his arrest.
WKYC reported that that Mr Jackson sent his “deepest condolences to the family of Ms Aisha Fraser, especially to her children”.
Mason’s earlier conviction bars him from ever returning to work as a judge.
The victim had worked as a teacher for two decades and a Gofundme page set up by the Shaker Heights Teachers’ Association is collecting donations in Fraser’s name.
Proceeds will go to her two young daughters.
The Shaker Heights Police Department said in a statement that the investigation into the teacher’s death is “ongoing”.
Article via Independent
Days Away From Mars, NASA Awaits ‘The Seven Minutes Of Terror’
Article via Forbes
Flying the freeway to Mars, the robotic probe InSight nears the end of its 301-million-mile cruise with nary a hitch and hardly a hiccup.
But looming just ahead is the exit ramp—the Martian atmosphere.
“There’s a classic term for it,” says Rob Grover of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The seven minutes of terror.”
That’s approximately the time InSight takes to land, a spooky 70-mile descent from the top of the atmosphere down to the ground.
Says Grover: “There is very little room for things to go wrong.”
Yet hundreds of things must go right, all without NASA’s backseat driving; during landing, there’s no joysticking.
“We can’t fly the vehicle in ourselves,” Grover says. “The flight computer on board has to do it on its own. Everything has to work perfectly by itself.”
And for those seven minutes: “Our hearts will be pounding.”
On left, the cruise stage, now separated; on right, the backshell containing the lander.Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
InSight lands November 26, the Monday after Thanksgiving, at 11:47 AM Pacific Time (2:47 PM Eastern).
Before the clock starts: The cruise stage—its delivery done—detaches from the capsule containing the lander.
Then the capsule—just before reaching the atmosphere—points itself, “tilting down 12 degrees,” says Grover. NASA’s leeway is minuscule, only “plus or minus a quarter of a degree.” Too shallow an angle, and the spacecraft skips off the atmosphere. Too steep, and it burns up.
And now the terrifying part.
Illustration: EDL (entry, descent, and landing) is underway.Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
InSight thunders in at 12,300 miles per hour—almost three-and-a-half miles per second.
Friction roasts it. The temperature on the heat shield hits 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Friction also brakes it; within two minutes, the speed of the spacecraft slows by more than 90 percent.
Yet it’s still going 1,000 miles per hour.
At seven miles up—commercial airliners fly about that high—the parachute opens. Within 15 seconds, the heat shield jettisons. For the first time, the lander is exposed to Martian air.
Another 10 seconds, and the three legs deploy. One mile above the ground, the lander falls from the backshell. Descent engines turn on. Touchdown velocity is 5 miles per hour.
Illustration: InSight lander, with parachute, descending.Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Illustration: InSight, legs extended, touching down.Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Much could happen. The parachute might not open properly. The falling heat shield could graze the lander. Descent engines may not shut off. A large surface rock could sit in the way. One of the legs might not release and lock.
Those scenarios, though unlikely, are not implausible. Any of them could cause an erratic landing.
“If the lander were to tip over,” says Grover, “it doesn’t have the ability to right itself. We would be stuck in that position. The science would be very difficult to do.”
Not helping any of this: The probe touches down during dust storm season.
“A global dust storm can blow up in a matter of days,” acknowledges Grover. But NASA isn’t fretting.
“We’ve been rehearsing for that,” he says. “We’ll land successfully in just about any conditions thought possible during the season.”
Right now, atmospheric dust is minimal; weather at the landing site appears normal.
Illustration: the InSight lander, deployed on the Martian surface. InSight will study the “inner space” of Mars, says NASA—its crust, mantle, and core. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Grover—a 17-year JPL veteran, including six years on InSight—admits “there’s a lot of anticipation” at NASA about the landing.
“A combination of excitement and nervousness,” he says. “But there’s a sense we’ve done everything we can.”
Any surprises from the mission, he expects, will be good ones.
“There’s magic around it,” he says, “even better than Christmas.” Just get past those seven minutes.
Worse than opioids: Alcohol deaths soar among the middle aged, women
Alcohol kills more people each year than overdoses through cancer, liver cirrhosis, pancreatitis and suicide, among other ways.
The last time lawyer Erika Byrd talked her way out of an alcohol rehab center, her father took her to lunch.
“Dad, I know what alcohol has done to me,” she told him that day in January 2011. “I know what it has made me do to you and mom. But that wasn’t me.”
By the time she died three months later, Byrd had blocked her parents’ calls because they kept having her involuntarily committed. They once had a magistrate judge hold a hearing at her hospital bed. He ordered herto undergo a month of in-patient treatment.
Byrd, who died in April 2011 at the age of 42, is among the rising number of people in the United States who have been killed by alcohol in the last decade.
It’s an increase that has been obscured by the opioid epidemic. But alcohol kills more people each year than overdoses – through cancer, liver cirrhosis, pancreatitis and suicide, among other ways.
From 2007 to 2017, the number of deaths attributable to alcohol increased 35 percent, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The death rate rose 24 percent.
One alarming statistic: Deaths among women rose 67 percent. Women once drank far less than men, and their more moderate drinking helped prevent heart disease, offsetting some of the harm.
Deaths among men rose 29 percent.
While teen deaths from drinking were down about 16 percent during the same period, deaths among people aged 45 to 64 rose by about a quarter.
People’s risk of dying, of course, increases as they age. What’s new is that alcohol is increasingly the cause.
“The story is that no one has noticed this,” says Max Griswold, who helped develop the alcohol estimates for the institute. “It hasn’t really been researched before.”
The District of Columbia, less than 10 miles away from the Venable law office where Byrd was a partner, had the highest rate of death from alcohol in the country, according to the institute’s analysis. Georgia and Alabama came in second and third.
Alabama, in fact, ranked third among states with the strongest alcohol control policies, as rated by medical researchers in a 2014 report published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
States can influence drinking – especially dangerous binge drinking – with policies such as taxes on alcohol and restrictions on where and when it can be sold.
Psychologist Benjamin Miller, chief strategy officer at the nonprofit Well Being Trust, says the larger health challenges in the South are to blame for high alcohol death rates. Southern states typically rank near the bottom in national rankings in cancer, cardiovascular disease and overall health.
Oklahoma, Utah, Kansas and Tennessee rounded out the five states with the strongest alcohol control policies, the researchers reported. States with more stringent alcohol control policies had lower rates of binge drinking, they found.
Nevada, South Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming and Wisconsin had the weakest alcohol control policies.
David Jernigan, a professor at Boston University’s school of public health who has specialized in alcohol research for 30 years, notes that the beer industry holds considerable sway in Wisconsin.
Binge drinking is sending far more people to the emergency room, a separate team of researchers reported in the February 2018 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
The researchers, who looked at ER visits from 2006 to 2014,found the largest increases were among the middle aged – especially women. The number of teenage binge drinkers landing in the ER during that time actually declined.
States can influence drinking – especially dangerous binge drinking – with policies such as taxes on alcohol and restrictions on where and when it can be sold.
Psychologist Benjamin Miller, chief strategy officer at the nonprofit Well Being Trust, says the larger health challenges in the South are to blame for high alcohol death rates. Southern states typically rank near the bottom in national rankings in cancer, cardiovascular disease and overall health.
Oklahoma, Utah, Kansas and Tennessee rounded out the five states with the strongest alcohol control policies, the researchers reported. States with more stringent alcohol control policies had lower rates of binge drinking, they found.
Nevada, South Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming and Wisconsin had the weakest alcohol control policies.
David Jernigan, a professor at Boston University’s school of public health who has specialized in alcohol research for 30 years, notes that the beer industry holds considerable sway in Wisconsin.
Binge drinking is sending far more people to the emergency room, a separate team of researchers reported in the February 2018 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
The researchers, who looked at ER visits from 2006 to 2014,found the largest increases were among the middle aged – especially women. The number of teenage binge drinkers landing in the ER during that time actually declined.
Older, often lifelong drinkers don’t need only to have their stomachs pumped. They frequently have multiple complications from their drinking.
Their often bulbous bellies need to be drained of fluid, which builds up from liver cirrhosis, and their lungs cleared of aspirated vomit, says Dr. Anthony Marchetti, an emergency room doctor at Upson Regional Medical Center in Thomaston, Georgia.
They might also have brain hemorrhages or internal bleeding, because booze prevents their blood from clotting properly.
By middle age, Marchetti says, long-term drinking can also lead to heart failure, infections due to immune suppression, a type of dementia from alcohol-induced brain damage, stomach ulcers and a much higher risk of cancer.
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