- Hello, NBA team No. 6 for all-time draft bust Darko
Milicic. Milicic, who was famously selected with the second overall pick in the
2003 NBA Draft by the Detroit Pistons, behind LeBron James and ahead of Carmelo
Anthony, has bounced between Detroit, Orlando, New York, Memphis and Minnesota
and been a 7-foot bust every place he’s gone. The latest indignity of his
career came Friday as the Minnesota Timberwolves, for whom he was an overpaid
afterthought last season, announced plans to use the amnesty clause in the
latest labor agreement to release Milicic. The clause requires a team to pay
the player the remainder of his contract, minus a small contribution from any
new team he signs with, but allows the team to remove that player’s salary from
their salary cap figure for the next season. Milicic has two years and $10 million remaining on his contract, but
only $7 million is guaranteed. Once he is amnestied, so to speak, he will go
through a modified amnesty process in which teams with cap space will be able to
make blind bids to pick up a portion of his remaining salary. If no team wants
a journeyman center who has been let go by five other teams and no one makes a
bid, Milicic will become an unrestricted free agent. The Timberwolves are
getting rid of him Milicic in order to give an offer sheet to Portland Trail
Blazers restricted free agent Nicolas Batum. Batum’s offer sheet will
reportedly be a four-year, $45 million offer with bonuses that could push the
deal past $50 million. Of course, the Timberwolves being the league doormat
they usually are, the Blazers plan to match any offers for Batum, although they
could still execute a sign-and-trade if he really wants to play in
Minnesota………….
- How does one move on from the one role they are
qualified to play in life? Jennifer
Lopez is getting closer to answering that question as she hints that she may
leave Fox’s hack-tacular reality karaoke series “American Karaoke” after two
seasons. "Maybe it's time for me to go," Lopez said. "It's been
on my mind a lot, as you can imagine. And now it's like, do we continue on this
journey? I've loved it so much. I enjoy the show so much...It's a tough
decision either way." For anyone with actual musical talent or skill,
leaving “AK” would be a no-brainer, nearly as obvious as never getting involved
with the show in the first place. But for Lopez…..she can’t sing or act and has
no knack for songwriting. Sitting on a stage judging aspiring karaoke-ers is
the only thing she really should be doing. Still, she sounds either a) on the
fence about a third season or b) angling for a pay raise because the way she
tells it, she is leaning toward not returning. “At the end of the day,
whichever way, it's a heartbreaking decision if, um, I'm going to have to go,"
she explained. Part of the problem for her has been putting her other projects
on hold to do the show, but her putting those projects on hold means the rest
of the world isn’t subjected to another crappy Jennifer Lopez movie. The entire
“AK” judging panel is actually in limbo, as sources have said Randy Jackson's
and Aerosmith frontman/exaggerated self-caricature Steven Tyler’s futures with
the series are in question. Producers have apparently been looking at Adam
Lambert to become a judge, as well as Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Nicky Minaj,
Fergie and will.i.am, and none have any musical talent or integrity at all and
the latter two are members of the Hack Eyed Peas, the only group possibly lower
on the musical totem pole than “American Karaoke” is………..
- How bad has Syria become? This isn’t a joke and there is
no punchline, because life in the embattled nation has become so ugly that its highest-ranking
diplomat to defect to the opposition dismissed the main international plan
seeking to stop the violence, saying Thursday that nothing short of President
Bashar Assad's ouster is acceptable. Nawaf Fares, formerly Syria's ambassador
to Iraq, insisted force is the only option to remove Assad from power. "There
is no roadmap ever with Bashar Assad, because he delays and ignores any plan,
any statement that is agreed on internationally," Fares said. "There
is no way that he can be pushed from power without force and the Syrian people
realize this." It took all of two seconds for Syria's Foreign Ministry to
respond Thursday and demand that Fares be punished. In a truly piece of
propaganda bullsh*t, the ministry said Fares had been "relieved of his
duties" and should face "legal and disciplinary accountability."
He becomes was the second prominent figure to leave the regime in a week,
suggesting Assad’s regime may be crumbling. Gen. Manaf Tlass, an Assad
confidant and son of a former defense minister, fled Syria last week and has
not yet resurfaced. Rumors from France have linked him to the Syrian
opposition, but French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius would not comment on reports
that Tlass was in Paris. "I know that there is some closeness between the
opposition and the general... contact has been made," Fabius admitted. Other
nations hope the defections will inspire others to leave and ultimately end
Assad’s reign of terror, which has raged on since the rebellion kicked off in
March 2011. Maybe in between massacring civilians, Assad should install a
revolving door at the border for all of his officials who want to flee………….
- Friendly neighborhood heroin dealers across the United
States, your clientele is about to expand, if it hasn’t already. Because the
government and medical community are vigilantly cracking down on curb OxyContin
abuse, those looking to chase their next high need to find other outlets. That
outlet, apparently, is heroin. Even as though the formula of OxyContin has been
changed to prevent the abuse of the drug through crushing or dissolving it in
water for snorting or injection purposes, heroin is quietly sliding in to take
its place. "We're now seeing reports from across the country of large
quantities of heroin appearing in rural and suburban areas," said. Dr.
Theodore J. Cicero, vice chair of research at Washington University's
department of psychiatry. "Unable to use OxyContin easily, which was a
very popular drug in rural and suburban areas, drug abusers who prefer snorting
or IV drug administration now have shifted to more potent opioids if they can
find them, or to heroin." Cicero’s thoughts were published in the New
England Journal of Medicine on July 12 after he and his fellow researchers
collected surveys from more than 2,500 patients at 150 drug treatment centers
in 39 states. The subjects in their study had been at the centers for about a
year and a half before and after the release of abuse-resistant OxyContin and
were being treated for prescription opioid abuse. Of those 2,500 patients, 36
percent said their drug of choice was OxyContin, but only 13 percent of them
still used it as their primary drug at the beginning of 2012. Most had switched
to another stronger opioid like Fentanyl or hydromorphone and the percentage
of patients who said they used heroin in the past 30 days increased from 10
percent to 20 percent. One subject explained that heroin was "easier to
use, much cheaper and easily available." "The most amazing thing was how quickly
it dropped because they weren't able to extract the drug anymore. They switched
to drugs that were potentially more harmful to them," Cicero said. Abuse-resistant
OxyContin was released in August 2010 and with its release, crushing or
dissolving the pills became near to impossible to do. The thousands of
people abusing the drug were understandably frustrated, but thankfully the
devil in the form of heroin was there to befriend them……..
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