- All of a sudden, Oklahoma City Thunder center Enes Kanter has
become the star of a real-life version of the movie “Terminal.” Kanter, who is
being detained in Romania after his passport was "canceled" by the
Turkish embassy on Saturday morning, now has too much in common with the film’s
main character, who was stuck in an American airport terminal after his
troubled Eastern European nation collapses in a fiery coup, rendering his
passport unusable. Kanter, who arrived in Bucharest from Jakarta, Indonesia, as
part of his 2017 Enes Kanter Light Foundation global tour, would seem to be the
sort of person you wouldn’t want to attack with such diplomatic pettiness. He’s
doing charitable work, he’s a famous professional athlete and oh wait, he’s one
of the most famous, outspoken critics of despotic Turkish leader Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. When his security goons aren’t beating down American citizens on
American soil, Erdogan is busy harassing Turks living abroad, according to a
video Kanter posted on Twitter from the airport in Romania in which he said
police officers have "been holding us here for hours." "The
reason behind it is just, of course, my political views," Kanter said. Just
because you labeled him as “a dictator,
and he's the Hitler of our century” and are a known supporter of Fethullah
Gulen, an Islamic leader and the face of the "Gulen Movement, you think an
upstanding leader like Erdogan, who just rammed through a referendum
essentially making him the country’s elected dictator for another decade-plus, would go international ass-hat
by canceling your passport? This is the latest blow for Kanter, who said last
summer he had been disowned by his family because of his political views……..
- It takes some major juevos to assault and rob an entire
bus full of passengers who also happen to be your country’s federal police. It
also takes fair amount of laziness/indifference/steadiness on the part of said
federal police to cooperate with said robbers, letting them take what they want
in order to avoid a potential shootout and loss of life. According to authorities
in Mexico, that’s precisely what went down when gunmen have assaulted and
robbed a bus full of federal police who were unarmed, dressed in civilian
clothes and headed to Mexico City, where they were to be on leave after 25
straight days on duty in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco. Maybe those 29
cops were still in vacation mode when the driver pulled over to check a
mechanical problem near a toll booth in the state of Morelos, sitting back and
going along with orders when armed men boarded the bus, threatened the drivers
and passengers and proceeded to liberate everyone’s personal belongings. A
statement by the National Security Commission, the officers did not resist in
order to avoid injuries or loss of life and a search is now on for the robbers,
who might not exactly have an immense amount of fear for the men and women
trying to apprehend them after the way their most recent encounter with the law
went down……..
- Because #massivepaydays and #lovingthespotlight, Tom Hardy
will superhero movie once more. Despite saying previously that action-hero
roles in films because they restrict an actor’s ability to bring more of
themselves to the role, Hardy is going to anchor Sony's latest foray into the
Marvel Comics cinematic universe, the forthcoming Spider-Man spin-off, “Venom.”
Hardy, fresh off the fiscal letdown that was the first season of “Taboo,” will
play the leading role in the Venom and become part of a new Spider-Man
cinematic universe that was briefly hinted at in Captain America: Civil War,”
in which current Spider-Man Tom Holland stepped into the role. In the spin-off,
Hardy will play Eddie Brock, a freelance photographer who becomes infected by
an alien lifeform and turns into a half-human, half-alien villain and views
Spider-Man as his arch nemesis. You might remember Topher Grace playing
Brock/Venom in a perfectly decent Spider-Man movie starring Tobey Maguire, or
you may not because Grace was eminently forgettable in the role. Either way,
the project will be helmed by “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer, working
from a script penned by Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner (“The Amazing
Spider-Man 2”). This one is being set on a breakneck pace, as filming is
scheduled to begin in the fall and the project is slated to hit theaters next
August, by which point a massive payday and the reality that he capably played
Bane in “The Dark Knight” will probably have absolved Hardy of his disdain for
action-hero movies…….
- You can have our tributes to arguably the darkest and
ugliest era in American history when you pry them from our cold, dead (and very
white) hands. So say lawmakers in Alabama who have approved sweeping protections for Confederate
monuments, names and other historic memorials even as their friends in other
southern states either remove or consider removing such monuments to a racist,
hateful era in this nation’s history. If passed into law, the measure
"would prohibit the relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other
disturbance of any architecturally significant building, memorial building,
memorial street, or monument" that has stood on public property for 40 or
more years.” That’s a pretty subjective description and allows for a wide berth
when determining what’s “architecturally significant,” and the bill would also
mandate that changes to names or memorials installed between 20 and 40 years
ago would need permission from a new state commission. Sadly, the many African-American
lawmakers who opposed the bill at every step of the legislative process didn’t have
the votes to shot this sh*t down even though they rightly argued that the bill
fortifies a contemptible legacy of slavery. "You say we are protecting
history. We are not protecting history. We are protecting monuments that
represent oppression to a large part of the people in the state of
Alabama," said Sen. Hank Sanders, an African-American Democrat from Selma.
That wasn’t enough to slow the roll of Sen. Gerald Allen, the bill's Republican
sponsor, who denounced what he called a "wave of political
correctness" moving these monuments to hate from public places into
storage or museums. The only tweak came when Gov. Kay Ivey added an amendment, which
lawmakers approved, to clarify that schools could change locations and do
renovations, but not change names. Still, this is a misguided attempt to keep
alive a completely bogus notion that the era of slavery and secession in
America is anything to be honored, remembered or memorialized in any way……..
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