Category: Uncategorized

South Korea’s Haeran Ryu bounces back from a poor start to end the second round as leader of the AIG Women’s Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes.

Source: BBC.

South Korea’s Haeran Ryu bounces back from a poor start to end the second round as leader of the AIG Women’s Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes.

Source: BBC.

It’s impossible to escape this summer’s “The Odyssey” discourse, and we have British classicist and translator Emily Wilson to thank for at least some of that.

Source: Vogue

Paramount Primal has preemptively acquired the high-concept thriller spec Sweet Spot from Nic Curcio & Kirby Gladstein, the writing duo behind the upcoming indie horror film Play House, Deadline can confirm. Plot details are under wraps, and there are no other attachments to the project as of yet. Curcio and Gladstein are filmmakers based out of Los Angeles […]

Source: Deadline.

The Motion Picture Editors Guild is urging California lawmakers to expand the state’s tax incentive offerings for film and television productions. On Friday, the IATSE local threw its support behind assembly bill 2319, which proposes a standalone post-production tax incentive between 35% to 50% intended to complement the existing Film & TV Tax Credit Program […]

Source: Deadline.

Ian Diaz’s wife begged a federal judge to show him mercy before he was sentenced to more than a decade behind bars … warning his imprisonment would tear apart their family and devastate their young son … TMZ has learned. In an April 2023 letter…

From TMZ.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche would have us believe the story ended when he declared President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund dead. It didn’t. Recent news this week shows the administration may not need that fund at all.

Two days before the Senate Judiciary Committee was set to vote Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general, the Justice Department announced a seven-figure payout to Paul Vaughn, an anti-abortion activist whom Blanche has described as a victim of Biden-era weaponization. Vaughn is not a Capitol rioter, and his case is not theirs. But The New York Times reported the settlement for what it is: proof that this DOJ is willing to use an existing federal statute — the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA — to compensate people it believes were victims of political prosecution.

No commission. No $1.8 billion fund. No press conference about “victims of lawfare” seeking redress. Just a settlement, quietly reached, through the same legal machinery that hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants are now lined up to use.

That machinery didn’t appear this week. It was there before there was a fund, and it will be there long after Blanche has finished talking about the fund as though it were the whole story.

Congress enacted the FTCA to compensate people harmed by government negligence or misconduct. It has been used to resolve claims involving everything from medical malpractice at Veterans Affairs hospitals to the FBI’s failures preceding the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church. It was designed to compensate victims of government wrongdoing — not to become a vehicle for compensating people convicted in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol.

Nearly 600 Jan. 6 defendants have already filed claims under the FTCA, according to reporting from ABC News and The Wall Street Journal. Hundreds more are expected.

Play

Blanche ‘hasn’t stopped being Trump’s personal lawyer,’ Judiciary Dem warns

July 30, 2026 / 07:53

Even if you take Blanche at his word that the “anti-weaponization” fund is “dead” and “not moving forward, ever,” his assurance answers only one question: whether the administration will create a new compensation program. It leaves unanswered the one that matters most: whether the administration will use existing federal law to compensate Jan. 6 defendants instead.

Here’s what should concern every taxpayer, Republican and Democrat alike: the DOJ doesn’t need a new commission or a special compensation fund to if it chooses to compensate Jan. 6 defendants. Once the department agrees to settle a FTCA case, the Treasury Department’s judgment fund pays it automatically without a separate act of Congress. Any Jan. 6 defendant who believes he or she has a viable FTCA claim can attempt to walk through that same statutory door. Some are seeking millions of dollars apiece, according to Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and other lawmakers.

Congress spent the spring in an uproar over Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. That fight was necessary. But it was also, in a sense, the easy one. The fund was visible, unprecedented and tied to a president who has repeatedly, and without evidence, claimed the justice system was weaponized against him.

The FTCA is none of those things. It’s an old statute, administered quietly, one claim at a time. That’s precisely what makes it more dangerous, not less.

If Republican Sens. John Cornyn, Thom Tillis and their colleagues truly want to prevent taxpayer dollars from flowing to Jan. 6 defendants, Blanche’s assurances won’t do it. Only Congress can. Lawmakers already have legislation before them: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s, D-R.I., bill barring settlements for defendants convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers, and Padilla’s broader proposal prohibiting federal funds from compensating anyone prosecuted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.

Passing either bill requires no leap of faith in Blanche. That’s the point.

Congress spent months guarding the front door. Blanche says it’s closed. But the back door remains wide open, and hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants are already trying to walk through it.

The post Blanche’s nomination may be stalled, but payouts to Trump allies are underway appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.

EXCLUSIVE: Dermot Mulroney will say goodbye to NBC’s Chicago Fire and will wrap up his storyline early in Season 15, sources close to production tell Deadline. Mulroney joined the hit firefighter drama from Wolf Entertainment and Universal Television in the show’s 13th season as a series regular, portraying Chief Dom Pascal. The actor joined Firehouse 51 following the […]

Source: Deadline.

What if the very thing we’re taught to tame are the things that make us special? This question has been swirling around in hair artist Kayra Theodore’s head since childhood. It’s also the message behind her first-ever hair show, Untied. “It was important for me to make sure my first collection started from the beginning,” she tells ESSENCE exclusively.

Walking into the back courtyard at 99 Scott, a coveted location for fashion shows, I take a left into an industrial warehouse. Two rows of black chairs line both sides of the space with a card on every seat. On the front of the show note, there’s a school girl in a uniform with braided bows pinned up her white socks. She’s holding a red book with the name of the show “Untied” scribbled on. 

A wooden school desk and chair sat in the middle of the floor. Then, an administrative announcement came over the loud speaker as if we were all back in school again. A woman guided the hand of a little uniformed girl—with braids, barrettes, and white bows in her hair—to her desk. 

“Makeup, jewelry, and hairstyles can be distracting to others and detrimental to the school climate,” the announcement asserted as the child sat and listened. “All forms of expression is to remain conservative.” The little girl who grew up internalizing these rules was Theodore. And, the girl in the chair was a memory of herself. 

Growing up with Haitian parents, “they would put bows in my hair before I go to school,” she says. But, on the first day of sixth grade, she walked in and realized she was the only Black girl in her class. “All of the students would make fun of my hair.” Like the assimilation the morning announcements mandated, Theodore started rejecting her culture and straightening her hair. 

Now, in her first-ever hair show, she reclaimed the parts of herself she tried to bury years ago. Models in big blush and mascara (a makeup look headed by her sister, Laura Theodore) wore hair sculptures braided in the shape of the bows she used to get bullied for. Some models had oversized braided bows tied around their neck like bow ties, while others had them teased and pinned on their shoulders or fixed on top of a bun. 

“Some pieces took half a day, while others ones took three days,” she says about the looks, which ranged from cornrows to sculptures and even a braided bridal veil. Using weave, glue, and a lot of hairspray, her first-ever hair show took inspiration from Jawara Wauchope’s Black Hair Reimagined and even had hairstylists from the show, like Vernon Francois, sitting front row. 

To present Untied, Theodore was selected as the recipient of the Instagram Draft Fund, an annual program giving creators access to resources to live out their imagination. When the Meta team reached out, “they said, ‘Do you have an idea that you’ve had sitting in your head and haven’t been able to make it come to life?” she recalled in an emotional speech after the show. “I really felt like that was God.” 

While she’s been working on the 32-look collection for three months, two of those months she was testing out a completely new braiding technique. But, “it didn’t work,” she says. “In the last month, I had to go back to what I usually do and build outward from there.” Writing down then sketching out her hair sculptures, she’s been braiding the story of her Haitian-American childhood all summer. 

By the end of the show, Theodore walked out and traded places with the little girl in the school desk chair. All grown up, she wore a red, paper doll-like Pipenco Lorena dress and a bow hairpiece with long, train-like hair ribbons which left her audience in a tear-shedding standing ovation. “I wanted to show people I lived this,” she says. “This is my life.” 

From The Hill

A U.S. Marine Corps F-35 stealth fighter jet crashed at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, Calif., on Friday. Marine officials confirmed to The Hill that it was an F-35 “aircraft mishap” in the vicinity of MCAS Miramar.  The pilot ejected, was recovered and is en route to a medical facility, officials said. It…

An estimated 60,000 migrants from Morocco have crossed into Ceuta, with dozens dying during the journey.

Source: BBC.

An estimated 60,000 migrants from Morocco have crossed into Ceuta, with dozens dying during the journey.

Source: BBC.