Announced to star Vin Diesel as the title character last year, Universal Picture's Kojak looks like it may have found a helmer in Life of Pidirector Ang Lee.http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=111824
"Kojak… New York… Ang Lee…" Diesel posted to his Facebook wall moments ago in response to a fan's question about what director he'd like to work with in the future.
Although it's entirely possible that Diesel is merely pointing out his top choice, to specifically name Kojak as the project coupled with the fact that the film has not yet announced a director suggests that Diesel's dream is about to come true.
Screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Skyfall) are providing the screenplay to the television series adaptation. The original show, which ran on CBS from 1973 to 1978, starred Telly Savalas as NYPD Detective Lieutenant Theo Kojak, known for his penchant for lollipops and his catchphrase, "Who loves ya baby?"
Kojak has never before been brought to the big screen but a short-lived series reboot was attempted in 2005 with Ving Rhames in the Kojak role.
Diesel is also set to produce the feature version alongside Samantha Vincent.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/20...d-mentally-black-man-sing-make-animal-noises/A suburban Detroit police officer admitted he asked a mentally ill black man to sing and dance and video recorded the incident.
Videos and and photos with degrading portrayals of black men were submitted earlier this month to the blog, Motor City Muckraker, purportedly from officers who disseminated them to friends and colleagues in the upper class, majority-white Michigan suburb of Grosse Pointe Park. One video portrayed a voice alleged to be an officer asking black men to do humiliating tasks, including “dance like a chimp.” In another incident, an officer allegedly texted a photo of a black man in the back of his trailer with the text, “Gotta love the coloreds.” The journalist, Steve Neavling, told the Huffington Post that he has more than a dozen videos shot by officers, but has not shared most of them because of their “humiliating nature.”
The unnamed officer has been taken off duty and is expected to face discipline, according to Neavling. But it is not clear whether that officer was the only one responsible for the photos and videos.
The incident is one of the most overt manifestations of recent minority mistreatment by law enforcement, particularly young black men. This week, an exposé in Florida revealed an aggressive police program in minority-dominated Miami Gardens is stopping the same individuals hundreds of times on disingenuous allegations of trespassing and other minor offenses. And on Friday, a federal appeals court declined to reverse a federal judge’s ruling that the New York Police Department engaged in unconstitutional racial profiling in its stop-and-frisk program.
Criminal charges are pending against a Calgary mother who police allege relied on holistic treatments instead of getting medical help for her seven-year-old son's strep infection.http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/mother-to-face-criminal-charges-in-son-s-strep-death-1.2436945
On the morning of March 2, emergency crews were called to a 17th Avenue S.W. basement suite where a young boy was having a seizure. He was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead.
An autopsy found the cause of death was a strep infection, which would have been treatable with penicillin.
Police allege the mother did not take the boy for treatment, giving him holistic remedies instead.
"The treatment rendered at home was homeopathic in nature. This would include herbal remedies. The mother refused to take the child to a medical professional. No excuse given — just her belief system," said Staff Sgt. Mark Cavilla.
The boy was bedridden for 10 days prior to his death, police allege.
Charges are pending against his 44-year-old mother.
Those charges include criminal negligence causing death and failing to provide the necessaries of life.
GENEVA — Iran and six major powers agreed early Sunday on a historic deal that freezes key parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for temporary relief on some economic sanctions.Link:
The agreement, sealed at a 3 a.m. signing ceremony in Geneva’s Palace of Nations, requires Iran to halt or scale back parts of its nuclear infrastructure, the first such pause in more than a decade.
Illegal immigrants blockaded a federal office that handles deportations in Atlanta on Tuesday morning, and later in the day others in Chicago chained themselves to the wheels of a bus they said was headed to the airport on a deportation run.
The moves were designed to call attention to President Obama’s deportation policies, which the immigrant-rights activists say have gone too far. They want the president to use executive authority to stop almost all deportations.
