24 January 2017

Upcoming New Superhero Movies

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With their collection of super powers, superior fighting skills, great looks and victorious nature, superheroes are attractive to kids and the young at heart. Their colorful costumes and often unique residences keep us entertained and inspired at the same time.
Examples of superheroes include:
Superman
• Spiderman
• Batman
• The flash
• Aquaman
• Wonder Woman

Every superhero has a nemesis. In most cases, the nemesis is just as impressive as the superhero and whenever they fight, it is a sight to behold. Originally presented in comic books, superheroes now grace the big screen thanks to Hollywood.

This year, there are some upcoming new superhero movies to look forward to. Read on to learn more.

The Lego Batman Movie
Many kids have played with Legos and loved the experience. Now, Batman is about to be expressed in Lego format for you.


The Lego Batman Movie is slated for release on February 20, 2017. It will be directed by Chris McKay and features Mariah Carey, Zach Galifianakis and Ralph Fiennes as part of the cast. The director plans to show the dark, crime-fighting, caped crusader in Lego form against his arch-nemesis, the Joker.

This movie is bound to attract audiences worldwide.

Logan
The X-Men are famous superheroes who save the world with their mutant powers. Wolverine is one among them who has received his own movie spin-off story and it has caught on like wildfire.


On March 3, 2017, Logan will be released. It is the last of a series of movies featuring the clawed mutant. Hugh Jackman again takes the lead as Wolverine for the last time. He is supported by Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook, Richard E. Grant among others.

Directed by James Mangold, Logan will explore the later years of the Wolverine and maybe even introduce a new mutant to the world, X-23. It is definitely worth the watch!

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
The first movie about the Guardians of the Galaxy was received with wide international acclaim. In this one, director James Gunn hopes to make a splash again with a deeper story and some surprise appearances too. The cast for this movie includes Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana, Vin Diesel and others.


The movie explores the parents of the Star Lord and introduces a new, adorable character, Baby Groot.

Wonder Woman
This is the first superhero movie ever to have a woman as the lead character and a female director too. Gal Gadot makes history playing the role of the iconic Wonder Woman while Patty Jenkins will sit in the director's chair.


Wonder Woman first showed up in Superman: Dawn of Justice and is slated to appear in the Justice League movie too. However, she appears in her own movie first. It tells the story of a World War 1 soldier who washes on the paradise island of Diana Prince. He tells her of the war going on in the outside world and Wonder Woman swoops in to save the day.

The movie is slated for released on June 2, 2017 and will feature Chris Pine, Robin Wright, Elena Ayana and Danny Huston among others.

Justice League
This is one of the most anticipated superhero movies of the year, find more information about it on our blog. Its release is planned to be on November 17, 2017.


The movie wil be directed by the legendary Zack Snyder. It will have a star studded cast of Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Jeremy Irons, Ezra Miller and others. Produced by Warner Bros., the movie will depict this group of superheroes fighting against an evil brought forward by Steppenwolf who was summoned by Lex Luthor to earth.

It is bound to be a big screen blockbuster and fans are at the edge of their seats in anticipation.

Conclusion
Superhero movies bring a fantastic world of wonder into cinemas and living rooms. These characters inspire and empower. We look up to them and believe in them too. This year, there is a slew of new movies from this genre that is bound to satisfy even the most ardent fans.

These are just a taste of the expected releases for 2017.

About Today's Contributor:
This article was prepared by Gaetano Esposito, he is a famous avid traveler and wild life lover.

23 January 2017

You Participated In The Women's March...Now what?

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This past weekend, scores of Americans took to the streets to voice their concerns about a new political paradigm under President Trump. Over 1.2 million women marched in Washington D.C. alone, while over a million participated in cities across the country. In total, there were 673 "sister marches" taking place around the world at the same time.
Which leads to the question: What is this surge of activists going to do next?
Enter RISE Movement, the newest wave in politics. (www.risemvmt.org). A group aimed at rebuilding the broken political system in America, RISE is strategically coordinating the ground efforts of the left side to win again. 
"At RISE, we've created a series of quarterly reports to explain how we lost, and what we can do to win again," states RISE co-founder Genevieve Thiers.  The first RISE report launches today at www.riseparty.org/quarterly_report.  The report is paired to a high-level dashboard to coordinate all the armies and individuals on the ground.  "There's no reason that this information should be in some DNC corner office somewhere," states Thiers.  "Everyone's a general."  The report is 32 pages, and explains how the left side lost, and an approach that can help it win again in 2020.
The RISE dashboard, referenced in the report, is in beta, but a template can be seen at www.riseparty.org/dashboard.  The interactive version is in progress.  The dashboard is powered by RISE and a number of other tech-savvy entities including flippable, ballot-ready, popvox and re:act. It coordinates over six critical pieces of how to win back the White House in 2020—everything from winning open seats to fighting bills to protesting executive actions and appointments to flipping Republican-held states to getting non-voters back to the polls and non-registered voters registered. It also contains a countdown to the 2020 elections, daily action items, a 30-day forecast, and a 4-year elections calendar.  
Activists can zoom into details or stay high-level and just stick to daily activities...it's their choice. 
"On the left side, we tend to be super intelligent, but uncoordinated," states Thiers.  "We can be a bit like ping-pong balls flying around in an empty room.  We need to work as a coordinated unit, and the RISE dashboard lets us do that."  
RISE is approaching left-leaning groups now about how to best use the dashboard to coordinate their armies, and the RISE report also includes a breakout of progressive groups for readers by function, so activists can easily figure out how to manage their time.  As events unfold in politics, the report will "react" in real time, designing new plans to win based on how current factors are playing out.
RISE members include former OFA-ers, Hillary team members, workers from Google, Microsoft, Apple, entrepreneurs, activists, artists, designers, developers, writers, immigrants, economists and more. "We're sort of like a tech startup jammed into a political action group," states co-founder Ellie Bahrmasel.  
The group is determined not only to resist the Trump agenda, but to change politics as well.  They are targeting four critical races in 2017—NC, NJ, VA and LA municipals—and building on-the-ground armies to head door to door and ask people who they want to see running, and what they want solved. 
"We're going back to basics," states Bahrmasel.  "People need to be a part of the process again.
The goal of the RISE field organization is to crowdsource the right candidate and solution set for an area, then galvanize local efforts around both in combination.  They theorize that if people are part of making something, they will care about promoting it. 
So...if you have some free time post the march, consider letting your voice RISE.

The Video:


About RISE:
RISE movement is the next wave in political disruption offering a new narrative. By showing how we are more united than divided, we will make America stronger and future focused. With a focus on interpartisan communication, voter outreach and education, real actionable economic policy and an irrefutable-fact-based narrative RISE will get all Americans back to voting for their own best interests and the best interests of this great nation as a whole.  The group has 5-full-time hires, over 10,000 volunteers in 34 states, and is a 527 PAC format. Welcome to the Re-United States of America.  Welcome to RISE.  www.riseparty.org 
SOURCE: RISE Movement


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21 January 2017

The Women's March Fotition Campaign - Connecting and Archiving ALL of The Women's Marches

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The Women's March Bay Area and Fotition have created a campaign to help connect and archive the nearly 400 marches taking place in the US and abroad.
Fotition recently launched a social change platform that lets people post and share photos to raise awareness and support for the causes they care about.
The Women's March Fotition campaign is free to use and makes it easy (and fun) for people to create March-inspired images by taking or uploading photos and choosing from 25 different campaign-themed overlays. People can then use their images to change their social profile pics and share them directly to their social media pages, with a simple click. Also, every image posted to the campaign will be displayed in a campaign gallery (no need for #hashtags), where people can go to view (and share) photos posted by campaign supporters.
"We are excited to support the Women's March and help connect and archive all of the marches around the world," says Christian Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Fotition. "January 21st will be remembered as a day when the world stood together in solidarity to defend human rights and celebrate our diversity. We think this campaign will be a great way to help commemorate the Women's March and everything that it stands for."
The campaign was launched just a few days before the March and Fotition plans to keep the campaign running through February. That way people can post and share their March photos even after the March has ended.  Fotition hopes the Women's March campaign will become the largest user-generated event photo archive in history. Even people who weren't able to participate in the March can post photos to show their support and help amplify the mission and the message of the March.
(PRNewsFoto/Fotition)
About Fotition:
Fotition is a revolutionary new platform that offers users a social experience that doesn't exist with any other social sharing network or fundraising platform. Fotition lets people use their photos to raise awareness and support for the causes they care about. It also gives brands a way to convert their charitable giving into advertising, without taking any money away from the charities or causes they support. Fotition recently came out of beta and has already partnered with brands like Starbucks and Disney to launch campaigns to support good causes. They have also attracted early investment from several prominent Silicon Valley tech icons, including Scott Cook (founder of Intuit).  

SOURCE: Fotition


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20 January 2017

The Trump Era Has Begun. How Can We Make Sense Of It?

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O superman! EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo
By Liam Kennedy, University College Dublin

Donald Trump is now the 45th president of the United States.

The country he will oversee is, to him, a dark and troubled place. In his first speech as its president, he described a tragedy of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape”. With a promise to end this “American carnage”, he built up to his signature applause line: “Together, we will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together we will make America great again.”

As Trump’s election as president in itself makes plain, America is indeed undergoing an excruciatingly painful reinvention. We cannot yet know where it will lead, and making sense of it will be no easy task. The last time America was this confused and disturbed, it spawned a whole cultural project dedicated to simply conveying the reality of what was happening.
Reflecting on the 1960 televised debates between presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the novelist Philip Roth lamented that
The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality … The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist … on the TV screen, as a real public image, a political fact, my mind balked at taking [Nixon] in. Whatever else the television debates produced in me, I should like to point out, as a literary curiosity, that they also produced a type of professional envy.
This sense that reality was outrunning the capacities of writers to represent it was not new, but tellingly articulated by Roth as a challenge occasioned by the growth of televisual media and the transformation of politics into spectacle. His comments indicated something profound and shattering: an epochal shift in the “American reality.” Prescient stuff, given today’s laments about a “post-truth” society.

Superman comes to the supermarket
It is not coincidental that Roth was writing at the start of a period of intense social and political unrest in the US. As he pilloried many contemporary American writers for failing to respond to this epochal change, he noted one exception: “There is Norman Mailer. And he is an interesting example, I think, of one in whom our era has provoked such a magnificent disgust that dealing with it in fiction has almost come to seem, for him, beside the point.”
Sure enough, Mailer helped fashion a “new journalism” that could cope with the emerging society of the spectacle in the 1960s. In his 1960 essay on Kennedy’s election campaign, Superman Comes to the Supermarket, Mailer described the president-to-be as an “existential hero” who could tap into the drives that roil the national unconscious. This reflected Mailer’s very particular vision of American history:
Our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull … and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.

Style and substance, in balance. Wikimedia Commons

In Kennedy, Mailer saw someone who could fuse these historical currents and potentially renew the nation: “Only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation.” To be sure, he recognised the dangers in celebrating a “superman” as leader, but reckoned Kennedy struck the right balance between rational substance and romantic style.

Later, with his hero assassinated in Dallas and the decade descending into protest and chaos, Mailer became a more jaundiced witness, if no less engaged. In The Armies of the Night, his account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon by legions of protesters, he argued that the US had entered the “crazy house of history,” reflecting the growing absurdity of events in late 1960s America. Yet he was smitten by the “idea of a revolution which preceded ideology.”

In the carnivalesque figures of the protesters he saw a flicker of existential promise:
They were close to being assembled from all the intersections between history and the comic books, between legend and television, the Biblical archetypes and the movies … the aesthetic at last was in the politics – the dress ball was going into battle.

The March on the Pentagon, 1967. Wikimedia Commons

This was to be a last hurrah for a counter-cultural politics that foundered on the mediocrity of the American mainstream. The centre held, just. Mailer’s perspective may have been perversely romantic, but this was also its power as a dissenting vision, attuned to “the dream life of the nation.”

Celebrity comes to the White House
American reality now seems to be undergoing another seismic shift, again in sync with a cycle of violence and civil unrest. And once again, reality appears to be outrunning American writers as they struggle to explain it, to make it credible. Step forward another Übermensch. Is Trump an existential hero in the mode Mailer described? And if he really is someone “who reveals the character of the country to itself”, what does he reveal about the character of the US today?

Trump has channelled the discontents of the nation, and tapped into angers and resentments that are more than political. He dares to say what should not be said, shocking the political and cultural elites, speaking to and for the “real Americans” in their language, giving voice to their inarticulate anger and thwarted dreams. He eschews the discourse of decency and decorum, bragging that he has “no problem with the size of his penis.

Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” is in some part an articulation and legitimisation of what has been disavowed in the making of a liberal democracy. He promises national renewal, but not the progressive, forward-looking renewal promised by Kennedy. Instead, he offers a regressive, backward-looking nationalism.

For Mailer, Kennedy’s heroism was inherent in his ability to balance glamorous style with political substance. Trump displays no such ability – he displays an excess of style and a deficit of substance. His heroism, such as it is, marks a new stage in the aestheticisation of politics, in which entertainment and political life have converged as never before.

Trump’s celebrity is the lifeblood of his appeal. He astutely understands his currency as a performer – “I will be so presidential”, he promised – and as a producer – “I play to people’s fantasies … I call it truthful hyperbole”.

Trump is the superman unleashed as celebrity phantasm, a figure of libidinal enjoyment who leeringly embodies the obscene underside of liberal democracy. And as was his campaign, so his presidency will be shadowed by neo-fascist subtexts and authoritarian tendencies. Witness his convictions that “at the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America”, and that “we all bleed the same red blood of patriots”.

As in the 1960s, today’s cultural and political turmoil is playing out in struggles over identity, representation and recognition – but in a more profound sense, the American reality itself has changed. This is not identity politics as we knew it; this is the politics of “wounded attachments”, resentment and grievance, the politics of all-or-nothing.

Trump’s gift for seizing attention and peddling fantasy plugs him into the zeitgeist and bemuses those who believe lies should have consequences. For many liberal, educated Americans, Trump’s political ascension is a confusing assault on their sense of reality. For writers and intellectuals it is an affront to their abilities, Ć  la Roth, to make credible the new American reality.

Maybe this new reality will find or produce its own Mailer. I hope whoever it is shares that writer’s “magnificent disgust.” Even as Trump was driven to his inauguration, legions of protesters gathered in the city, across the US, and beyond. Perhaps new armies of the night are stirring.

The Conversation
About Today's Contributor: 
Liam Kennedy, Professor of American Studies, University College Dublin


This article was originally published on The Conversation


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19 January 2017

The Hasty Pudding Theatricals Announces Octavia Spencer as 2017 Woman of the Year

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The Hasty Pudding Theatricals, the oldest theatrical organization in the United States, announces Oscar winning actress, OCTAVIA SPENCER as the recipient of its 2017 Woman of the Year Award. The Pudding is proud to honor an actress whose depth of talent has captivated audiences with her comedic wit and her graceful portrayals of the underrepresented.
The Woman of the Year Award is the Hasty Pudding Theatricals oldest honor, bestowed annually on performers who have made lasting and impressive contributions to the world of entertainment. Established in 1951, the Woman of the Year Award has been given to many notable and talented entertainers, including Meryl Streep, Debbie ReynoldsKatharine HepburnJulia RobertsJodie Foster, Dame Helen Mirren and most recently Kerry Washington.
The Woman of the Year festivities, presented by the Related Companies, will begin at 3:00p.m. on January 26, 2017, when Ms Spencer will lead a parade through the streets of Cambridge. Following the parade, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals will host a celebratory roast for the actress. At 4:00 p.m., Ms Spencer will be presented with her Pudding Pot at Farkas Hall, the Hasty Pudding's historic home in the heart of Harvard Square since 1888. A press conference will follow the presentation.
For the first time ever, the press conferences for Hasty Pudding's Man and Woman of the Year will be live-streamed and available to the public free-of-charge. More information will be available on the Hasty Pudding's social media channels soon via Facebook www.facebook.com/thehastypudding, Twitter @thehastypudding and Instagram @thehastypudding. Afterward, the Hasty Pudding will give a preview of their 169th production, Casino Evil.
"We could not be more excited to offer Ms Spencer our Woman of the Year award. We are humbled by her talent and are so honored that our little Pudding pot will be sitting alongside Ms Spencer's Oscar and Golden Globe on her mantle," said Hasty Pudding Theatricals' Co-producer Adam Chiavacci
"Everyone here is really looking forward to meeting her – as long as she doesn't prove as difficult as her character on 30 Rock!" added Pudding Co-producer Natalie Kim.
OCTAVIA SPENCER, a veteran character actress and one of Hollywood's most sought-after talents, has become a familiar fixture on both television and the silver screen. Her critically acclaimed performance as Minny in DreamWork's feature film The Help won her the 2012 Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, SAG Award, and Broadcast Film Critic's Choice Award among numerous other accolades.
Octavia can currently be seen in the highly acclaimed drama Hidden Figures alongside Taraji P. Henson, Janelle MonĆ”e, and Kevin Costner. The film tells the true story of several African-American women who provide NASA with critical information needed to launch the program's early successful space missions. Octavia's performance as Dorothy Vaughan has earned her SAG, Golden Globe, and NAACP Image Award nominations to date. Later this year, she will be seen starring in The Shack, a film based off of the best-selling novel of the same title. The film follows a man, whose daughter is abducted during a family vacation, with evidence found in an abandoned shack leading authorities to believe she was murdered. Octavia also co-stars in Marc Webb's drama Gifted alongside Chris Evans and Jenny Slate. The film tells the story of Rank Adler, a deliberate underachiever who is raising his niece in rural Florida.
Octavia recently wrapped production on Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, in which she stars alongside Michael ShannonMichael Stuhlbarg, and Sally Hopkins. The film is an otherworldly love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. She also recently finished filming Small Town Crime with John Hawkes and Anthony Anderson, a film about an alcoholic ex-cop who, through an act of self-redemption, becomes hell-bent on bringing a killer to justice.
Last year, Octavia reprised her role as Johanna in Allegiant, the third installment of Lionsgate's The Divergent Series franchise. She also voiced the character of Mrs. Otterton in the Disney animated film Zootopia, one of fastest worldwide grossing films of the year. Last fall, she co-starred alongside Elisabeth Moss and Boyd Holbrook in The Free World, a drama focusing on a recently released former convict who becomes involved with a married woman with an abusive husband that premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival; the drama Fathers and Daughters with Quvenzhane Wallis, Diane KrugerRussell CroweAmanda Seyfried, and Aaron Paul; and The Great Gilly Hopkins, the adaptation of Katherine Peterson's young adult Newberry Award winning novel. Octavia also reprised her role as Opal in Mark Waters' Bad Santa 2, along with Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates.
In 2014, Spencer co-starred alongside Kevin Costner in the drama Black or White, which premiered at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival to rave reviews. Previously, Octavia co-starred in Tate Taylor's Get On Up, a chronicle of musician James Brown's rise to fame that also starred Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman and the sci-fi, action-adventure Snowpiercer opposite Tilda Swinton and Chris Evans. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, the film followed a train that holds all remaining inhabitants on earth after a climate-change experiment wipes out the rest of the population, and the class system that emerges. In 2013, Spencer was seen in the indie-drama Fruitvale Station which follows the final hours of Oscar Grant's life, a young man whose death sparked national outrage after video footage of his shooting was released to the public on New Year's Eve 2009.  Fruitvale Station won several prestigious awards including both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for US Dramatic films at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, the Un Certain Regard Award for Prix de l'avenir at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, and was named one of AFI's Films of the Year and received nominations for the 2014 Spirit Awards and NAACP Image Awards. Octavia was awarded "Best Supporting Actress" from the National Board of Review for her performance in the film and received an individual nomination from the NAACP Image Awards. She also served as a producer on the film.
Additional film credits include Diablo Cody's directorial debut Paradise alongside Russell Brand and Julianne HoughSmashed, an independent film which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival; Bryce Dallas Howard's directed segment of Call Me CrazyA Five Film, an anthology of five short films focused on various stories of mental illness; Blues for Willadean, Fly Paper, Peep World, Dinner For Schmucks, Small Town Saturday Night, Herpes Boy, Halloween II, The Soloist, Drag Me To Hell, Seven Pounds, Pretty Ugly People, Coach Carter, Charm School, Win A Date With Tad Hamilton, Bad Santa, Spiderman, Big Momma's House, Being John Malkovich, Never Been Kissed and A Time to Kill.  In 2009, Octavia directed and produced a short film entitled The Captain, which was a finalist for the coveted Poetry Foundation Prize at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival.    
Among her many other professional achievements, Octavia has co-authored an interactive mystery series for children called Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective. The first title in the series, Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective: The Case of the Time-Capsule Bandit was published by Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing in Fall 2013 and the second book, Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective: Sweetest Heist in History, is currently in bookstores.   

ABOUT THE HASTY PUDDING INSTITUTE OF 1770
The Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770's philanthropic mission is to provide educational and developmental support in all aspects of the performing arts for the underprivileged, to encourage satire and comedy, and to cultivate young talent around the world. The Institute is comprises the Hasty Pudding Club (the oldest social club in the United States), the Hasty Pudding Theatricals (the third oldest theater group in the world, after the ComĆ©die-FranƧaise and the Oberammergau Passion Players) and the Harvard Krokodiloes (the foremost collegiate a cappella group in the United States). Over the last two centuries, it has grown into a premiere performing arts organization, a patron of the arts and comedy, and an advocate for satire and discourse as tools for change worldwide.


Martin Luther King III, Vanessa Bell Calloway, David Mann, Lou Gossett, Jr., Bill Withers, Ed Gordon & More Added To 25th Annual Trumpet Awards

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Martin Luther King III
Bounce will world premiere the 25th Annual Trumpet Awards, the prestigious annual event celebrating African-American achievements and contributions, on Sunday, January 29 at 9:00pm ET.
Bounce recently acquired all assets of The Trumpet Awards and now owns, produces and exclusively premieres the star-studded ceremony.
Black-ishAngie Tribeca star and two-time EMMY nominated writer and actor Deon Cole and RosewoodThe Real Husbands of Hollywood and seven-time NAACP Image Award nominated actress Nicole Ari Parker will host the black-tie ceremony, to be held at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday, January 21, 2017.
Updates announced today:
  • Martin Luther King III will be presented with the Impact Trumpet Award.
  • An all-star Gospel Tribute featuring Shirley CaesarErica CampbellJekalyn CarrLe'Andria JohnsonTravis Greene and Derek Minor.
  • Previously announced honoree iconic musical group New Edition will be saluted in a medley performed by R&B bands Jagged Edge and Silk.
  • Vanessa Bell CallowayEd GordonLou Gossett, Jr., David MannWillie Moore, Jr., Gary Owen and Bill Withers have been added to the line-up of presenters.
  • Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed is set to open the ceremony.
Tamela Mann, Regina BelleBJ the Chicago Kid, Lalah Hathaway, Kenny Lattimore and Keke Wyatt will also be performing throughout the evening.
Honorees at this year's silver anniversary ceremony include television host and Daytime EMMY nominee Wendy Williams who will be presented with the Trumpet Award for Entertainment, former NBA great Dikembe Mutombo who will be recognized with the Humanitarian Trumpet Award, New Edition receiving the Lifetime Achievement Trumpet, GRAMMY-winning soul singer Peabo Bryson accepting the Legend Trumpet and fashion blogger Gabi Gregg being given the Trailblazer Trumpet Award.
In a very special tribute, civil rights icon and founder of the Trumpet Awards Xernona Clayton will be presented with the distinguished "Golden Trumpet Award" in recognition of her unparalleled leadership, affecting change, and steadfast work in building the legacy of the awards.   
Black-ish, Angie Tribeca and two-time EMMY(R) nominated actor Deon Cole and Rosewood, The Real Husbands of Hollywood and seven-time NAACP Image Award nominated actress Nicole Ari Parker host  the 25th Annual Trumpet Awards...
ABOUT BOUNCE
Bounce (@BounceTV) airs on the broadcast signals of local television stations and corresponding cable carriage and features a programming mix of original and off-network series, theatrical motion pictures, specials, live sports and more.  

Bounce has grown to be available in more than 94 million homes across the United States and 93% of all African-American (AA) television homes, including all the top AA television markets. Among the founders of Bounce are iconic American figures Ambassador Andrew Young and Martin Luther King, III.
SOURCE: Bounce

18 January 2017

Protect Public Education - Stop Betsy DeVos! [Video Included]

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Image via www.bravenewfilms.org
The following is an email I've received from our friends at Brave New Films and, as usual, I'm very happy to share it with you


If you live in the US and are concerned about the future of the country's public education, this is definitely worth reading/watching... 

Stay safe!

Loup Dargent
Image via www.bravenewfilms.org
The Email: 
Loup,

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate held their hearing on Trump’s Secretary of Education nominee, Betsy DeVosAnd it was terrifying. 

We saw on full display a woman with no previous education experience other than trying to destroy Michigan's public school system and replace it with failing for-profit charter schools. 

A woman who is out to destroy public education as we know it and spent millions of dollars to do so.

Education can be the building block of a just and equal America – or it can be the feeder of an unequal, segregated America. 

Stand up today and share this video to protect free, public education for all! 

In solidarity, 
Robert Greenwald, President"


The Video:



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14 January 2017

Tell The White House Press Corps: Stand Up To Donald Trump's Blacklist! [Petition]

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The following is a very topical email (it has to do with Trump's behaviour towards the Press... as you've probably already guessed from the title of this post) I've recently received from Media Matters for America... 

Feel free to read it and act accordingly.

Stay safe!

Loup Dargent


Image via Media Matters For America
The Email: 
"Loup -- 

​At Donald Trump's first press conference as president-elect, Trump berated and blackballed CNN reporter Jim Acosta for daring to ask questions about his network's bombshell reporting on Trump's relationship with Russia. Even worse, the incoming White House press secretary threatened to throw Acosta out for doing his job and ask questions, and another Trump adviser attacked him. 

You would expect that the press would be outraged at such behavior from the administration. You would be wrong. The press pretended like none of this ever happened. They ignored that their colleague was being punished and shut out right in the middle of the press conference and continued engaging with Trump as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. 

>> Tell the White House Press Corps: Stand up to Trump's blacklist

Trump has literally banned the Des Moines Register from covering his events. He banned Univsion from attending his events. He revoked The Washington Post’s credentials for a period in retaliation for a headline that he didn’t like. He revoked Politico’s credentials for a while to punish them for an article he didn’t like. BuzzFeed--which Trump called "a pathetic pile of garbage" during the press conference--has been on a blacklist since June of 2015. The Daily Beast is on the blacklist and is almost always denied credentials as a result. This list isn’t exhaustive, either. 

But journalists covering Trump don’t learn. Time and time again, as one outlet after another is frozen out, reporters continue to go about their interactions with Trump and his people as if nothing is wrong. 


Enough is enough. Some principles are more important than competition among news outlets. 

When Trump does this, journalists must refuse to engage until he removes that person/outlet from the blacklist. Instead of ignoring Trump's bad behavior and going about their business, they must close ranks and stand up for journalism.
If a free press has any hope of surviving the next 4 years, we need the journalists covering Trump to nip this in the bud and send a clear message.

Anyone could be next.

John Whitehouse
Digital Director
Media Matters for America
@existentialfish "

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