Tip leads to safe return of AMBER Alert victim; ex-teacher Tad Cummins arrested

LIVE: Tad Cummins and Elizabeth Thomas breaking news

by Sinclair Broadcast Group

Tad Cummins was arrested on Thursday April 20, 2017 after a AMBER Alert triggered a nationwide manhunt. (Courtesy Siskiyou County Sheriffs Office )

WASHINGTON - A man accused of running away with a former student has been found and arrested.

According to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, Tad Cummins and and the girl* were located in Northern California.

The 50-year-old man and the 15-year-old girl were reported missing March 13 from Columbia, Tennessee.

"We couldn"t be happier to tell you she will soon be on her way back home to Tennessee," Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gwyn said.

Siskiyou County Sheriff"s Office spokesman Kelly Giordano says the capture of Cummins and rescue of the girl came thanks to a tip called into the department on Wednesday night.

Giordano says an officer responded to a tip Cummins" Nissan Rogue was spotted. The responding officer found the vehicle, which had no license plates. The officer ran the VIN number, which came back as Cummins" vehicle. The SCSO they mobilized their Special Response Team (SRT) this morning to Cecilville, where the vehicle was found. SRT officers found Cummins and the girl at a residence located near a commune in Cecilville.

Cummins did not resist arrest and was taken into custody just after 9 a.m. Thursday morning. He"s currently in transit from Cecilville to the Siskiyou County Jail located in Yreka, California. The area where they were found is two hours away from the jail. Cummins will be held on charges of sexual conduct with a minor and aggravated kidnapping. He has a hold for his extradition to Tennessee, placed by the TBI.

What happened in California this morning, however, proves it only takes one person to lead to a successful end. We are extremely thankful the hard work of all partners in this search has paid off, Gywn said. Were also grateful for the publics support and vigilance throughout this search effort.

"At the end of the day she"s 15 years old. She"s 15 years old; she"s a young girl that"s with a grown man that"s 50 years old. He needs to be held accountable for kidnapping this girl," Gwyn said.

Efforts to reunite the girl with her family were ongoing at the time of this post.

The last confirmed sighting was recorded in Oklahoma City, when the two were seen on security cameras inside a Walmart March 15.

Cummins faces charges of sexual contact with a minor and aggravated kidnapping. TBI said he was believed to have had two guns in his possession.

A photo and witness reported the former teacher had inappropriate contact with his student.

"We"re so happy that California police worked quickly and were able to find them and get her safe," one of the girl"s sisters told The Tennessean.

"I believe the FBI are going to make sure she"s healthy before she comes home," she said. "We"ll make sure she"ll get what therapy she needs and that she"s safe, that she knows she"s safe."

A lawyer for the girl"s family has said the teacher was allowed to continue working at the school for two weeks after he was reported kissing the girl. Attorney Jason Whatley has said the school system must have not believed the student"s report.

The school"s investigative files provided to The Associated Press by the attorney show that both Cummins and the girl denied kissing. The teacher, however, acknowledged that the girl was "a really good friend and she does leave her other classes to come see him when she needs someone to calm her down," according to a school report dated Jan. 30.

The report recommended that the girl be taken out of Cummins" class and that he be reprimanded to uphold his professional responsibility. The report also recommended that the administration monitor Cummins" classroom to make sure students weren"t there when they weren"t supposed to be.

The teacher would later be reprimanded on Feb. 3 by school principal Penny Love after the girl was seen in Cummins" classroom for a little more than half an hour that day. In her letter, Love said the girl being in his classroom was a violation of the principal"s order to him.

The school system didn"t suspend Cummins until Feb. 6. He was fired about a month later a day after the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation issued an Amber Alert about the teen.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said it worked tirelessly for the past five weeks, looking into more than 1,500 leads from all 50 states.

Two days after the girl disappeared, surveillance images from a Walmart in Oklahoma City showed Cummins and the girl purchasing food items in the store with cash. The images showed Cummins had altered his hair to appear darker and the girl"s hair may have changed to red.

The teacher"s wife of 31 years has filed for divorce. Court records show that Jill Cummins sued her then-missing husband on the grounds of irreconcilable differences and inappropriate marital conduct. The wife, who works for the Maury County school system, said she had not seen her husband since March 13. The couple has two children together.

*Editor"s Note: The name of the girl involved in this case has been removed from the original report because she is an alleged victim of a s*x crime.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/amber-alert-subject-elizabeth-thomas-found-safe-teacher-tad-cummins-arrested

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UPDATE Attorneys for Ledell Lee argue they should be allowed to locate, test DNA evidence collected in 1993 as part ...

AFRICANS GET EXECUTED IN ARKANSAS
In a hearing this afternoon before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright, attorneys for death row inmate Ledell Lee argued that they should be allowed to locate crime scene evidence collected in 1993, including a single hair and a Converse shoe with a pinhead-sized spot of human blood on it, for modern DNA testing. They hope testing can prove that the African-American hair found at the crime scene belongs to someone other than Lee, and that the speck of blood found on Lee"s shoe does not belong to the victim in the case.

UPDATE: Wright denied the petition.

Here it is. Lee was sentenced to death for the Feb. 9, 1993 murder of Debra Reese, 26, who was beaten to death in the bedroom of her home in Jacksonville. Investigators found that she was strangled and struck at least 36 times with a "tire thumper," a club used by truckers to check tire pressure. Her husband, a truck driver, had given her the tire thumper for protection while he was on the road. Lee has maintained he is innocent of the crime.

As reported in the jacksonville"s arkansas leader newspaper, lee was also convicted of raping two other Jacksonville women, and was put on trail in the rape and murder of Christine Lewis, a 22-year-old mother, also from Jacksonville, who was abducted from her home in Nov. 1989 before being raped and strangled. Her body was left in an abandoned house. Lee"s trial in the Lewis case ended in a hung jury.

During the hearing, Lee"s attorney Lee Short made the case that prior counsel in the Reese case failed Lee by not insisting on modern DNA testing of the items prior to now. He said that Lee had reached out to the Innocence Project in 1996, asking for them to take up his case, but was told they didn"t have the staff or funding. Pulaski County Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Johnson, arguing for the state, said that while there have been advancements in DNA testing techniques and technologies, attorneys for Lee had presented no evidence to the court proving those advancements.

Short said that at the time of Lee"s original trial, the science of hair analysis was mostly about comparison. "Basically what happened at the trial is this," Lee said. "I"ve got a hair. I"ve got another hair. I"m going to show you what the differences are." Lee said that with significant scientific advancements since 1993, investigators can now determine much more from hair analysis, especially if the hair involved has a root. Johnson said there"s no way of knowing if the hair has a root. Short claimed there was testimony to the effect that there was a hair root, but couldn"t find the passage while searching the transcript at today"s hearing. As for the speck of blood found on Lee"s Converse tennis shoe which was determined destroyed during testing to prove it was human blood Short said modern techniques could potentially recover a sample and prove it was either Lee"s blood or belonged to someone other than Debra Reese.

Judge Wright noted that there have been many instances where Mr. Lee "s case had come before the courts, but he hadn"t made the argument that the material should be tested with modern technologies and techniques. Wright said that if actual innocence was the basis of a claim by Lee, that could have been raised "earlier than the eve of execution." Short said that Lee has always maintained his innocence in the case, adding that without undertaking modern DNA testing, Lee "was not a good candidate for an actual innocence claim." If the court allows the testing, Short said, he believes the results will make Lee a very good candidate for an innocence claim. Johnson said that the purpose of the hearing is "not to ask "what if?"" adding that Short had "besmirched" the character of previous counsel who represented Lee. Short replied that he would "absolutely" besmirch the character of Lee"s previous counsel.

Short said that his investigations have shown that the evidence in the case is supposed to be in the custody of the Jacksonville Police Department, which is required to preserve the evidence. He asked the court to order the Jacksonville PD to either produce those items for testing or admit that they have been discarded. Short said attorneys for Lee are not asking for a new trial, only that the evidence be made available for testing.

Short said that Lee"s case was based on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony from witnesses he painted as flawed, including one witness who was on Vicodin at the time he claimed he saw Lee leaving Reese"s home, and another who told investigators she was of the Rastafarian religion and smoked marijuana daily. All eyewitnesses in the case, Short said, made "cross-racial identification" of Lee, which has been found to be flawed in other cases. Short also said that even though the crime scene was "extremely b****y," when Lee was arrested three hours after the murder, Lee was only found with a single speck of blood on his shoe. Short said the strongest evidence by the state was a Converse shoe imprint left at the crime scene. If Lee had changed out of his b****y clothes, Short asked, why didn"t he change his shoes too?

Johnson countered that even if modern testing found that the hair discovered at the crime scene belonged to a different African-American man, and that the blood on the shoe belonged to someone other than Debra Reese, neither would prove Lee"s innocence or create an alibi for him the night of the crime. Short argued that if either of those outcomes turned out to be true, it would "substantially advance" Lee"s case for innocence. Short cited the West Memphis 3 case, in which later DNA testing found that none of the DNA evidence discovered at the crime scene matched Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley or Jason Baldwin. Short said that in that case, Johnson could have made the same argument as he did in Lee"s case. The discovery that DNA evidence collected at the crime scene didn"t match any of the West Memphis 3 was instrumental to securing their release.

Judge Wright said he would have a ruling on the issue "by the close of business today."

Source: http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2017/04/18/attorneys-for-ledell-lee-argue-they-should-be-allowed-to-locate-test-dna-evidence-collected-in-1993-as-part-of-innocence-claim

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Accidental movie star Sharlto Copley on his gonzo career and ...

FREE FIRE MOVIE REVIEW

In the Martin Scorsese-produced shoot em up Free Fire, South African actor Sharlto Copley plays Vern, a narcissistic gunrunner in a polyester suit whos prone to a certain behavioral grandiloquence. He describes himself as a rare and mysterious pearl but cant shoot a gun to save his life; hes revealed to be a misdiagnosed child genius but never recovered from discovering his brilliance lacks any basis in truth.

Its a baroque characterization all antic energy and adenoidal line readings that allows Copley to steal just about every scene hes in. Which is no small feat considering free fires ensemble cast is rounded out by Oscar-winner Brie Larson and Armie Hammer (as a studly stoner) and offers determinedly demented performances by British actors Sam Riley and Babou Ceesay all amid a cartoonish crime tableau where the sense of suspense comes from just how many bullets the characters can pump into one another before finally bleeding out.

Copley explains his objective in Free Fire, opening Friday, wasnt to keep it real so much as surreal.

With the Vern character, I thought, Can I pitch the voice that way? Is the voice going to annoy the out of people? the actor says, seated on the patio of a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. Is the audience going to go, That was funny for the first minute. Now please shoot him and shut him up!

Copley, though, isnt the sort of actor who plays things safe. Its not for everyone, he says. When you take a strong position as an actor, its risky. It is what you might call scene-stealing or chewing the scenery. But thats my instinct: to do the thing Id like to watch on-screen.

Eight years into what can fairly be called an accidental movie star career, the 43-year-old has built a bizarre yet fascinating filmography by gnawing off sizable chunks of Hollywood scenery and chewing them to smithereens. With his natural talent for accents, implacable joie de vivre, gonzo skill at improvising dialogue and bottomless capacity to change his appearance from role to role, Copley is becoming increasingly well-known for his self-styled, sui generis screen presence. One that can bring to mind Crispin Glover or John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum in the performances proud eccentricity.

Which makes it all the more surprising to discover, then, that Copley had barely contemplated acting when he was cast in his debut movie, 2009s documentary style sci-fi thriller District 9. At the time, the Pretoria native had his sights set on becoming a media maverick, operating a film and TV production company while trying to set up ETV, what Copley describes as South Africas first national, free-to-air terrestrial TV channel.

He fluked into the role when writer-director Neill Blomkamp a Johannesburg school friend and filmmaking collaborator asked Copley to appear as a bumbling Afrikaner bureaucrat in a 10-minute test film he intended to show Hobbit and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. In the short, Blomkamp was pursuing the kind of lo-fi, found footage aesthetic that eventually found its way into District 9, which Jackson ended up producing.

Sharl was always this guy who was extremely overt and larger than life and very funny. He also could create characters very easily even though acting was never on his radar, Blomkamp says. Being a personality was on his radar. When he was starting his TV station, one of the shows was like Punkd. He was the guy who would manipulate people and mess with them. But that was in the greater goal of becoming a writer-producer-director.

Despite that lack of acting bona fides, the test footage persuaded Blomkamp and Jackson that Copley could carry the $30-million Sony film. And D9, of course, went on to become a surprise smash, grossing $210 million worldwide and earning four Academy Award nominations including best picture. You could imagine the conversations Neill must have had when he said, I want to cast my buddy from South Africa, Copley says, growing wide-eyed at the memory. What has he done? Well, hes not really an actor. And hes going to make up the dialogue. Its impossible! I didnt even know I could do it!

Since then, the actor has gone on to rack up memorable performances in a dozen-odd films. Appearing alongside Bradley Cooper and Liam Neeson as the mentally unstable Capt. James Howling Mad Murdock in Foxs 2010 A-Team movie adaptation, Copley adopts a drawling Southern accent and attempts to use a defibrillator to jump-start a car engine. Thats one of my favorite all-time characters, an absolute essential part of being able to work in Hollywood, he says. After District 9, my agents were very quick to set up that meeting saying, Look, he isnt the bureaucrat guy. But people thought, Hes not an actor. This is him. I got that a lot.

Playing a psychotic baddie in Spike Lees 2013 Oldboy, the actor grew out his nails, donned prosthetic scars and assumed an upper-crust English accent (as well as what Copley calls a bisexual edge). He plants loves true kiss on Angelina Jolie as the unrequiting subject of her storybook sorceress characters affections in Maleficent. And as a samurai sword-wielding mercenary pursuing Matt Damons character in the 2014 sci-fi thriller Elysium (also directed by Blomkamp), Copley displays a convincing homicidal streak and outre physicality that had remained, until then, an unproven commodity.

The actor also provides a motion-capture performance and weirdly childish voice-over as a Pinocchio-like A.I. battle bot in Blomkamps action-dramedy Chappie. And by this point, Copley serves as something like a spirit animal for the writer-director.

Off camera, as a friend, he really has a heart of gold, says Blomkamp. On-screen, working with him, theres a level of intensity he has that 99.9% of actors dont have: a specificity and intensity about what hes doing with the role, and wanting to know every single possible thing he can know about it. Its probably what makes him so magnetic to watch.

But none of those roles offered such a pu pu platter of dramatic personae as last years first-person-shooter action flick Hardcore Henry. Portraying a character named Jimmy, Copley appears in 11 incarnations as a homeless alcoholic, hippie biker, ghillie suit-wearing sniper and quadriplegic scientist among them getting his head blown off, going up in flames and dying repeatedly, only to come back and chew the scenery again.

The actor called it his most challenging professional experience to date (and not just because at one point he thought he had accidentally run over and killed a stunt man during production). A good character actor is going to do those characters really different, says Copley. The real challenge is, how do you play 11 versions of the same guy? If you go too different, it starts to feel like, No, thats weird. Youve got to feel like its him still in there.

To hear it from Ben Wheatley, director and co-writer of Free Fire, Copleys background behind the camera gives him certain advantages inhabiting different characters. On set, hes offering up loads and loads of stuff all the time almost to the chagrin of the other performers, Wheatley says. Hes come up through postproduction, through sales and all sorts of stuff. He can look at how everythings made with a much more understanding eye.

Of Copleys overall body of work, the director adds: A lot of why those performances are so rounded is because they come from that position of understanding what the world of the work is like.

Toward the end of the year, however, Copley plans to cross the filmmaker-performer divide once more, having written, with the intention of directing and starring in, a film project he describes as satirical science fiction with a lot of comedy.

Currently casting the movie, the South African admits some difficulty in finding actors who can conjure the heartfelt yet buck-wild je ne sais quoi that imbues his own performances.

Im thinking, Who do I put with me? What Ill often find is theyre great in serious but not that funny. Or theyre so funny but am I going to feel them? Its that line of: How much heart and how much humor? Copley says. Like Woody Allen has his thing. Will Ferrell has his thing. The tone, if I get it right, becomes my thing.

And what, precisely, is that tone? Its the instinct I have as an actor. Its for the purpose of entertaining, not the purpose of, Thats so real! Those performances never interested me.

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Source: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-mn-free-fire-sharlto-copley-20170420-story.html

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Berkeley reverses cancellation of Ann Coulter speech

Ann Coulter on The Sean Hannity Radio Show (4/19/2017)

The PostsWilliam Wan and Susan Svrluga report:

The [University of California at Berkeley] had announced Wednesday that it was canceling [Ann] Coulters appearance following several political protests in Berkeley that turned violent.

But on Thursday, the university said it had found a venue where it could hold the speech on May 2, instead of the original April 27 date. However, a leader of the college Republican group that originally invited coulter said the university was placing strict conditions on the event, and he said his group intended to reject the new terms.

The decision to cancel Coulters speech drew sharp criticism from some on the campus, such as Robert Reich, a Berkeley professor who served as labor secretary under President Bill Clinton.

Im not sure from the story what conditions the college Republicans are rejecting; I will update the post when I learn more.

Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg=AFQjCNGJDBAUnZMd4mviw0q7TUzgfbeMjQ&clid=c3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&ei=MtX5WJCgOdut3wGrpYHgBg&url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/04/20/berkeley-reverses-cancellation-of-ann-coulter-speech/

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Happy 420 Day: The Surprising History Behind The Global Cannabis Celebration

Happy 420: NEW UPDATE!! VECTOR & MOTORBIKE OP!! - Playerunknown"s Battlegrounds

Thursday, April 20 marks the annual cannabis celebration 420. With fans of the drug in North America and around to world set to celebrate en masse, there is still confusion over the meaning of the celebration, and theories on where the term originated abound.

While some claim the term comes from the police code 420 meaning marijuana smoking in progress, others have linked the name to dictator Adolf Hitlers birthday, which was on April 20. The most widely accepted theory, more plausibly, stems from the notoriously eclectic band The Grateful Dead.

Marijuana fans the world over are set to celebrate 420 on Thursday. [Image by Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Images]

Legend has it, Dave Reddix, a roadie for the band, coined the term during high school in the 1970s when he would regularly meet up with several of his friends after school at 4:20 to smoke marijuana. Reddix and his friends would reportedly use the code 420 to each other throughout the day to make plans for that afternoon. After Reddixs brother helped him get a job with the band, the term quickly caught on through the circle of Grateful Dead fans, or, Deadheads, a group that has long been synonymous with the drug.

The name really took off in 1990 when the band released a flyer inviting fans to smoke 420 with them at 4:20 P.M on April 20. A flyer reportedly found its way to Steve Bloom, a reporter from weed-centric publication High Times who published the flyer in the magazine and continued to use 420 to reference the drug.

TIME tracked down Reddix and interviewed him on the eve of the celebration. When asked about the significance of the time 4:20, Reddix had a surprisingly simple answer. He explained that school finished at 3 p.m., with sports practice immediately after, so by the time Reddix and his friends were finished with their daily commitments, it was around 4:20 p.m.

Reddix went on to explain the factors that lead to the creation of their cannabis club.

We got tired of the Friday-night football scene with all of the jocks. We were the guys sitting under the stands smoking a doobie, wondering what we were doing there.

Around the country and the world, stoners and marijuana enthusiast alike get ready to celebrate the annual event on Thursday, April 20. While in the past this may have meant mayhem and chaos for police, the growing acceptance of marijuana across North America and parts of the world mean the majority of those celebrating run little risk of punishment or arrest.

USA Today report that the sheer size of the crowds that gather on College Campuses and public spaces to observe the celebration mean that even those states that have not yet legalized the recreational consumption of weed are likely to turn a blind eye come Thursday.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced plans to decriminalize recreational use of marijuana in the country. [Image by Richard Drew/AP Images]

With numerous states across the US and all of Canada reducing or abolishing penalties for recreational use of the drug, large numbers of green tourists are reportedly arriving in more relaxed states ready to celebrate on Thursday. Speaking to self-proclaimed bud tender Jason Coleman, USAToday report that many Denver, Colorado area marijuana dispensaries are preparing for record sales. Coleman, a worker at popular Denver dispensary Medicine Man said he expected the store to double their normal sales in the days leading up to 420.

South Carolina tourist Catherine Heelan described the mood in Colorado compared to her home state.

For people like me, its mind blowing. Theres no shame. The stigma and shame is gone here. No one looks down on you.

Meanwhile, political activists are also using the occasion to protest federal government interference with state-level legislation regarding the legalization of marijuana for medical uses. The demonstration aims to hand out 1,000 joints to workers on Capitol Hill before holding a mass smoke-in on the Capitol steps next Monday.

[Featured Image by Brennan Lindsley/AP Images]

Source: http://www.inquisitr.com/4159640/happy-420-day-the-surprising-history-behind-the-global-cannabis-celebration/

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"Fargo" Season 3 Premiere Recap: Let Me Go A.C. on You

Fargo Season 3 Extended Trailer

Buried just underneath the blood-splattered snow mounds of the American Midwest, right out of earshot of the aw jeezs and dontchyaknows that populateFargos Minnesota Nice is a question Noah Hawleyand the Coen brothers before himhave been trying to answer since 1996: What, exactly, makes a story true? What does it mean for a storyteller to claim, upfront, to be taking you on a journey exactly as it occurred, only to have a UFO descend from the sky to break up a firefight?

The Law of Vacant Places, Fargos third season premiere, lays out this thesis blunter than any Fargo season (or film) before it. We open with a small room somewhere in East Berlin, 1988, on the Communist side of the still-standing Berlin Wall. Outside it is lightly snowing, but inside two men are caught in one heck of a misunderstanding:Jakob Ungerleider knows, possibly for a fact, he is not Yuri Gurka, that his wifes name is Helga Ungerleider and not Helga Albracht, that she is at home avoiding the winter weather and not lying in a morgue, strangled to death. But for Jakob Ungerleider to be right, the stateand by extension, the stoic officer sitting across from himwould have to be wrong. What you are giving me is words, the officer says. This wife who is alive, a different last name, that is called a story. We are not here to tell stories. We are here to tell the truth. Understand?

And we do understand, then, that in its third year Fargo is going to exist more than ever in the murky gray between Ungerleider and the state, truth and story, trudging plow-like through the foothills between a truth, your truth and the truth. Which makes it all the more appropriate that when fargo: year 3 arrives now, 2017, a period plagued with alternative facts and fake news, it does so not with the grace of a UFO but with all the subtly of an air conditioner falling on your head.

Flash forward to 2010; the dates, names and location change but the situation is same as it ever was. We trade Ungerleider vs. the Communist state for Stussy vs. Stussy, Ray and Emmit, two brothers (but not twins) both portrayed in varying degrees of paunchiness by Ewan McGregor. McGregor, who has played dual roles twice before, seems to have a better handle on Ray, thanks, Im sure, in no small part to the sometimes-prosthetic, sometimes au naturelgut dragging down his usually slight frame, as life seems to do to Ray at any given turn. As Emmit, his performance feels a lot more like Ewan McGregor got drunk at a Great Gatsby-themed party and tried to do a Minnesota accent. Great wigs, though, and kudos to whoever decided to color Emmits smile a white more blinding than the snow outside his stuffed-bear-boasting mansion. What Hawley has instilled in both brothers, though, is a belief in something they believe to be true at such a deep, fundamental level, theyre both willing to stealand, eventually, killin order to bring that truth to life. Emmit, that he deserves his vast fortune, that hes earned it; Ray, that his brother stole that very same fortune away from him.

Heres what we do know: When the brothers father died, he bequeathed a red Corvette to Emmitand a vintage stamp collection to Ray. Emmit, business-savvy even then, proposed a trade and Ray, just 15-years-old with visions of backseat trysts dancing in his head, agreed. The eldest Stussy then sold the stamp collection into the basis for his eventual fortune, vaulting off that foundation to become the Parking Lot King of Minnesota, while Ray steered that red Corvette out of his high-school glory days and into a life of male-pattern baldness and parolees splashing p**s on to his cowboy boots. The way I figure, you still owe me, Ray tells Emmit in the brothers only scene across from each other, one lone stamp still hung lovingly on the office wall behind them.

And, again, who knows what the truth is? Who knows whether Emmit would have still amassed a fortune while driving a dingy Corvette, or if Ray would have even realized the value of some dusty stamps? What matters is thebeliefthat they are right,a belief so strong that, in Rays case, he convinces drug-test-blowing parolee Maurice LeFay (a delightfully strung out Scoot McNairy) to break into his brothers house and steal back what he sees as his birthright. But belief is as dangerous as it is fickle; after all, it is because Maurice is sure, so sure, half-stoned and full-dense as he is that the address written on the wind-stolen piece of paper read Eden Prarie that he ends up breaking into the wrong home and murdering the step-father of Gloria Burgle.

Gloriaand what a name that is, Gloria Burgleis Fargos prerequisite put-upon small-town police officerjust, aw heck, trying to do the right thing, aspiritual successor in browns and tans to both Molly (Allison Tolman, season one) and Lou (Patrick Wilson, season two) Solverson. Glorias a whisper in the Minnesota wind, struggling to gain attention from a smart-phone absorbed son, Nathan, and automatic doors alike. The fact that Glorias husband left her for another man doesnt say as much as her quiet acceptance after the fact.

But, as anyone who has seen HBOs misery-hour The Leftovers can tell you, a character played by the formidable Carrie c**n is going to have more layers a Fargo extrasoutfit. The same woman who casually describes a U-Turn as flipping the b-word is also to walk, unflinching, into her step-fathers suspiciously open front door, to return gun-drawn even after she discovershis body in front of the open freezer door.

Fargo, for all its cheeky colloquialism and black humor, is still usually good for at least one panic-attack-disguised-as-TV-scene per episode (heck, season two was made up of roughly 85 percent tense standoffs). And Jesus, what a scene. Hawley plays with the darknessor lack thereof only an isolated house in the middle of the Minnesotan countryside could provide, but its the sound that turns this into a nightmare; the static of the TV mingled withMaurices faint footsteps are all we get until that overwhelming throat-singingthink Watto from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace but possessed by the demon Pazuzubursts in to soundtrack Glorias mad, flashlight-assisted rushthrough a house that suddenly seems just that much more haunted.

And, in the end, it amounts only to confusion and the discovery of a stack of what looks like old horror and pulp (The Dungeon Lurk, The Planet Wyh). What the heck? whispers Gloria to a house that can only answer with creaks in the wind.

Bless Mary Elizabeth Winsteads Nikki Swango for providing the world with A) The name Nikki Swango, a surefire staple onfake IDs for years to come, and B) the mostand possibly onlyballer as h**l competitive bridge montage in the history of competitive bridge. While Maurice bungles the stamp-theft to high h**l, Ray and his simpatico to the point of spooky parolee-turned-girlfriendare taking home third runner-up (check herFacebook, it happened) in the Wildcat Invitational.

I love the genuine affectionbetween Nikki and RayNikki could have easily been played as a leeching harpy, Ray just as simply slipped into the role of vengeful thugespecially when compared to the private life of Emmit. Nikkis apartment is nothing compared to Emmits sprawling estate, but she and Ray fill the entire placewith warmth as easily as they fill the bathtub with their bodies; compare that to Emmits wife reminding him to take off his house shoes, a nod to a life of great sterility.

But, of course, no moment of peaceful bliss goes untarnished in the Fargo universe. I wont lie, Maurice says, bursting into Nikkis bathroom bearing a sleeve of $.25 stamps. It did not go smooth.It never does; the situation escalates, from threat to threat, from bare a*s to bare a*s until Maurice draws a gun, demanding a dollar value of $5,ooo for his troubles. I believe it was Chekhov who dictated a gun drawn must be fired by the third act unless the character who drew said gun is crushed to death underneath an air-conditioning unit.

Hawley milked that death-by-AC for all it was worth, spinning and whirling its way from Nikkis apartment to Maurices cranium, and I wont sit here and tell you the resulting Silly Putty-esque flattening wasnt worth the wait. But even more, it cleverly justifiedthe idea of Nikkiscompetitive bridge infatuation; any person who understands the mind-dulling rules of a game like Bridge, understands wellenough for gosh-darn third runner up spot in the Wildcat Invitational, is a character I believe can calculate Maurices flight down her apartment steps.

Appropriate, too, that its Ray, the bald-headed brawn to Nikkis brains, that eventually says h**l to the data and simply boots the A.C. from the window. The aftermath of the murder, so quickly and efficiently done, is key; the duo is energized, even elated. Youre sosexy, he says to Nikki as she lies to a police officer over the phone. Because to these two, especially Ray, all of this, the botched robbery, the quick escalation to violence, its all a means to procuring what Ray is owed. Has always been owed. Ray isnt dangerous because hes naturally a criminal, or because hes violent. Hes dangerous because of that malleable idea of the truth, his truth, a vision of a future-to-bethat so consumes Ray Stussy hes willing to do anything to make it a reality.

As the strains ofNathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats S.O.B. closes out the episode, its only appropriate that the lyrics Im gonna need someone to help me echoas we cut back to Gloria, a character whose grip on reality, once as simple as flipping a b-word on a wide open road, is plummetingfaster than a dislodged air-conditioner, turning end over end toward the pavement.

• Its hard to glean much of David Thewlis rot-mouthed enigma V.M. Varga, which I believe is exactly the point. I do love the way Thewlis plays him seemingly detached from humanitywaiting in Emmits office in the dark like an unplugged robot was a great touchwhich lends an extra chilling note of uncertainty to lines like We already have access to your system.
• Note: thanks to a visit to the set, I know what the deal is with Vargas teeth. It aint great. Its actually, in Thewlis own words, very gross.
• You know the more I think about it, the more I question why Nikkiwhy anyone living in Minnesota, actuallywould even need an air conditioner in the first place.
• If all Michael Stuhlbargs Sy Feltz does the entire season is passive-aggressively echo anything Emmit says with an extended jeeeeeeez, I would not complain.

Source: http://observer.com/2017/04/fargo-season-3-premiere-recap-ewan-mcgregor-carrie-c**n/

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Serena Williams is pregnant � her swimsuit selfie spoke the truth

Überraschung! Serena Williams ist in der 20. Woche schwanger

Serena Williams is pregnant, her representative confirmed Wednesday afternoon, hours after the tennis star posted and then deleted what appeared to be a baby announcement on social media.

"I"m happy to confirm Serena is expecting a baby this Fall," the athlete"s rep told the associated press via email.

williams" early morningSnapchatselfie showed the 35-year-old athlete in profile, wearinga bright yellow one-piece swimsuit and sportingthe bittiest of bellies captioned with the declaration,"20 weeks."

Williams and Redditco-founder Alexis Ohaniangot engaged in December. Other posts on her Snapchatshowed signs of what appeared to be a vacation in Mexico.

Along with lots of entertainment and news outlets, the Women"s Tennis Assn. picked up on the Snapchat post early in the morningbut later took down its congratulations message, according to CNN, which posted a screen grab of the deleted selfie. Tennis" US Open offered congratulationsas well, without question.

Updated, 4:53p.m.: This post wasupdated with confirmation that Williams is pregnant.

The article was originally published at 3:19 p.m.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-april-serena-williams-pregnant-tennis-star-1492638557-htmlstory.html

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