Tina Knowles Shuts Down Beyoncé's BET Awards Show Controversy

Tina Knowles is not having your Beyoncé conspiracy theories, OK, internet? 

Commenters lashed out at the House of Deréon designer after she fumbled the reason why Beyoncé skipped out early on the BET Awards Sunday evening. According to Bey’s mom, who stayed behind to accept awards on her daughter’s behalf, Yoncé had to leave immediately after opening the show with Kendrick Lamar to make her concert date in London. 

“On behalf of my beautiful daughter, who is on a plane. She had to run straight from the stage and get on the plane and fly to London for a concert,” Knowles said. “Hopefully she’ll make it in time. But that’s how important this awards show was for her to show up.” 

The internet quickly cried foul upon discovering that Beyoncé wasn’t scheduled to perform her first show in the U.K. until Tuesday, June 28. And even then, Queen B is playing in Sunderland, England, on Tuesday night — she doesn’t make it to London until July 2. 

Tina scrambled to right her wrongs in two Instagram posts early Tuesday morning. 

“First of all I did make a mistake on the city and the day,” Knowles wrote. “I asked why did she have to leave early and was told by a member of her staff that ‘she had to get back in time for her concert’ and that she actually should have been there 2 days before, as the tour has been down for a month.”

Bey’s mom added, “I assumed the date was Monday and the city was London well it turned out to be in the U.K. but wrong city and on Tuesday. I want to point out that there is a nine hour time difference and it is an eleven to 12 hour Flight that equates to 19 – 20 hrs to get there!” 

Hello guys first let me sayI just got a wind of the mess that has festered since last night ! The fact that I supposedly lied about my Daughters concert . First of all I did make a mistake on the city and the day . I asked why did she have to leave early and was told by a member of her staff that “she had to get back in time for her concert ” and that she actually should have been there 2 days before, as the tour has been down for a month I assumed the date was Monday and the city was London well it turned out to be in the Uk but wrong city and on Tuesday. I want to point out that there is a nine hour time difference and it is an eleven to 12 hour Flight that equates to 19 – 20 hrs to get there! I then want to ask what would be the point of lying to the public and knowing that anyone could see when the date was. Any one with good sence could see that ! I am hurt and disappointed because I know what kind of work, sacrifice , and personal Money it took for her to do this show and support the Bet Award show and to give her fans that did not get to attend the concert a piece of her show. (Even though it means she has one day to rehearse herself and dancers after being off for a month) That was really important to to her. Although everyone told her this is going to take a toll on your tour because you will only have one day to rehearse and you and the dancers will have been off for a month. You will be exhausted because you get to the states on Thursday rehearse for Bet fly to Mexico to be with your Sister for her Birthday on Friday get back to La on Sunday and start rehearsals at Bet At 7 am . (Who else would get three hours of sleep like that? ) Book a huge private plane to carry your dancers and creative staff and choreographers road Managers and pay for it out of your own pocket. Who does that? Please understand that I absolutely am not doing this for anyone but my self ! I know I owe no explanation to anyone but I am tired of people writing my story. So I chose to tell my own ! Thanks for listening❤️continued on next post

A photo posted by Tina Knowles (@mstinalawson) on Jun 27, 2016 at 10:41pm PDT

In another post, Tina pinned the controversy on people who want to “start lies and false rumors about our entertainers we celebrate when they stumble.” 

Tell ’em, Tina! 

Honestly, we can’t imagine keeping up with Bey’s schedule for world domination her world tour, so let’s cut Tina a break. 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Time For California Lawmakers To Dump Prop 209 Affirmative Action Ban

The California legislature and Governor Brown now have all the ammunition they need to do what they should have done years ago. And that’s dump the outdated, outmoded, and grossly harmful Proposition 209. That’s the state amendment passed by voters two decades ago in 1996 that banned the use of race as a factor in college admissions. The ammunition was supplied convincingly by the US Supreme Court when it strongly upheld the University of Texas’s affirmative action program. Justice Anthony Kennedy rammed the point home that race can be considered in admission to ensure broad, and meaningful racially diverse colleges. California Attorney General Kamala Harris further underscored the critical importance of affirmative action at California colleges in her friend of the court brief.

Affirmative action also assures the fair and equitable use of tax dollars for public education. This is a point missed or deliberately distorted in the affirmative action wars. That is that African-American and Hispanics pay taxes, lots of taxes, and are vital public stake holders. Yet when colleges, and universities shut the door or severely limit the number of African-American and Hispanic students at public institutions this means their tax dollars’ amount to de facto support of modern day quasi Jim Crow education. They are forced to pay for educational services and advantages in higher education that white students get and their children are denied.

Studies on college admissions to California colleges and universities have repeatedly found that there was a big plunge in the number and percentage of Black and Hispanic student enrollment after the passage of Prop. 209. This downward trend has remained agonizingly steady over the years. The studies also found that colleges and university administrators have done everything they could to devise policies and strategies employed to deftly skirt around Proposition 209 to ramp up the low numbers of black and Latinos on the campuses. The efforts have failed to boost the numbers. The problem of stagnant or declining Black and Hispanic student enrollment is made even worse by the widening gap between the percentage of underrepresented minority students graduating from California high schools and the percentage enrolling at UC.

In 2014, the California senate took a big stab at trying to roll back Proposition 209 when it passed the Constitutional Amendment 5. This would have given voters another chance to consider the use of race in college admissions. The bill was pulled after some Asian-American constituent groups claimed that reinstituting affirmative action would do major harm to Asian-American students’ chances of getting admitted to state colleges and universities. The charge that Asian-Americans would and are getting the short end of the admissions stick from affirmative action doesn’t hold up. Asian-American students already make up a disproportionate number of students at many public universities. According to university figures, at the University of Texas they make up 16 percent of the university enrollees though they are only 4 percent of the state’s population.

The figures there are typical of their enrollment at many public universities where Asian-American students make up double digit numbers of the student population.

The other old argument is that affirmative action is just another way of imposing quotas that would admit a lot of unqualified, poorly-educated Black and Hispanic students to the colleges. This is nothing more than a rehash of the old quota or reverse bias argument that’s been used for years by conservatives to thwart affirmative action.

Quotas have long since been ruled illegal. Despite popular myth even before the imposition of Proposition 209 in California there was never a quota system that mandated a set number of Black and Hispanic students be admitted at any California university or state college. Race, then, was simply used as one of several factors that could be considered in a student’s admission.

The brutal reality is that Proposition 209 is a relic of a time past when the relentless attack on affirmative action was a sneaky, and malicious way to maintain a racially discriminatory, two tiered education system that blatantly excluded Black and Latino students. It was bad public policy then, and in the two decades that Proposition 209 has been on the books, it still is. Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, there’s absolutely no reason why California lawmakers shouldn’t speak too and dump Proposition 209. Their swift action on this can and will serve as a model for other states that followed California’s lead and imposed bans on affirmative action in higher education to make affirmative action a reality again. We’ll all benefit from that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

King Tommen Finally Reveals Why We Never Saw Ser Pounce Again

(Spoilers are coming, you’ve been warned!)

Meow we finally know the truth.

In the most gut-wrenching scene from Sunday’s “Game of Thrones” Season 6 finale, Tommen Baratheon, the first of his name, jumped from a window of the Red Keep, ending his reign and actor Dean-Charles Chapman’s run on the show. 

The scene was horrifying, but after it, only one question was on everyone’s mind: Who the heck is going to take care of Ser Pounce?

“Yeah, I don’t know. I suppose there’s a lot of staff around the kingdom to look after him. Hopefully he didn’t get caught up in the blast. That’d be a tragedy. I like to think he’d also move on with his life and get a girlfriend maybe,” Chapman told The Huffington Post.

Pounce, of course, is the hero cat who stole the moment in Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell) and Chapman’s first scene together. Tommen’s pet made only one appearance on the show, and now we know the reason why.

The 18-year-old says he was nervous for his scene with Dormer, and the cat didn’t make things any easier.

“With the cat, it was my first time working with animals, and it was quite hard because you’re doing a scene with the other actress or actor, and at the same time there’s trainers off the set, behind the camera, like with a little toy putting food on the bed for it to stand in a certain position, and that cat that day would have none of it. He was just loving life. He just really wasn’t on his game that day,” Chapman explained. “Yeah, I think that was the reason why they didn’t have him back because it’s just hard work. Cats can’t understand English, so you tell a cat, ‘Come on. Jump on the bed,’ and he just looks at you like, ‘What are you talking about?'”

Dormer previously said in a Reddit AMA that Ser Pounce was a diva, causing speculation that that was reason the cat wasn’t back. We just hoped the rumors weren’t true. Apparently, she wasn’t kitten.

Chapman did add, however, that he loved the scene with Pounce. Perhaps the actor learned his lesson after comments about a love scene with Dormer were blown out of proportion in previous interviews. It’s not worth hurting Pounce’s feelings.

The loss of Pounce in the show is obviously cat-astrophic, but Chapman was only getting started, as he talked to HuffPost about the aftermath of the finale and the bloodshed ahead.

What was your reaction to Tommen’s scene?

As soon as I read it, I was sort of not really looking forward to it. This show has so many deaths every year, and at some point you know it’s going to come unless you’re really lucky. And as soon as I read it, I was kind of really nervous to film it, because I wanted it to be good. I wanted Tommen to go out in a good way. In a way, it’s an awful thing what he did. But instead of getting his skull crushed or, you know, dying in a sword fight, I think it was a great way visually. It looked great.

On the day, I think the main note I got from the director, I mean, we did it loads of variations on the day, but I think the one that made it to the end, it was just, “Have almost no reaction to what you’re seeing.” It’s so difficult to process what he’s seeing, and it’s almost like a dream. It’s like he’s hallucinated. Instead of him streaming tears from his eyes [or] running away to confront his mom, he’s just there, completely broken and by himself. Lost in his own thoughts [and that] leads to his death. 

Did you talk about how that reflected Bran getting pushed out the window?

Not really. That’s something I thought of not too long ago after I shot the scene. I didn’t really think of it like that. If you think of it like that, it is kind of clever. I suppose it’s a message of karma isn’t it? Karma comes down fast. Jaime intentionally tried to kill Bran, really. And [as] payback, [Cersei] got her son intentionally taking his own life.

What was it like shooting that scene?

For me, I was the only cast person there. Of course, I talk to the crew and the directors, but when you’re with the other actors you’re always talking. But that scene, I was by myself. It was weird. It was a great day. I couldn’t have asked it to be better. I couldn’t have asked for a better director. I thought it was shot beautifully. I thought it was edited beautifully with the lighting, the music and the way it looked. I think on the day, I was just more cool. “Game of Thrones” shoots from July to December, and I think we shot that in October or November, so I had four months to think about this scene, and it was finally there in front of me, and I was like, “Let’s do it.”

What do you think about Cersei’s actions?

In a way, she sort of caused Tommen’s death, didn’t she? And now she’s the queen. I don’t know how that’s going to pan out, especially now that she hasn’t got any children to keep her down to earth. I don’t know if she’s going to become the woman version of Joffrey. But, she’s an evil woman. She is. But she had no choice. She had to do something about it. I would do the same thing if it was those times again and I was in the same situation. In a way, I blame her, and in a way, I don’t.

What do you think about the theory that Jaime could be the one to kill her?

Oooh, that’d be good TV. That’d be very good TV [laugh]. For me now, I’m not in next season, so I can actually sit down and watch it with no spoilers. I literally know as much as you guys. But yeah, for Jaime to kill Cersei, that’d be pretty cool. I’d sort of like Dany to kill her. One-on-one girl fight. That’d be pretty sweet. But yeah, Jaime, I think he could possibly stab her or something.

Have you heard about the Cleganebowl?

Is this the Mountain and the Hound?

Yup. Fans think the Mountain and the Hound will face off. Do you think Tommen outlawed trial by combat because he’s secretly against Cleganebowl?

I don’t think he knew. I think he was just following rules, being the puppet I guess that he was. But, I guess it could happen. Fans want it to happen, so why wouldn’t it happen? I could definitely see the Hound coming back having to wrestle the Mountain. That’d be sweet. That’d be the highlight of my life. Yeah, I could see it happening.

We finally found out who Jon Snow‘s mom is. What was your reaction?

I really nerded out to be honest with you. In a way, I guess everyone sort of half knew that Jon Snow’s mom was Ned Stark’s sister [Lyanna Stark] … We all sort of figured it was Ned’s sister, but when I saw that I was like, “Yes, finally, my dreams are coming true.”

People were also excited about Lyanna Mormont.

I don’t know how old she is, but she’s a pretty ace actress, isn’t she? She knows what she’s doing. I hope she’s in Season 7, as well. I know the fans would love that. Hats off to the girl that played that role. She’s great.

(The actress is Bella Ramsey, FYI.)

How do you think the show will end?

I don’t think there will be an Iron Throne. I think it’ll all get blown away in dragon fire or something.

Wow!

Yeah, I think all this stuff over a metal chair is a bit too much. I think they’re gonna fix all of it. There’s definitely going to be major bloodshed. 

Have you seen the reaction to your scene yet?

It’s great. I’ve been getting major laughs, not only about me, but Tommen, which is absolutely great. And, as well, I want to use this opportunity to say thank you to all the Tommen fans, the people that actually got Tommen and loved Tommen. I love all you guys. Thank you for that.

No, thank you your grace. May the Light of the Seven guide you.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

This Animated Tribute to the NASA Voyager Space Program Is Simply Stunning

This Animated Tribute to the NASA Voyager Space Program Is Simply Stunning

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 are still exploring interstellar space today. Both probes have flown by Jupiter and Saturn while the Voyager 2 has made its way to Uranus and Neptune too. The Voyager space program has traveled further in space than anything ever has and serves as a wonderful reminder of how much farther we can go. Santiago Menghini made this short tribute to the program using animation and real archival footage to stitch together a poetic story of its ongoing journey.

Read more…

What Dark Magic Makes This Weird Yo-Yo Work?

Yo-yo tricks are already a miracle of physics. But Ben Conde specializes in a type of yo-yo with an unattached string, and does things that defy all logic. But there’s one sneaky feature that makes these contraptions work.

Read more…

Why Has Donald Trump Stopped Tweeting? 

Over the past 30-ish hours, the Supreme Court struck down
a Texas anti-abortion law, Liz Warren spent a solid 15 minutes burning Trump, and the GOP let Crooked Hillary get away with Benghazi
once and for all. And throughout all of it, red-faced Twitter egg king Donald Trump hasn’t made a peep. Something’s not right.

Read more…

Watch Galaxy S7 gaming get WAY better with Vulcan API

needyEarlier this year we spoke with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney about why Vulkan API was important to the Galaxy S7. It was a trailblazer, he said, saying that the graphics prowess this device was about to have would be mind-blowing. Today we get to see more about what it means to have the connection Sweeney speaks of. Moving from … Continue reading

Pinterest update: Visual Search searches images with pics

whatisPinterest has launched a new version of their app that’ll make it far easier for you to find products based only on what you’ve seen. Put an image into this app and you’ll find markers on said image, allowing you to find products like what you’ve Pinned. Today Pinterest launches not only “buyable Pins on web”, they’re also adding visual … Continue reading

Avoiding Windows 10 is about to get a whole lot easier

windows10It may be an understatement to say that Microsoft has been aggressive in its efforts to get Windows 7 and 8 users to upgrade to Windows 10. First came the promise that Windows 10 would be a free upgrade for PC users on an older version, and then came the rather nagging desktop popups prompting users to take advantage of … Continue reading

This is what Volkswagen will pay 2.0 TDI Diesel owners

VWSo you’re a Volkswagen or Audi 2.0-liter TDI owner – or you used to be – and your big question this morning is “how much is VW going to pay for my car?” The ink is hardly dry on the proposed settlement between the emissions-test-cheating German automaker, regulators in the US, and a suit brought by drivers themselves, but already … Continue reading