Short Haircuts For Spring-Summer 2015

Short Haircuts For Spring-Summer 2015

Probe into Rapper Slim Dunkin's fatal shooting continues

Atlanta police Saturday continued to investigate the shooting death of rapper Slim Dunkin, who was gunned down in a Memorial Drive recording studio Friday after possibly getting into an argument with another person. .

Dunkin, whose real name is Mario Hamilton, 24, was  rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Atlanta Police Major Keith Meadows said Saturday there have been no arrests and “we’re still talking to people, but the truth is we don’t know exactly what happened.” Meadow said  13 to 20 people were in the building when the shooting occurred, around 5:30 p.m.

Investigators were still piecing together the sequence of events.  Meadows said that Hamilton got into a "verbal altercation"  before the video shoot and the person he was arguing with pulled out a pistol and shot Hamilton once in the chest.

Meadows said Saturday it's not clear whether the argument was over the video.

"Right now we're just trying to....identify who may have seen what, really just trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together," Meadows said. "It seems everybody witnessed something very different. We're just trying to go back and make sense of everything."

Police have not recovered the handgun that was used.

Hamilton, who lives in metro Atlanta, was an emerging rap star with growing connections in the industry. Music news website HipHopDX reported Saturday Dunkin was a childhood friend of Waka Flocka Flame and appeared on Gucci Mane and Waka's "Ferrari Boyz" album released over the summer.

Another industy website, TheBoomBox, reported that the Brick Squad affiliate was to appear in the "Push Ups" video for Mane and V-Nasty when he was shot.

Fans posted a memorial Facebook page, “Rest In Peace Slim Dunkin,” where comments were posted Saturday.

“Life is so cruel, people don't give a dam [sic] about no one not even themselves, you got people crying, because people are dying," read one. Read another: " “It shows you that you can't trust a soul on this planet one min you with that person next you at there funeral."

Sam Houston State FCS NCAA Championship Game Ticket Information

NCAA CHAMPIONSHIP GAME TICKET INFORMATION
Sam Houston State University will have an allotment of 4,000 tickets for the NCAA Division I Football Championship game at Pizza Hut Park in Frisco, Texas, Saturday, January 7.

Kickoff is at 12 noon. The game will be televised on ESPN.
Regular season Bearkat season ticket holders and Bowers Stadium Suite Holders will have the opportunity to order midfield tickets ($45 each) Monday and Tuesday.o order, regular season season ticket/suite holders must call or come by the Sam Houston athletic ticket office located in the Ron Mafrige Field House Monday or Tuesday. The telephone number is (936) 294-1729. Season ticket/suite holders may order up to four tickets (or the same amount as their season ticket total if it is more than four).
Deadline to guarantee the order is Tuesday, Dec. 20, at 6 p.m. After then, these seats will be opened for sale to the public. This opportunity applies only to regular season package purchasers, not playoff series customers.

Sam Houston State students will receive an email early next week from SHSU Student Services with information and a pass word to order tickets online from Pizza Hut Park in the Bearkat student section. Tickets are $40.

Pizza Hut Park sidelines tickets (2,000 seats located between the end zone and the 25-yard line) will go on sale to the public on line at  beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday. These tickets will not be sold out of the SHSU athletic ticket office.

Barry Bonds gets 30-day home sentence -- at worst

SAN FRANCISCO—Eight years of being investigated for steroid allegations ended for home run king Barry Bonds on Friday with a 30-day sentence to be served at home. No more -- and maybe less.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston immediately delayed imposing the sentence while Bonds appeals his obstruction of justice conviction. The former baseball star was found guilty in April not of using steroids, but of misleading grand jurors.

Even without prison time, the case has left its mark on the seven-time National League MVP. His 762 career home runs, and 73 homers in 2001, may forever be seen as tainted records, and his ticket to baseball's Hall of Fame is in doubt.

Bonds declined to speak in court. Well-wishers hugged the 47-year-old in the hallway courtroom after the hearing was over, and a smattering of fans cheered him as he left the courthouse. It was a marked departure from his initial court appearance four years ago, when guards had to clear a path for Bonds to get through dozens of onlookers to his SUV.

"Whatever he did or didn't do, we all lie," said Esther Picazo, a fan outside the courthouse. "We all make mistakes. But I don't think he should've gotten any kind of punishment at all."

Bonds was sentenced to two years of probation, 250 hours of community service, a $4,000 fine and 30 days of home confinement. It will take time to determine whether he serves any of it; his appellate specialist, Dennis Riordan, estimated it would take nearly a year and a half for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to rule.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Parrella called the sentence a "slap on the wrist" and the fine "almost laughable" for a superstar athlete who made more than $192 million for playing baseball.

Parrella had sought 15 months in prison and argued that home confinement wasn't punishment enough "for a man with a 15,000-square-foot house with all the advantages." Bonds lives in a six-bedroom, 10-bath house with a gym and swimming pool.

"The defendant basically lived a double life for decades before this," Parrella said. He ripped Bonds not only over performance-enhancing drugs but over his personal life: "He had mistresses throughout his marriages."

Parrella said Bonds made lots of money due in part to his use of performance enhancers and that he has been "unrepentant" and "unapologetic" about it.

Illston said none of that had any bearing on Bonds' sentencing.

She said she agreed with a probation department report that called Bonds' conviction an "aberration" in his life. She said she received dozens of letters in support of Bonds, some discussing how he has given money and time "for decades" to charitable causes.

Bonds is the last -- and highest-profile -- defendant in the government's investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO, a steroids distribution ring. The ex-slugger has long denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs.

Illston said she was compelled to give Bonds a sentence similar to the two she meted out to other figures convicted after trial of lying to the grand jury and federal investigators about their connection to steroids.

The case against Bonds after he testified before the grand jury Dec. 3, 2003. Prosecutors revised his original 2007 indictment several times and spent a year unsuccessfully appealing a key evidentiary ruling before jurors deadlocked in April on three of the four remaining charges related to his grand jury testimony.

On the final charge, the trial jury convicted Bonds of purposely answering questions about steroids with rambling non sequiturs in an attempt to mislead the grand jury.

"I think he probably got off a little easy," said Jessica Wolfram, one of the jurors who convicted Bonds of obstruction. "He was just so clearly guilty, so I actually am happy he got sentenced to something."

Wolfram said she researched the case after the trial and viewed evidence not presented then. After that, she felt even more comfortable that Bonds was guilty.

Besides Bonds, 10 people were convicted of various charges in BALCO cases. Six of them, including track star Marion Jones, were ensnared for lying to grand jurors, federal investigators or the court. Others, including Bonds' personal trainer Greg Anderson, pleaded guilty to steroid distribution charges.

The government's top BALCO investigator, Jeff Novitzky, declined to comment outside the courtroom after attending the hearing.

Bonds was one of two former baseball superstars to stand trial in doping-related cases this year. The trial of pitcher Roger Clemens was halted after just two days in July because prosecutors used inadmissible evidence. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has set a new trial for April 17.

Both men will face a different judgment day in 2013, when they'll be eligible for the Hall of Fame.

Britney Spears Is Engaged

Britney Spears and Jason Trawick certainly had a lot to celebrate this month. Not only did the pop star and her beau celebrate their 30th and 40th birthdays, respectively, a source confirms to PEOPLE they're now engaged!

In fact, the pop star's longtime love proposed on his birthday Thursday night in Los Angeles. "He surprised her after she gave him his gifts and after they had cake last night," a source says of his proposal with a Neil Lane sparkler.

Sources recently told PEOPLE that Trawick was ready to pop to the question – and that the two had "been talking about marriage for a long time."

And, early Friday, Spears started dropping hints about her big news on Twitter.

PHOTOS: Britney & Jason's Love Story in 6 Sweet Shots


The singer began dating Trawick, her former agent, in 2009.

Spears has two sons, Preston, 6, and Jayden, 5, with ex-husband Kevin Federline, whom she divorced in 2006.

"She's very happy. It's going to be a great weekend," says another source. They plan to celebrate tonight in Las Vegas. 

Howard Hughes

I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness. Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life....If we select Nixon, then he, I know for sure knows the facts of life." -- from handwritten memos by Howard Hughes, early in the 1968 presidential campaign

Best known for: aviator, movie producer, billionaire, hypochondriac.

Born: Howard Robard Hughes, Jr., December 24, 1905, in Houston.

Family: Mother: Allene (Gano) Hughes (died March 29, 1922); Father: Howard Robard Hughes, Sr., founder of Hughes Tool Company (died January 14, 1924); Uncle: father's brother Rupert, a writer for Samuel Goldwyn's movie studios; Wives: Houston socialite Ella Rice (married June 1, 1925, divorced in 1929); Actress Jean Peters (married 1957, divorced 1970); Hughes often dated Hollywood actresses in the 1930s, especially Katherine Hepburn.

Education: Hughes attended private school in Boston, where he was better at golf than classwork. He was attending Thacher School in California when his mother died. In California, Hughes spent time with his uncle, Rupert, who inspired his later interest in filmmaking. Hughes never graduated from high school. Nonetheless, his father arranged for him to sit in on classes at Cal Tech by donating money to the school. Afterward, Howard returned to Houston and enrolled at Rice Institute (now Rice University). Howard, Sr. died suddenly a few weeks after his son turned eighteen. Young Howard inherited much of the family estate and dropped out of Rice.

Profession: Family business: Uncle Rupert supervised Howard's part of the estate and interests in the Hughes Tool Company until he was twenty-one. Family quarrels led Howard to have company lawyers buy out his relatives. A Houston judge and friend of his late father's granted Howard legal adulthood on December 26, 1924, allowing him to take over the tool company.

Career: Movies: Following the summer of 1924, Howard and Ella moved to Hollywood to pursue Howard's interest in making movies. When his first attempt failed, he hired Noah Dietrich to head the movie subsidiary of his tool company, and Lewis Mileston as director. The new team won an academy award for Two Arabian Nights (1928). Their next film, Hell's Angels (1930), written and directed by Hughes and starring Jean Harlow, was the most expensive movie of its time at a cost of $3.8 million. This movie, about World War I aviators, lost $1.5 million at the box office but allowed Hughes to indulge his interest in flying. While shooting Hell's Angels, Hughes earned his pilot's license. Two later Hughes films tested the limits of public morality. Scarface (1932) was censored until Hughes sued to allow its release, and The Outlaw (1941) became controversial for its sexually explicit advertising and content, both featuring a sensational décolletage worn by a busty Jane Russell.  Inspired by the excitement over The Outlaw, Hughes later took a break from airplane fuselage design to create the half-cup bra, modelled of course by his Hollywood discovery, Jane Russell.  It was in the '30s that Hughes built the Texas Theater, the movie house in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas in which Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in 1963. The closeness of both men to the CIA makes it all but certain that the Texas Theater would have become a clandestine meeting place for spies. Such use of movie theaters had long been a staple of espionage tradecraft, and other Hughes properties were put to similar use. Hughes owned the RKO movie studio from 1948 to 1955.

Aviation: In 1932, Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company division of Hughes Tool. The company has pioneered many innovations in aerospace technology. But its origin was an attempt to finance the expensive conversion of a military plane into a racing plane. The next year, he achieved a false status by lobbying the Commerce Department to lower his pilot's license number from 4223 to 80. Charles Lindbergh's number was 69. The only real job Hughes ever had also came in 1933. He signed on as a co-pilot for American Airways. He applied under the name Charles W. Howard. The ruse was quickly discovered, however, and Hughes resigned. After entering and winning the 1934 All-America Air Meet in Miami, Hughes built and personally test-piloted the world's most advanced plane, the H-1. On September 13, 1935, he set a new speed record, taking the plane to 352 mph. Over the next two years, he set two new records with transcontinental flights. Between July 10 and 14, 1938, Hughes piloted a special Lockheed 14 with a crew of four on a flight around the world. He cut Lindbergh's New York to Paris record in half, and finished the trip in three days, nineteen hours and seventeen minutes. Houston's airport was renamed in his honor. As World War II approached, Hughes turned his full attention to building military aircraft. But his regard for secrecy and disregard for military protocol and standardized materials kept him from getting contracts. Henry J. Kaiser, the famous shipbuilder, helped Hughes get a contract to build three "flying boats" for $18 million in three months. Those terms proved impossible for Hughes. In the end, he produced only one of the planes after the war ended. It was flown only once on November 2, 1947, by Hughes himself. The public ridiculed him by calling the plane "The Spruce Goose." Another wartime contract for reconnaissance planes went similarly unfulfilled, and caused the deaths of two people when Hughes crashed during a test flight at Lake Mead. In 1947, the Senate investigated Hughes failure to meet his wartime contracts. In the 1950s and beyond, Hughes manufactured spy satellites.

Military-Industrial Complex: Throughout the 1950s, as the power of three entities grew -- the Hughes empire, organized crime, and the new Central Intelligence Agency -- it became all but impossible to distinguish between them. By the end of the decade, Hughes' chief of staff, Robert Maheu, had orchestrated the CIA's dirtiest secret -- plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro with the help of two heads of organized crime. Vice President Richard Nixon was the White House action officer in the clandestine attempts to oust Castro. Zapata Off-Shore, the oil company owned by future CIA director and U.S. president George Bush after he split it off from Zapata Oil partner Hugh Liedtke in 1954, had a drilling rig on the Cay Sal Bank in 1958. These islands had been leased to Nixon supporter and CIA contractor Howard Hughes the previous year and were later used as a base for CIA raids on Cuba. Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy largely because of a scandal over a never repaid $205,000 "loan" Nixon's brother received from Hughes. As attorney general, Robert Kennedy secretly investigated the Hughes-Nixon dealings.

After Bobby Kennedy's assassination in 1968, Maheu and Hughes hired long-time Kennedy advisor Larry O'Brien along with other political insiders to protect their interests in Washington. In 1953, Hughes had founded the Hughes Medical Institute in Delaware as his sole act of philanthropy. By turning over all of the stock of Hughes Aircraft Company to the institute, he made his billion-dollar-a-year weapons factory a tax-exempt charity. By 1969, that scam was about to be shut down by a Senate bill, which followed an investigation by fellow Texan Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the House Banking Committee. But O'Brien lobbied his allies and got a loophole creating an exemption for "medical research organizations" like the Hughes Medical Institute.

President Nixon's downfall began when he ordered burglars to break into Larry O'Brien's office in 1972. At the time, O'Brien was both a Hughes employee and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, headquartered in the Watergate Hotel. The Watergate burglars happened to have been heavily involved in the covert anti-Castro operations (which Nixon oversaw as vice president). They were also deeply involved in the conspiracies which grew out of those operations; conspiracies which prevented any major political future for the Kennedy family, and led directly to Nixon's resurrection from political obscurity. The purpose of the break-in was never revealed because the Watergate scandal's investigations were sidetracked, likely on purpose, into a focus on multiple other high crimes by Nixon. Whatever the purpose of the break-in, Hughes was right in the middle of the major forces linking the conspiracies that resulted in the murders and character assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and the Watergate scandal that toppled the Nixon administration.

During all of these political intrigues, arguments between Hughes and his employees continued to threaten military contracts and resulted in his firing his long-time associate Noah Dietrich in 1957. As a stockholder in Trans World Airways, Hughes lobbied for the airline's purchase of sixty-three jets in 1956. He sold his TWA stock in 1966 for $546 million when the company faced numerous lawsuits. That same year, Hughes moved to Las Vegas and began doing business there. Las Vegas organized crime interests were actively transferring casino ownership to frontmen with less tainted reputations.

Hughes took over Air West in 1970. (He was later indicted in the Air West takeover, but the case was dismissed.) Hughes was increasingly reclusive and decreasingly in control of his business dealings. Not even Nixon could contact him directly. Maheu's power was also declining. The CIA assassination plots had begun to leak to the press, requiring the government to distance itself from Maheu. Not only did he know too much, it was one of his associates, attorney Ed Morgan, who had leaked the story to columnist Jack Anderson. It was now Chester Davis, Raymond Holliday, and Bill Gay, the Hughes Tool Company executives who ran Hughes Nevada properties, who were contacted by the CIA when they wanted to build a CIA ship, the Glomar Explorer, to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.

In 1972, Hughes sold Hughes Tool Company's stock and renamed his company Summa Corporation, ending any remaining role in his business. His health deteriorated and his entourage of aids carted him to Panama, Canada, London and Acapulco. On June 5, 1974, a break-in occurred at Hughes' Romaine Street headquarters in Los Angeles. The theft of secret documents sent shockwaves through the U.S. intelligence community.

Death: Hughes died April 5, 1976, en route by private jet to a hospital in Houston. His drastically changed appearance and the fact that he had been seen by so few people for so long forced the Treasury Department to use fingerprints to identify his body. He left an estate estimated at $2 billion. Four hundred prospective heirs tried to inherit it but it eventually went to twenty-two cousins on both sides of his family. Texas, Nevada and California claimed inheritance-tax in disputes reviewed by the Supreme Court three times. Hughes Aircraft ended up in the hands of Hughes Medical Institute, which sold it to General Motors in 1985 for $5 billion. Four hotels and six casinos in Las Vegas and Reno remained with Summa Corporation.

Bibliography:  Walter F. Pilcher, "Hughes, Howard Robard, Jr." The Handbook of Texas Online.
<http>; Chantal S.A. Web site, History: 1950, < >; Michael Drosnin, Citizen Hughes (New York: Bantam Books, 1985) pp. 6, 89, 89n., 272, 298-300, 309-311, 407-409, 430-431; 463, 539; "Zapata Petroleum Corp.," Fortune magazine, Apr. 1958, p. 248; Warren Hinckle with William Turner, The Fish is Red, (NY: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 67-69, 279-80; republished as Deadly Secrets, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992; Richard Bartholomew, “Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used in the JFK Conspiracy” (self-published manuscript, 1993, p. 63; Fair Play Magazine, Issue 17, July-August 1997).

Rapper Slim Dunkin slain in Atlanta studio

(AP)

ATLANTA - Atlanta police say the rapper Slim Dunkin was gunned down Friday evening in a city music studio as he prepared to record a video.

Police Maj. Keith Meadows said the performer, whose real name is Mario Hamilton, was fatally shot in the chest after getting into an argument with another individual.

"It appears the victim was scheduled to do a photo shoot," Meadows told The Associated Press. "Before the video shoot took place, it appears the victim and suspect got involved in a verbal altercation. We don't know what that altercation was about."

"The suspect produced a weapon, discharged that handgun one time, striking the victim in the chest," Meadows said.

The performer was transported to Grady Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Meadows said police have not been able to identify the shooter. He said 13 to 20 people were in the small office-type building at the time of the shooting, which took place around 5:30 p.m., but they were in different places.

"We've questioned a number of witnesses inside the recording studio at this time." Meadows said.

Police have not recovered the handgun that was used.

"Right now we're just trying to....identify who may have seen what, really just trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together," he said. "It seems everybody witnessed something very different. We're just trying to go back and make sense of everything."

Meadows said the victim was in his early 20s and resided in the Atlanta area.

Many fans were posting messages late Friday night on the rapper's Facebook page.