Tracee Ellis Ross will be return­ing to TV with Reed Between The Lines, a new half-hour com­edy green-lit by BET that will be shot in Atlanta. In the new show, Ross plays Dr. Carla Reed, a busy psy­chi­a­trist, wife, and mother, who’s strug­gling to bal­ance career and family.

Ross will also pro­duce, along­side Arthur Har­ris and Kel­lie Grif­fin, the for­mer head-writer for Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.

Reed Between The Lines con­tin­ues BET’s re-entry into the orig­i­nal scripted series arena along­side The Queen Lat­i­fah pro­duced Let’s Stay Together and rein­car­nated Girl­friends’ spin-off The Game. Pro­duc­tion on the pilot is slated to start in Atlanta on August 11th.

Girl­friends, Ross’ last TV series, was can­celed two years ago after an 8 sea­son run on UPN and then The CW. She can next be seen in the Off-Broadway Play, “Love Loss and What I Wore,” writ­ten by Nora and Delia Ephron, as part of the rotat­ing cast along­side Rosie O’Donnell, Sherri Shep­herd, Jane Lynch, Brooke Shields, and a slew of others.

J. Lo To Replace Ellen As “American Idol” Judge?

The American Black Film Festival Completes 14th Year

Join Carol Blackmon and Majic 107.5 / 97.5 on Friday, August 6 for the Beauty Shop Tour, sponsored by Visa!

Carol and Majic 107.5 / 97.5 will be visiting 10 metro Atlanta beauty shops during Carol’s Majic Midday Cafe from 10 am to 3pm!

If you want us to visit your salon, hit us up on Twitter by clicking RIGHT HERE!

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From Stylelist:

Fresh off the success of her inaugural fragrance Heat, launched in February to great fanfare, Beyonce Knowles is set to debut another spicy scent this September in the form of Beyonce Heat Ultimate Elixir.

This time around the 28-year-old Texas native puts a spin on the original fragrance by using notes that are meant to capture a more private side to the multi-hyphenate entertainer. Ultimate Elixir mixes spicy-floral Red Vanilla Orchid and Osmanthus petals with the sensuous notes of Cedarwood and Amber, then adds in delicious Vanilla and Tonka bean to drive the point home that this is a bouquet meant for one sexy siren.

SOURCE

VIDEO: Beyonce Turns Up The “Heat” In Perfume Ad

Oops! Beyonce Pulled Over For Texting While Driving

Yesterday we told you that Laurence Fishburne’s daughter is allegedly dating porn star Brian Pumper. Well we just found out that she’s about to release her own porno.

Montana Fishburne, who’s new porn name is “Chippy D,” is now an official porn star after doing a film with notorious adult film star Brian Pumper.

TMZ has learned Montana Fishburne is starring in a porno flick for Vivid Entertainment — explaining, “I’ve watched how successful Kim Kardashian became and I think a lot of it was due to the release of her sex tape.”

Unlike the celeb she admires — Montana is not arguing that her tape was stolen or obtained illegally.

The flick is set to be released in August.

Daddy Fisbburne must be going all kinda crazy right now!!!

SOURCE

Is Laurence Fishburne’s 18 Year-Old Daughter Dating A Porn Star?

She acts, sings, and dances, and now Jennifer Lopez may be adding a new gig to her résumé. The superstar has reportedly signed on to judge America’s biggest television show.

Deadline Hollywood reports that J.Lo has inked a deal to become a judge on the tenth season of “American Idol,” replacing Ellen DeGeneres who announced her exit today. The singer-actress would serve on the judging panel with Randy Jackson. Negotiations began months ago, but a deal was not finalized until this week.

Lopez was the celebrity mentor on Latin night during the talent competition’s sixth season. She has been busy recording her next album Love?, set for release on her new home at Island Def Jam.

VIDEO: Jennifer Lopez & Diddy Disagree Over Why They Broke Up

J. Lo: “My Goal Is To Sing Live As Much As Possible”

Aaron Hall has thrown some good-natured jabs at some of today’s R&B singers.

One of Carlton Jordan’s video peeps ran into the former lead singer of Guy turned dog whisperer and asked him for his thoughts on performers like The-Dream and Trey Songz.

SOURCE

RELATED: GALLERY: The-Dream Caught On The Beach With Another Woman

Check out Miss Luckett looking fab:

Did Keyshia Cole Lose Multi-Million Endorsement To LeToya Luckett?

LaToya Luckett Beats The Destiny’s Child Break-Up Horse

Washington Redskins footballer Devin Thomas is giving the ladies something to look at in his recent Krave Magazine shoot. In the issue he shares advice on dating, groupies and reveals whether he’s in a relationship.

Check out a few excerpts below:

On advice he would give another guy before dating

Be honest about what you are looking to get out of the situation, be frank. A lot of guys sell a woman a dream but that all comes back to haunt you in the end.

On groupies

Beware of them! It’s hard in my line of work to find somebody that can really be there for you. It’s tough meeting quality females, I’m not at the library you know. I can only really pick from the females I meet at the club.

On if he’s single or taken

I’m always looking to bake a cake with somebody. I’m completely single. I love relationships though, I love beauty and I love a woman who can show off her beauty without being trashy. I like all shades of women and I like a confident woman that can match me. I like excitement and I don’t want to talk about football all day. Impress me with the stuff that you do.

Take a look at the pics from the photoshoot courtesy of necolebitchie:

Michael Vick Cleared In Shooting Incident

Take a look at Devin in his video with Fantasia:

NEW VIDEO: Fantasia Feels “Bittersweet”

In a historical move, President Barack Obama appeared on today’s episode of The View. President Obama said the only reason he had chosen this show over all the others was because his wife Michelle watched it.

Take a look:

Obama On “The View”: What Would You Ask Him?

Shirley Sherrod Plans To Sue Right Wing Blogger Andrew Breitbart

From CNN.com:

Former Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod said Thursday she will pursue a lawsuit against conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart posted an edited video clip of Sherrod appearing to say she discriminated against a white farmer looking for assistance. The clip showed her addressing a chapter of the NAACP.

“I will definitely do it,” she said when asked whether she was considering legal action. Sherrod made her remarks during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in San Diego, California.

Breitbart “had to know that he was targeting me,” Sherrod said. “At this point, he hasn’t apologized. I don’t want it at this point, and he’ll definitely hear from me.”

Breitbart did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has said he released the Sherrod video because he believes it shows the NAACP itself tolerates racist behavior within its ranks — an accusation that came after the civil rights group made a similar charge against the conservative Tea Party movement.

“This was not about Shirley Sherrod,” Breitbart told CNN’s John King.

The controversy surrounding the clip led to a rush to judgment and Sherrod’s forced resignation. However, it was later determined that her speech, unedited, focused on how the incident changed her outlook and made her realize people should move beyond race. The incident occurred 24 years ago, before Sherrod began working for the USDA.

She received an official apology from the USDA and a phone call from President Barack Obama once the full text of her remarks came to light.

Sherrod has since been offered another position at the Agriculture Department.

Obama said earlier Thursday that Sherrod “deserves better than what happened last week.” Speaking at a National Urban League conference in Washington, Obama called the claim of racism against her “bogus.”

“Many are to blame” for the reaction that followed, he said, “including my own administration.”

Her whole story, Obama said he told Sherrod, “is exactly the kind of story we need to hear in America (because) we all have our biases.”

Read the full story here.

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]]> http://majicatl.com/photos/carolblackmon/shirley-sherrod-plans-to-sue-right-wing-blogger-andrew-breitbart/feed/ 0 http://majicatl.com/photos/carolblackmon/is-laurence-fishburne%e2%80%99s-18-year-old-daughter-dating-a-porn-star/ http://majicatl.com/photos/carolblackmon/is-laurence-fishburne%e2%80%99s-18-year-old-daughter-dating-a-porn-star/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:00:23 +0000 Carol Blackmon http://majicatl.com/?p=297731 Veteran actor Laurence Fishburne must be losing his mind right now. We're hearing that "The Matrix" actor's 18 year-old daughter is dating porn star Brian Pumper (yes, that's his real porn name)!! The two were spotted by CarltonJordan.com at a Subway... Read more..]]>

Veteran actor Laurence Fishburne must be losing his mind right now.

We’re hearing that “The Matrix” actor’s 18 year-old daughter is dating porn star Brian Pumper (yes, that’s his real porn name)!!

The two were spotted by CarltonJordan.com at a Subway in the Mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles! The website promises to have a video shortly and we will post it when it goes live.

Surely there are other guys out there that this chick can hook up with!!

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Congress addressed a historic wrong on Wednesday afternoon, replacing it instead with a slightly lesser wrong, when the House voted to reduce the disparity in the sentencing of people caught with crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.

To be charged with a felony, crack users needed to possess only 5 grams of the drug. To be hit with the same charge, powder cocaine users needed to be caught with 500 grams. This 100-to-1 disparity has frequently been cited by drug war opponents as exhibit A to buttress their claim that drug laws are racist.

Pending President Obama’s signature, the new law will reduce that disparity to 18-to-1. The threshold for crack cocaine in the new law will be 28 grams; the powder level remains the same.

The moment on the House floor came and went fairly quickly, but the ease with which the bill passed belied a lot of behind-the-scenes activity.

As of Friday, the bill was not on the calendar to be considered this week. But on Saturday at the Netroots Nation conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked about the disparity and said that she expected the bill to come up the next week. It was placed on the calendar on Tuesday.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) controls the floor schedule and has been pushing on the issue for several weeks, working “hand in glove,” according to one Senate aide, with Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who sponsored the upper chamber’s version of the disparity fix. The Senate aide said that Hoyer was late to a bicameral leadership meeting Tuesday night because he was still making calls to nail down support for the legislation.

A key question was whether Republicans would demand a roll call or allow it to pass by a voice vote. Few vulnerable politicians, in an election year, want to vote on anything that could be cast as being soft on crack cocaine. Hoyer worked directly with House Republicans to assuage some of their concerns in an effort to ward off a demand for a recorded vote, which could jeopardize the legislation.

A House Republican aide confirmed that Hoyer approached Republicans before the vote but said that the GOP’s decision not to demand a roll call had more to do with the bill having the support of conservative stalwarts such as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the Prison Fellowship Ministries and activist Grover Norquist. With a left-right coalition intact, the bill sailed through.

In March, the Senate approved the legislation to reduce the disparity to 18-to-1, also on a voice vote.

President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, having expressed opposition to disparity in the past.

Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) hailed the law. “Although the majority of crack offenders are white, 80 percent of convictions fall on the shoulders of African Americans. A law that reflects such a high degree of discriminatory application needs to be fixed,” he said after the vote. “This is not to say the crack cocaine is not harmful and destructive in our neighborhoods and communities. It is, and S. 1789 includes increased criminal penalties for serious drug offenders. Furthermore, this legislation does not sacrifice our law enforcement capability; it simply recalibrates the exaggerated sentencing guideline to better reflect the relative harmfulness of crack and powder cocaine.”

Other members of the Congressional Black Caucus said that it was a step in the right direction, but that more needs to be done. “I would have hoped that it would have gone further. But we’ll take this for the moment. I mean it’s movement. We’re headed in the right direction,” said Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who, after losing his bid for Alabama governor, is a Democrat again.

“We always know that we have work to do,” said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), “but the fact is that we have done something now that we never have been able to achieve before — to close that disparity gap, which is really important to all our communities… This is a big deal.”

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisc.) called it a “work in progress.” “I’ve been elected as a member since 1988 and I’ve yet to vote on the perfect thing,” she said. “We’re down to 18 to one instead of 100 to one.”

The vote comes a day after the House approved legislation — again by voice vote; nobody wants to be on record on drug policy issues — creating a blue ribbon commission to study the criminal justice system from top to bottom and recommend reforms. The commission was pushed through the Senate by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), whose tough-guy credentials allowed him to take on the issue of sentencing and drug-policy reform.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of cops and judges who advocate for reform, hailed passage of both measures. “The ‘war on drugs’ has done nothing to reduce drug use,” said the group’s head, Neill Franklin, a 33-year police veteran who led multi-jurisdictional anti-narcotics task forces for the Maryland State Police. “But this failed prohibition policy has achieved some results: far too many cops killed in action, billions of tax dollars wasted, powerful and well-funded drug cartels and out-of-control violence in our cities. It’s great to see our elected representatives finally beginning to address these problems, but there’s still a lot more work to be done.”

There are still dome dead-enders, however, unwilling to stop fighting the war. “I’m really disappointed we chose to reduce the penalties of cocaine trafficking,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). “The original legislation was passed 25 years ago in response to the epidemic of addiction and violence in communities across America and it worked. Violent crime is down, drug crime is down substantially since those days and one of the major reasons is because of the increase in penalties. Now we’ve lowered those penalties and I greatly worry that this is going to cause more cocaine trafficking, increased addictions and the destruction of more lives.”

Days after releasing a statement, Essence magazine Editor-in-Chief Angela Burt Murray is continuing to defend her decision to hire Elliana Placas, a white woman, as the publication’s new fashion director.

In an opinion piece for The Grio, Burt Murray claims that the magazine’s “commitment to black women remains unchanged.”

She added: “When we run pieces on how unemployment is devastating black men? Nada. When we run story after story on how HIV is the leading cause of death for black women age 18-34? Zilch. The things that really are the end of our world apparently aren’t.”

What do y’all think about all of this? Will you continue to support Essence? Leave your comments below.

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]]> http://majicatl.com/photos/markallwood/essence-eic-fires-back-at-critics-over-hiring-of-white-fashion-director/feed/ 0 http://majicatl.com/photos/carolblackmon/lisa-wu-hartwell-quits-%e2%80%9creal-housewives-of-atlanta%e2%80%9d/ http://majicatl.com/photos/carolblackmon/lisa-wu-hartwell-quits-%e2%80%9creal-housewives-of-atlanta%e2%80%9d/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:31:57 +0000 Carol Blackmon http://majicatl.com/?p=297561 We've been telling you guys that one of the "Real Housewives of Atlanta" cast mates was likely going to be cut this season, and we just found out that Lisa Wu Hartwell is quitting the drama-filled reality show. Her third season with the series will be her last. Her publicist Carlos Scott tells the Read more..]]>

We’ve been telling you guys that one of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” cast mates was likely going to be cut this season, and we just found out that Lisa Wu Hartwell is quitting the drama-filled reality show. Her third season with the series will be her last. Her publicist Carlos Scott tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

“She doesn’t want to just be a reality star,” Scott tells the newspaper’s radio and TV blogger Rodney Ho. She recently appeared on a “Meet the Browns” episode and completed a fitness DVD.

Black Voices, which broke the news, is speculating that she won’t even be on the opening credits and may only pop up in a handful of episodes as the show introduces the two new cast mates, Phaedra Parks and Cynthia Bailey.

Is Lisa Wu-Hartwell Leaving The “Real Housewives Of Atlanta?”

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Keith Sweat Plays The Begging Man Again On “Test Drive”

A body believed to be that of former Atlanta Hawks player Lorenzen Wright was found in southeast Memphis today according to sources.

Wright was reported missing on July 22nd.

Sources tell Memphis’ MyEyeWitnessNews.com that a body found in a wooded area of southeast Memphis is indeed that of the missing basketball player, who divided his time between Atlanta and Memphis. Sources tell the website that the body had been shot, and it may have been a self-inflicted gunshot.

Memphis police are still investigating.

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