Chuck Phillips, the Los Angeles Times reporter who couldn't stop thinking that Diddy had something to do with Tupac Shakur's 1996 murder, is leaving the paper as part of its recent 150-staffer reduction of its newsroom. Also departing: longtime music scribe Richard Cromelin. [Variety via MTV]
And you thought he was only good at releasing albums after death. Judging by the exterior of this stand in a mall outside Jakarta, Indonesia, he's also proved himself quite skillful at selling goat's feet—a local delicacy—to starved shoppers. [Neatorama via the listenerd]
The Los Angeles Times has retracted its controversial March 17 story "An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop War," which claimed that Sean "Diddy" Combs was aware that Shakur would be attacked in late November 1994, and that the attack was orchestrated by associates of the Bad Boy CEO. The paper acknowledged that it had been hoaxed by its "confidential sources" immediately following a March 27 debunking of the story on The Smoking Gun, but only today did it announce a full retraction of the original article, written by longtime Diddy conspiracy theorist Chuck Phillips.
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Ray J, the 27-year-old brother of Brandy celebrating his first top ten hit, "Sexy Can I (feat. Yung Berg)," wants you to know that despite the attention he's received for knocking boots with Whitney Houston and Kim Kardashian, he (somehow) still loves women. "A lot of people think of me as being an attention whore or a slut. And I'm not really that. I love being in front of the camera and entertaining. But I do respect women. I'm not disrespectful to anybody that I'm cool with. I just want people to know that I'm not a disrespectful pedophile." Earlier in the same interview, J described the love and chronic Biggie and Tupac showed the then-underage singer immediately before their respective murders.
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Noz of Cocaine Blunts has unearthed news of what has the potential to the best autobiography since Jose Canseco's Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big*. The book in question is Producing a Genius, a still-in-progress work by Shock-G, a.k.a. Humpty Hump, a.k.a. the leader of seminal '90s rap group Digital Underground. According to Shock's MySpace blog, "the book will chronical [sic], my 6 years, 4 tours, 19 studio sessions, 7 video shoots, 13 house parties, 2 courtroom cases, 5 basketball games, 3 streetfights, 4 arrests/police run-ins, dozens of tag-team girl trade-off experiences inwhich [sic] I was side by side with Tupac, and what it was like to record the young genius in the early years of his career, a time that he himself called the best time of his life."
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The Los Angeles Times and Bad Boy Hater No. 1 Chuck Phillips have admitted that their latest attempt to implicate Sean "Diddy" Combs in the shooting of Tupac Shakur was based on forged FBI reports, which the Smoking Gun reported yesterday. "In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," says Phillips. Will this finally force Phillips to move on already? Or will he still unleash two related pieces he promised would arrive this year?
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Chuck Phillips' latest Los Angeles Times article implicating Sean Combs in the shooting of Tupac Shakur may have been based on fradulent FBI reports created by Frank Sabatino, a 31-year-old scam artist who likes to get up close and clerical with rap superstars. In 2011, Phillips will a reveal a new theory of the crime based on lyrics by the Game. [The Smoking Gun]
In a lengthy story published this morning that rather exhaustively recaps the events leading up to the 1996 death of Tupac Shakur, the L.A. Times comes this close to naming the assailants behind Shakur's non-fatal 1994 shooting outside of a New York studio. The paper does, however, finger the men who reportedly planned the shooting thanks to "newly discovered information," and they include pals of one P. Diddy, longtime hip-hop biz fixtures who've repeatedly denied the rumors/accusations that they had any involvement with the assault.
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The Tupac Amaru Shakur Center For The Arts, a nonprofit geared toward bringing the creative and performing arts to kids and teens, was vandalized twice in two days in a pair of inexplicable incidents with a disturbing racial dimension.
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Once again, Idolator intern Kate Richardson scours the video sites, looking for the best fan-made music videos. In this installment, she takes two different subjects—bloodthirsty vampires and adorable animals—and tries to figure out if the two can be compared:
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Hot on the heels of the announced forthcoming filmed epic centering around the life of the Notorious B.I.G., filmmakers have skipped his arch-rival Tupac in the biopic stakes and gone straight to his mother with Dear Mama: The Life Story Of Afeni Shaku. Producer and former 'Pac confrere Young Noble is clearly as awed by Tupac's politically radical, estate-executing mama as he is by 'Pac himself:
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Even the dead are trying to show up 50 Cent. [HHNLive]
Tupac's mom, Afeni Shakur, is trying to smack down Death Row Records for using unreleased Pac songs to pull itself back into the black. Lawyers for the world's most productive dead guy discovered the lost tapes during Death Row's recent bankruptcy woes and said that they were "being advertised to potential buyers as the jewel in the crown of the Death Row assets," despite the fact that any Tupac-related work materials should have reverted to Afeni Shakur's Amaru Entertainment. No response yet from broke dude and finger biter Suge Knight. (Also, kudos to the Guardian on a most excellent bad headline pun. I'm actually a little jealous.)
Billboard is reporting that "the writer's share" of Tupac Shakur's publishing catalog has been sold by his mother, Afeni Shakur, to EverGreen Copyrights, a company that will help oversee the release of countless unreleased Shakhotchkes:
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Now on display at Madame Tussaud's London. Cringe all you want, but do you have how many mold artisans they had to outsource just to get the "Thug Life" tattoo correct? 
Idolator
