Federal agents joined local investigators Tuesday night after authorities found what they’re calling an ‘incendiary device’ in an apartment fire that injured a Georgia Tech graduate student. According to a report from our media affiliate CBS Atlanta, the fire happened at about 4 p.m. at the apartment located about a mile from Georgia Tech’s campus at 275 10th St. near Piedmont Park. The student suffered severe burns on his hands, arms, chest and face. The Joint Terrorism Task Force was on the scene, along with the Atlanta Police Department’s bomb squad. ATF and FBI agents also were at the scene.
Atlanta City Councilwoman Cleta Winslow plead guilty in Fulton County State Court on Tuesday to a DUI charge from last year, according to the AJC. Winslow was sentenced to probation, ordered to pay a $700 fine and must perform community service.
Some Georgians have changed their minds about the need for a new source of transportation funding in the aftermath of last week’s snowstorm, according to a report in the Atlanta Business Chronicle. A narrow plurality of voters now would support a 1-cent regional transportation sales tax if they got a second chance to vote on it, according to a poll released Tuesday by InsiderAdvantage, (CQ) an Atlanta-based media and polling firm.
The children of Martin Luther King, Jr. are embroiled in yet another messy, public fight over their father’s legacy. Dexter Scott King and Martin Luther King, III are suing their sister, Bernice King, to force her to return a bible used by MLK and his Nobel Peace Prize. Bernice King, who is the CEO of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent and Social Change, claims her brothers want to sell the items. In a media statement released yesterday, Bernice King said the two pieces of memorabilia are “priceless and should never be exchanged for money in the marketplace.” She went on to say that “our father MUST be turning in his grave.”
The Hollywood Reporter says that actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of a drug overdose on Sunday, had only one scene left to film for part two of Mockingjay, the final film in The Hunger Games series. The article hints that CGI will be used to fill in the scenes Hoffman, 46, had yet to film as central character Plutarch Heavensbee. The Hunger Games films have all been shot in and around Atlanta.
In other Atlanta-related movie news, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are apparently teaming up to make a movie about Richard Jewell, the police officer and security guard who was falsely accused of setting off the bomb at Centennial Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. According to a report in Deadline Hollywood, the film will be based on Marie Brenner’s 1997 Vanity Fair article “The Ballad Of Richard Jewell.” Hill will play Jewell and DiCaprio the lawyer who defended him.