LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – If you liked the music in the trailer for Baz Luhrmann‘s “The Great Gatsby,” you’ll be happy to hear Jay-Z isn’t just lending a few of his songs to the soundtrack, he’s composing the upcoming film’s entire original score.
The rapper is, apparently, hard at work to accomplish the task with another artist, who goes by the name The Bullitts.
The latter broke the news on Twitter in the early morning hours Sunday.
“Jay-Z and myself have been working tirelessly on the score for the upcoming #CLASSIC ‘The Great Gatsby,’” Bullitts exclaimed. “It is too DOPE for words!”
Don’t expect the collaborators to start producing tunes from the Roaring Twenties. The trailer certainly indicates otherwise and Luhrmann mixed in modern music for “Romeo + Juliet,” as well as the musical period piece “Moulin Rouge!”
It appears the flappers in Luhrmann’s latest film will be dancing to a very different beat than what F. Scott Fitzgerald imagined while writing his classic novel.
“The Great Gatsby,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, hits theaters on May 10.
Warner Bros. and Jay-Z‘s rep did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German drugmaker Bayer said its drug Nexavar reached a goal of improving the survival of patients with a certain type of thyroid cancer in a late-stage trial.
It said on Thursday it plans to submit data from the trial as the basis for marketing approval of Nexavar to treat radioactive iodine refractory differentiated thyroid cancer.
(Reporting by Maria Sheahan)
Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEWTOWN, Connecticut (Reuters) - Hundreds of the children who escaped the harrowing attack on their elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, last month head back to classes on Thursday for the first time since a gunman killed 20 of their schoolmates and six staff members.
School officials are preparing for droves of anxious parents to join the fleet of buses carting children to a disused middle school in the neighboring town of Monroe. Chalk Hill Middle School, closed about a year and half ago, has been hastily refurbished in the three weeks since the December 14 attack and renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School.
With their children's safety foremost on parents' and officials' minds in the wake of the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, the school has been outfitted with a new security system. Monroe Police Department officers will patrol the grounds, and all outside doorways and sidewalks will be under surveillance.
"I think right now we have to make this the safest school in America," Monroe Police Lieutenant Keith White said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Parents wishing to remain with their kids, ages 5 to 10 in kindergarten through grade 4, will be allowed to accompany them to their classrooms and afterwards may stay in the school's "lecture room" for as long as they like, according to a memo to parents on the school's website. Counseling will be available for students and parents at the new school, about 7 miles south of the scene of the shooting.
"I'm not sure I'm ready yet to totally let them go," Sandy Hook parent Sarah Swansiger said on CNN about her trepidation over the return to school.
When the students return around 9 a.m. Thursday, they will find all of the belongings they left behind when teachers and police evacuated them from Sandy Hook nearly three weeks ago after Adam Lanza burst through the school doors and opened fire.
They will be welcomed to a building that has been decked out as a "Winter Wonderland" with the help of thousands of kids from around the world.
"This does not look like the other elementary school," Newtown School Superintendent Janet Robinson said emphatically.
In the meantime, no new details have emerged to explain why the 20-year-old Lanza, armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, two other firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, targeted the school.
Described by family friends as having Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their home about 5 miles from the school before driving to Sandy Hook and embarking on the massacre, police said. He then took his own life as police were arriving at the school, which had an enrollment of 456.
Police have offered no firm motive for the attack, and state police investigators have said it could be months before they finish their report.
The massacre in Newtown, a rural New England town of 27,000 residents about 70 miles northeast of New York City, stunned the nation, prompting President Barack Obama to call it the worst day of his presidency and reigniting an extensive debate on gun control. Obama has tasked Vice President Joe Biden with assembling a package of gun-control proposals to submit to Congress in the next several weeks.
The National Rifle Association, the most powerful gun-rights lobby in the United States, has rebuffed calls for more stringent firearms restrictions and instead called for armed guards to patrol every public school in the country.
(Writing by Dan Burns; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
TAMOUN, West Bank (AP) — An arrest raid by undercover Israeli soldiers disguised as vegetable vendors ignited rare clashes in the northern West Bank on Tuesday, residents said, leaving at 10 Palestinians wounded.
Israeli army raids into Palestinian areas to seize activists and militants are fairly common. The raids are normally coordinated with Palestinian security forces, and suspects are usually apprehended without violence.
The clashes began early Tuesday after Israeli forces disguised as merchants in a vegetable truck arrested one man. Regular army forces then entered the town, prompting youths to hurl rocks to try to prevent more arrests.
Israeli forces fired tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition as youths set tires and bins on fire to block the passage of military vehicles. In several hours of clashes, dozens of masked youths hid behind makeshift barriers, hurling rocks and firebombs at soldiers.
Faris Bisharat, a resident of Tamoun, said 10 men were wounded, some by live fire. Bisharat said the wanted men belong to Islamic Jihad, a violent group sworn to Israel’s destruction. It wasn’t clear how many men Israeli forces sought to arrest. There were no immediate details on how seriously the 10 were hurt.
The Israeli military said it arrested a “terrorist affiliated with the Islamic Jihad terror group.” It said two soldiers were injured during the raid.
The fighting, which broke out in several parts of the town of some 8,000 people, were a rare, angry response. It was also unusual for Israeli forces to use live fire toward Palestinian demonstrators. Israel says it uses live fire only in extremely dangerous situations.
Middle East News Headlines – Yahoo! News
We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:
RELATED: ‘Roseanne’ Predicted Internet Addiction; A Weather Alert from Hell
Filmmaker Ryan James Yezak boiled down the biggest stories of 2012 into four minutes. And, yes, Honey Boo Boo made it in there:
RELATED: Even Batman Gets Tripped up by Apple Maps
RELATED: The Videos You Shouldn’t (and Probably Couldn’t) Try at Home
So, raise your hand if you knew Patrick Stewart and company were having this much fun behind the scenes at Star Trek: The Next Generation.
RELATED: Here’s a Video of George Takei Reading ’50 Shades of Grey’
RELATED: Cookie Monster Batman and the Dog You Wish You Had
Marvel’s Stan Lee — the guy who created characters like the Amazing Spider-Man, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and the X-Men — turned 90 the other day. In honor of him and his heroes, here are all his cameos from all of the Marvel movies he helped create:
And, finally, it’s 2013 somewhere… right? Please take caution when announcing that news to this very excitable baby. Happy New Year!
Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police say a paparazzo was hit by a car and killed after taking photos of Justin Bieber‘s white Ferrari on a Los Angeles street.
Los Angeles police Officer James Stoughton says the photographer, who was not identified, died at a hospital shortly after the crash Tuesday evening. Stoughton says Bieber was not in the Ferrari at the time.
The sports car was parked on the side of Sepulveda Boulevard near Getty Center Drive after a traffic stop. The photographer was struck as he walked across the boulevard after taking pictures.
Stoughton says no charges are expected to be filed against the motorist who hit the man.
A call to a spokesperson for the singer was not immediately returned Tuesday night.
Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Setting a looming deadline to avert self-created calamity has become a frequent device for the U.S. Congress to get things done in recent years. When all else fails, as it often does, it’s supposed to frighten members into action.
That was the idea when Congress created the “fiscal cliff” in August, 2011 to resolve a partisan struggle, also with a deadline and also self-created, over raising the federal debt ceiling.
Catastrophic budget cuts, timed to coincide with the threat of hefty income tax increases, would finally produce big cuts in the soaring federal budget by December 31, 2012, or else.
It didn’t work.
Congress scared everyone but Congress, which while cutting taxes for most and raising them for a few, made no pretense of trying to make any progress toward reducing the deficit.
“We created a monster,” Democratic Representative Charles Rangel of New York said on the floor of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night just before a House vote averted most of the effects of the fiscal cliff.
“This fandango was an immense embarrassment,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein said in an interview with Reuters, calling it “cringeworthy.”
And “the fact that we are going to have another disastrous confrontation over the debt limit in two months, with the radical right wing of the House Republicans determined to send us over the edge if they don’t get their way, is actually frightening.”
“This House could have done worse, by rejecting the plan” to avoid the cliff, he said, “but it has done nothing to challenge its record as at minimum the worst Congress in our lifetimes.”
The next confrontation to which Ornstein referred is likely to start heating up in a matter of weeks in anticipation of the need to once again raise the borrowing limit for the government beyond the current level of about $ 16 trillion. The risk will be a default by the government.
‘PSYCHOLOGICAL FALLOUT’
Republicans in Congress, many of whom acknowledged publicly that they took a beating from President Barack Obama in the contest over the cliff, are promising to pursue spending cuts with extra vigor as a condition for approving the debt ceiling increase in the Republican-controlled House.
Historically, each partisan grudge match over spending has tended to make the next one even more bitter.
Alice Rivlin, a former U.S. budget director and Brookings Institution budget expert, also worries about “psychological fallout” from the battle over the cliff that could spill over into the debt ceiling struggle as well as contribute to the global perception that when it comes to the economy, the U.S. can’t govern itself.
“It’s very bad for the economy,” she said in an interview with Reuters, “and for our image in the world. We don’t look like a country in charge of its own destiny. That’s hard to quantify but it’s bad.”
“This is a Congress that can barely get its work done – especially when confronting the most important issues of the day,” said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University expert on Congress.
“In many ways, public disgust with Congress is already baked in: the public’s expectations are so low that it’s hard for Congress to surprise us,” she said in an interview with Reuters.
That wasn’t the way Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – the chief architect of the cliff – expressed it on August 1, 2011 as he spoke on the Senate floor.
“It might have appeared to some as though their government wasn’t working,” he said, “but in fact the opposite was true. The push and pull Americans saw in Washington these past few weeks was not gridlock, it was the will of the people working itself out in a political system that was never meant to be pretty.”
Republican Representative David Dreier of California expressed a similar sentiment Monday night as the House closed the loop on the plan McConnell designed.
“This is the greatest deliberative body known to man,” he said.
(Editing by Eric Walsh)
Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., left, with Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, head into a closed-door …Updated 11:38 pm ET
The House of Representatives late Tuesday easily approved emergency bipartisan legislation sparing all but a sliver of America’s richest from sharp income tax hikes -- while setting up another “fiscal cliff” confrontation in a matter of weeks.
Lawmakers voted 257-167 to send the compromise to President Barack Obama to sign into law. Eighty-five Republicans and 172 Democrats backed the bill, which had sailed through the Senate by a lopsided 89-8 margin shortly after 2 a.m. Opposition comprised 151 Republicans and 16 Democrats.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner voted in favor of the deal, as did House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, his party's failed vice presidential candidate. But Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy voted against it.
Obama, speaking from the White House briefing room shortly after the vote, praised lawmakers for coming together to avert a tax increase that “could have sent the economy back into a recession.”
“A central premise of my campaign for president was the change the tax code that was too skewed toward the wealthy at the expense of working, middle-class Americans. Tonight, we’ve done that,” the president said.
But he signaled that the legislation was “just one step in the broader effort” of getting the nation’s finances in order while boosting growth and job creation.
“The deficit is still too high,” he said, warning Republicans that he would stick with his demands for a “balanced” approach blending spending cuts with revenue increases, notably from the rich and wealthy corporations.
Republicans vowed a renewed focus on cutting government outlays.
“Now the focus turns to spending,” Boehner said, vowing his party would “hold the president accountable for the balanced approach he promised, meaning significant spending cuts and reforms to the entitlement programs that are driving our country deeper and deeper into debt.”
As debate began, Republican House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp heralded “a legacy vote” that amounted to a victory for his party because Democrats agreed to make permanent the tax cuts his party enacted in 2001 and 2003. Camp called the bill a step towards reforming the country’s “nightmare” tax code and described it as the largest tax cut in history.
Representative Sander Levin, the top Democrat on Camp’s committee, claimed victory because the vote shattered “the iron barrier” Republicans maintained for 20 years against raising taxes.
It fell to Democratic Representative Charlie Rangel to admit “this is no profile in courage for me to be voting for this bill” because “we created this monster.”
The polarized House approved the measure, unchanged, after House Republican leaders beat back a day-long insurrection within their ranks fueled by conservative anger at the bill’s lack of spending cuts. A final vote was expected late Tuesday evening.
“They’re crazy, but they’re not that batshit crazy,” Democratic Representative Alcee Hastings told reporters as the Republican plan came into focus.
Hastings’s blunt assessment came after a day in which Republican leaders at times seemed to be as much political arsonists as firefighters in the face of rank-and-file GOP anger at the bill.
The House seemed on track to torch the legislation, a hard-fought bipartisan bill crafted by Vice President Joe Biden and McConnell that sailed through the Senate by a lopsided 89-8 margin in a vote shortly after 2 a.m.
The compromise bill averts the sharpest tax increase in American history. But it hikes rates on income above $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for households, while exemptions and deductions the wealthiest Americans use to reduce their tax bill face new limits. The accord also raises the taxes paid on large inheritances from 35% to 40% for estates over $5 million. And it extends by one year unemployment benefits for some two million Americans. It also prevents cuts in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients and spares tens of millions of Americans who otherwise would have been hit with the Alternative Minimum Tax. And it extends some stimulus-era tax breaks championed by progressives.
The middle class will still see its taxes go up: The final deal did not include an extension of the payroll tax holiday. A report released by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office Tuesday complicated matters further. It said that the Senate-passed compromise would add nearly $4 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years.
Despite the overwhelming Senate vote, the accord landed with a thud in the House, where Cantor surprised lawmakers by coming out flatly against the deal during a morning closed-door meeting of House Republicans. Cantor’s announcement fueled conservative anger at the absence of spending cuts in a measure that had originally been considered a likely vehicle for at least some deficit-reduction. The results fed fears that the legislation was doomed.
Republican leadership aides played down the drama by insisting that “the lack of spending cuts in the Senate bill was a universal concern amongst members in today’s meeting.”
After grappling with the insurrection all day, Republican leaders gave their fractious caucus a choice during an emergency 5:15 p.m. meeting: Try to amend it or go for a straight up-or-down vote on the original deal.
Cantor and Boehner “cautioned members about the risk in such a strategy,” according to a GOP leadership aide.
House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, emerging from the gathering, bluntly told reporters “it’s pretty obvious” that amending the legislation and sending it back to the Senate would kill it. Democrats and Republicans in the upper chamber had signaled that lawmakers there would not take up a modified version of what was already a difficult deal.
The resulting pressure on GOP leaders was immense: Absent action to avert the fiscal cliff, Americans would face hefty across-the-board income-tax hikes, while indiscriminate spending cuts risked devastating domestic and defense programs. Skittish financial markets were watching the dysfunction in Washington carefully amid warnings that going off the so-called cliff could plunge the fragile economy into a new recession.
Defeat would have handed Boehner a fresh embarrassment by blocking a measure he explicitly asked the Senate and White House to negotiate without him but vowed to act on if Republicans and Democrats could reach a deal. Public opinion polls had shown that Republicans would have borne the brunt of the blame for fiscal cliff-related economic pain.
Republicans had also fretted about the message if final passage came on the back of a majority of Democratic votes, a tricky thing for Boehner two days before he faces reelection as speaker. (In the hours before the vote, conservative lawmakers played down the risks of a rebellion against the Ohio lawmaker).
Time ran short for another reason: A new Congress will take office at noon on Thursday, forcing efforts to craft a compromise by the current Congress back to the drawing board.
Efforts to modify the first installment of $1.2 trillion in cuts to domestic and defense programs over 10 years -- the other portion of the “fiscal cliff,” known as sequestration -- had proved a sticking point late in the game. Democrats had sought a year-long freeze but ultimately caved to Republican pressure and signed on to just a two-month delay while broader deficit-reduction talks continue.
That would put the next major battle over spending cuts right around the time that the White House and its Republican foes are battling it out over whether to raise the country's debt limit.
Republicans have vowed to push for more spending cuts, equivalent to the amount of new borrowing. Obama has vowed not to negotiate as he did in 2011, when a bruising fight threatened the first-ever default on America's obligations and resulted in the first-ever downgrade of the country's credit rating.
“I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they have already racked up through the laws that they passed,” he warned Tuesday. “The consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic.”
The president then left for Hawaii to rejoin his family on vacation.
As House Republicans raged at the bill, key House Democrats emerging from a closed-door meeting with Biden expressed support for the compromise and pressed Boehner for a vote on the legislation as written.
“Our Speaker has said when the Senate acts, we will have a vote in the House. That is what he said, that is what we expect, that is what the American people deserve…a straight up-or-down vote,” Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters.
Conservative activist organizations like the anti-tax Club for Growth warned lawmakers to oppose the compromise. The Club charged in a message to Congress that “this bill raises taxes immediately with the promise of cutting spending later.”
President Barack Obama had previously declared that “this agreement is the right thing to do for our country and the House should pass it without delay.”
There were signs that the 2016 presidential race shaped the outcome in the Senate. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, widely thought to have his eye on his party’s nomination, voted no. Republican Senator Rand Paul, who could take up the libertarian mantle of his father Ron Paul, did as well.
In a sign of deep GOP unease over the legislation, Republican leaders Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy did not speak during the debate. Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn all did.
Biden's visit -- his second to Congressional Democrats in two days -- aimed to soothe concerns about the bill and about the coming battles on deficit reduction.
“This is a simple case of trying to Make sure that the perfect does not become the enemy of the good,” said Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, one of the chamber’s most steadfast liberals. “Nobody’s going to like everything about it.”
Asked whether House progressives, who had hoped for a lower income threshold, would back the bill, Cummings said he could not predict but stressed: “I am one of the most progressive members, and I will vote for it.”
Jan 1 (Infostrada Sports) – Results from the Auckland Classic Women’s Singles Round 1 matches on Tuesday
2-Julia Goerges (Germany) beat Anastasija Sevastova (Latvia) 6-3 6-4
Marina Erakovic (New Zealand) beat Stephanie Dubois (Canada) 6-2 6-1
1-Agnieszka Radwanska (Poland) beat Greta Arn (Hungary) 6-2 6-2
8-Mona Barthel (Germany) beat Grace Min (U.S.) 6-1 6-3
6-Yaroslava Shvedova (Kazakhstan) beat Lara Arruabarrena Vecino (Spain) 6-3 6-2
Romina Oprandi (Switzerland) beat Nudnida Luangnam (Thailand) 6-0 6-2
Heather Watson (Britain) beat 5-Sorana Cirstea (Romania) 6-3 (Cirstea retired)
Australia / Antarctica News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Copyright © News dogy. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
