Monday, July 28, 2008

Monday, 28th July 2008



New Whitney Houston Song Leaked on Internet

Today

7:36 AM PDT


Whitney Houston says it all in a new track making the rounds online.

"I want you to love me like I never left," the legendary songbird trills in the aptly titled "Like I Never Left."

MIA from the music scene since her private life went on a roller-coaster ride full of substance-abuse problems and a trainwreck marriage to Bobby Brown,

Ms. Houston hasn't released a new tune in approximately forever—or at least since 2003's "One Wish (for Christmas)."

While "Like I Never Left" is technically a love song featuring Akon, the lyrics couldn't be more perfect for her return to recording.

In one verse from the three-minute, 39-second cut, Houston coos, "Yes, your girl is coming back."

Whit is expected to release her new—and much anticipated—album this coming fall.
Welcome back, Whitney! And please stay this time.


AGENTS REPLAYING A HOLLYWOOD DRAMA:

Endeavor - Ariel Z. Emanuel


Once upon a time in Hollywood, a band of rebels left a lumbering old talent agency to start a hot little company of their own -- and in a dozen years or so managed to reach the top of the heap.

Twice upon a time, actually.

Just as Michael S. Ovitz and his peers walked away from the William Morris Agency to found Creative Artists Agency more than 30 years ago,

Ariel Z. Emanuel and three associates left International Creative Management in 1995 to found Endeavor.

Creative Artists, under Mr. Ovitz and the people who succeeded him after he left in the mid-'90s, has long been the talent industry's leader, staking its claim as a voracious

(and, some detractors said during the Ovitz years, sometimes thuggish) conglomerate that changed the way talent is bought and sold here.

Along the way, Endeavor became Creative Artists' doppelganger.

With only a third as many agents and a much smaller client list, the junior agency is known for the sort of quick thinking, ferocity and barely bridled ambition that carried Creative Artists to the top.

But Endeavor now has to show that it has staying power, and how it accomplishes that task offers a window onto the shifting landscape of talent brokering in Hollywood.


LBN-COMMENTARY By EDUARDO PORTER:


Sometimes, I wish the founding fathers had included an instruction manual with the Declaration of Independence, like when it came to the pursuit of happiness.

Money is one way to go about it, of course.

And it has generally been true that the rich are happier than the poor.

But something else must be happening to Americans that is affecting their sense of well-being.

Despite the fact that income inequality -- the chasm between rich and poor -- has grown to levels rarely seen outside the third world, happiness inequality in the United States seems to have declined sharply over the past 35 years.

And that is not because everyone is just that much more cheerful.
According to new research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the happiness gap between blacks and whites has fallen by two-thirds since the early 1970s.

The gender gap (women used to be happier than men) has disappeared.
Most significant, the disparity in happiness within demographic groups has also shrunk:

the unhappiest 25 percent of the population has gotten a lot happier.

The happiest quarter is less cheerful.


WHO READS THE LBN E-LERT? Veteran movie producer Mike Medavoy along with approximately 300,000 other "influencers".


LBN-COMMENTARY By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN:

What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of "Dallas" and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club?

You'd get T. Boone Pickens.

What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin?
You'd get Shai Agassi.

And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world's leader in electric cars?

You'd have the start of an energy revolution.

The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power.

Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai.

Agassi, age 40, is an Israeli software whiz kid who rose to the senior ranks of the German software giant SAP.

He gave it all up in 2007 to help make Israel a model of how an entire country can get off gasoline and onto electric cars.

He figured no country has a bigger interest in diminishing the value of Middle Eastern oil than Israel.

On a visit to Israel in May, I took a spin in a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront in Agassi's prototype electric car, while his sister watched out for the cops because it is not yet licensed for Israeli roads.

Agassi's plan, backed by Israel's government, is to create a complete electric car "system" that will work much like a mobile-phone service "system," only customers sign up for so many monthly miles, instead of minutes.


Every subscriber will get a car, a battery and access to a national network of recharging outlets all across Israel -- as well as garages that will swap your dead battery for a fresh one whenever needed.


LBN-SEE IT.....Sleepy Meg Ryan.....




















LBN-MEDIA INSIDER:


***The real reason Katie Couric is still anchoring "CBS Evening News"?


Insiders say network brass are overlooking her sagging, third-place ratings because the talented anchor has a "pay or play" contract.

"The contract is airtight," said one source.
"If [CBS head] Les Moonves wants to get rid of her, he's got to shell out around $40 million.
He's tried to get her to move on, and she was like, 'Fine. I'll leave - where's my money?'

LBN-COMMENTARY By MICHAEL FITZGERALD:
The average American home has 27 power-sucking devices that are always on -- but how much they actually consume, most people don't know.

LBN-POLITICAL BRIEFING
By MAUREEN DOWD:
It could have been a French movie.

Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion.

They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and -- tant pis -- go their separate ways.

Sarko, back to Carla Bruni.

Obama, forward to Gordon Brown.

A Man and a Man.

All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.

Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.

Sarko is right and Barack is left.

One had a Jewish grandfather, the other a Muslim one.

The French president is a frenetic bumper car;

the Illinois senator is, as he said of the king of Jordan's Mercedes 600, "a smooth ride."

But the son of a Hungarian, who picked a lock to break into the French ruling class, embraced a fellow outsider and child of an immigrant who had also busted into the political aristocracy with a foreign-sounding name.

LBN-HOLLYWOOD INSIDER:


***HBO has opted not to renew racy drama "Tell Me You Love Me" for a second season.

The decision was made almost a year after the sexually explicit series premiered on the pay cable channel.

LBN-NOTICED: PAULA ABDUL

***Whatever she was feeling, Paula Abdul was sure making a racket outside her gynecologist's office Wednesday.

Though her rep insists Abdul was "laughing and giggling" in a courtyard outside her doctor's office on Crescent Boulevard in LA after an exam, a witness said she was having some sort of meltdown.
Our spy saw Abdul "sobbing on the phone to her friends and clutching papers from her doctor" for two hours.









***Madonna stepped out of a Kabbalah Center in NYC.




















LBN COMMENTARY By FLORIE BRIZEL:


Israel's daily newspaper Maariv exercised extremely poor judgment printing Senator Barack Obama's personal and, presumably, private prayer to God that he left in Jerusalem's Western Wall.

I even feel violated by this "betrayal" of confidentiality.

Is nothing sacred any longer?

But the real "sin" is on the head of the Orthodox seminary student who stole the note in the first place and then immorally passed it on.

Regardless of whether this Torah scholar received money for the purloined paper, he deserves to be exposed and expelled for his theft.


He lacks the character normally developed through such soul-searching religious study.


LBN-BOOK NEWS:


***"Responsibility 911" is an anthology of 56 authors who speak to the role responsibility plays in a free society.

The new book also introduces the principle as a critical component to maintaining freedom.

The book also introduces to what has been called "the most compelling monument project to freedom of the 21st Century"

- the building of the Statue of Responsibility - a 300 foot tall companion to the Statue of Liberty.

A sampling of featured authors includes:

ChrisTopher Reeve, George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger,

George S. McGovern, Rudy Giuliani, Bishop Desmond Tutu,

Stephen R. Covey, Pope John Paul, Michael Levine,

Tom Peters, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey among others.

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