Oscar Preview: Les Mis, Chicago Casts to Sing & Dance

By Stephen M. Silverman

02/20/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

From left: Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, in Les Misérables, and Catherine Zeta Jones, in Chicago

Universal (2); Miramax

Strike up the band, for Sunday night's Oscars promise to be very musical.

In the most detailed preview yet of what is to be expected – and what isn't – the 85th annual Academy Awards producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron tell Deadline.com that their special tribute to the resurgence of movie musicals in the past decade will star Les Misérables nominees Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway with costars Russell Crowe, Eddie Redmayne, Aaron Tevit, Samantha Barks, and Helena Bonham Carter; Dreamgirls Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson; and Chicago winner Catherine Zeta-Jones.

"What we don't want to do is play it safe," says Zadan about the show in general, admitting – repeatedly – that the job of producing it is "enormous."

So is the Oscar night orchestra: 60 pieces. Accompanying all those instruments will be:

• The previously announced Justin Timberlake, as well as Barbra Streisand, who's only sung on the show once before in her 5½-decade career (and that was 36 years ago)

• Golden Globe song winner Adele ("Skyfall" is up for Best Song) and "Goldfinger" diva Shirley Bassey, an Oscar newbie, who'll appear as part of the James Bond 50th anniversary tribute

• And the evening's host, Seth MacFarlane, who's been known to break into song on more than one occasion – such as when he hosted SNL.

Other reveals:

• "It's not going to be three hours but we will try to get it close to that," says Zadan. (There are 24 categories to recognize.)

• Six college filmmaking students will serve as Oscar presenters after winning a contest to be on the show.

• The 007 tribute will not feature a reunion of Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.

• MacFarlane's opening monologue is "clever and sort of unique … like a throwback to the days of Bob Hope and Johnny Carson," says Zadan.

• Streisand's number is being kept a secret, "but we love the speculation," says Meron.

The 85th annual Academy Awards will air live on Sunday, Feb. 24, on ABC from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

Justin Timberlake and Barbra Streisand

Justin Lane / Landov; Walter McBride / Retna

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Scientists use 3-D printing to help grow an ear

WASHINGTON (AP) — Printing out body parts? Cornell University researchers showed it's possible by creating a replacement ear using a 3-D printer and injections of living cells.

The work reported Wednesday is a first step toward one day growing customized new ears for children born with malformed ones, or people who lose one to accident or disease.

It's part of the hot field of tissue regeneration, trying to regrow all kinds of body parts. Scientists hope using 3-D printing technology might offer a speedier method with more lifelike results.

If it pans out, "this enables us to rapidly customize implants for whoever needs them," said Cornell biomedical engineer Lawrence Bonassar, who co-authored the research published online in the journal PLoS One.

This first-step work crafted a human-shaped ear that grew with cartilage from a cow, easier to obtain than human cartilage, especially the uniquely flexible kind that makes up ears. Study co-author Dr. Jason Spector of Weill Cornell Medical Center is working on the next step — how to cultivate enough of a child's remaining ear cartilage in the lab to grow an entirely new ear that could be implanted in the right spot.

Wednesday's report is "a nice advancement," said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, who wasn't involved in the new research.

Three-dimensional printers, which gradually layer materials to form shapes, are widely used in manufacturing. For medicine, Atala said the ear work is part of broader research that shows "the technology now is at the point where we can in fact print these 3-dimensional structures and they do become functional over time."

Today, people who need a new ear often turn to prosthetics that require a rod to fasten to the head. For children, doctors sometimes fashion a new ear from the stiffer cartilage surrounding ribs, but it's a big operation. Spector said the end result seldom looks completely natural. Hence the quest to use a patient's own cells to grow a replacement ear.

The Cornell team started with a 3-D camera that rapidly rotates around a child's head for a picture of the existing ear to match. It beams the ear's geometry into a computer, without the mess of a traditional mold or the radiation if CT scans were used to measure ear anatomy.

"Kids aren't afraid of it," said Bonassar, who used his then-5-year-old twin daughters' healthy ears as models.

From that image, the 3-D printer produced a soft mold of the ear. Bonassar injected it with a special collagen gel that's full of cow cells that produce cartilage — forming a scaffolding. Over the next few weeks, cartilage grew to replace the collagen. At three months, it appeared to be a flexible and workable outer ear, the study concluded.

Now Bonassar's team can do the process even faster by using the living cells in that collagen gel as the printer's "ink." The 3-D technology directly layers the gel into just the right ear shape for cartilage to cover, without having to make a mold first.

The next step is to use a patient's own cells in the 3-D printing process. Spector, a reconstructive surgeon, is focusing on children born without a fully developed external ear, a condition called microtia. They have some ear cartilage-producing cells in that tissue, just not enough. So he's experimenting with ways to boost those cells in the lab, "so we can grow enough of them from that patient to make an ear," he explained.

That hurdle aside, cartilage may be the tissue most amenable to growing with the help of 3-D printing technology, he said. That's because cartilage doesn't need blood vessels growing inside it to survive.

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Wall Street ends down sharply after Fed minutes

(Reuters) - And the Oscar for best pickup line in a movie goes to - Audrey Hepburn in the romantic thriller, "Charade." That's according to the results from women polled by the U.K.-based dating site Badoo.com and released on Wednesday before the Academy Awards on Sunday. "I don't bite you know ... unless it's called for," Hepburn told Cary Grant in the 1963 release, and, 50 years later, women still chose it first. Men, however, had different ideas. They favored this Bette Davis line from the 1932 movie, "The Cabin in the Cotton," - "I'd love to kiss you, but I just washed my hair. ...

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The Lede: Palestinian Filmmaker Describes Detention at Los Angeles Airport

The trailer for “5 Broken Cameras,” Emad Burnat’s autobiographical film on life in the West Bank.

The Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat, who had a hard time convincing immigration officers at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday that his invitation to this weekend’s Academy Awards was real, described his brief detention in a statement on Wednesday.

Last night, on my way from Turkey to Los Angeles, my family and I were held at U.S. immigration for about an hour and questioned about the purpose of my visit to the United States. Immigration officials asked for proof that I was nominated for an Academy Award for the documentary “5 Broken Cameras,” and they told me that if I couldn’t prove the reason for my visit, my wife Soraya, my son Gibreel and I would be sent back to Turkey on the same day.

After 40 minutes of questions and answers, Gibreel asked me why we were still waiting in that small room. I simply told him the truth: “Maybe we’ll have to go back.” I could see his heart sink. Although this was an unpleasant experience, this is a daily occurrence for Palestinians, every single day, throughout the West Bank. There are more than 500 Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks, and other barriers to movement across our land, and not a single one of us has been spared the experience that my family and I experienced yesterday. Ours was a very minor example of what my people face every day.

As my colleague Jennifer Schuessler reported, Mr. Burnat, who was nominated along with his Israeli co-director Guy Davidi for his autobiographical film about the difficulties of life in the occupied West Bank, was eventually released after a previous winner of the Oscar for best documentary, Michael Moore, managed to get a lawyer for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to intervene.

My blog today on Palestinian Oscar nominee Emad Burnat detained last nite at LAX because he didn’t look Oscar-ish enuff http://t.co/WH81TCjt

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) 20 Feb 13

In a post on his blog, Mr. Moore explained that he was waiting for the Palestinian filmmaker at a dinner for nominees when he received an urgent appeal for help.

I received an urgent text from Emad, written to me from a holding pen at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Here is what it said, in somewhat broken English: “Urgent – I am in the air port la they need more information why I come here. Invitation or some thing. Can you help they will send us back. If you late, Emad.”

I quickly texted him back and told him that help was on the way. He wrote back to say Immigration and Customs was holding him, his wife, Soraya, and their 8-year old son (and “star” of the movie) Gibreel in a detention room at LAX. He said they would not believe him when he told them he was an Oscar-nominated director on his way to this Sunday’s Oscars and to the events in LA leading up to the ceremony. He is also a Palestinian. And a olive farmer. Apparently that was too much for Homeland Security to wrap its head around.

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Nexus 7 sales soared in 2012, but still fell short of iPad mini and Kindle Fire

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What's Next for Mindy McCready's Two Young Boys?

By Steve Helling

02/19/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Mindy McCready's apparent suicide on Sunday has left her two young sons in custodial limbo.

The boys – Zander, 6, and Zayne, 10 months – had been in state custody since Feb. 7, when McCready called police to ask for help in making her father and stepmother leave her home. When police arrived, McCready appeared to be intoxicated, according to a Department of Human Services report.

In a subsequent petition, the singer's father, Tim McCready, asked the court to order her to undergo mental health and substance abuse evaluation and treatment, alleging that his daughter, who had recently lost her boyfriend, "hasn't had a bath in a week ... screams about everything ... [is] very verbally abusive to Zander."

After a judge granted the petition, the children were quickly removed and placed into foster care. Although McCready was released from treatment, the boys remained in state custody.

At the time, Zander's father, Billy McKnight, requested custody of his son. "My son needs me." he told PEOPLE on Feb. 8. "I'm married, working and successful. I'm on the right track and proud of it. I've been sober for years. I just want my son."

But McCready's mother and stepfather, Gayle and Michael Inge, also want custody of the children – and authorities seem to agree.

In a proposed order sent to Circuit Judge Lee Harrod, the Department of Human Services proposed that the Inges might be a better fit for the children, claiming that they have "a substantial relationship." The Inges had custody of Zander for much the past few years, during McCready’s rehab and jail stints.

With McCready's death, the judge will have to determine what is in the children's best interest. A custody hearing has been scheduled for April 5.

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Drug overdose deaths up for 11th consecutive year

CHICAGO (AP) — Drug overdose deaths rose for the 11th straight year, federal data show, and most of them were accidents involving addictive painkillers despite growing attention to risks from these medicines.

"The big picture is that this is a big problem that has gotten much worse quickly," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which gathered and analyzed the data.

In 2010, the CDC reported, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths nationwide. Medicines, mostly prescription drugs, were involved in nearly 60 percent of overdose deaths that year, overshadowing deaths from illicit narcotics.

The report appears in Tuesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

It details which drugs were at play in most of the fatalities. As in previous recent years, opioid drugs — which include OxyContin and Vicodin — were the biggest problem, contributing to 3 out of 4 medication overdose deaths.

Frieden said many doctors and patients don't realize how addictive these drugs can be, and that they're too often prescribed for pain that can be managed with less risky drugs.

They're useful for cancer, "but if you've got terrible back pain or terrible migraines," using these addictive drugs can be dangerous, he said.

Medication-related deaths accounted for 22,134 of the drug overdose deaths in 2010.

Anti-anxiety drugs including Valium were among common causes of medication-related deaths, involved in almost 30 percent of them. Among the medication-related deaths, 17 percent were suicides.

The report's data came from death certificates, which aren't always clear on whether a death was a suicide or a tragic attempt at getting high. But it does seem like most serious painkiller overdoses were accidental, said Dr. Rich Zane, chair of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The study's findings are no surprise, he added. "The results are consistent with what we experience" in ERs, he said, adding that the statistics no doubt have gotten worse since 2010.

Some experts believe these deaths will level off. "Right now, there's a general belief that because these are pharmaceutical drugs, they're safer than street drugs like heroin," said Don Des Jarlais, director of the chemical dependency institute at New York City's Beth Israel Medical Center.

"But at some point, people using these drugs are going to become more aware of the dangers," he said.

Frieden said the data show a need for more prescription drug monitoring programs at the state level, and more laws shutting down "pill mills" — doctor offices and pharmacies that over-prescribe addictive medicines.

Last month, a federal panel of drug safety specialists recommended that Vicodin and dozens of other medicines be subjected to the same restrictions as other narcotic drugs like oxycodone and morphine. Meanwhile, more and more hospitals have been establishing tougher restrictions on painkiller prescriptions and refills.

One example: The University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora is considering a rule that would ban emergency doctors from prescribing more medicine for patients who say they lost their pain meds, Zane said.

___

Stobbe reported from Atlanta.

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Online:

JAMA: http://www.jama.ama-assn.org

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov

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AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com

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M&A deals lift Wall Street shares nearer a record high

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rose on Tuesday as this year's ongoing surge in merger activity suggested investors were still finding value in the market even as indexes closed in on all-time highs.

Office Depot Inc surged 9.4 percent to $5.02 after a person familiar with the matter said the No. 2 U.S. office supply retailer was in advanced talks to merge with smaller rival OfficeMax Inc , which jumped more than 20 percent.

News of the potential move came just days after Berkshire Hathaway and a partner agreed to acquire H.J. Heinz Co for $23 billion, and following a revised $20 billion takeover of Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo by Anheuser-Busch InBev .

Deal activity has helped equities resist a pullback as investors use dips in stocks as buying opportunities. The S&P is up about 7 percent so far in 2013 and has climbed for the past seven weeks in its longest weekly winning streak since January 2011, though most of the weekly gains have been slim.

The Dow industrials closed 0.9 percent away from their record high while S&P 500 was 2.2 percent off its peak.

"Deals are good for the market," said Frank Lesh, a futures analyst and broker at FuturePath Trading LLC in Chicago. "The fact that they're being done is a positive."

More than $158 billion in deals has been announced so far in 2013, more than double the activity in the same period last year and accounting for 57 percent of global deal volumes, according to Thomson Reuters Deals Intelligence.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 53.91 points, or 0.39 percent, to 14,035.67. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> gained 11.15 points, or 0.73 percent, to 1,530.94. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> gained 21.56 points, or 0.68 percent, to 3,213.59.

Other stocks in the office supplies sector also rose. Larger rival Staples Inc shot up 13.1 percent to $14.65 as the best performer on the S&P 500.

"Equity investors have to be encouraged by M&A since, if the number crunchers are offering large premiums, that shows how much value is still in the market," said Mike Gibbs, co-head of the equity advisory group at Raymond James in Memphis, Tennessee.

On the downside, health insurance stocks tumbled, led by a 6.4 percent drop in Humana Inc to $73.01. The company said the government's proposed 2014 payment rates for Medicare Advantage participants were lower than expected and would hurt its profit outlook.

UnitedHealth Group lost 1.2 percent to $56.66. The Morgan Stanley healthcare payor index <.hmo> dropped 1.2 percent.

Wall Street's strong start to the year was fueled by better-than-expected corporate earnings, as well as a compromise in Washington that temporarily averted automatic spending cuts and tax hikes that are predicted to damage the economy.

The compromise on across-the-board spending cuts postponed the matter until March 1, at which point the cuts take effect. Ahead of the debate over the cuts, known as sequestration, further gains for stocks may be difficult to come by.

Some investors say the debate could be the catalyst for a long anticipated sell-off after the market's recent strong run.

Carter Worth, a technical analyst at Oppenheimer, pointed to the "especially complacent action of the past six weeks," noting that, as of Friday, stocks have gone 33 sessions without a dip of more than 1.5 percent.

"We would be selling aggressively into the market's current strength," he said in a research note.

Economic data showed the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market index unexpectedly edged down to 46 in February from 47 in the prior month as builders faced higher material costs.

According to the Thomson Reuters data through Monday morning, of the 391 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results, 70.1 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies have risen 5.6 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

Express Scripts rose 2.5 percent to $56.98 after the pharmacy benefits manager posted fourth-quarter earnings.

About two stocks rose for everyone that fell on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. About 6.48 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, in line with the daily average so far this year.

(Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak Ryan Vlastelica and Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

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Brazen Jewel Robbery at Brussels Airport Nets $50 Million in Diamonds

BRUSSELS — They arrived at Brussels Airport armed with automatic weapons and dressed in police uniforms aboard two vehicles equipped with blue police lights. But their most important weapon was information: the eight hooded gangsters who on Monday evening seized diamonds worth tens of millions of dollars from a passenger plane preparing to depart for Switzerland knew exactly when to strike — just 20 minutes before takeoff.

Forcing their way through the airport’s perimeter fence, the thieves raced, police lights flashing, to flight LX789, which had just been loaded with diamonds from a Brinks armored van from Antwerp, Belgium, and was getting ready for an 8:05 p.m. departure for Zurich.

“There is a gap of only a few minutes” between the loading of valuable cargo and the moment the plane starts to move, said Caroline De Wolf, a spokeswoman for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, an industry body that promotes the diamond business in Belgium. “The people who did this knew there was going to be this gap and when.”

They also knew they had to move swiftly in a secure airport zone swarming with police officers and security guards. Waving guns that the Brussels prosecutors office described as “like Kalashnikovs,” they calmly ordered ground staff and the pilot, who was outside the plane making a final inspection, to back off and began unloading scores of gem-filled packets from the cargo hold. Without firing a shot, they then sped away into the night with a booty that the Antwerp Diamond Centre said was worth around $50 million but which some Belgian news media reported as worth much more.

The thieves’ only mishap: they got away with 120 packets of diamonds but left some gems behind in their rush.

“They were very, very professional,” said the Brussels prosecutor Ine Van Wymersch, who said the whole operation lasted barely five minutes. The police, she added, are now examining whether the thieves had inside information. “This is an obvious possibility,” she said.

Passengers, already on board the plane awaiting takeoff, had no idea anything was amiss until they were told to disembark as their Zurich-bound flight, operated by Helvetic Airways, had been canceled.

“I am certain this was an inside job,” said Doron Levy, an expert in airport security at a French risk management company, Ofek. The theft, he added, was “incredibly audacious and well organized,” and beyond the means of all but the most experienced and strong-nerved criminals. “In big jobs like this we are often surprised by the level of preparation and information: they know so much they probably know the employees by name.”

He said the audacity of the crime recalled in some ways the so-called Pink Panther robberies, a long series of brazen raids on high-end jewelers in Geneva, London and elsewhere blamed on criminal gangs from the Balkans. But he said the military precision of Monday’s diamond robbery and the targeting of an airport suggested a far higher level of organization than the cruder Pink Panther operations.

The police have yet to make any arrests related to the airport robbery, said the prosecutor, but have found a burned-out white van that they believe may have been used by the robbers. It was found near the airport late on Monday.

Scrambling to crack a crime that has delivered an embarrassing blow to the reputation of Brussels Airport and Antwerp’s diamond industry, the Belgian police are now looking into possible links with earlier robberies at the same airport. The airport, which handles nearly daily deliveries of diamonds to and from Antwerp, the world’s leading diamond trading center, has been targeted on three previous occasions since the mid-1990s by thieves using similar methods to seize gems and other valuables. Most of the culprits in those robberies have been caught.

Jan Van Der Cruysse, a spokesman for the airport, insisted that security was entirely up to international standards, but “what we face is organized crime with methods and means not addressed in aviation security measures as we know them today.” Precautions designed to combat would-be bombers and other threats, he added, could not prevent commando-style raids by heavily armed criminals. “This involves much more than an aviation security problem.”

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Burger King takes down Twitter account after hack attack

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hackers breached the Twitter account of fast-food chain Burger King, posting the online equivalent of graffiti and sometimes making little sense.

Burger King Worldwide Inc suspended its Twitter account about an hour after it learned of the attack at 12:24 p.m. EST on Monday, company spokesman Bryson Thornton said in an email.

“It has come to our attention that the Twitter account of the BURGER KING® brand has been hacked,” the company said in a statement. “We have worked directly with administrators to suspend the account until we are able to re-establish our legitimate site and authentic postings.”

Several tweets carried the logo of Burger King’s larger rival McDonald’s, but spelled the latter company’s name incorrectly. Others sought to tarnish Burger King, the third-largest U.S. hamburger chain, and its employees.

“Just got sold to McDonalds,” one tweet said, adding “FREDOM IS FAILURE”.

(Reporting by Ilaina Jonas; Editing by Dale Hudson)

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