Wahlberg wants to punch-out 1D

Mark Wahlberg wants to beat up One Direction - CNN.com Video

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HBO wants J.J. Abrams to take it to 'Westworld'

Michael Crichton’s cult classic Westworld, which imagines a Wild West-themed vacation destination inhabited by robots, is coming to HBO.

The pay network gave a pilot production commitment to the project from J.J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan (Person of Interest), and producer Jerry Weintraub (Behind the Candelabra).

The logline for the adaptation of the 1973 film reads: “Set in the amazing world dreamt up by Michael Crichton, Westworld is a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.”

Nolan and Lisa Joy will write and executive produce the series; Nolan is set to direct the pilot.

This is not the first time Westworld has made its way to the small screen. A very short-lived 1980 series starring James Wainwright and Connie Selleca called Beyond Westworld continued the story from the film and its 1976 sequel Futureworld.

The original film starred Yul Brynner as the robot gone awry while James Brolin and Richard Benjamin starred as tourists who got more than they bargained for. Check out the original trailer below:

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Seyfried wants to be in 'Mean Girls' musical

Amanda Seyfried played Karen in the movie "Mean Girls," but she'd want to play another character on stage.There have been rumors about a musical based on "Mean Girls"Amanda Seyfried starred in the movie version as KarenIn Allure magazine, Seyfried said she'd want to play Regina in the musicalBut could Seyfried pull off the role of the queen bee?

(EW.com) -- When we heard the rumors around a "Mean Girls" musical, we immediately started casting the parts.

But one thing we didn't account for was the idea that Amanda Seyfried might not want to reprise her role as Karen.

That is so fetch: Tina Fey wants Mariah Carey for 'Mean Girls' musical

After all, what about Karen would make Seyfried not want to play her? She's pretty. She doesn't have to think, like, ever. She gets to wear pink on Wednesdays. She has ESPN, and her boobs can predict the weather. Or rather, her boobs can tell you about the current weather conditions.

So why would Seyfried want to walk away from the character who first put her on our radar? The temptation of the dark side, perhaps?

Amanda Seyfried eyeballing Seth MacFarlane's comedy Western

Seyfried tells Allure, "I desperately want to be Regina." So our question for you is: Would this work? Could Seyfried's big doe eyes contain the ferocity necessary to be queen bee? More importantly, could Seyfried convincingly play the girl who can't be killed (even when hit by a bus)?

Although Seyfried's career has definitely sky rocketed since her days as Karen, we're not so sure we could handle a switch up within the plastics squad. What are your thoughts? Who would you cast as Regina George in a "Mean Girls" musical?

See the original story on EW.com.

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Snooki wants to dance with the stars

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Romney wants his risky pick to play it safe

GLEN ALLEN, Va. (AP) — Mitt Romney wants running mate Paul Ryan to play it safe.

Ryan, the nation's most controversial budget architect, is often described as the intellectual leader of the House Republican caucus. But Romney's presidential campaign headquarters in Boston seems, for now, to prefer that the 42-year-old father of three talks about camping and milking cows instead of the fiscal proposals that made him a conservative hero.

Ryan, who wrote a plan to overhaul Medicare as chairman of the House Budget Committee, did not use the word "Medicare" with voters over the first four days as the vice presidential candidate. When he finally touched on the health care insurance program for seniors, he did so only in broad strokes after Romney himself first outlined the campaign's talking points.

"We will not duck the tough issues," Ryan said Friday in Virginia. "We will lead."

But Ryan has been directed to avoid taking questions from reporters who travel with him, and to agree only to a few carefully selected interviews. He is known for sketching budget graphs on napkins to explain his ideas, but this past week it was Romney who used a white board during a news conference to help detail his own plan — one he says is virtually identical to Ryan's.

"I'm joining the Romney ticket," Ryan told an Ohio television station this week. "It's not the other way around. So I'm supporting the Mitt Romney plan."

Some of the Republican Party's most passionate voters see it a different way. Reluctant to support Romney during the GOP primary, they favor Ryan and his ideas more than the former Massachusetts governor who will head the party's ticket.

Romney hopes that Ryan's conservative credentials and his boyish enthusiasm will help him solidify support from the base of his party and close the "likability gap" with President Barack Obama, who remains relatively popular in spite of the nation's struggling economy.

Yet Romney does not want Ryan's plans to overshadow his own candidacy. Advisers suggest that Ryan's role will change over time. He is eager to do more, and a week after his selection became official, there are already signs that he's beginning to play a more active role.

The congressman planned to visit a retirement village in Florida on Saturday, where he was expected to help reassure nervous seniors that his plans are designed to save Medicare, not end it. Still, Romney's campaign managers want him to proceed with caution.

Romney's team remembers well the problems caused by running mates who may have been trusted prematurely to play a prominent role in a presidential race — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2008 and Sen. Dan Quayle in 1988, among them.

The Republican presidential campaign has gone to great lengths to remind voters that Romney's way rules.

Before Ryan first addressed Medicare in Ohio this week, large signs were placed in front of and behind the podium reading, "The Romney Plan." After spending his first two days campaigning with Romney, Ryan will be at his side again in the week ahead for at least one campaign appearance.

The candidates, labeled as "America's Comeback Team" in Romney's campaign signs, are set to appear together in New Hampshire's largest city on Monday. It is expected to be first of what may be many joint appearances in the coming days.

When they are together, the gregarious Ryan helps Romney shed his sometimes wooden image, and they seem to draw larger crowds together than Romney does on his own.

Just don't expect Ryan to start charting his Medicare plans on stage. His proposal to turn the guaranteed health care program for people 65 and over into a voucher-like system creates significant political challenges for the Romney-Ryan ticket — and for Republicans across the country. Many seniors don't fully understand the proposal, and Obama's re-election campaign is aggressively condemning the plan as something that would "end Medicare as we know it."

That's largely why Romney is easing Ryan into the debate. While Ryan explained his complicated plans at length during dozens of Medicare town hall-style meetings before becoming Romney's running mate, those kinds of meetings probably are over because they're considered too politically dangerous to continue.

Instead, Ryan is being encouraged to discuss his young children, his working-class background and his love of the outdoors as the American people get to know him.

"Let's play stump the running mate later. Right now I want to enjoy the fair," Ryan said when asked about Medicare at the Iowa State Fair.

"We do cow-milking contests in Wisconsin," he continued. "I usually lose to a 17-year-old woman who grew up on a dairy farm, who's wearing like a sash and tiara."

Despite the cautious approach, Romney's advisers are expecting Ryan to stumble at times early on as his record faces unprecedented scrutiny. Already, some concerns have popped up.

He reversed course on Thursday and acknowledged lobbying the government for stimulus money after twice denying he had done so. The admission came only after the release of letters, with his signature, asking for millions of the program's dollars on behalf of two companies in his home state.

And while he has tried to avoid diving into the specifics of his Medicare plan, a reporter pushed him to explain an apparent contradiction during an impromptu lunch meeting in Ohio.

In the interview, Ryan said he never would have included a $700 billion Medicare cut in his budget if Obama hadn't done it first.

"He put those cuts there," Ryan said of the president. "We would never have done it in the first place."

The defense represented a deviation from the Romney campaign's talking points and overshadowed what was supposed to be a made-for-TV stop at local hotdog restaurant.

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Mitt Romney wants an apology

Mitt Romney disputed reports that he worked for Bain Capital longer than he had publicly suggested, insisting Friday he had no role "whatsoever" in managing the company after February 1999 when he left to run the Winter Olympics. Public filings from the company suggest otherwise.

In consecutive interviews with all five television news networks, Romney accused President Barack Obama and his campaign of attacking him on his record at Bain Capital in order to "deflect attention" from Obama's "failed" economic record. And he called on Obama to apologize for the false attacks.

"There is absolutely no evidence that I had any role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February 1999," Romney told ABC News' Jon Karl. "Why the president continues and his people continue to make these kinds of charges and try to turn this into something big is clear, I think, to the American people because the president's failed to do the job he was elected to do which was to get this economy turned around."

Asked by Karl about an Obama campaign aide's assertion that he may have committed a "felony" by leaving his name on Securities and Exchange Commission documents if he didn't work at Bain, Romney called the charge "ridiculous and disturbing" and "beneath the dignity of the president and his campaign."

"The president needs to take control of his people," Romney said, calling the attacks "false and misleading."

On Thursday, the Boston Globe reported that Romney's name remained on several documents Bain had filed with the SEC, including a 2002 filing that described him as the firm's "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president."

Asked why his name remained on documents if he wasn't involved in the company, Romney told ABC that he had "retained ownership" until he and Bain officials could negotiate a departure and retirement package with the company. He told CBS News' Jan Crawford he had the "capacity" to return to Bain if he wanted after the Olympics but chose not to. He told Crawford he didn't "recall even coming back once" for Bain management meetings because he was running the Olympics "full time."

Asked by CNN's Jim Acosta about Democratic pressure for him to release additional tax returns and financial information about his investments overseas, Romney insisted he had "complied with the law" by filing federal financial disclosures and by releasing his 2010 tax returns. He said he would release his full 2011 returns when they are complete and suggested he wouldn't release more.

"That's all that's necessary for people to understand something about my finances," Romney told CNN.

Romney's round of interviews came after days of withering attacks from the Obama campaign on the presumptive Republican nominee's business record and personal finances. For days, the Romney campaign declined to engage the offensive, instead keeping its focus on Obama's handling of jobs and the economy.

But amid criticism from Republicans that Romney was endangering his campaign by ignoring the Obama attacks, the GOP seemed to shift course, releasing a series of TV ads trashing Obama for lying about Romney's record.

On Friday, the campaign scheduled a last-minute round of interviews with Romney in New Hampshire, where the candidate is set to spend this weekend off the campaign trail. In the interviews, Romney tried to shift the attention back to Obama's negative campaigning.

Asked if he believes he's being "swift-boated" by Democrats—a reference to independent attacks on John Kerry during the 2004 campaign—Romney told CNN he "hadn't heard that term." He told Acosta that Obama appears to be employing the "Kill Romney" strategy "they promised," referring to a phrase first floated by Democratic strategists in a Politico story last year.

In nearly all of the interviews, Romney mentioned the phone call he received in May from Obama once he clinched the nomination, telling reporters that Obama had told him he wanted to engage in an "important debate" about the state of the country and said he had "agreed" with the president. He told Fox News' Carl Cameron he found Obama's attacks "very disappointing" and "politics a lot worse than usual."

"(Americans) expected more from this president. He was the one that talked about a post-partisan presidency, changing the way politics works, changing the way Washington works. And I think people assumed he would make it better," Romney said. "But instead, with the kinds of attacks that he's been launching over the last several weeks, he's been making it worse and people recognize that."

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Syria wants guarantees to pull troops from cities

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — The Syrian government on Sunday appeared to be backing out of a cease-fire deal aimed at ending the country's crisis, saying that it will not withdraw its troops from cities without written guarantees from armed groups that they also will lay down their weapons.

Last week, Syrian President Bashar Assad accepted a cease-fire agreement brokered by international envoy Kofi Annan calling for government forces to withdraw from towns and villages by Tuesday, and for the regime and rebels to lay down their arms by 6 a.m. Thursday. The truce is meant to pave the way for negotiations between the government and the opposition over Syria's political future.

But in a statement released Sunday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdessi said that earlier reports that Damascus would pull its troops from cities and their suburbs by Tuesday were "wrong."

Makdessi said that Annan has failed so far to submit to the Syrian government "written guarantees regarding the acceptance of armed terrorist groups to halt violence with all its forms and their readiness to lay down weapons."

He added that Syria will not allow a repeat of what had happened during the Arab League's observer mission in Syria in January, when the regime pulled back its armed forces from cities and their surroundings, only to see rebels flood the areas vacated by government troops.

"Armed terrorist groups used this to rearm its elements and spread its authority on entire districts," Makdessi said.

On Thursday, a U.N. presidential statement raised the possibility of "further steps" if Syria doesn't implement the six-point peace plan outlined by Annan, which Assad agreed to on March 25. The statement called on all parties, including the opposition, to stop armed violence in all forms in 48 hours after the Syrian government fully fulfills the measures.

The U.N. says at least 9,000 people have been killed in Syria since the crisis began 13 months ago.

___

Mroue reported from Beirut.

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New Jersey governor wants all tax brackets cut by 10 percent (Reuters)

(Reuters) – All New Jersey income tax brackets should be cut 10 percent, Governor Chris Christie proposed on Tuesday, saying the state was on the comeback trail due to harsh budget measures taken last year.

The governor, a Republican, in his annual State of the State address also recommended a series of changes in education, including some on teacher tenure and layoff criteria that likely will be opposed by unions.

He also condemned a ruling by the New Jersey's top court on school funding and called for changes in the criminal justice system, including a ban on bail for violent offenders and mandatory drug treatment programs for non-violent drug users instead of jail.

He called on the top state court to "admit" that its decision requiring poor, often urban schools to get increased funding was "a failure" because pupil performance at those schools has not improved.

Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver criticized Christie's income tax cut proposal, , saying a family earning $50,000 a year would only get an $80 break while a family earning $1 million a year would reap a $7,200 tax cut.

"A 10 percent across-the-board income tax cut might make a nice sound bite, but ultimately it benefits the wealthiest far more than low and middle income earners," she said in a statement.

Oliver estimated that Christie's plan would cost the state $1 billion.

Christie, saying that New Jersey competes with neighboring New York and Connecticut for jobs, noted that both states have raised income taxes on the wealthy. New York's top rate is 8.82 percent and Connecticut's highest rate is 6.7 percent, both below New Jersey's current 8.97 percent rate.

The tough-talking Christie, who has thrown his support behind Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney since deciding to not seek the nomination himself, said that under his leadership, New Jersey is no longer "a punch line" in popular culture. The state became a virtual synonym for sleaze and bad taste with the popularity of the television shows such as "The Sopranos" and "The Jersey Shore."

On the education front, Christie proposed stiffer requirements for teacher tenure and proposed that layoffs be determined by teachers' effectiveness rather than by inverse seniority.

"It is unfair to the other 557 school districts and to our state's taxpayers, who spend more per pupil than almost any state in America," he said.

In addressing ways to reduce crime in violence-plagued cities such as Newark, Christie, a former U.S. prosecutor, proposed banning bail for violent offenders, a move that could require a change in state law and possibly the state constitution. Christie said such a ban could give witnesses more confidence that they could testify in court without risking their lives.

He called on the Democratic-led legislature to work with him. The governor, who once inflamed tensions by suggesting that the media should "take a bat" to Democratic state Senator Loretta Weinberg, said that "anger is natural and passion is good."

The governor, who is now considered a possible vice presidential candidate, faulted Washington politicians for not fixing the economy and made it clear where he stood in the national debate over the 1 percent richest and the so-called 99 percent. "The politics of envy have overtaken the imperative of opportunity," he said.

He recommended fully restoring the earned income tax credit to aid the working poor; the credit was cut in 2010.

(Reporting By Joan Gralla; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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