With ‘Sex and the City 2′ set to open on May 27, selected songs from the soundtrack have already leaked on the web, including Liza Minnelli’s cover of Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It).’

The Oscar, Tony, and Emmy Award winner is one of the few celebrities who make a cameo in the heavily anticipated sequel to the 2008 Blockbuster film.

The fun, the fashion, the friendship: ‘Sex and the City 2′ brings it all back and more as Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall), Charlotte (played by Kristin Davis) and Miranda (played by Cynthia Nixon) take another bite out of The Big Apple — and beyond — carrying on with their busy lives and loves in a sequel that truly sparkles.

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Heidi Klum and Seal are keeping their swirl love burning by renewing their vows over and over and over and over and over again. This makes the sixth time for the couple. Pop the hood.

“It’s our time — a lovely family time,” Heidi recently told Redbook magazine of the family tradition. “It’s about remembering this moment of love we gave to each other and reinforcing it.”

Well, it beats these stars who are always marrying someone new. Congratulations …. again!

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The distinction is the first time the Catholic Church has officially recognized the work of any popular American artist. With it, the song joins the ranks of works such as “Don Giovanni” by Mozart, the Vatican’s own “Advocata Nostra,” featuring the voice of Pope Benedict XVI, and “After The Rain,” by Dame Shirley Bassey.

“The genres are very different from each other, but all these artists share the aim to reach the heart of good minded people,” the Vatican explained on its official MySpace Music page.

The playlist, compiled by Father Giulio Neroni, was released Thursday, December 3 – and “Changes” has received nearly five million plays since then.

“This came as such an amazing surprise – it’s not something I would have ever thought possible,” says the late rapper’s mother, Afeni Shakur. “I give thanks every day, knowing Tupac’s words and music continue to have such an incredible effect on people worldwide. My son was always striving to reach out to as many people as he could, and he changed the world in doing so.”

Released two years after the rapper’s death in 1998, “Changes” has been acknowledged as one of Tupac’s all-time classics ever since, with a message that resonates just as strongly today. The song is a streetwise meditation on racism, the Middle East, drugs and gang violence coupled with a call for hope and peace. In essence, it highlights the need for change on both a personal and global level.

“Let’s change the way we eat, let’s change the way we live, let’s change the way we treat each other,” states Tupac on the track. “You see, the old way wasn’t working, so it’s on us to do what we gotta do to survive.”

The acclaimed single climbed to the top of the charts upon its release and became the only posthumously released Hip-Hop song to receive the Grammy nomination for “Best Rap Solo Performance.” It recently confirmed its lasting power when it hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Ringtones Chart (November 7, 2009), a spot it held for a whopping 34 weeks.

“It’s a testament to Tupac’s genius that his music can have this kind of impact more than ten years after the fact,” says Interscope Geffen A&M Chairman Jimmy Iovine. “This is an unprecedented honor to his legacy, as well as for those who had the privilege of working with him during his lifetime.”

In additional Tupac news, it was announced in September that the artist’s private writings would be added to Atlanta University Center’s Robert Woodruff Library – an institution that also houses Martin Luther King’s papers – to be made available for scholarly research.

The collection features Shakur’s handwritten lyrics and track listings, personal notes, video and film concepts, fan correspondence, promotion materials and other items providing a unique insight into his creative genius.

Peep the video for “Changes.”

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Since occupying the White House, Barack Obama has hosted fifteen town-hall meetings; appeared in more than 800 images on the White House Flickr photo-stream; and held four prime-time press conferences, the same number held by George W. Bush in his entire presidency. He’s sent a video message to the people of Iran. He’s given an address in Cairo that was translated into fourteen languages. He’s sat on Jay Leno’s couch, where he riffed about the supreme strangeness of having his own motorcade (“You know, we’ve got the ambulance and then the caboose and then the dogsled”), and he’s walked Brian Williams through the White House, where he introduced the anchor to Bo the dog. Two weeks ago, when he made a controversial comment at a press conference (that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” toward Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.), he followed up with yet another press appearance in the White House briefing room—and an exclusive interview on Nightline. And that was before he sat down for a well-publicized beer with Gates and the offending officer …

Such are the president’s media habits. It’s gotten to the point where one expects to see and hear from him every day. He’s in the information business almost as much as the policy business. “This is president as content provider,” says Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman and adviser to George W. Bush. “It’s like when Rosie O’Donnell had a show and a magazine and a blog.”

The president has taken a fair amount of heat for this full-saturation approach. Friends and critics alike have complained it cheapens his words, erodes his mystique, and, worst of all, smacks of desperation. “You don’t have to be on television every minute of every day,” cracked Bill Maher recently. “You’re the president, not a rerun of Law & Order.” Yet it’s also clear that the public has a near-insatiable appetite for Obama-related content, from the trivial to the serious. Dreams From My Father is now in its 156th week on the New York Times’ best-seller list. Bill Burton, a White House deputy press secretary, tells me that he fields almost as many phone calls from the celebrity press as from the Washington Post, as if the president were George Clooney. “And they call about things that might surprise you,” he adds. “Like when Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination.” (You know your president’s a headliner when E! is interested in cabinet resignations.)

With unemployment at 9.5 percent and the most ambitious public-policy initiative to sell since the creation of Medicare, it’s a decided plus for Obama to be lumped into the same category as a box-office star. Indeed, the president’s personal popularity, still hovering at 58 percent, may be one of the few weapons he has left. As Republicans are fond of noting (usually with some frustration), so long as the public still likes him personally, it’ll remain open to his agenda—at least in theory. “If you poll a question about a policy in an anodyne, sterile way, you’ll often find that Barack Obama’s positions are inversely proportional to his popularity,” notes Gillespie. “But if you say it’s President Obama’s policy, it pulls the numbers right back up.”

The White House is exquisitely aware of this advantage. Three years ago, Rahm Emanuel, then a congressman and now Obama’s chief of staff, shrewdly remarked to me that the then-senator was as much “a cultural phenomenon as a political phenomenon.” Last month, when I ran into Emanuel in the West Wing reception area, I asked him how being a cultural phenomenon compared to being a guy voters want to have a beer with. He thought for a moment. “There’s a brand to it,” he said, before vanishing into a meeting.

As public support for health-care reform erodes—polls show it’s now below the 50 percent mark—it’s no accident that the White House is making the most of brand Obama. Health-care reform is the main tent-pole in the president’s domestic agenda, the piece of legislation in which Obama has the highest stake. And so he sits for an interview on the Today show with Meredith Vieira. He holds a conference call with progressive bloggers. He courts regional media, convenes town-hall meetings, and holds assorted press conferences, including one in prime time.

It’s a large helping of Obama, surely. But those who think the White House has overdone it are missing the point. In today’s media environment, ubiquity is not the same as overexposure. It’s a deliberate strategy. And it’s critical to any understanding of the Obama presidency.

It’s almost cliché by now to say that Barack Obama is a new-media president. But it’s not his nimble use of Facebook and Twitter that makes him so. It’s the fact that he’s the first president who has grasped the possibilities of today’s high-velocity, high-density, highly variegated media landscape. With the exception of George W. Bush, all of Obama’s predecessors had a limited number of news outlets in which to make their cases, limited space in which to do it, and a time-bound moment to make their mark—if voters didn’t catch their press conferences or read the morning paper, they were pretty much out of luck. Now, as all of us are aware, the web provides infinite space for both its own native forms (blogs, news aggregators, original YouTube posts) and old media (newspapers, TV clips), making it possible for us to watch a speech or read a story whenever we want, unconstrained by space and time. The resulting landscape is vast, diffuse, and multiplatform. And Obama is a multiplatform natural: He’s done books and audiobooks; he commands audiences on both YouTube and from the podium; he BlackBerrys; he makes a nice photo. He recognizes that, in the same way a blog can’t survive on just one post a day, a presidency can no longer survive on one message per day or one press conference per year. Instead, you have to turn on a fire hose.

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First lady Michelle Obama continued to charm Russia on Tuesday, where she and the president attended a graduation ceremony at the New Economic School and a President Medvedev-hosted lunch at the Kremlin. President Obama did a bunch of business as well.

Mrs. Obama wore a black and white dress with a black flower brooch on Tuesday. She had also worn a black and white frock on the Fourth of July, and the same color combination to dinner with the Medvedevs on Monday night.

See the photos of Michelle Obama with Russian First Lady Svetlana Medvedeva, Sasha, Malia and others!

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From the moment wife Tameka told him she was pregnant with 6-month-old Naviyd, the R&B singer was suspicious, reveals insiders. “The first thing Usher said was, ‘How did this happen?’ – because he was gone a lot, and their sex life was very, very limited,” revealed a friend of the star. Now pals are urging Usher to determine paternity with a DNA test, reveals a source. “People have been telling him that around the time the little boy was conceived, Tameka got together with another man.”

Usher loves both his sons and is going to fight for custody, divulged his friend. “But he’s determined to get truthful answers.” Meanwhile, Tameka is fighting back hard – charging that 30-year-old Usher has been playing around, revealed an insider.

“Tameka also insists that Usher is Naviyd’s father. She says that although they weren’t spending much time together, they did get together for one night of passion. And that’s when she got pregnant.”… By the time Naviyd was born this past December, the couple was reportedly already separated. “now the war is truly on,” said the insider.

[From the National Enquirer, print edition, July 6 2009]

From the way the friend phrases it, it almost sounds like Usher is going to fight for custody of both of his sons regardless of paternity results, which could be interesting. The Enquirer goes on to talk about how scared Tameka is that she’ll end up poor again, and as a result she’s going to fight tooth and nail for everything she has. There’s as much as $80 million at stake here, and everyone was calling Tameka a gold digger long before she and Usher tied the knot.

Neither of these two strike me as model spouses, and they’re being remarkably immature for grown adults. Their friends are passing information about the two like it’s eighth grade. Luckily their sons are too young to know what’s going on. But I’m sure the drama is just beginning.

Here’s Usher arrives for the Dior fashion show at Paris Fashion Week yesterday. Images thanks to WENN.com .

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As Forbes described in a 2005 article, Michael Jackon’s 1984 Victory tour was directly responsible for Kraft purchasing Foxboro Stadium in 1988, a transaction that eventually led to him being able to buy the team in 1994.

In 1988 Kraft and a partner put up $25 million to buy the Foxboro stadium from the Sullivan family, besting a $16 million offer from the Pats’ owner, Kiam. (Kraft would buy out his 50-50 partner for a small premium five years later.) [Former Patriots owner, and current Foxboro Stadium owner] Charles Sullivan had used the stadium as collateral to fund [Michael Jackson's] Victory Tour back in 1984. Overleveraged, Sullivan went bankrupt and was forced to sell the arena. To this day Kraft’s collection of photos and mementos includes a poster from the ill-fated tour.

The death of Michael Jackson Thursday sent the internet a surge of traffic that caused crashes and slowdowns in what one website is calling a major “wake-up call” for internet infrastructure.

Here is a roundup of links related to the slowdown:

DataCenterKnowledge: Chart shows that “web creaks as Jackson fans mourn” — web site response time grows, availability down

TechCrunch: TMZ, which broke the story, crashed on its scoop boom; Perez Hilton also reportedly down

TMZ: “major web sites bombed by a tidal wave of traffic”

TechCrunch: Twitter disables search to accommodate surge

CNet: Google confirms “difficulty,” ABC News drops to 11% availability

Merc: Facebook: status updates surged

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This is very sad day for me , my niece, and I am sure for billions of people on the planet. A few hours ago I was taking a nap and my niece calls me hysterically crying. I thought someone in my family passed, I kept telling her to calm down and tell me what was wrong and she blurted out , “It’s Michael, Michael Jackson is dead!!!” . My niece isn’t someone who cries easily she is 30 years old (2 years younger than me ) and normally has emotions in check, but this was a huge blow. As you can imagine, this is gonna be very traumatic for the BILLIONS of fans of this legendary man. For all those haters who made his life hell, I am sure your happy right now. For the rest of us who loved and admired him, just play his music, watch is videos, and keep him in your hearts every time you dance….

Story & Photos From MSNBC.com

Michael Jackson has died at age 50 after being rushed to UCLA Medical Center, NBC News has confirmed.

Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Steve Ruda told the L.A. Times that Jackson was not breathing when paramedics arrived at his home and CPR was performed.

TMZ.com reported that he may have suffered cardiac arrest.

Jackson had been due to start a series of comeback concerts in London on July 13 running until March 2010. The singer, whose hits included “Thriller” and “Billie Jean,” had been rehearsing in the Los Angeles area for the past two months.

The shows for the 50 London concerts sold out within minutes of going on sale in March.

His lifetime record sales tally is believed to be around 750 million, which, added to the 13 Grammy Awards he received, makes him one of the most successful entertainers of all time.

He lived as a virtual recluse since his acquittal in 2005 on charges of child molestation.

There were concerns about Jackson’s health in recent years but the promoters of the London shows, AEG Live, said in March that Jackson had passed a 4-1/2 hour physical examination with independent doctors.

A life in music

Jackson was born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, the seventh of nine children. Five Jackson boys — Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael — first performed together at a talent show when Michael was 6.

 
  
 
They walked off with first prize and went on to become a best-selling band, The Jackson Five, and then The Jackson 5.

Jackson made his first solo album in 1972, and released “Thriller” in 1982, which became a smash hit that yielded seven top-10 singles. The album sold 21 million copies in the United States and at least 27 million worldwide.

The next year, he unveiled his signature “moonwalk” dance move while performing “Billie Jean” during an NBC special.

In 1994, Jackson married Elvis Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1996. Jackson married Debbie Rowe the same year and had two children, before splitting in 1999. The couple never lived together.

Jackson has three children named Prince Michael I, Paris Michael and Prince Michael II, known for his brief public appearance when his father held him over the railing of a hotel balcony, causing widespread criticism.

Here are some videos..R.I.P.

Jackson 5 Home Videos On SOul Train

Michael Jackson Master Dancer

Who Is It

Who Is It – Michael Jackson

Rock with you

Rock With You – Michael Jackson

One of my faves, “Stranger In Moscow”

Stranger In Moscow – Michael Jackson

Eva Longoria and Kerry Washington in a L'Oreal advertisement

L’Oréal, the French cosmetics giant, whose advertising campaigns proclaim “because you’re worth it”, was found guilty of racial discrimination for considering black, Arab and Asian women unworthy of selling its shampoo.

France’s highest court was told that the group had sought an all-white team of sales staff to promote Fructis Style, a haircare product made by Garnier, L’Oréal’s beauty division.

The word went out that Garnier’s hostesses should be BBR — “bleu, blanc, rouge” — the colours of the French flag. The expression is widely recognised in the French recruitment world as a code for white French people born to white French parents, a court was told, in effect excluding the four million or so members of ethnic minorities in France.

La Cour de Cassation, the equivalent of the US Supreme Court, said that the policy was illegal under French employment law, upholding a ruling given by the Paris Appeal Court in 2007.

That image already suffered a battering when L’Oréal executives were forced to deny claims that they had lightened the singer Beyoncé Knowles’s skin for a campaign last year. The ruling also hinted at widespread prejudice among French shoppers since L’Oréal believed that they were more likely to buy shampoo from white sales staff, the court was told.

The ruling will fuel anger among black and Arab French people, who complain that they face widespread discrimination when seeking employment.

The court ruled that Adecco, the temporary recruitment agency whose Districom division hired the hostesses, was also guilty of racial discrimination. The Paris Appeal Court had fined both L’Oréal and Adecco €30,000 (£25,500) and ordered them to pay a further €30,000 each in damages to SOS Racisme, the anti-racist campaign group, which brought the case. The court upheld the fines but told the appeal court judges to reconsider the damages.

L’Oréal expressed “disappointment” at the judgment, which ends three years of legal wrangling over the discrimination claims. Adecco declined to comment.

Samuel Thomas, the vice-chairman of SOS Racisme, described the ruling as a “very great victory”. He said: “Whatever the size of the company, none is able to escape prosecution.”

The court was told that a Districom executive had sent a fax to its headquarters in 2000 saying that Garnier’s hostesses should be aged 18 to 22, wear size 38 to 42 clothes (British sizes 8 to 12) and be “BBR”.

Prosecutors said that Garnier wanted to exclude members of the ethnic minorities on the ground that they would be less likely to sell its shampoo in French shops. The court was told that only 4.65 per cent of the hostesses hired for Garnier’s campaign were black, Asian or Arab.

Before the BBR fax went out, the agency had been offering a pool of candidates in which 38.7 per cent were from ethnic minorities, suggesting that they had been blocked during the final stages of recruitment.

Districom employees said that they were given oral instructions to favour white sales staff. But Thérèse Coulange, the deputy managing director of Districom, who sent the fax, said that she had merely wanted hostesses able to “express themselves correctly in French”. She said that the fax had been a personal initiative and not the implementation of company policy.

Laurent Dubois, Garnier’s former managing director, told a lower court that he had “never given the slightest order to discriminate against anyone” and described racial prejudice as “foreign to L’Oréal’s genes”.

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Attention people: STAY FAR AWAY FROM L’Oreal products. Even if you cut down your use by half. Show them they will suffer greatly for their ignorance. I am no longer using Feria for my hair coloring..which sucks because that is a great product, but there are hundreds of other options nowadays and I am going to take advantage of them. You guys should do the same. This is a great protest for all people of all colors including white to participate in, because I am sure knowing something like this would piss anyone off who believes in equality.