Amy Adams to take a trip down Lois Lane

Amy Adams has been cast as spiky reporter Lois Lane in Zack Snyder's forthcoming Superman film, according to the LA Times. She will star opposite British actor Henry Cavill, who was revealed as the new Man of Steel in January.

Adams, now a three-times Oscar nominee following her best supporting actress nod for David O Russell's The Fighter, was told the news on Sunday following a phone call from Snyder. The director, who will work from a concept developed by the Dark Knight team of Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David S Goyer, said Adams was the perfect choice to play the tough yet sensitive journalist who falls for the man from Krypton.

"There was a big, giant search for Lois," Snyder told the Times. "For us it was a big thing and obviously a really important role. We did a lot of auditioning but we had this meeting with Amy Adams and after that I just felt she was perfect for it."

Snyder said Adams's character would be a "lynchpin" in the latest Superman reimagining, which will attempt to ground the character in a world closer to our own reality than previous iterations.

"It goes back to what I've said about Superman and making him really understandable for today," he said. "What's important to us is making him relevant and real and making him empathetic to today's audience so that we understand the decisions he makes. That applies to Lois as well. She has to be in the same universe as him [in tone and substance]."

Adams, 36, will follow an established big-screen Superman tradition by playing older than her opposite number in the film, tentatively titled Superman: Man of Steel. Cavill is 27, but original Lois Lane Margot Kidder was also four years older than Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner's 1978 Superman, widely considered the best film of the series. Kevin Costner and Diane Lane will play Superman's adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, in the new adaptation.

Adams's appointment was announced with unfortunate timing for Warner Bros as Hollywood blog Deadline published a letter from Joanne Siegel, widow of Superman creator Jerry Siegel, to Warner Bros chief executive Jeffrey Bewkes asking him to personally intervene to bring a long-running legal case to a sensible close. The Siegel estate, along with that of co-creator Joe Schuster, recently successfully asserted its copyright to the character in a move which will force Warner to negotiate before making any future Superman films. However the studio has embarked on a strategy to try and force the family's attorney to resign due to an alleged role as a financial participant in the case.

"My daughter Laura and I, as well as the Schuster estate, have done nothing more than exercise our rights under the Copyright Act," wrote Siegel. "Yet, your company has chosen to sue us and our long-time attorney for protecting our rights.

"On December 1st I turned 93. Unfortunately I am not in the best of health. My cardiologist provided a letter to your attorneys informing them that I suffer from a serious heart condition and that forcing me to go through yet another stressful deposition could put me in danger of a heart attack or stroke. Nonetheless your attorneys are forcing me to endure a second deposition even though I have already undergone a deposition for a full day in this matter. As clearly they would be covering the same ground, their intention is to harass me."

Siegel never sent the letter as she died of heart failure in a Los Angeles hospital on 12 February. The Siegel estate's battle with Warner continues.

Cuomo Reaches Deal With Top New York Legislators to Close $10 Billion Gap

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and top lawmakers agreed on a budget that eliminates next year’s $10 billion deficit by sticking close to the governor’s proposals for spending cuts without new taxes, they said.

The agreement for the fiscal year that begins April 1 would add $250 million of spending to Cuomo’s proposed $132.5 billion plan. Even with the increase, total outlays would decline 2 percent, the first such drop since at least 1995. Lawmakers, who Cuomo said faced a choice between accepting his plan or shutting down government, may be on a path to achieve New York’s first early budget since 1983.

Cuomo, a 53-year-old Democrat, made the announcement yesterday in Albany, the state capital, after meeting with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver , a Democrat from Manhattan, and Senate President Dean Skelos, a Republican from Long Island.

“Well done, my friends,” he said as he reached for handshakes at the end of the press conference.

The agreement “transforms the way we do business,” Cuomo said. Lawmakers agreed with Cuomo’s proposals to limit future spending growth on Medicaid to U.S. medical-cost inflation, starting in April 2012. School aid would grow no faster than personal income among the state’s residents.
Cuts to City

Silver said he expects Democrats in the Assembly will support the budget, even though they lost their bid to extend an 8.97 percent tax on millionaires due to expire Dec. 31. Cuomo and Skelos opposed any new taxes.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the plan cuts state aid “more than ever before” and that the amounts added in the agreement “are merely a fraction of the $600 million necessary to avoid additional layoffs and cuts in the city’s budget.” The state granted no revenue-sharing money to the city for the second consecutive year, while aid to other cities was reduced 3 percent.

The mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, owner of Bloomberg News.

Medicaid and aid to local schools, the two biggest parts of the state budget, are expected to increase about 4 percent under the new formulas, Cuomo has said. Next year, before the controls apply, Cuomo’s budget called for Medicaid and school aid spending to fall $2.85 billion each from levels called for by existing law. Education aid in the coming school year would have been $1.5 billion below last year’s level.

The agreement calls for the elimination of 3,700 prison beds, while adding about $272 million to Cuomo’s proposed aid to local school districts and other education programs, and smaller amounts for senior citizen centers, higher education and other programs.
Revenue ‘Looking Good’

Budget Director Robert Megna said no new total amounts for state spending or the size of the budget were available, and it wasn’t yet known exactly how the state would pay for the increased outlays. Cuomo’s budget, including federal aid, was 2.6 percent lower than last year, a decline that was trimmed to 2 percent, according to the announcement of the budget plan.

“Revenue right now is looking good enough that we probably finance the increase from that,” Megna said.

While a budget agreement is in place, state officials are still negotiating with labor unions for about 130,000 workers whose contracts expire March 31. If unions don’t agree to savings of $450 million, Cuomo has said he may fire 9,800 employees.
Tax Cap

Other issues still to be resolved by lawmakers and Cuomo include passage of a state-imposed cap on local property taxes and extension of rent-control laws for New York City and nearby counties. Cuomo favors both measures. Republicans in the Senate have already approved a cap on property-tax growth at the lower of 2 percent or inflation, while Democrats want rent controls to remain and be enhanced.

Whether the Legislature approves the budget early, before the March 31 end of the fiscal year, depends on how soon bills are drafted and printed. Last year’s spending plan wasn’t approved until Aug. 4, after former Governor David Paterson pushed through bills that lawmakers had to approve or face a government shutdown.

A “message of necessity” by the governor may be required to get approval before March 31, Cuomo said. That action would remove the requirement that bills be on lawmakers’ desks at least three days, or parts of days, before voting.

Removing the property-tax cap and rent controls from the budget negotiations “has been a huge help getting not only an on-time budget, but an early budget,” said Senator George Maziarz, a Republican whose district stretches from Niagara Falls to Rochester.

Eye-opener: Who are you picking for the NCAA Finals?

Since it has been easy so far to predict the NCAA games, picking next Monday's final should be a piece of cake.

Kentucky vs. Connecticut is just a matter of picking between two of the most successful programs of the past two decades.

Butler and VCU comes down to whether you believe more in the magic of the Horizon League or that of the CAA.

We are looking at a Final Four in which the teams have won 37 consecutive games combined.

Mike Lopresti column: It will be surreal.

Campus Rivalry: It is all so improbable

3-4-8-11 does seem a bit more like a winning Keno card than an NCAA seeding chart but doesn't that make this all the more predictable?

Or maybe having two teams outside of the BCS Conferences does that.

VCU is a newbie to this. Kentucky has won seven titles and UConn two under Jim Calhoun. Butler is in its second consecutive Final Four.

Not that Rams coach Shaka Smart is awed by that.

"Over the last 10 or 15 years … the playing field has evened out a little bit. When you have a senior-laden team like we do, you have an opportunity to make a run like this, because we have as much experience as anybody we're going to play."

Attempts to Remove Radioactive Water Continue in Japan

TOKYO — Workers in Japan pressed their efforts on Monday to remove highly radioactive water from inside buildings at a crippled nuclear power plant, as reports surfaced that more radiation may be seeping into seawater.

Attempts to contain the contamination at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station suffered a setback on Sunday when alarmingly high radiation levels were discovered in a flooded area inside the complex.

The operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the elevated radiation levels in the water, which had flooded the turbine buildings adjacent to the reactors, were at least four times the permissible exposure levels for workers at the plant and 100,000 times greater than water ordinarily found at a nuclear facility.

Alarm over the radiation levels grew last Thursday when two workers were burned after they stepped into highly radioactive water inside Reactor No. 3. Over the weekend, a worker trying to measure radiation levels of the water at Reactor No. 2 saw the reading on his dosimeter jump beyond 1,000 millisieverts per hour, the highest reading on the device. The worker left the scene immediately, said Takeo Iwamoto, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power.

The average amount of radiation workers at the Fukushima plant are exposed to in a year is at most 50 millisieverts. In emergency situations, the limit is usually raised to 100 millisieverts but it has been raised to 250 millisieverts during the crisis.

There was no evacuation of the roughly 1,000 workers stationed at Daiichi after the high radiation levels were discovered. Naoki Sunoda, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power, said that since the crisis began on March 11, 19 workers had been exposed to radiation levels of 100 millisieverts.

Despite the new problem, Mr. Sunoda said, workers on Monday were still trying to determine a way to approach the turbine building of Reactor No. 2 to extract the contaminated water.

Coalition air raids hit Gaddafi's birth place

Backed by the airpower of Western forces, the rebels in Libya say that they have seized control of Sirte, the birthplace of Colonel Gaddafi.

This comes after they re-captured a string of towns over the weekend following US, British and French air strikes on government positions.

There were also at at least nine explosions overnight in the capital, Tripoli.

The government said the air strikes gave the rebels an unfair advantage in the conflict and it accused international forces, now under Nato command, of going beyond the UN mandate to protect civilians.

The mood among rebels is jubilant after their apparent success in Sirte, the BBC's Kevin Connolly reports from their headquarters of Benghazi.