Daily News Feed 11.21.08

Top-Earning Couple: Jay Z and Beyonce
What happens when you marry an $82 million hip-hop brand and an $80 million R&B empire? You get Hollywood’s best-paid power couple. Thanks to a monster year filled with music, movies, fashion and endorsement deals, Jay-Z and his new bride, Beyonce Knowles, collectively raked in $162 million between June 1, 2007 and June 1, 2008. The jaw-dropping sum garners them bragging rights atop our first annual ranking of Hollywood’s Top-Earning Couples, a list that also includes A-list pairings Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman, David and Victoria Beckham, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, among others. (Continue Reading…)

Inmates Take on Ivy Leaguers in Chess
David Wang is a young man who’s clearly going places. The Princeton University sophomore is gifted with a brilliant mind, a movie-star smile and an understated self-confidence. Kelvin Washington is a middle-aged man who’s not going anywhere for the next 44 years. He’s a career criminal who has spent 29 years behind bars for a string of robberies and burglaries. An unlikely pairing, the two men went head to head Wednesday at the New Jersey State Prison, a maximum-security lockup. Their battlefield: a chess board. In an unusual cultural exchange program that began six years ago, Princeton students travel to the prison in Trenton, 16 miles from their Ivy League campus, to play chess with the inmates. (Continue Reading…)

Obama Considering African American Woman to Fill FCC’s Top Post
President-elect Barack Obama is said to be considering the appointment of the first African American woman as the new chairman of the FCC, replacing Republican Kevin Martin. Heading up the selection process is Henry Rivera, partner at the Washington, D.C., communications law firm Wiley Rein. Rivera was the first Hispanic FCC commissioner, serving from 1981 to 1985, and is considered an advocate for local telcos, wireless companies and cable TV providers. “Businessweek” reported that Rivera has drawn up a short list of candidates that includes two African American women. One is Julia Johnson, a Florida consultant who chairs Video Access Alliance, an advocacy and advisory group for independent, emerging, and minority networks and Internet content providers. (Continue Reading…)