Qatar Airways has ordered 24 new aircraft

The first deals have been done at this year’s Paris Air Show, with Qatar Airways ordering 24 Airbus A320 jets.

The list price of the planes is $1.84bn (£1.13bn), but airlines usually get discounts, especially in recessions.

Orders are expected to be relatively slow at the show, with many airlines considering delaying existing orders as they struggle to fill their flights.

But Spanish airline Air Nostrum has confirmed an order for 35 Bombardier CRJ-1000 jets, listed at $1.75bn.

The airline is the launch customer for the new model. Bombardier had previously announced the order, but not the customer.

In another development, aerospace giant Rolls Royce said it had clinched a $1.5bn order to supply and maintain engines for 20 Airbus A330 aircraft in Bahrain-based Gulf Air’s fleet.

‘Freefall has stalled’

Boeing has said it is not expecting large number of orders at the show.

“We don’t save the orders for the air shows,” Boeing’s chief of commercial aeroplanes, Scott Carson, told the BBC earlier on Monday.

But the airlines are not really cancelling existing orders either, for fear of falling behind rivals once an economic recovery gets underway.

Such a recovery could be well underway by the time the air show returns to Farnborough next June, Mr Carson said, insisting “the freefall has stalled”.

In the meantime, Boeing and rival aircraft maker Airbus are both having to help the airlines buy their planes by assisting them in raising finance.

In some cases, this involves them lending the airlines money, which in turn diverts funds from other activities, such as takeovers or research and development.

But this is a short-term problem, Mr Carson stressed, pointing to a considerably brighter future.

“Long-term, we see this as a great market,” he said.

Mr Obama made public health a key part of his election campaign

US President Barack Obama is due to outline his controversial healthcare reform plans to a meeting of doctors in a bid to secure their support.

At the annual meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA), he is expected to set out his argument for a public insurance programme.

Doctors, along with other groups, are divided over Mr Obama’s proposals.

Health reform was one of Mr Obama’s key election promises. Nearly 50 million people are without medical insurance.

Mr Obama is proposing a 10-year reform programme, estimated to cost about $1 trillion, that would make healthcare available to all Americans.

While many accept the need for some healthcare reforms, debate is raging over the details.

Proposed savings

In his speech to the AMA, President Obama will make his case for “a health insurance exchange where private plans compete with a public option that drives down costs and expands choice,” a senior administration official was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying.

But many groups - including the AMA - have expressed concern that a public plan would have competitive advantages that would ultimately drive private insurers out of the market.

An AMA board member told a Senate panel hearing last week that the group “strongly opposes” a public, government-run insurance plan that pays physicians at the rates of the Medicare programme for the elderly.

Dr Samantha Rosman said the AMA is in favour “of a new option that is market-based and not run by the government”.

President Obama on Sunday announced a further $313bn (£190bn) in proposed savings to help reform healthcare.

He said the savings - made by cutting waste in the Medicare programme and the Medicaid programme for poor people - would “rein in unnecessary spending and increase efficiency and the quality of care”.

The money comes on top of the $635bn down payment on reform detailed in the budget proposal submitted to Congress this year.

The US spends more than $2 trillion a year on healthcare, although about 15% of the population have no medical cover.

Europe’s new billion-euro Herschel space observatory, launched in May, has achieved a critical milestone.

The telescope has opened the hatch that has been protecting its sensitive instruments from contamination.

The procedure allowed light collected by Herschel’s giant 3.5m mirror to flood its supercold instrument chamber, or cryostat, for the first time.

The observatory’s quest is to study how stars and galaxies form, and how they evolve through cosmic time.

The command sent on Sunday to fire two pyrotechnic bolts holding down the hatch was arguably the key moment in the European Space Agency (Esa) mission since the 14 May launch from Earth.

“We need the lid open or we can’t see the sky, so it’s a really important event,” said Professor Matt Griffin, the principal investigator on SPIRE, one of three instruments inside the cryostat.

There is a YouTube video that shows what would have happened - in slow motion.

News of the hatch opening came on the eve of the Paris air show, a big event in the space calendar when Esa and the space industry come together to celebrate their achievements.

A Herschel display is a prominent feature in the Esa pavilion which the public can visit from Friday 19 June, after the trade days here at Le Bourget that run from Monday to Thursday.

Herschel’s instruments sit inside a tank kept at supercold temperatures During final ground testing (L), the cryostat was sealed and evacuated Only in the vacuum of space (R) can the cryostat be opened up safely The lid release allows light from the mirror to reach the instruments It was a critical procedure - failure would have killed the entire mission

Scientists stress it will be a while yet before they are ready to release a “first light” image from the telescope. Herschel is little more than half way through its check-out phase and it is still several weeks away from beginning full operations.

The astronomical community - and the public - will have to be patient as they wait for Esa’s flagship space telescope (which is bigger than Hubble in mirror diameter) to show off its capability.

Herschel is sensitive to light at long wavelengths - in the far-infrared and sub-millimetre range.

This will allow it to see past the dust that scatters visible wavelengths, and to gaze at really cold places and objects in the Universe - from the birthing clouds of new stars to the icy comets that live far out in our Solar System.

Herschel was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket in May The observatory is tuned to see the Universe in the far-infrared Its 3.5m diameter mirror is the largest ever flown in space Herschel can probe clouds of gas and dust to see stars being born It will investigate how galaxies have evolved through time The mission will end when all the superfluid helium boils off Telescope seeks cold cosmos

For the observatory to see these phenomena requires that it, too, be very cold. Superfluid helium is used to take its instruments very close to “absolute zero” (-273C). This is done inside a huge evacuated tank.

For nearly two years, the instruments have been locked away in the top of this cryostat to maintain their frigid state and protect them from contamination. Only now - a month into the mission - was it considered safe to open the lid.

“Anything that’s launched into space always has some water vapour and various other contaminants - volatile gases - absorbed in its materials; and in space the water and these volatiles slowly boil away into the vacuum of space,” explained Professor Griffin, who is affiliated to Cardiff University, UK.

“It is conventional and necessary to wait for this to happen, to make sure these contaminants don’t find their way inside the cryostat where they could condense in the instruments.”

Herschel is heading for an observation position some 1.5 million km from Earth. It is more than 90% of the way there.

Indeed, its distance from home is now so great it took almost five seconds for the pyro command to reach Herschel. A slight temperature rise and a shaking detected on the spacecraft indicated to controllers that the lid opening was successful.

A victory margin of just three runs suggests a tight finish, but in fact England had the game under control for the majority of India’s innings.

This was helped by what is undoubtedly the talking point of the game - the controversial and mystifying change to India’s batting order.

Why, when you have two of the most destructive hitters in world cricket - Yuvraj Singh and Mahendra Dhoni - do you send out the little-known Ravi Jadeja instead?

Youvraj and Dhoni could only sit helplessly on the boundary edge as Jadeja struggled to keep up with the scoring rate. He eventually fell to an excellent catch on the long-on boundary by Stuart Broad, having scored 25 from 35 balls - he blocked 16 dot balls.

India were well behind by now and James Foster’s excellent stumping of Yuvraj made their task almost impossible. Stuart Broad, Ryan Sidebottom and James Anderson all kept their heads at the end, producing yorker after yorker to send the holders home.

Having batted so poorly against South Africa, and been put into bat by Dhoni, it was crucial that England started positively. Unfortunately Luke Wright, who has faded since starting the tournament so strongly, mis-hooked RP Singh in only the second over and was comfortably taken by Yusuf Pathan inside the circle at fine leg. England were 3-1 and looked horribly vulnerable.

But Kevin Pietersen loves the big occasion and was visibly bristling as he rushed out to bat from the dug-out.

He forced a couple of misfields from his old friend Yuvraj - and hit him for four - as, with Ravi Bopara, they set about restoring the innings in a much more positive and effective manner than had been the case against South Africa.

The big surprise came when Bopara, who was bowled by Jadeja for 37, was replaced by Dimitri Mascarenhas, rather than Owais Shah. This was only the 11th over, and Shah has been England’s most consistent batsman of the tournament - but the decision had been taken to send in the hitter.

It took Mascarenhas an age to get going - no fours were hit between the 10th and 16th overs - and this might have affected Pietersen who unnecessarily aimed a premeditated sweep at a full toss from Jadeja and was plumb lbw for 46 from 27 balls.

It is no bad thing to try and upset your opponent’s bowling plans, but England’s first priority should have been to get their own plans right.

Mascarenhas’ promotion appeared to disrupt England’s already fragile batting order. He also missed a rare long-hop off the final delivery of the innings to finish with 25 from 27 balls, and I hope the experiment is not repeated against West Indies on Monday.

Thousands of jobs are riding on Ener1’s efforts to build the best car battery in the world.

The start-up firm is the only U.S. company able to mass produce batteries on American soil for an automobile industry poised to make a monumental shift from gasoline to electric power.

Many say whoever controls the battery industry will control the auto industry and the thousands of jobs that go with it.

Ener1’s newly opened production facility near Indianapolis could employ 3,000 workers. Like other renewable energy companies popping up in the Midwest, people are hoping Ener1 can replace some of the fast-disappearing auto and other manufacturing jobs.

Its lithium-ion battery technology is praised for being one of the best available. But Ener1 must compete for big contracts against larger, mostly Asian firms with much more experience in this field.

“Things will be difficult,” said Brian Sponheimer, an analyst at Gabelli & Co., the research arm of GAMCO Investors. “There’s a lot of optimism about their chemistry, but they haven’t been tapped for a major program yet.”

The race to develop a suitable electric car battery is exciting and Ener1 is certainly fighting hard to win.

Its employees have a desire to usher in a game-changing technology for not only the auto industry but the entire energy sector.

“This should be the dream of all battery engineers, to replace oil,” said Naoki Ota, the firm’s chief science officer.

The company’s spotless Indianapolis production facility is buzzing with activity. Workers in white suits scurry about, trying to hide proprietary technology from our camera.

The company has applied for a $480 million government loan to expand its facility and hopefully allow it to land a big contract. If that happens, Ener1 says it will go on a hiring spree.

“We’re talking about a serious growth in people,” Ulrik Grape, head of the company’s car battery division.

The company could then start making batteries on a large scale. Still, its lack of experience in manufacturing remains a problem.

Many of its competitors, including Japan’s Panasonic and NEC, South Korea’s LG, and a joint venture between U.S.-based Johnson Controls (JCI, Fortune 500) and the French company Saft, have been making batteries in high volumes for decades.

If Ford or General Motors are going to buy batteries for an electric car, they need confidence the company they’re buying from can deliver.

“They need to illustrate their competitiveness,” said Sponheimer. “They need to find someone that trusts them.”

The company is working on it. They’ve been supplying the Norwegian firm Think Automotive with batteries for over a year, and recently announced a preliminary deal with upmarket California carmaker Fisker.

These are good starts, analysts say, but the company still needs to prove itself on a larger scale. The lack of experience may be one reason why GM decided to go with LG when choosing a battery supplier for its much-hyped Volt.

Manufacturing know-how aside, analysts are generally upbeat on the firm.

That Ener1 actually has a production facility in the United States gives it an immediate advantage, said Michael Lew, an analyst with Think Equity. Car batteries are heavy and expensive to ship, and it can take up to two years to build a new facility in the United States.

Lewis also noted that while Ener1 competitors may have experience making other types of batteries, the lithium ion field for cars is still a new game for everyone.

“They have as good a chance as anyone else,” said Lew, but he also noted the company’s ability to perfect large-scale manufacturing as its major challenge.

On the technology side, Ener1 is thought to have some of the best ideas going.

The chemicals it uses in coating the lithium strips that make up the battery are said to be top-notch. Unlike some of its competitors, the chemicals allow the company to produce different types of batteries for different types of vehicles. That’s a competitive advantage, said Banc of America Securities-Merrill Lynch alternative energy analyst Steven Milunovich, who has a buy rating on the stock.

And the design of the battery itself, which allows several cells to be stacked on one another reducing the chance it will catch on fire, is also praised.

The company’s technical prowess is how Charles Gassenheimer, the company’s chief executive, responds to questions about whether it can compete in this global battery race.

“We are the first people to provide this breakthrough in terms of the flat, stacked design and work with revolutionary new chemistries,” Gassenheimer recently told Fortune, CNNMoney’s sister publication. “We may have as much as a two year advantage over our competition.”

Another good sign for the firm: After doing much research into the company’s business plan, the government is still considering giving it the $480 million loan.

“If they get the money, the government thinks it has a fighting chance,” said Milunovich.

Ener1 may be the only U.S. company making batteries in America now, but they probably won’t be for long. The privately held A123 Systems, which already makes batteries in Asia, may have a plant stateside in the next few years.

And smaller firms like Maxwell (MXWL), Valence (VLNC) or the scores of other entrepreneurs aspiring to make a cheap, light, fast-charging, long-lasting car batteries will likely enter the fray with Ener1.

It remains to be seen though, if any of them can stand up to the competition from Asian giants.

Even after staging its best run since the 1970s, the Dow is barely positive for the year — and all the running to stand still is starting to wear investors out.

“We have a market that appears to be a little nervous,” said John Wilson, chief technical strategist at Morgan Keegan. “It still wants to move up, but there’s been some disappointment about the rise in rates and drops in mortgage applications.”

After a three-month run up, stocks ended little changed last week, although the Dow industrials and the S&P 500 did manage to eke out small gains.

The 10-year note yield hit 4% last week for the first time since October, as investors pulled money out of government debt. That sent mortgage rates up, which could stymie the housing market’s path toward stabilization. Add a weak dollar, rising oil and gas prices and trillions of dollars in government stimulus flooding the system — and worries about inflation are starting to surface.

This week’s string of reports include housing starts and building permits, wholesale and consumer inflation, manufacturing and the labor market. Investors will also keep close watch on the bond market.

Most of the economic reports due are expected to show a moderate improvement over the previous reading, a trend in the economic news over the last few months that has helped propel stocks. But a slight improvement in the monthly reports is not to say a recovery is yet taking hold.

“What we’ve seen recently has reflected an end to the paralysis and panic phase of the cycle in the five or six months since Lehman’s collapse,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc.

“Things aren’t as bad as they were, but that period was an aberration in terms of the pace of the slowdown,” he said. “We’re now back to the grind.”

The Dow has now risen in 12 of the last 14 weeks, gaining nearly 33% for its best run since March 1975. The S&P 500’s gain in 12 of the last 14 weeks is the best since the 1930s. Even so, the Dow ended Friday’s session just barely higher for 2009, while the S&P 500 is up less than 5% year-to-date.

For stocks to move a lot higher, investors are going to need to start to see reports that show a recovery taking hold, not just the pace of a slowdown waning, the analysts said.

Monday: The Empire State index, a measure of manufacturing in the New York area, is expected to have worsened to negative 5.1 in June from negative 4.6 in May, according to a consensus of economists surveyed by Briefing.com. Any reading below zero shows the sector is contracting.

Health care will be in focus Monday. President Obama speaks about reform to the American Medical Association in Chicago. Also the Congressional Budget Office releases its estimates on the Kennedy health bill. The CBO’s estimates are key since they are used by Congress in making legislative decisions.

Tuesday: May housing starts and building permits, from the Census Bureau, are both expected to show a slight improvement from earlier levels, as the housing market edges closer to stabilizing.

Housing starts are expected to have risen to a 483,000 unit annual rate in May from a 458,000 unit annual rate in April. Building permits, a measure of builder confidence, is expected to have risen to a 500,000 unit annual rate in May from a 498,000 unit annual rate.

The Producer Price Index (PPI), a measure of wholesale inflation, is expected to have risen 0.6% in June after rising 0.3% in May. The so-called core PPI, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, is expected to have risen 0.1% in June after rising 0.1% in May.

The Federal Reserve releases its reports on industrial production and capacity utilization shortly before the start of trading.

Wednesday: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for May is expected to fall 0.9% after falling 0.7% in April. So-called core CPI, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, is expected to have risen 0.1% after rising 0.3% in May.

The first-quarter current account balance and the weekly oil inventories report are also on tap.

FedEx (FDX, Fortune 500) reports quarterly results in the morning. The package delivery company, often seen as a proxy for the health of the economy, is expected to have earned 52 cents per share versus $1.45 a year ago.

Thursday: The weekly jobless claims report from the Labor Department is due before the start of trading. The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment is expected to have risen to 610,000 from 601,000 in the previous week.

The May index of leading economic indicators is due shortly after the start of trading. LEI, from the Conference Board, is expected to have risen 0.9% after rising 1% in the previous month.

The Philadelphia Fed index, a regional read on manufacturing, is expected to have narrowed to a decline of negative 17 in June from a decline of negative 22.6 in May.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testifies before the House Financial Services Committee about how the Obama administration plans to restructure the financial regulatory system.

Thursday also brings a General Motors bankruptcy hearing in New York.

Friday: State-by-State unemployment reports are due in the morning.

Friday is also a quadruple options expiration day, a quarterly event in which stock index futures and options and individual stock futures and options are all expiring simultaneously. This can create increased volatility in the underlying shares, although the impact has been more measured in recent years. 

He’s been labeled by many as the “reformist,” a man who can take Iran beyond the truculent anti-Western rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Moussavi was not seen as a reformer during his stint as prime minister during the 1980s.

So, when Iran’s government announced over the weekend that Mir Hossein Moussavi had lost in his bid to become the country’s next president, young Iranians took to the streets by the thousands alleging ballot fraud.

Thousands of others around the globe championed the cause on social-networking Web sites and agreed to wear green on Monday in solidarity with Moussavi’s supporters.

But what is often lost in the outrage is whether Iran would look different under a Moussavi presidency.

Though the 67-year old is credited for successfully navigating the Iranian economy as prime minister during a bloody eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, he also was a hard-liner whom the Economist described as a “firm radical.”

He, like most Iranians in power, does not believe in the existence of Israel. He defended the taking of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979, which led to the break in ties between the countries.

He was part of a regime that regularly executed dissidents and backed the fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie.

And as late as April, he opposed suspending the country’s nuclear-enrichment program but said it would not be diverted to weapons use.

“I wouldn’t go as far as (call it) a ‘Velvet Revolution,’” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said of the phrase many are using to describe the rallies in Iran.

“At the end of the day, Moussavi has been more involved and been there from the very beginning of the revolution in a way that Ahmadinejad never was,” Parsi told “CNN Newsroom” on Sunday. “Moussavi was one of the founders of the revolution.”

Moussavi was named prime minister in 1980. A year earlier, Iran had become an Islamic republic after the ruling monarchy was overthrown and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was forced into exile.

The same year, a group of students in support of the Islamic revolution took 52 Americans hostage and held them for 444 days.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1981, Moussavi defended the hostage-taking as the beginning of “second stage of our revolution.”

“It was after this that we rediscovered our true Islamic identity,” he said.

The incident, Moussavi added, ended the “problem of pro-American circles and their following in Iran.

“After this, we felt the sense that we could look Western policy in the eye and analyze it the way they had been evaluating us for many years.”

In 1988, author Salman Rushdie released his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses,’ which Iran said insulted Islam. The country’s supreme leader called for the death of Rushdie. And Moussavi, in a radio broadcast, said the order would be carried out.

Moussavi told the Financial Times in April that he would not halt Iran’s uranium enrichment program if he were president. “No one in Iran would accept suspension,” he said.

Since his stint as prime minister, Moussavi has been absent from politics. For the past 10 years, his official job has been to head the state-owned Art Center. He is a painter.

The long “20 years of silence,” as the Iranian media dubbed it, is working to Moussavi’s advantage.

Of Iran’s population of 70 million, almost 60 percent are younger than 28 — too young to have lived through the 1979 revolution. To them, Moussavi represents a sea change from Ahmadinejad.

While the president calls the Holocaust a myth, Moussavi has condemned the killing of Jews.

While Ahmadinejad has unleashed the morality police to ensure that women cover their hair in public, Moussavi has pledged his support for women’s rights.

Most importantly, the youth are unhappy about the faltering economy under Ahmadinejad, with the unemployment rate topping 30 percent by some accounts. They are hungry for anyone who represents change, analysts have said.

“We have really an interesting moment of historic irony here,” Afshin Molavi, a fellow at the New America Foundation, said on the CNN talk show Fareed Zakaria GPS.

“Moussavi is a child of the revolution. Moussavi was never a real reformer, either, when he was prime minister.

“And now he’s being faced with the question: Should he unleash the young people out onto the streets who supported him — thus threatening the very system that he fought for?”

Shahriar Etimani, an Iranian-American who was part of a demonstration Sunday in Washington, D.C., to protest the election results, said he realizes Moussavi is part of the establishment, but he remains hopeful.

“The cynical part of me says that these guys have 30 years’ of experience of survival. So this will be another blip on the radar?” he said. “The hopeful part of me says that, ‘You know what? There needs to be a catalyst and we don’t know where that catalyst comes from. We don’t know where that tipping point will come from.’”

Tami Farrell, who became Miss California USA last week when Donald Trump dumped Carrie Prejean, promises to avoid controversy during the five months of her reign.

Tami Farrell became Miss California USA last week and is set to reign for five months.

“I’m trying my best to kind of calm the waters,” Farrell said in an interview Sunday at the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl.

Prejean’s same-sex marriage comments, semi-nude photos and personal feud with state pageant officials contributed to a storm of controversy that brought unusual attention to the title Farrell now carries.

“I think that everything in life happens for a reason, and I’m just blessed to have this opportunity,” Farrell said.

Farrell, 24, said, “it’s been a crazy few days” since Wednesday, when she got the call that Prejean had been ousted.

“I keep stepping into controversy, but hopefully I can avoid it for a while,” she said.

She hopes the extra attention will help launch her show business career.

“A couple of my favorite music groups have called, because I sing, so maybe we could record something together,” she said. Farrell did not name the groups.

She is also a writer and has had meetings in recent days about a screenplay she’s written.

“All I can tell you is that it’s hilarious and that if (actor) Will Farrell or (director) Adam McCay could give me a call, things would be wonderful,” she said.

The Mouseketeers’ prerogative, it seems, is to rage against the Disney machine that made them.

The Jonas Brothers — Nick, Joe and Kevin — do a little growing up on their new album.

In lieu of racy Vanity Fair photo shoots or leaked full-frontal iPhone pics, however, Jonas brothers Nick, 16, Joe, 19, and Kevin, 21, have given us their rebel yell in album form. “Lines, Vines and Trying Times” (out Tuesday) is the sound of a not-quite-quarter-life crisis, JoBros-style: heartthrob angst wrapped in glossy hooks, soaring pop-rock choruses, and (plus ca change) really great hair.

On their fourth release in as many years, the boys don’t entirely topple their Tiger Beat pedestal, but with Lines’ PG-13 sentiments and wailing guitars, they try hard to leave their tween-dream innocence behind. That leads, inevitably, to a few clunky metaphors: The pensive “Turn Right” compares life to NASCAR, while the admittedly addictive “Poison Ivy” equates love with — ahem — a bad rash.

When the album’s brash lead single, “Paranoid,” and the sprawling “Don’t Speak” reach for a sort of baby-U2 grandiosity (”The Joshua Shrub”?), they nearly pull it off. Alas, even guest rapper Common can’t save misguided bank-robber narrative “Don’t Charge Me for the Crime”; it’s the sonic equivalent of being held at gunpoint by a baby rabbit.

Determinedly wholesome entries like “Fly With Me” and “Keep It Real” bow dutifully to the Jonases’ younger fan base, but darker bits, such as the apparent Taylor Swift dis “Much Better” (”Now I’m done with superstars/And all the tears on her guitar…. You’re much better”), cut through the NutraSweet. In the end, ruminative piano ballad “Black Keys” feels the most honest; its quiet brushstrokes of teenage despair easily transcend “Lines’ ” misdemeanor mutinies.

Here are more EW Picks for the week of June 15:

Movies

“The Proposal” (out Friday). What would lure Sandra Bullock back to the romantic comedy genre she had left for dead after 2002’s “Two Weeks Notice”? Why, the chance to be a bitch. In “The Proposal,” the actress plays an evil wretch of a Canadian boss who conspires to marry her beleaguered assistant (Ryan Reynolds) in order to stay in the United States. “I wasn’t doing romantic comedies because I’ve been so disappointed with the types of films that fall into that label,” Bullock told EW earlier this year. “Then I read this one. And I got pissed because I liked it.” As for the nude scene? Jokes Bullock, “I wanted to do full-frontal nudity before I turned 60, so, check.”

“Year One” (out Friday). “The two worst hunter-gatherers in a Stone Age tribe are expelled and venture out into a world they didn’t know existed,” says director Harold Ramis of his latest comedy, produced by his friend Judd Apatow. The lead buffoons (Jack Black and Michael Cera) embark on a journey that traces the Book of Genesis and allows them to sound off on their opposing views of religion. Kinda deep for a summer comedy, no? “I talk about these things in elevated and intellectualized ways,” laughs Ramis. “But it’s really just a good, dumb, broad comedy.”

“Whatever Works” (out Friday). Larry David and Woody Allen seem like kindred comic spirits, but New York’s most famous neurotics didn’t forge lasting bonds during their previous encounters. “We didn’t really strike up a lifelong friendship in my hour and a half on the set of ‘Radio Days,’ ” jokes David, who played “Communist Neighbor” in Allen’s 1987 film. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fans will recognize David’s character, an arrogant misanthrope named Boris, “although this guy’s a much bigger nut,” says David. “This guy confronts people for no reason whatsoever.”

TV

“HawthoRNe” series debut (9 p.m. ET, Tuesday, TNT). Jada Pinkett Smith and Michael Vartan are both good actors, and “HawthoRNe” creator John Masius helped oversee “St. Elsewhere,” so EW’s Ken Tucker is disappointed that what he’s seen of the series so far is mostly mawkish and predictable. Pinkett Smith’s head nurse Christina Hawthorne is tough but compassionate; Vartan’s a nice-guy chief of surgery.

“The Unusuals” series finale (10:01 p.m., Wednesday, ABC). Farewell to the oddball cop show EW’s Ken Tucker championed during its short run for its shaggy-dog storylines and fine ensemble acting, “a little bit of ‘NYPD Blue’ crossed with ‘Barney Miller.’ ”

“Raising Sextuplets” (WE tv, Thursday, 10 p.m.) It’s easy to cringe at WE’s attempt to hop on the multiples-show bandwagon. Or their efforts to put forth husband and wife Bryan and Jenny Masche as the anti-Jon & Kate (bearlike Bryan’s major complaint about perky Jenny is that she sugarcoats her nagging). But it’s also impossible not to adore this couple: They end their fights in giggles, let their 1½-year-old kids play in the mud, own a small messy house, and, in this episode, try to save a tree. If that’s not refreshing enough, they make out. A lot.

DVD

“Burn Notice: Season 2″ (out Tuesday). Good season? Well, it began with Michael (Jeffrey Donovan) being drafted by the folks who shafted him and ended with him jumping out of a helicopter and his mom’s house going boom. So yeah, good season.

“Transformers: The Complete First Season 25th Anniversary Edition” (out Tuesday). The animated TV series’ first season was just as complex — and hard to resist — as the race-cars-morphing-into-robot toys, asking viewers to follow the war between the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and aided by the human Witwicky clan, and the evil Decepticons, who followed the Autobots to Earth. Purists will appreciate the extras, including a printable script and an origins doc.

Books

“In the Kitchen,” Monica Ali (out Tuesday). Monica Ali — short-listed for Britain’s Booker Prize for her first novel, “Brick Lane” — returns with the tale of Gabe Lightfoot, head chef at London’s once-posh Imperial Hotel. Lightfoot, the veteran of many a restaurant kitchen, choreographs a cacophonous staff of immigrants (Indians, Filipinos, Russians; some legal, some not) in a loud and lively daily performance. Lightfoot isn’t endearingly scrappy, like Nazneen, the Bangladeshi immigrant of “Brick Lane”; he’s harder to crack. But once you get past his calloused, scarred exterior, you’ll find him just as mesmerizing.

“L.A. Candy,” Lauren Conrad (out Tuesday). The first in a planned three-book, young adult fiction series, loosely based on the author’s own transformation into a “reality” TV star (on MTV’s “The Hills”) and fashion designer.