ASSOCIATED PRESS: The U.S. Secret Service is investigating an online survey that asked whether people thought President Barack Obama should be assassinated, officials said Monday. The poll, posted Saturday on Facebook, was taken off the popular social networking site quickly after company officials were alerted to its existence. But, like any threat against the president, Secret Service agents are taking no chances. “We are aware of it and we will take the appropriate investigative steps,” said Darrin Blackford, a Secret Service spokesman. “We take of these things seriously.” MORE
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VARIETY: Columbia Pictures and director David Fincher have set the core cast for “The Social Network,” the Aaron 
Sorkin-scripted drama about the formation of Facebook. Jesse Eisenberg will play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Justin Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became Facebook’s founding president; and Andrew Garfield will play Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg over money. Production will begin next month in Boston and then move to Los Angeles. Script focuses on the evolution of Facebook, the online social network created in 2004 on the Harvard campus, and how overnight success and wealth changed the lives of the classmates who created it. Eisenberg, who went from “The Squid and the Whale” to “Adventureland,” locked the central role as Zuckerberg as Columbia prepares to release his latest film, “Zombieland,” on Oct. 2 MORE