Nicholas Hoult Is 'Beautiful' In 'Warm Bodies'

Teresa Palmer gushed to MTV News about her co-star's zombie performance.
By Josh Wigler, with reporting by Josh Horowitz

Teresa Palmer and Joel Edgerton
Photo: MTV News

If Hollywood can turn vampires and werewolves into sex icons, what's keeping zombies from entering that same sexy stratosphere? Well, there's the whole feasting-on-human-flesh thing to consider, we suppose, not to mention the endless groaning and decaying to boot.

Despite their brain-craving reputation, the walking dead are about to undergo a serious makeover in "Warm Bodies," director Jonathan Levine's adaptation of the Isaac Marion novel set in a post-apocalyptic world where a zombie named R (played by "X-Men: First Class" actor Nicholas Hoult) inexplicably falls in love with Julie Grigio, whose father is a general in the dwindling human resistance.

Teresa Palmer, who plays Julie, spoke with MTV News at the Sundance Film Festival about her work on "Warm Bodies" and why she can't wait to fall in love with a zombie on the big screen.

"I'm just excited to see how Nicholas Hoult comes across on the screen," said Palmer, who's attending Sundance to support her drama "Wish You Were Here." "He was so beautiful to work with. He does such an incredible performance. He's playing a zombie, so he can't say much, but he's very expressive with his eyes."

It's not just Hoult's "beautiful" zombie performance that Palmer fell in love with, but the "Warm Zombies" universe as a whole.

"The world that Jonathan Levine has set up is so epic and so interesting," she said. "It's always very cool when Jonathan Levine does something. I'm really excited to see it."

Are you excited to see zombie love story "Warm Bodies"? Let us know in the comments.

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival is officially under way, and the MTV Movies team is on the ground reporting on the hottest stars and the movies everyone will be talking about in the year to come. Keep it locked with MTV Movies for everything there is to know about Sundance.

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Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1677682/warm-bodies-movie-nicholas-hoult.jhtml

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Mailing it in: In South Carolina, a trip to the post box says everything about the GOP campaign (The Ticket)

The barrage of campaign mail in South Carolina.

ELGIN, S.C.--It can take my mail-lady more than the average 10 seconds to fill my box these days. Earlier this week, she even had to roll back, because she thought she might have missed something. I was able to walk out to greet her before she got through cramming everything in.

"Make sure all my campaign stuff is there," I said.

"Oh absolutely," she said. "We have to suffer to put it in, and you have to suffer to take it out."

That day's mess of campaign pottage brought the usual: two flyers from Mitt Romney, one from Ron Paul and, bless his heart, a flyer from Rick Perry--who had already dropped out of the race and endorsed Newt Gingrich.

His flyer had a different message. It urged me not to waste my vote on Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum.

After resigning from Congress, the flyer said, Gingrich made $1.6 million from Freddie Mac, a lending institution that "helped create the housing crisis." Gingrich advised both lenders, "in his capacity as a 'historian,'" the flyer added. "But Americans have had enough history with insiders who use their previous service to make a quick buck."

Also, Santorum "sold out his conservative principles" when he backed Sen. Arlen Specter, who turned Democrat and helped pass Obamacare.

It was, obviously, too little and way too late, but the bad timing of this missive offers some insight into just how nervous campaigns become in the final clinch.

Looking at that sad little flyer from Perry, I could sense the sheer sweaty anxiety as his campaign finally crumbled. Surely a flurry of phone calls went back and forth: Have you sent out that Perry flyer? No? Well hold off, let me call headquarters ... Yes, they're saying don't send it ?no, they're saying do send it, yes, go, get to the P.O. by five ? Hi, me again, you didn't already send it, did you? You did? Damn?

If you let your campaign mail pile up for a week instead of throwing it away, and stop clicking the channel when attack ads come on--both of which I did for the sole purpose of writing this article--the daily barrage serves as a barometer of who's leading, who is closing in, who has the most cash, and who is desperate.

The flyer was the first piece of mail I'd seen from Perry in weeks. Newt Gingrich, who at this writing is either threatening Romney's lead or has overtaken it, hasn't been much of a mail guy either: two flyers, both hitting Romney, one for his "Pro-Abortion Record" and one for his deficit-reduction plan. Not only that, Romney is the "second most dangerous man in America."

Yes, it's that time in the campaign. If you have red meat, please throw it to the crowd.

I haven't received squat from Santorum (but you can't miss him on TV, either boosting himself in his own ads or being attacked in someone else's). The only real players in the mailbox battle, so far as I can tell, are Mitt Romney and Ron Paul?the leading candidate and the man in third.

The Romney flyers are confident. They are the work of someone shoring up his base. Although the former Massachusetts governor is trying to remind everyone that he is not a so-called "Washington insider," he is also letting people know that he has the approval of the establishment. He has the endorsement of South Carolina's governor, Nikki Haley, and he kinda sorta has the blessing of Jim DeMint, South Carolina's U.S. senator from the tea party. (Actually, DeMint hasn't endorsed anyone, but he did say something Romneyish in 2007, and again in 2012. Both quotes are on one of the flyers.)

Romney's attack mail focuses squarely on Gingrich and Santorum, easily and effectively using images to make his case: Newt's scowling, porcine head versus? Romney's tall, Lincolnesque bearing; ?Santorum biting his lip in frustration versus smiling, confident Romney, backed by an American flag and an applauding Nikki Haley.

Romney doesn't, so far as I can tell, even acknowledge Ron Paul, although Paul obviously can't afford not to notice Romney. The other day I got a letter from Paul: "Do you believe Palmetto State workers should be forced to pay a union boss just to have a job and feed their families?"

Although Paul lets his libertarian freak flag fly during debates, on the home front he knows that you can't really win my state without appealing to the hard right: against unions, against abortion, against Obamacare. A few days ago, he sent a long letter detailing his anti-abortion stance. Just after that, he sent a DVD.? He says everything pro-lifing, climate change-denying, immigrant-loathing voters want to hear: Romney "said abortion should be legal"; Gingrich "wants to give illegal aliens citizenship"; Perry "endorsed environmental fraud Al Gore for President." He's a 76-year- old man with a one-time title shot, and it shows.

By its nature, the TV campaign is louder and more relentless, as every commercial break on the Today show and the local evening news is filled with voices cancelling each other out, as each candidate proclaims he's the only one who can beat Obama.

Ron Paul goes after Gingrich and Santorum as "serial hypocrites" who "can't be trusted." Gingrich likewise attacks Romney as a pro-abortion governor who "can't be trusted." Romney's Restore America's Future Super PAC, in an ad of perhaps questionable effectiveness, hits Gingrich because he keeps on admitting to making mistakes-- a bad thing, apparently. More to the point, Paul outlines Gingrich's contradictions, using clips of Rush Limbaugh, Megyn Kelly and Ed Schultz, while a creepy Phillip Glass-like score plays ominously in the background.

"This is the cauldron," Henry McMaster, the state attorney general, told me last week at the University of South Carolina's Moore School of Business, where his candidate Jon Huntsman was fielding questions. "We're out of the frying-pan and into the fire, because South Carolina, historically, beginning in 1980, is the one who picked the president."

Last weekend, his man had picked up the endorsement of The State newspaper. He dropped out mere hours later.

That's how fast it goes in this ongoing battle for the vote of Current Resident, set to conclude today. The mail lady and I are looking forward to it.

Rodney Welch is a writer in South Carolina. He reviews books for the Free-Times in Columbia, S.C..

Read more coverage of the 2012 South Carolina primary at Yahoo News.

Other popular Yahoo! News stories:

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20120121/el_yblog_theticket/mailing-it-in-in-south-carolina-a-trip-to-the-post-box-says-everything-about-the-gop-campaign

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Lose a job, prepare for really long job search

Bureau of Labor Statistics

The median amount of time it's taking for unemployed people to find new jobs is about 21 weeks.

Here?s the good news: Employers are hiring more workers than they are firing these days, a welcome turnaround from the darkest days of the Great Recession.

Here?s the bad news: If you are among those unlucky enough to lose your job now, you'd better prepare for a long job search.

The median duration of unemployment was 21 weeks or about five months as of December. That means half of all unemployed workers had been without a job for more than five months.

That?s actually an improvement from mid-2010, when the median duration of unemployment peaked at 25 weeks. But it?s still nearly three times what it was before the recession began and much higher than in previous tough job markets.

The main problem: There just aren?t enough jobs to go around.

Last year the economy added an average of about 137,000 jobs a month. While that?s better than when the economy was shedding jobs, it wasn?t nearly enough to absorb the millions of unemployed and new workers entering the market, said Sylvia Allegretto, an economist with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

?That rate of job growth is simply not fast enough to really soak up all those who are unemployed and underemployed, and those who have left the labor market and will be coming back to the labor market,? Allegretto said.

?

Allegretto doesn?t expect the situation to improve?much soon for the long-term unemployed.

That?s partly because there are still 13 million people who are unemployed and seeking work. It?s also because there are many other Americans out there who may have stopped looking for a job because the market was so bad, and will start looking again if the market improves.

Those excruciatingly long job searches are an especially big problem for older workers. The median duration of unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds was 16.3 weeks in December, compared with 31.4 weeks for 55- to 64-year-olds.

Related:

Many Americans still not prepared for a job loss?????
Five years without work: Labor department will now track it

{"contentId":"10192757","totalVotes":"5573"}

How long do you think it would take you to find a new job?

Source: http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/20/10192757-lose-a-job-prepare-for-a-really-long-job-search

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Mineral quashes deadly bacterial poisons

In animals, manganese shows promise fighting a hemorrhagic E. coli toxin

Web edition : 12:16 pm

A simple mineral supplement ? manganese ? holds promise as the first successful treatment for hemorrhage-inducing infections caused by some food- and waterborne germs. The mineral helps detoxify Shiga toxin, which is produced by a host of bacteria, including the type of E. coli that killed scores and sickened more than 3,700 people in Europe last year.

The new work, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, appears in the Jan. 20 Science.

Although the data are preliminary, ?it?s an exciting finding,? says microbiologist Vernon Tesh of the Texas A&M Health Science Center in Bryan, who did not participate in the new study. Manganese might soon offer a low-cost treatment that physicians could administer ?to every patient that comes into the clinic with a bloody stool,? he says.

?That would be a tremendous boon,? he adds, because although antibiotics can wipe out germs responsible for these infections, such drugs are strongly discouraged. Killing the bugs only expedites their release of Shiga toxin, increasing a patient?s risk of kidney failure, stroke and death.

The new finding ?is a classic example of serendipity in science,? says coauthor Adam Linstedt, a cell biologist at Carnegie Mellon. His team has been exploring the somewhat mysterious cellular role of a protein called GPP130. Then a colleague at the University of California, Santa Cruz reported the puzzling observation that giving cells manganese made their GPP130 disappear.

Normally, foreign materials entering a cell get tasted by an internal compartment called an endosome. Endosomes then shunt undesirable substances to another compartment, a lysosome, where they will be broken down and their raw materials discarded or recycled.

That should spell the end of Shiga toxin ? except it never reaches the lysosomes. Somewhere along the way, the poison hijacks protein-trafficking systems and forces a detour elsewhere in the cell. There the hijacker knocks out the cell?s life-sustaining machinery.

Linstedt and Somshuvra Mukhopadhyay, also of Carnegie Mellon, now show that it?s GPP130 that Shiga toxin hijacks. And manganese can defend GPP130 from that attack, allowing cells to shuttle the toxin directly to lysosomes, where it?s broken down into harmless components. In cells grown in a test tube and in mice, manganese pretreatment prevented death from the administration of pure Shiga toxin.

How clinically helpful that might be remains unclear. The toxin destroys the body?s smallest blood vessels, notes epidemiologist Dirk Werber of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. Vascular injury, which is the most dramatic consequence of infection with Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, ?is likely to be well under way by the time infected patients seek medical attention for diarrhea,? he says.

That?s true, Tesh acknowledges, although up to seven days can pass between the onset of bloody diarrhea and catastrophic vascular effects, as the toxin breaks out of the gut and begins circulating. So there would probably be a brief window when manganese treatment could save lives, he says.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers are now homing in on the minimum amount of manganese needed to protect animals, and hope to soon begin testing using Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli.

Found in: Food Science

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337775/title/Mineral_quashes_deadly_bacterial_poisons

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Lifting Myanmar sanctions in play if April vote fair: McCain (Reuters)

HANOI (Reuters) ? U.S. sanctions on Myanmar could begin to come down if by-elections scheduled for April 1 in the former British colony are fair and open, U.S. Senator John McCain said on Thursday.

After half a century of authoritarian rule Myanmar has taken a series of dramatic steps in recent months to open up, the latest of which was the release last week of some 300 political prisoners.

The United States decided to upgrade diplomatic ties with Myanmar as a result, and President Barack Obama called the move a "substantial step" in democratic reform but stopped short of lifting economic sanctions.

Senator Joe Lieberman, speaking in Vietnam ahead of a visit to Myanmar with McCain and two other senators, said if the by-elections were "fair and open and legitimate" Myanmar could expect "some response from the United States in terms of the status quo between our countries as it exists now."

"And certainly lifting of the sanctions, or some of them, would be part of that consideration," McCain added.

Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi enter parliament will run in the by-election, seeking a voice in parliament after boycotting polls in November 2010.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pledged to "meet action with action" in relations with Myanmar, and instructed a team at the State Department to identify further steps that the United States could take in conjunction with others to support the reforms.

Sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western nations have crippled Myanmar's economy, despite its rich resources including natural gas, timber and precious gems, and driven it deeper into the embrace of regional power China.

Analysts have said Obama's motivations for re-engagement with Myanmar include his stated desire to reassert U.S. power in the Asia-Pacific.

McCain, a former navy pilot and prisoner of war in Vietnam, said ties between the United States and Vietnam should be strengthened to help counter China, but Vietnam's human rights record would limit progress.

"There is increased tensions with China about the South China Sea and other issues and we believe that a multilateral approach to China and an increase in our strategic partnership with Vietnam is certainly called for," he said.

Lieberman said many in the U.S. Congress would like to be able to transfer weapons to Vietnam "to particularly enhance maritime security" of the South China Sea, but that was unlikely unless human rights improved.

Human Rights Watch has said there has been an increase in the use of "national security" charges in Vietnam to silence critics.

(Reporting by John Ruwitch; Editing by Ed Lane)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120119/wl_nm/us_myanmar_usa_sanctions

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IMF seeks up to $500 billion in new funds (AP)

BRUSSELS ? The International Monetary Fund said Wednesday that it's aiming to increase its financial firepower by around $500 billion so it can issue new loans to help ease a worsening financial crisis.

Responding to speculation surrounding its funding requirements, the Washington-based institution said its staff estimates that countries around the world will need about $1 trillion in loans in the coming years. Most of the concerns center on the 17 nations that use the euro and their debt crisis.

Thanks to about $200 billion that European countries have promised the IMF, it's more than one-third of the way to its fund-raising goal.

The IMF has put up about a third of the financing of the eurozone's bailouts over the past two years. But there are growing worries that non-European countries will also need more help because of the worsening economic outlook.

Earlier, its sister organization, the World Bank, urged emerging countries to be ready for a severe global downturn if the crisis in the 17-nation eurozone intensifies.

The eurozone, in particular, has been pushing countries around the globe to give more funds to the IMF. The idea is to build up a larger firewall to stop the continent's debt troubles from spreading to large economies like Spain, Italy or even France.

But so far, even countries relatively flush with cash, like China or Brazil, have been reluctant to put up more money for Europe. So has the United States.

The Obama administration said Wednesday that it had not changed its opposition to further U.S. support for the IMF to handle Europe's debt crisis.

"We continue to believe that the IMF can play an important role in Europe, but only as a supplement to Europe's own efforts," said Treasury Department spokeswoman Kara Alaimo.

Eswar Prasad, a former top IMF official who teaches economics at Cornell University, said emerging market countries may have started to see the need for such support because Europe's debt crisis has begun to cut into their exports. He said also that concern about possible European bond defaults is triggering a flight to safer bonds. That means less capital is flowing to emerging markets.

"There is a sense among many countries that the problems of Europe are beginning to wash up on their shores, so some action must be taken," Prasad said.

Prasad expects the issue to be discussed Thursday at a meeting of deputy finance ministers for Group of 20 countries in Mexico City. But he doesn't expect a decision until the G-20 finance ministers meet Feb. 24-25 in Mexico City.

"The United States is almost certainly not going to put any more money on the table," Prasad said. "Even if the administration wanted to do it, there is little chance they could get it through Congress."

British Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday that the government would be prepared to back an increase but that he would require approval from his Parliament.

"We believe the IMF must always lend to countries, not to currencies," Cameron said at a news conference with Italian Premier Mario Monti. "We would only act if that was with others, not just as part of a eurozone measure.

But Cameron said it's up to the eurozone itself to prove that it's "standing behind its own currency."

Monti said British taxpayers wouldn't have to pay for Italy's economic woes.

"To my knowledge, my country has not cost a penny to the U.K.," Monti said. "I don't see a reason why this should change in the future."

How the IMF's fund-raising goal will be reached is set to be discussed at a meeting of finance ministers of the Group of 20 leading economies in Mexico next month.

____

David Stringer in London and Martin Crutsinger in Washington contributed to this story.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/eurobiz/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120118/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_imf_resources

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Modest China slowdown as exports, housing drag: Reuters poll (Reuters)

BEIJING (Reuters) ? China's 2012 economic outlook has dimmed because of weakening export demand and a faltering housing market, and its central bank will probably try to spur more bank lending to prevent a steeper slump, a Reuters poll showed on Thursday.

Economists on average predicted gross domestic product growth would slow to 8.4 percent from 2011's 9.2 percent.

That is weaker than the 8.6 percent consensus in a similar poll conducted in October and 8.8 percent in the previous poll in July.

Of the 34 economists surveyed, only five predicted that GDP growth would dip below the 8 percent mark seen as the minimum for ensuring sufficient job creation. But in the survey three months ago, not one of the economists thought GDP would breach the 8 percent threshold.

China's growth rate slowed to 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter, the slowest pace in 2- years.

Economists widely expect the economy to deteriorate further, although the Reuters poll showed that they expect the first quarter to be the trough, with growth picking up as the year progressed.

"We expect things to get worse before they get better," Qu Hongbin, China economist with HSBC, wrote in a note to clients.

First-quarter growth may ease to 8.2 percent with one economist predicting a growth rate as low as 7.2 percent, according to the Reuters poll.

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Graphic for the poll: http://link.reuters.com/tyz95s

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PROPERTY WOES

With the euro zone in danger of slipping into a recession and growth looking sluggish in the United States, China's exports will struggle. A senior Chinese official called the 2012 export outlook "grim," according to a report by the Xinhua news agency on Saturday.

At home, the biggest threats to China's growth stem from a housing market slowdown and the risk of bad debts piling up on banks' books.

Average home prices in the country will probably fall between 10 to 20 percent in 2012, with the biggest declines expected in major cities such as Beijing, according to a Reuters poll earlier this month.

Beijing has tried to orchestrate a gradual cool-down of the property market, which appeared to be overheating in 2010. But a sharper real estate slowdown could curb growth.

That in turn could hit banks' books. Banks lent heavily to property developers and to local governments, many of which used land as collateral. To make matters worse, local governments rely heavily on land sales for revenue, so a weakening housing market makes it harder for them to repay debt.

PBOC ON HOLD

A relatively modest economic slowdown would give Beijing the much-needed stability it seeks ahead of its leadership change in 2012 and enough room to keep interest rates unchanged.

The poll result showed that the People's Bank of China would keep its benchmark interest rates unchanged until July 2013 -- a cut in benchmark interest rates is often read as a strong signal of serious relaxation of monetary policy.

An official Chinese newspaper, echoing many economists, said on Wednesday that China does not have sufficient reason to cut interest rates as year deposit rate was 3.50 percent, still below the 4.1 percent rate of consumer inflation that month.

The poll showed that China's CPI will ease to 3.4 percent in 2012, a significant drop from the previous poll result of 4 percent.

As growth eases and inflation long as the country's real interest rates, after adjusting for inflation, were still negative.

In December, China's one-pressure is relieved, the PBOC may use a less potent tool -- cutting banks' required reserve ratio (RRR). The poll showed the central bank may cut the RRR by to 19 percent from its current level of 21 percent by the end of 2012, to pump liquidity into the banking system.

Economists further expected the reserve requirement to hit 18 percent by the end of 2013. China announced a 0.5 percentage point cut in RRR at the end of November 2011, and analysts said that the central bank may announce another cut in short order.

(Reporting by Beijing economics team, writing by Zhou Xin; Editing by Ken Wills and Emily Kaiser)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/china/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120119/bs_nm/us_economy_china_poll

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