AnnaLynne McCord to get “Scorned” With Billy Zane in new thriller

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – AnnaLynne McCord is about to become a woman “Scorned.”

“90210″ star McCord has signed on for the revenge thriller “Scorned,” alongside “Titanic” star Billy Zane and Viva Bianca from Starz’s “Spartacus.”

McCord and Zane will play Sadie and Kevin, a couple whose romantic weekend at a lake house takes a sideways turn when a text message from Sadie’s best friend (played by “Bianca”) to Kevin reveals a lurid love affair between the two, sending Sadie on a vengeance spree.

“Scorned” will be directed by Mark Jones, the creator and director of the beloved “Leprechaun” horror-movie series.

Jones likened the project to “sophisticated” thrillers such as “Fatal Attraction” and “Misery.”

“Having done horror with comedy, I wanted to delve into something more sophisticated along the lines of ‘Fatal Attraction’ and ‘Misery,’ and develop a multi-dimensional, twisted character in our lead villain (McCord), who I feel brings an original and incredibly unique take on her character,” Jones said.

Lightning Entertainment will handle international sales of the film, with Lightning’s Audrey Delaney and Marc Bienstock executive-producing.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Anorexic Bakes to Gain Control Over Food

Camilla Kuhns of Kirkland, Wash., makes the best cookies in the world. Ask anyone but her.

Kuhns is a 29-year-old anorexic with a penchant for baking. She has never tasted one of her own confections. Her younger brother, Seth, samples dough and final products to let her know if anything is off, and her mother, Ilene, tastes the frosting.

“Yeah, my mom’s my angel when it comes to the frosting,” Kuhns told ABC News Seattle affiliate KOMO-TV right before she entered an inpatient treatment program for her eating disorder two weeks ago. “I don’t know what it is, but it makes me very anxious.”

On her blog, Kuhns said she is 5’8″ and weighs 104 pounds with her shoes and clothes on and while holding her purse. She baked challah breads, cakes and pastries for others to enjoy while her own daily intake amounted to a head of cauliflower with hot sauce and a tablespoon of nuts. To ensure she burned off every single calorie consumed, she exercised for three to four hours a day.

Her best friend, Amber “Nic” Poppe, said that Kuhns has suffered from various eating disorders since she was 11. Both her anorexia and the baking escalated recently after a tough year that included the death of a friend and a messy divorce.

“Baking became therapeutic for her. I know it sounds strange but it seems like her way of overcoming her issues with food,” Poppe said.

Actually, it isn’t so strange. Experts have long noted the connection between eating disorders and baking, as well as cooking, watching cooking shows and collecting recipes.

In a famous 1943 study known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, men put on a semi-starvation diet for six months developed such an intense obsession with food, they daydreamed, read and talked about it constantly. The fixation was so persistent that more than 40 percent of them mentioned cooking as part of their post-experiment plans. After they left the study and regained their weight, three of the men changed their occupations to become chefs.

“I see it a lot this in my practice,” said Jennifer Thomas, an assistant psychologist at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center at McLean Hospital in Boston. “Patients will prepare elaborate meals for friends and family while they themselves go hungry. They get a vicarious joy and a sense of superiority from watching others indulge while they don’t allow themselves to eat.”

As someone who was anorexic for five years, Victoria Casciaro said she can relate. The 20-year-old college student admitted she was also a starving baker who constantly made treats she never considered eating herself.

“I would look at what I put in the mixing bowl and it would scare me because I didn’t have the nutrition facts, so I couldn’t calculate whether or not it was a safe or dangerous food,” she recalled.

Not only would Casciaro resist her sumptuous creations, she would wash her hands frequently during the baking process to prevent herself from accidentally tasting the ingredients. She’d carefully avoid taking even the tiniest nibble for fear that she’d gain weight or set off a binge.

Haley Anderson, a 20-year-old recovering anorexic, said she’d often whip up copious amounts of baked treats for everyone else, then talk herself out of trying them.

“I’d tell myself that taste buds have memory,” she said, “and if you can avoid a certain food long enough then you could forget what it tastes like and no longer be tempted by it.”

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Romney, Obama converge on Iowa in late scramble for votes

DUBUQUE, Iowa (Reuters) - The presidential race, which has hinged for months on a handful of states, converged on one city in Iowa on Saturday as President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney each made a last-minute appeal for support before Tuesday's election.

With the race in a dead heat nationally, both candidates touched down briefly in Dubuque, a Mississippi River city of 58,000 people, as they sprinted across the country in a bid to secure any possible advantage before Election Day.

In an airport rally early in the afternoon, Romney urged supporters to try to sway friends and neighbors who back Obama. He said he would reach out to Democrats as well if elected - a stance that could appeal to independent voters who have little stomach for partisan gridlock.

"I want you to reach across the street to the neighbor, who has that other sign in his front yard. And I'm going to reach across the aisle in Washington, D.C., to the politicians who are working for the other candidate," Romney told about 2,000 people.

Six hours later, Obama reminded about 5,000 people in a park in downtown Dubuque that he had started his first presidential bid in Iowa in 2007, and highlighted successes of his time in office, such as ending the war in Iraq and expanding access to healthcare.

"After two years of campaigning and after four years as president, you know me by now. You may not agree with every decision I made, you may have sometimes been frustrated with the pace of change. But you know that I say what I mean and I mean what I say," Obama said.

A new poll by the Des Moines Register newspaper showed Obama leading Romney by 47 percent to 42 percent in Iowa, though the survey showed the president barely edging his opponent on the critical question of which candidate would do better fixing the economy.

Earlier in the day in Ohio, Obama hammered Romney for opposing his bailout of the auto industry and said his challenger tried to scare workers by saying inaccurately that Chrysler planned to shift jobs to China.

About one in eight Ohio jobs is tied to auto manufacturing, and the bailout has helped Obama win over some of the white working-class voters who are heavily backing Romney in rest of the country.

"I've been a Republican for 35 years and I've never voted for a Democrat on the federal level - until now," retiree Patrick Dorsey said as he waited for Obama to speak. "Economically, Romney's just going to make the rich richer."

TIGHT RACE IN POLLS

Romney will have a hard time winning the White House if he does not carry Ohio, and a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Saturday showed him trailing Obama by a statistically meaningless margin of 1 percentage point in the state. Other polls show him trailing by a larger margin in Ohio.

The race for the White House remains effectively tied at a national level, with 47 percent backing Obama and 46 percent supporting Romney, according to a Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll released on Saturday.

Still, analysts say Obama holds an edge in many of the eight or nine competitive states that will determine who controls the White House. Reuters/Ipsos polls released on Saturday showed Obama leading by 3 percentage points in Virginia but trailing by 2 points in Colorado. The two were dead even in Florida. All the results were within the credibility interval, a measurement of the accuracy of online polls.

Other surveys generally show Obama leading by narrow margins in Wisconsin, Nevada and New Hampshire. Romney is considered to have the edge in North Carolina.

Romney has tried to expand the battlefield over the past week to states that had been considered beyond his reach.

"We win Pennsylvania, we save America in three days," Romney's vice presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, said at an airport rally in the state capital, Harrisburg.

Ryan is due to visit Minnesota on Sunday, another state that has been considered solidly Democratic. Romney himself is due to speak in Pennsylvania on Sunday.

Obama officials say the Romney campaign is visiting those states out of desperation because he has been unable to establish a clear lead in other battleground states.

Nevertheless, the Obama campaign is dispatching Vice President Joe Biden's wife, Jill Biden, to Pennsylvania and former President Bill Clinton to Minnesota.

Capping Saturday's tour, Obama made a joint appearance with Clinton before an enthusiastic crowd of 24,000 - one of the largest of his campaign - at an outdoor arena in Bristow, Virginia. The Dave Matthews Band provided the warm-up act.

On stage, Clinton mocked Romney for his shifting positions and attempts to explain away earlier comments on the auto bailout, saying the Republican "tied himself in so many knots ... that he could be hired as the chief contortionist for the Cirque du Soleil."

Clinton, seen by Obama's campaign as appealing to undecided voters because of the prosperous economy he presided over, lauded the president as a "good commander-in-chief and a good decider-in-chief."

Earlier on Saturday, Obama also held a rally in Wisconsin, a state considered safely in his column earlier this year.

"You don't take anything for granted, you go as hard as you can to the end, and that's exactly what we're going to do in all our battleground states," said campaign manager Jim Messina.

Obama started the day at the federal government's disaster-relief headquarters in Washington, where he received an update on the efforts to help Northeastern coastal states recover from devastating storm Sandy.

The storm has afforded the Democrat an opportunity to rise above the fray of campaigning. But it has also raised the stakes for him to show his administration can respond quickly and effectively in a crisis, as residents of New York and New Jersey vent frustration at power outages and gasoline shortages.

(Additional reporting by Samuel P. Jacobs, Matt Spetalnick, Jeff Mason and Mark Felsenthal; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Peter Cooney and Doina Chiacu)

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Syria army quits base on strategic Aleppo road

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Syrian army abandoned its last base near the northern town of Saraqeb after a fierce assault by rebels, further isolating the strategically important second city Aleppo from the capital.

But in a political setback to forces battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad, the United Nations said the rebels appeared to have committed a war crime after seizing the base.

The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday government troops had retreated from a post northwest of Saraqeb, leaving the town and surrounding areas “completely outside the control of regime forces”.

It was not immediately possible to verify the reported army withdrawal. Authorities restrict journalists’ access in Syria and state media made no reference to Saraqeb.

The pullout followed coordinated rebel attacks on Thursday against three military posts around Saraqeb, 50 km (30 miles) southwest of Aleppo, in which 28 soldiers were killed.

Several were shown in video footage being shot after they had surrendered.

“The allegations are that these were soldiers who were no longer combatants. And therefore, at this point it looks very likely that this is a war crime, another one,” U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said in Geneva.

“Unfortunately this could be just the latest in a string of documented summary executions by opposition factions as well as by government forces and groups affiliated with them, such as the shabbiha (pro-government militia),” he said.

Video footage of the killings showed rebels berating the captured men, calling them “Assad’s dogs”, before firing round after round into their bodies as they lay on the ground.

Rights groups and the United Nations say rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have committed war crimes during the 19-month-old conflict. It began with protests against Assad and has spiraled into a civil war which has killed 32,000 people and threatens to drag in regional powers.

The mainly Sunni Muslim rebels are supported by Sunni states including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and neighboring Turkey. Shi’ite Iran remains the strongest regional supporter of Assad, who is from the Alawite faith which is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

STRATEGIC BLOW

Saraqeb lies at the meeting point of Syria’s main north-south highway, linking Aleppo with Damascus, and another road connecting Aleppo to the Mediterranean port of Latakia.

With areas of rural Aleppo and border crossings to Turkey already under rebel control, the loss of Saraqeb would leave Aleppo city further cut off from Assad’s Damascus powerbase.

Any convoys using the highways from Damascus or the Mediterranean city of Latakia would be vulnerable to rebel attack. This would force the army to use smaller rural roads or send supplies on a dangerous route from Al-Raqqa in the east, according to the Observatory’s director, Rami Abdelrahman.

In response to the rebels’ territorial gains, Assad has stepped up air strikes against opposition strongholds, launching some of the heaviest raids so far against working class suburbs east of Damascus over the last week.

The bloodshed has continued unabated despite an attempted ceasefire, proposed by join U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to mark last month’s Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

In the latest in a string of fruitless international initiatives, China called on Thursday for a phased, region-by-region ceasefire and the setting up of a transitional governing body – an idea which opposition leaders hope to flesh out at a meeting in Qatar next week.

Veteran opposition leader Riad Seif has proposed a structure bringing together the rebel Free Syrian Army, regional military councils and other rebel forces alongside local civilian bodies and prominent opposition figures.

His plan, called the Syrian National Initiative, calls for four bodies to be established: the Initiative Body, including political groups, local councils, national figures and rebel forces; a Supreme Military Council; a Judicial Committee and a transitional government made up of technocrats.

The initiative has the support of Washington. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Wednesday for an overhaul of the opposition, saying it was time to move beyond the troubled Syrian National Council.

The SNC has failed to win recognition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people and Clinton said it was time to bring in “those on the front lines fighting and dying”.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Jon Boyle)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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‘Wreck-It Ralph’: what the critics say about Disney’s new animated film

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Critics love “Wreck-It Ralph.”

The new Disney animated adventure has attracted an 84 percent “fresh” rating on the critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, trouncing the scores of recent Pixar films like “Brave” and “Cars 2.” The film centers on an arcade game villain who tires of being the bad guy and sets off on a quest across various video games to see if he can become a hero. John C. Reilly, Jane Lynch and Sarah Silverman lend their voices to the film, which hits theaters today.

“Wreck-It Ralph” is battling a long legacy of horrific video game movie adaptations, an ignominious list that includes “Street Fighter” and “Super Mario Brothers.” But TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde says that the film, loaded with inside-jokes for gamers, manages to side-step the critical infamy that greeted that anti-Criterion Collection.

“Life lessons about being true to yourself are learned along the way, delivered with all the subtlety of Felix’s hammer, but ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ actually makes us care about these videogame characters and their dreams for a better life,” he writes. “Even when the plot twists and character arcs in Phil Johnston (‘Cedar Rapids’) and Jennifer Lee’s screenplay feel familiar, the voice performances, particularly from Reilly and Silverman, keep things fresh.”

By and large, Duralde’s fellow critics agreed. In The New York Times, A.O. Scott hailed the film and its video game-hopping setpieces as triumphs of the production designer’s art. It’s a film, he says, that could have been crassly commercial and totally fixated on merchandising potential, but instead is a well-executed, cleverly scripted, pixilated pleasure.

“The secret to its success is a genuine enthusiasm for the creative potential of games, a willingness to take them seriously without descending into nerdy pomposity,” he writes. “I am delighted to surrender my cynicism, at least until I’ve used up today’s supply of quarters.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Betsy Sharkey is also among the fans of the film. She praised the 3D film for its innovative premise and for finding the humanity in its video game characters.

“More culturally connected and a tad racier than we usually see in the Disney brand, ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ does a terrific job of providing enough oomph and aaaahs for adults and plenty of giggles for kids inside its artfully wrapped animation package,” she writes. “Whether the presence of Pixar’s John Lasseter at the studio’s animation helm or the new kids on the filmmaking block are responsible, the film blows in like a fresh 21st century breeze.”

Also sitting back and enjoying the game was Time critic Mary Pols, who raved that “Wreck-It Ralph” was the best family film of the year, thanks to its clever jokes and generous heart.

“As a little girl gazes into a screen, with only the audience privy to the lively, far more complex world teeming inside, the message is, And we’re satisfied with this? ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ celebrates video games, but it also makes a subtle plea for participation in a three-dimensional world,” she writes.

“At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself when I take my PlayStation-Game Boy-Xbox-deprived kid to see it this weekend.”

That’s not to say that “Wreck-It Ralph” didn’t have its detractors, among them the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr and the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern. Burr said the conceit was a clever one, but complained that the execution was faulty.

“It’s just more of the fodder designed to keep your kids attached to the life support systems of their home entertainment centers,” Burr writes. “Cranky old critic says: Send ‘em outside to play instead.”

Morgenstern also found the plot to be inert, griping that after kicking off promisingly it devolves into a numbing series of chases.

“A further question posed by ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is whether brilliant animation alone can sustain a film that comes up short in dramatic development,” he writes.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Germany’s Merck halts supply of cancer drug to Greek hospitals

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German pharmaceuticals firm Merck KGaA is no longer delivering cancer drug Erbitux to Greek hospitals, a spokesman said on Saturday, the latest sign of how an economic and budget crisis is hurting frontline public services.

Drugmakers raised concerns with EU leaders earlier this year over supplies to the euro zone’s crisis-hit southern half and Germany’s Biotest in June was the first to stop shipments to Greece because of unpaid bills.

Publicly-owned hospitals in some countries worst hit by the euro zone debt crisis had been struggling to pay their bills, Merck’s chief financial officer, Matthias Zachert, was quoted as saying by German paper Boersen-Zeitung in an interview on Saturday.

He said however that the only country where Merck had stopped deliveries was Greece.

“It only affects Greece, where we have been faced with many problems. It’s just the one product,” he told the paper.

A spokesman for the company told Reuters that the drug concerned was Erbitux and that ordinary Greeks can still purchase it from pharmacies.

Some countries have taken action to pay bills, such as in Spain, where the government has said it will help hospitals to pay off debts.

“That has improved things, even though the situation should still be regarded as critical for the coming years,” Zachert said.

Erbitux is Merck’s second best-selling prescription drug, bringing in sales of 855 million euros ($ 1.1 billion) in 2011 from treating bowel cancer and head and neck cancer. ($ 1 = 0.7785 euros)

(Reporting by Frank Siebelt and Victoria Bryan; editing by Patrick Graham)

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Power slowly returns in New York after superstorm

NEW YORK (AP) — Fewer than 1 million customers are without power in New York state, the least since Superstorm Sandy pummeled the region.

New York utilities report about 908,000 customers still without power. Parts of Manhattan started to flicker on overnight.

The Long Island Power Authority continues to report the most outages, with about 460,000 homes, buildings and businesses still dark as of 7:30 a.m. Saturday. There are about 275,000 Con Edison customers without service and another 119,000 in suburban Orange and Rockland counties.

Officials say that as power was being restored Friday, several small explosions jolted residents of a Manhattan neighborhood and popped two manhole covers.

The Daily News reports the explosions occurred when the utility started restoring electricity and the current hit salt on the power lines. Nobody was hurt.

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Apple rolls out iPad mini to shorter queues

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Europe approves high-price gene therapy

LONDON (Reuters) – European officials have approved the Western world’s first gene therapy drug from a small Dutch biotech company, in a milestone for the novel medical technology that fixes faulty genes.

The formal clearance from the European Commission paves the way for a launch next summer of the treatment for an ultra rare genetic disease that will cost around 1.2 million euros ($ 1.6 million) per patient, a new record for pricey modern medicines.

After more than 20 years of experiments and a series of disappointments, the EU approval of Glybera, which treats the genetic disorder lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD), is a significant boost for the gene therapy field.

Joern Aldag, chief executive of Amsterdam-based uniQure, said more such treatments would follow and argued a high price was justified because gene therapy restored natural body function and did not just offer a short-term fix.

“This provides higher benefit to patients than the classical protein replacement strategy and this is why we think we should be fairly and adequately compensated,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday.

Patients with LPLD, which affects no more than one or two people per million, are unable to handle fat particles in their blood and are at risk of acute and potentially fatal inflammation of the pancreas.

The approval follows a positive recommendation from the European Medicines Agency in July.

The privately owned firm is now working with governments on potential pricing strategies, which are likely to vary from country to country, ahead of the commercial roll-out from the second half of 2013.

Aldag said some countries preferred the idea of a one-off payment at the time of treatment but others were interested in an annuity system, which would probably involve charging around 250,000 euros a year for five years.

That kind of annual charge would put Glybera in a similar price range to expensive enzyme replacement therapies for other rare diseases, such as Cerezyme for Gaucher disease from Sanofi’s Genzyme unit.

UniQure is also preparing to apply for regulatory approval for Glybera in the United States, Canada and other markets.

EARLIER SETBACKS

The idea of treating disease by replacing a defective gene with a working copy gained credence in 1990 with the success of the world’s first gene therapy clinical tests against a rare condition called severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID).

People with SCID – also known as “bubble boy disease” – cannot cope with infections and usually die in childhood.

The field then suffered a major setback when an Arizona teenager died in a gene therapy experiment in 1999 and two French boys with SCID developed leukaemia in 2002.

In China, Shenzhen SiBiono GeneTech won approval for a gene therapy drug for head and neck cancer in 2003 but no products have been approved until now in Europe or the United States.

More recently, some large pharmaceutical companies have also been exploring gene therapy. GlaxoSmithKline, for example, signed a deal in 2010 with Italian researchers to develop a SCID therapy. ($ 1 = 0.7730 euros)

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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