Friday 22 August 2008

Applegate to continue TV show






Actress Christina Applegate will keep on shooting her U.S. TV series Samantha Who? as she undergoes reconstructive breast surgery next a double mastectomy.

The 36-year-old principal revealed on Tuesday she had both breasts removed after being diagnosed with cancer last month. Applegate � wHO was minded the all clear following the operation � is now scheduled to undergo reconstructive surgery over the succeeding eight months.








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Tuesday 12 August 2008

Mental disability groups protest Ben Stiller film 'Tropic Thunder'






LOS ANGELES - "Tropic Thunder" is pushing the envelope too far for groups representing the mentally disabled.

Dozens of citizenry from organizations such as the Special Olympics and the American Association of People with Disabilities protested the film industry spoof across the street from the film's Los Angeles premier at Mann's Bruin Theatre on Monday. The protesters held up signs with slogans such as "Call me by my nominate, not by my label" and chanted phrases like "Ban the movie, forbidding the word."

The groups are outraged over scenes featuring the liberal usage of a derogative term used to distinguish the mentally disabled. In the motion-picture show, director and co-star Ben Stiller plays a fame-hungry actor purge in a war motion-picture show who previously had a role as a mentally disabled character named Simple Jack. The DreamWorks cinema, which opens Wednesday, as well stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black.

"When I heard close to it, I felt truly hurt inside," said Special Olympics world-wide messenger Dustin Plunkett. "I cannot believe a author could write something like that. It's the non the way that we want to be portrayed. We possess feelings. We don't like the word retard. We are people. We're hardly like whatsoever other people out on that point. We desire to be ourselves and not be discriminated against."

Andrew J. Imparato, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said he and other representatives from advocacy groups representing the mentally disabled met with DreamWorks co-chair Stacey Snider and watched a private showing of the film Monday morning. Imparato called the movie "tasteless" and aforementioned it was "offensive start to finish."

"I have a sense of humour," said Imparato. "There were parts of the movie where I laughed, but it seems to me that the moving picture tried in truth hard to go too far and then pull back on everything that was offensive except the issue of people with intellectual disabilities. I only think Ben Stiller and the people involved in this flick just didn't think it was sledding to be offensive."

Following the original complaints from the advocacy groups, DreamWorks pulled some promotional materials, including a site that promoted the film-within-a-film starring Stiller's character which contained the tag origin "Once in that respect was a retard." DreamWorks spokesman Chip Sullivan antecedently said in a statement that "no changes or cuts to the plastic film will be made."

"If you want to pick on people, as the old playground saying goes, pick on hoi polloi your possess size," aforesaid Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, wHO is career for a boycott of "Tropic Thunder" along with the other groups. "This population struggles too often with the basics to have to struggle against Hollywood. We're sending a message that this hate speech is no thirster acceptable."








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Wednesday 6 August 2008

Pre-Eclampsia May Be Autoimmune Disease

�Biochemists at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston say they are the first to provide preclinical evidence that pregnancy-induced high blood pressure or pre-eclampsia may be an autoimmune disease. Their research could provide novel diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities for this intractable disease. Findings seem online in Nature Medicine on July 27.





Scientists in the testing ground of Yang Xia, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant prof of biochemistry and molecular biology at the UT Medical School at Houston, provided evidence of the connection by inducing symptoms similar to pre-eclampsia in pregnant mice that had been administered autoantibodies isolated from women with the condition. This proof-of-principle experimentation is called adoptive transfer.





Pre-eclampsia typically occurs in the last trimester of pregnancy and is characterized by a sudden increase in blood pressure sensation, excess protein in the urine and swelling of the men, feet and face. It affects around one in 20 pregnancies and the only cure is

Lou Reed's Berlin - movie review

As the terms and bylaws that differentiate television and pic continue to erode,
the basic structural differences 'tween the album and the mix magnetic tape have all but
vanished with the tide. The last few years have seen critical attention turn away
from records with broad thematic arcs and toward the simpler idea of a collection of unrelated
songs. One inevitably only to look at the thoroughgoing output of Lil' Wayne bootlegs and
the beguiling popularity of mash-up creative person Greg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) to see that
the parts have progressively become more important than the total in recent years.



Julian Schnabel's engrossing newfangled documentary, Lou Reed's Berlin, is immediately at odds
with this mindset. Schnabel prefaces the film with his have interpretation of Lou
Reed's famous 1973 commercial failure, an record album, as he would have it, about "love's
obscure sisters: jealousy, rage, and loss". In reality, Berlin was the follow-up to
Reed's breakthrough album Transformer, a Bowie-aping glam rock juggernaut. But unlike its widely-loved,
commercially successful forerunner, Berlin made hooey at the cash register and was
received with interracial critical reaction. Today, many of Reed's most impassioned fans reckon
it his shining 60 minutes as a solo artist.



As Schnabel projects his short-film interpretation of the album's heroine Caroline
(played by the filmmaker's wife and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly actress Emmanuelle Seigner)
over the cramped stage, the former Velvet Underground frontman rips through the tunes
with a killer backing band that includes Alice Cooper's axe-man Steve Hunter and
bassist Fernando Saunders, not to mention The Brooklyn Youth Chorus. The set, culled
from Reed's three-night residency at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse in 2006, too
features backing vocals by Antony Hagerty, of torch songsters Antony and the Johnsons,
and Sharon Jones, the conspicuous soul vocalizer who fronts R&B throwbacks the Dap-Kings. The
camera work, regard of the great Ellen Kuras (the films of Michel Gondry, N
eil Young: Heart of Gold), responds to the lyrical shifts in Reed's songs with a uncanny
swoon of grace. She gets as close as possible to the stoic legend, retreating only
when his peek promises an imminent lashing.



If Lou Reed's Berlin is a warm remembrance of the days when a great album was perpetually
superior to a capital single, it is too a bona fide concert film in a time of filmed
concerts. With the illustrious exceptions of the aforesaid Heart of Gold, Denis Hennelly
and Casey Suchan's staggering Rock the Bells, and, to a lesser extent, Martin Scorcese's
rumbustious Shine a Light, concerts on the big screen have get just that: Directionless
documents of bands playing their hits and nothing much more. Coupled with the thousands
of live clips uploaded to YouTube every week, the rare symbiosis of director and
live act seems all simply extinct. But Schnabel's pic is the real handle, a thoughtfully
prepared and enacted collaboration of visual style and auditory walking on air by 2 artists
world Health Organization, on the outset, await like they don't even have a species in common.



Like whatever good Deluxe Edition, Schnabel ends his film with two cuts not on Berlin: "Candy
Says" from White Light/White Heat and "Rock Minuet," the standout from his swan
birdcall Ecstasy. The former finds Reed getting outright upstaged by Hagerty, who delivers
the song's poetic refrain with such lilting elegance that you nearly learn Reed substantially
up at one point. In the latter sung dynasty, however, it's all crazy, rambling Reed in savage
form, reveling in an elegy for the death of the dangerous NYC. Schnabel and Kuras know
their subject enough to know how to human body him: with space, darkness, and unyielding
cool. The cool, of course, could have been delivered in an all-white bedroom with
stuffed bunnies and posters of High School Musical, as long as Reed was there.



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