Mel Gibson returns for 'Darkness'

Actor back onscreen with 'Edge'

Martin Campbell will direct the feature adaptation of the six-hour 1985 BBC miniseries, which Campbell also helmed.

William Monahan wrote the script, and Graham King is producing through his GK Films banner. Michael Wearing, who produced the original, will also produce, and the BBC will be involved in a producing capacity.

Campbell, who last directed "Casino Royale," developed the project and brought it to King a year ago. He enlisted Monahan for a page one rewrite; the scribe worked with King on "The Departed." King is self-financing the project and is committed to an August production start in Boston. It is unclear whether he will fully finance through production or enlist a studio.

Gibson will play a straitlaced police investigator whose activist daughter is killed. He plunges into the case and uncovers systemic corruption that led to his daughter's death.

Gibson had long been a fan of the mini and was receptive when King and Campbell approached him several months ago.

Before "Signs" and "We Were Soldiers," Gibson starred in 2000's "What Women Want" and "The Patriot." Subsequently, he concentrated on directing, with "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004 and "Apocalypto" in 2006.

While Gibson has stayed under the radar after controversy sparked when he made anti-Semitic comments to a police officer during a DUI arrest in Malibu, he has continued to be offered acting vehicles, and he came close to accepting on several occasions, including "Under and Alone," a fact-based drama still in development at Warner Bros.

At a time when supposedly proven stars aren't translating to opening weekends, films that Gibson starred in and directed have grossed north of $5 billion worldwide.

King and Monahan won Oscars for "The Departed," and the producer recently made a first-look deal with the writer, who has taken residence in GK headquarters. Among the projects on which Monahan and King are collaborating is the Paramount-based true story of Jim Keene, who traded a prison sentence to go undercover at a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. King will produce that film with Alexandra Milchan, based on an upcoming Playboy magazine article by Keene and writer Hillel Levin.

Oil on April 18 hit a record $117 a barrel as nervousness over oil supplies from Nigeria outweighed a rally in the dollar and fears of an economic slowdown in China.

Gold and wheat prices dipped on a slight recovery of the dollar and increased global supplies, but rice prices have surged. The U.S. Agriculture Department said in a weekly report that U.S. rice exports last week were nearly twice that of the previous week and the highest in five months.

In addition, corn has advanced 68 percent and, despite the small fall-off in wheat prices, wheat still has advanced by 92 percent.

"You have a generalized commodity bubble due to commodities having become an asset class that institutions use to an increasing extent,” Soros told an audience at an event sponsored by the Centre for European Policy Studies.

Commodities have outpaced stocks and bonds this year, spurring pension funds and other investors to increase holdings in wheat, gold, copper and tin, according to reporting in Bloomberg.

Editor’s Note: Special: How to Make Healthy Profits in Sick Economy

The UBS Bloomberg Constant Maturity Commodity Index of 26 commodities has returned 20 percent so far this year. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 Index of stocks has fallen 7.3 percent, reported the news service.

U.S. Treasuries have returned 3 percent to investors, according to Merrill Lynch indexes.

In addition to commodities being undervalued, the "financial crisis is leading to a flight from all paper currencies, causing diversification into the safe havens of gold, silver and oil,” Soros said.

Soros isn’t alone in his assessment of commodities’ value.

Jim Rogers, a co-founder with Soros of the Quantum Hedge Fund, has had a reputation since the late 1990s for being a commodities bull, and that was before the market rallied in 2001.

Since then, the Rogers International Commodity Index has more than quadrupled since its start in 1998.

Rogers also is skeptical of the dollar’s future value. He favors hard assets such as gold, oil and agricultural commodities.

Soros, though, remains more optimistic on the dollar, and he believes the greenback will eventually reclaim its supremacy.

"The euro, while it is obviously an alternative, is not a truly attractive alternative, and therefore there’s a general flight from currencies,” said Soros.

"That’s how you have the creation of sovereign wealth funds, which are basically seeking to diversify from monetary assets to real assets.”

I am looking for lifetime business partner(s). [ Version 3.4 ]

Happy Earth Day! In honor of today's planetary celebration, The Huffington Post has pulled together everything you could possibly need or want to know about Earth Day.

If you're curious about Earth Day in general, you can check out the official Earth Day site or go here to see the US government's Earth Day page.

If you're a fan of lists, or just looking for some eco-friendly tips and ideas, here are some of our favorites:

7 Energy-Saving Gadgets
10 Ways To Green Up Your Sex Life
16 Ways To Turn Your Business Green
52 Tips For Living Green.

If you prefer to think outside the box, you can check out HuffPost contributor Olivia Zaleski's 10 Things You Shouldn't Do On Earth Day.

Tired of being told what (and what not) to do, and just looking for a reason (and a way) to celebrate? Go here for a calendar of Earth Day events around the world and here to find some great eco-friendly (and alcoholic!) drink choices to celebrate with.

But, if you just can't imagine life without the jet, and think the idea of carbon offsets is so terribly gauche, then try any of these 10 utterly luxurious ways to cut your Jimmy Choo-heeled carbon footprint.

On the other hand, who doesn't like to save money? Here are 7 Earth Day money-saving tips for your home.

Looking for some Earth Day laughs? To see which of your favorite Comic Strips are doing Earth Day features, click here.

Or, better yet, check out the most amazingly hilarious Go-Green video ever made, starring, of course, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Adam McKay.

Got big plans for Earth Day? Anything we missed? Share your tips below!

Cancer therapy

Stemming the tumorous tide

Apr 17th 2008 | SAN DIEGO
From The Economist print edition

Cancers grow from stem cells. That discovery should translate into better treatment for tumours of all types

Wellcome

STEM cells have a controversial reputation, but in truth they are what makes human life possible. Each tissue in the body grows from a particular sort of stem cell. When it divides, one of its daughters remains a stem cell while the other eventually turns into whatever tissue its mother was designed to produce—be it blood, muscle, nerve or whatever. That is how healthy tissues are renewed, and it is now looking likely that it is how unhealthy tissues are renewed, too. Indeed, many researchers think that the underlying cause of cancer is the brakes coming off the regulatory system that stops normal stem cells from reproducing too much. For one of the most important medical discoveries made in recent years is that cancers, too, have stem cells and that these appear to be the source of the rest of the tumour.

This helps to explain why cancers are so hard to deal with. Treatments that kill the bulk of a tumour, but leave the stem cells alive, are only buying time. On the other hand, if all of a tumour's stem cells could be killed then it would torpedo the old wisdom that no patient is ever cured of cancer, but merely goes into remission. True cures for cancer would be possible.

 

The cancer-stem-cell theory, though plausible, was based on animal experiments and its relevance to humans was untested. But a series of studies reported this week at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, in San Diego, has changed that. They suggest both that cancer stem cells are very relevant indeed to survival, and that going after them is an excellent idea.

The relevance of cancer stem cells to survival was shown by William Matsui of the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Centre in Baltimore. He looked at samples from 268 people with pancreatic cancer and found that the pattern of stem cells in their tumours predicted how long they would live. Those whose tumours had stem cells at their edges (the “invasive margin” in the militaristic jargon of the cancer-warriors) lived on for an average of 14 months. Those who did not lived an average of 18 months. Not a huge difference, but confirmation that cancer stem cells have an impact on the outcome of disease.

Bombs away

Such stem cells, then, are as bad as theory suggests they should be. The question is, can they be eradicated?

Animal tests suggest this is hard. For reasons as yet unknown, stem cells are resistant to standard cancer chemotherapies. With this in mind, Jeffrey Rosen and his colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, compared samples from breast-cancer patients taken before and after 12 weeks of chemotherapy. They reasoned that if stem cells were resistant in people as well as mice, then the proportion of stem cells within a tumour would increase as more vulnerable cells were killed off in disproportionate numbers.

And that is exactly what happened. Among women treated with old-fashioned chemotherapy, the share of stem cells within their tumours rose from 5% before treatment to 14% afterwards. Dr Rosen, however, went further. In a parallel experiment he looked at a group of women being treated with a new drug called lapatinib. In these people, the proportion of cancer stem cells decreased from 10% before therapy to 7.5% after they were treated.

Lapatinib is a product of the growing field of molecular medicine—the design of drugs to attack specific protein molecules associated with particular diseases. In this case the protein attacked is HER2, a molecule often found on the surface of breast-tumour cells. Ironically, however, it was not lapatinib's effect on HER2 that made it potent against stem cells. Lapatinib, it turns out, also inhibits the activity of a protein called the epidermal growth factor receptor, which has been found to be important for stem-cell proliferation. When its activity is blocked, a stem cell's daughters both lack stem-cell qualities and the chain of “stem-cellness” that the system depends on is broken. Hence the proportion of stem cells in the tumour falls.

It is too early to tell if Dr Rosen's discovery is a life-prolonging one. But Dr Matsui and his colleague, Carol Ann Huff, are thinking along similar lines.

Alongside Dr Matsui's pancreatic-cancer work, they have been looking at treating multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, with a combination of heavy artillery and guided missiles: high-dose cytotoxic chemotherapy to kill the bulk of the cancer cells and antibodies called rituximab. These bind to a protein called CD20 that sits on the surface of cancer stem cells. It was expected to kill them.

Not every experiment works, and this one did not. As expected, patients left with the fewest cancer stem cells after the therapy lived longest. But this was the luck of the draw, for the rituximab failed to kill the cancer stem cells. Indeed, Dr Huff and Dr Matsui could see stem cells coated with the antibodies alive and well in their samples.

The next step, Dr Huff and Dr Matsui agree, is to bring in even more powerful missiles. Another proprietary antibody that binds to CD20, called tositumomab, is radioactively labelled. If this coats the myeloma stem cells in the way that rituximab does, the radiation should kill them.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, where tositumomab was developed, have already begun such an experiment. Andrzej Jakubowiak, who is leading the trial, says four patients have been on the treatment long enough to be evaluated, and three of them have already been taken off other drugs and appear clinically stable—which for advanced myeloma is an unusually good success rate. The laboratory data also look promising. The radiological bombs seem to be destroying the cancerous stem cells in exactly the predicted manner—although Dr Jakubowiak rightly cautions that too few patients have been treated to allow firm conclusions.

The upshot of all this is that the stem-cell hypothesis of cancer growth looks a good one. It explains a lot of things, and allows biologists to look at tumours in a new way—almost akin to developing organs, albeit ones with no function and growth that is out of control. That insight, and a better understanding of stem-cell biology, may be the chink in cancer's armour that people have long been searching for. And that is a truly optimistic thought.