NFLX stock jumps, as Netflix audience returns

Netflix regained 600,000 subscribers?after 800,000 left last summer following a rate increase. As the customer count climbs, so has the NFLX stock.

Netflix?has regained almost as many customers as it lost following an unpopular price increase, signaling that the video subscription service is healing from its self-inflicted wounds.

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Fourth-quarter figures released Wednesday show?Netflix?Inc. ended December with 24.4 million subscribers in the U.S., up from 23.8 million at the end of September. That gain of about 600,000 customers compares with the loss of 800,000 subscribers last summer after it raised its U.S. prices as much as 60 percent.

The uptick is a positive sign for?Netflix?after several months of upheaval battered its stock. The shares reversed course Wednesday, surging nearly 16 percent.

The fourth-quarter performance should help bolster confidence in?Netflix?CEO Reed Hastings, who was skewered in Internet forums and analyst notes for miscalculating how subscribers would react to higher prices.

A contrite Hastings had promised that?Netflix?would lure back customers, and so far it has been even more successful than he forecast.

"You are never as smart or dumb as they say," Hastings said in a Wednesday interview. "We know we are just beginning to climb back in terms of consumer trust and affection."

The fallout from the earlier customer defections contributed to a 14 percent decrease in?Netflix's?fourth-quarter earnings.

Netflix?made $40.7 million, or 73 cents per share, in the final three months of last year. That compares with income of $47.1 million, or 87 cents per share, a year earlier.

Investors had been bracing for a bigger drop-off. Analysts polled by FactSet had forecast fourth earnings of 54 cents per share.

Revenue climbed 47 percent from the previous year to $876 million ? $19 million above analyst projections.

Netflix's?stock soared $15.08, or nearly 16 percent, to $110.12 in extended trading. It had ended regular trading up $2.37, or 2.6 percent, at $95.04. If the rally carries over into Thursday's trading,?Netflix's?stock could close at its highest level in three months.

The stock still has a long way to go to return to its peak of nearly $305, which was reached in July, about the same time that?Netflix?announced the price increase that outraged customers.

"It's still too early to know how much success?Netflix?is going to have this year, but seeing those gains in customers makes investors feel safer," said Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn.

Now that the backlash over the higher prices has eased,?Netflix's?biggest challenge may be fending off competitive challenges to its primary business of streaming video over high-speed Internet connections.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/CVDHXQn1pnU/NFLX-stock-jumps-as-Netflix-audience-returns

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Wisconsin's Scott Walker poised to bury recall foes in money chase

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker raised $4.5 million in a recent five-week period ? vastly more than his opponents. The sum might scare off unions from spending big money in a potential recall election.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/yb3YVXdX4Lc/Wisconsin-s-Scott-Walker-poised-to-bury-recall-foes-in-money-chase

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Factory strength propels economy into 2012 (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? U.S. factory output in December grew at the fastest pace in a year and homebuilder sentiment improved this month, further evidence the economy entered the new year on firmer footing.

Inflationary pressures also remained in check as wholesale prices slipped last month, which could give the Federal Reserve leeway to respond to an anticipated slowdown in growth in the first half of 2012.

Factories boosted output by 0.9 percent last month, pushing total industrial production 0.4 percent higher, the Federal Reserve said.

"Manufacturing really outperformed. That shows a good ramp-up in terms of industrial production, which is good news," said Eric Green, an economist at TD Securities in New York.

Manufacturing has been one of the main drivers of growth since the end of the 2007-09 recession, and the latest data add to a picture of an economy expected to have expanded at around a 3 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter.

Last year, the economy added the most manufacturing jobs since 1997.

Higher industrial production came despite a 2.7 percent plunge in utilities. In an unseasonably warm winter, it was the fifth consecutive month of declines for utilities.

The U.S. stock market largely ignored the data but shares rose on optimism the International Monetary Fund would raise more funds to fight Europe's debt crisis and after Goldman Sachs' earnings beat estimates. Prices for U.S. government debt declined.

In a separate report, U.S. homebuilder sentiment unexpectedly rose in January to its highest level in four and a half years, suggesting the nation's downtrodden housing market is starting to heal. The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market index climbed to 25 from 21 in December.

The index has been improving since October, reinforcing optimism the housing market is finding a bottom and might even contribute to economic growth this year.

"I would be hardpressed to see a strong recovery, but the worst is behind us," said Josh Feinman, an economist at DB Advisors in New York.

SLOWDOWN EYED

Still, a recession widely seen to have taken hold in the euro zone and gradual fiscal tightening at home are expected to slow economic growth in the United States during the first half of this year. The Fed has left the door open to provide further support for an economy still suffering from an 8.5 percent unemployment rate.

Tame wholesale inflation would give them maneuvering room. The Labor Department said prices received by farms, factories and refineries unexpectedly fell in December, down 0.1 percent from the prior month.

Core producer prices, which exclude food and energy, rose 0.3 percent in December, lifted by higher prices for light trucks. It was the largest gain since July, but labor market weakness will make it harder for firms to pass higher costs on to consumers.

"Inflation is not on the Fed's radar screen," said Brian Dolan, chief currency strategist at Forex.com in Bedminster, New Jersey. "The Fed is more concerned about the slowness of the recovery and lack of job creation."

Energy costs for businesses fell 0.8 percent last month, with gasoline down 2.3 percent. Food prices fell 0.8 percent.

That brought the 12-month reading for producer price inflation down to 4.8 percent, a bigger drop than expected.

Nearly a third of the month-on-month gain in core prices was due to an increase in prices for light motor trucks, the Labor Department said.

(Additional reporting by Lucia Mutikani in Washington and Emily Flitter, Julie Haviv and Richard Leong in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/economy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120118/bs_nm/us_usa_economy

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Powerful drug's surprising, simple method could lead to better treatments

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

With one simple experiment, University of Illinois chemists have debunked a widely held misconception about an often-prescribed drug.

Led by chemistry professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute early career scientist Martin Burke, the researchers demonstrated that the top drug for treating systemic fungal infections works by simply binding to a lipid molecule essential to yeast's physiology, a finding that could change the direction of drug development endeavors and could lead to better treatment not only for microbial infections but also for diseases caused by ion channel deficiencies.

"Dr. Burke's elegant approach to synthesizing amphotericin B, which has been used extensively as an antifungal for more than 50 years, has now allowed him to expose its elusive mode of action," said Miles Fabian, who oversees medicinal chemistry research grants at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The institute is part of the National Institutes of Health, which supported the work. "This work opens up avenues for improving upon current antifungals and developing novel approaches for the discovery of new agents."

Systemic fungal infections are a problem worldwide and affect patients whose immune systems have been compromised, such as the elderly, patients treated with chemotherapy or dialysis, and those with HIV or other immune disorders. A drug called amphotericin (pronounced AM-foe-TARE-uh-sin) has been medicine's best defense against fungal infections since its discovery in the 1950s. It effectively kills a broad spectrum of pathogenic fungi and yeast, and has eluded the resistance that has dogged other antibiotics despite its long history of use.

The downside? Amphotericin is highly toxic.

"When I was in my medical rotations, we called it 'ampho-terrible,' because it's an awful medicine for patients," said Burke, who has an M.D. in addition to a Ph.D. "But its capacity to form ion channels is fascinating. So my group asked, could we make it a better drug by making a derivative that's less toxic but still powerful? And what could it teach us about avoiding resistance in clinical medicine and possibly even replacing missing ion channels with small molecules? All of this depends upon understanding how it works, but up until now, it's been very enigmatic."

While amphotericin's efficacy is clear, the reasons for its remarkable infection-fighting ability remained uncertain. Doctors and researchers do know that amphotericin creates ion channels that permeate the cell membrane. Physicians have long assumed that this was the mechanism that killed the infection, and possibly the patient's cells as well. This widely accepted dogma appears in many scientific publications and textbooks.

However, several studies have shown that channel formation alone may not be the killing stroke. In fact, as Burke's group discovered, the mechanism is much simpler.

Amphotericin binds to a lipid molecule called ergosterol, prevalent in fungus and yeast cells, as the first step in forming the complexes that make ion channels. But Burke's group found that, to kill a cell, the drug doesn't need to create ion channels at all ? it simply needs to bind up the cell's ergosterol.

Burke's group produced a derivative of amphotericin using a molecule synthesis method Burke pioneered called iterative cross-coupling (ICC), a way of building designer molecules using simple chemical "building blocks" called MIDA boronates joined together by one simple reaction. They created a derivative that could bind ergosterol but could not form ion channels, and tested it against the original amphotericin.

If the widely accepted model was true, and ion channel formation was the drug's primary antifungal action, then the derivative would not be able to wipe out a yeast colony. But the ergosterol-binding, non-channel-forming derivative was almost equally potent to natural amphotericin against both of the yeast cell lines the researchers tested, once of which is highly pathogenic in humans. The researchers detailed their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The results are all consistent with the same conclusion: In contrast to half a century of prior study and the textbook-classic model, amphotericin kills yeast by simply binding ergosterol," Burke said.

"The beauty is, because we now know this is the key mechanism, we can focus squarely on that goal. Now we can start to think about drug discovery programs targeting lipid binding."

The researchers currently are working to synthesize a derivative that will bind to ergosterol in yeast cells, but will not bind to cholesterol in human cells, to see if that could kill an infection without harming the patient. They also hope to explore other derivatives that would target lipids in fungi, bacteria and other microbes that are not present in human cells. Attacking these lipids could be a therapeutic strategy that may defy resistance.

In addition to exploiting amphotericin's lipid-binding properties for antimicrobial drugs, Burke and his group hope to harness its channel-creating ability to develop treatments for conditions caused by ion-channel deficiencies; for example, cystic fibrosis. These new findings suggest that the ion-channel mechanism could be decoupled from the cell-killing mechanism, thus enabling development of derivatives that could serve as "molecular prosthetics," replacing missing proteins in cell membranes with small-molecule surrogates.

"Now we have a road map to take ampho-terrible and turn it into ampho-terrific," Burke said.

###

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: http://www.uiuc.edu

Thanks to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116743/Powerful_drug_s_surprising__simple_method_could_lead_to_better_treatments

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'Artist,' 'Tinker Tailor' up for UK film awards

British actors Daniel Radcliffe and Holliday Grainger hold a Bafta Award after they announced the British Academy Film Award nominations in Piccadilly, London, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

British actors Daniel Radcliffe and Holliday Grainger hold a Bafta Award after they announced the British Academy Film Award nominations in Piccadilly, London, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

British actors Daniel Radcliffe and Holliday Grainger hold a Bafta Award after they announced the British Academy Film Award nominations in Piccadilly, London, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

British actor Daniel Radcliffe after he announced the British Academy Film Awards nominations in Piccadilly, London, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

British actor Daniel Radcliffe after he announced the British Academy Film Awards nominations in Piccadilly, London, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

British actress Holliday Grainger after she announced the British Academy Film Award nominations in Piccadilly, London, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

LONDON (AP) ? It's spry versus spy as frothy silent movie "The Artist" and moody thriller "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" lead the race for the British Academy Film Awards, Britain's equivalent of the Oscars.

"The Artist" received 12 nominations and "Tinker Tailor" 11, with each film up for best picture and director, and best actor nominations for leading men Jean Dujardin and Gary Oldman.

The other best-film nominees, announced at a ceremony Tuesday by actors Daniel Radcliffe and Holliday Grainger, were "The Descendants," ''Drive" and "The Help."

In a diverse field not dominated by any single film, there are also multiple nominations for "Hugo," ''My Week With Marilyn," ''The Iron Lady" and "The Help."

The nominations are another feather in the cap of "The Artist," a black and white French film about a silent screen star's fall with the rise of talkies that has become an unlikely hit. On Sunday it won three Golden Globes, including best musical or comedy film.

Director Michael Hazanavicius said Tuesday he and his crew had been "a bit mad to make a black-and-white silent film in 2011."

"We certainly hoped to find an audience, but the support we have received from so many people in so many different countries was unexpected, overwhelming and quite wonderful," he said.

The shortlist gives a boost to "Tinker Tailor," an atmospheric adaptation of John le Carre's espionage classic that has received rave reviews but has so far been snubbed during the U.S. awards season.

"Tinker Tailor" producer Tim Bevan said the film was a "particularly British cultural phenomenon. It's great that it's being recognized at the BAFTAs but that it hasn't at the Golden Globes is not surprising."

"'The Artist' seems to be the film with the momentum, and rightly so," he said. "It's been an OK year but not a brilliant year for movies, and 'The Artist' defines what cinema should be. It's brave, different, it's got a great shot."

The best actor contest pits Oldman and Dujardin against Brad Pitt for "Moneyball," George Clooney for "The Descendants" and Michael Fassbender for "Shame."

The best actress category includes two performers playing real-life icons ? Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in "My Week With Marilyn" and Meryl Streep as former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady."

Streep, who has been widely praised for her performance, said the nomination was "thrilling news ... Not just for me, but for the film of which I am very proud, and for the hundreds of people who worked on it! Thanks, from a (New) Jersey girl."

The other nominees are Berenice Bejo for "The Artist," Tilda Swinton for "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and Viola Davis for "The Help."

The prizes will be awarded at a ceremony at London's Royal Opera House on Feb. 12. They are considered an important indicator of prospects at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles two weeks later.

In recent years, the awards, known as BAFTAs, have helped small British films gain momentum for Hollywood success.

In 2010, Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" won seven BAFTAs, including best film; it went on to take eight Oscars. Last year "The King's Speech" won seven BAFTAs and four Oscars, including best picture.

"My Week With Marilyn," the story of the movie legend's time shooting an ill-starred comedy in England, received six BAFTA nominations, including a supporting-actor nod for Kenneth Branagh, who plays Laurence Olivier.

He is up against Christopher Plummer for "Beginners," Jim Broadbent for "The Iron Lady," Jonah Hill for "Moneyball" and Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Ides of March."

The supporting actress category features Carey Mulligan for "Drive," Jessica Chastain for "The Help," Judi Dench for "My Week With Marilyn," Melissa McCarthy for "Bridesmaids" and Octavia Spencer for "The Help."

The multinational best-director contest pits Hazanavicius against Denmark's Nicholas Winding Refn, for the turbocharged "Drive," Sweden's Tomas Alfredson for "Tinker Tailor," Britain's Lynne Ramsay for "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and Martin Scorsese of the United States for "Hugo."

The best British film category contains "My Week With Marilyn," racing documentary "Senna," sex-addiction drama "Shame," family tragedy "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

Steven Spielberg's equine adventure "War Horse" was overlooked in the major categories but gained five nominations, including cinematography, visual effects and music.

___

On the Net: http://www.bafta.org

Jill Lawless can be reached at: http://twitter.com/JillLawless

(This version CORRECTS Corrects first name of supporting actress nominee Octavia Spencer.)

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2012-01-17-EU-Britain-Film-Awards/id-58b0c600a18b450e819300adc6f6d305

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