United States (Celebrity News Service) – 114 minutes

In theaters September 2, 2011

Rating: R, Thriller

The Debt earns our gratitude.

It’s a remake of a 2007 Israeli thriller about a legendary hunt for a notorious Nazi war criminal that examines that ever-elusive boundary between legend and truth.

The espionage drama begins in 1997 as shocking news reaches retired Mossad (the Israeli CIA) secret agents Rachel (Helen Mirren) and Stefan (Tom Wilkinson) about former colleague David (Ciaran Hinds), whom they worked with on a previous mission several decades ago.

The journalist daughter of facially scarred Rachel is in Tel Aviv to promote a book she has just written about her mother’s Nazi-hunting exploits, over 20 years after World War II, when she and her two colleagues hunted down, abducted, and apparently killed infamous Nazi doctor Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), known as the Butcher of Birkenau for the horrific genetic experiments he performed, and who was then living and practicing obstetrics in East Berlin.

But improbable as it seems, Rachel finds out now, 30 years later, that Vogel may still be alive in the Ukraine, where a mental hospital patient is claiming to be him.

So we flash back to 1966 to see younger versions of Rachel (Jessica Chastain), Stefan (Marton Csokas), and David (Sam Worthington) perform their demanding mission, built around Rachel’s visits to gynecologist Vogel’s office, ostensibly to treat her infertility.

With a scheme as impassioned, complicated, and tense as the one the trio of spies has cooked up, things do go awry — and, people being people, a romantic triangle develops among them, which doesn’t exactly help them stay focused on the task — so that their mission will have to become part of history with several of its secrets remaining just that.

Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, Proof, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) keeps his thriller urgent and breathless most of the way, in a manner that recalls the Bourne trilogy and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. But although he really takes to the thriller genre, Madden makes the romantic entanglements much more than an afterthought; that is, he seems to know just when to slow things down and just when to speed them up.

The two-time-period screenplay by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman, and Peter Straughan must satisfy our desire for justice as well as our curiosity about the interpersonal dynamics involved. And as the past and the present catch up with each other, the film does just that, ratcheting the suspense up to an excruciating level several times.

If the third act doesn’t quite exceed or even fulfill our expectations — and, sad to say, it doesn’t — we can blame it on the superior nature of the first two acts.

The ensemble cast is mostly fine, and we would expect no less from the likes of stalwarts Mirren and Wilkinson. The exception is wooden Worthington, who rarely makes a big-screen impression at all despite his level of charisma-free stardom (Avatar, Terminator Salvation, Clash of the Titans) and here once again brings little if anything to the table. The result is that we really don’t buy that his David is the young version of Hinds’ mature version.

But the splendid if not astonishing chameleon Jessica Chastain takes a third 2011 step (after The Tree of Life and The Help) toward what appears to be a rapid rise to superstardom.

As a powerfully gripping and fascinating thriller, The Debt is paid in full.

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Jerusalem, Israel (AHN) – Nearly half of Israel’s population was left without cellphone service today when one of the country’s three carrier services collapsed. An estimated three million or 44 percent of the country’s population are unable to use their mobile phones.

A statement on Cellcom’s website, signed by company CEO Amos Shapira, apologized for the “serious fault.”

Shapira is calling the incident “the worst technical problem since the founding of the company”in 1994.

The repair time to fix the problem could take hours or as long as days to fix.

“Hundreds of our company’s engineers and employees are working to put an end to this outage as soon as possible,” he said.

He added that Cellcom’s Vice President of Technology was one of the employees working with Nokia engineers in Finland looking into the problem and trying to resolve the network issues.

According to reports angry and irate customers lined up at Cellcom service centers throughout the country. At one service center extra security guards to protect employees from disgruntled customers.

Many of the company’s customers took to the social networking site Twitter to voice their anger or humor over the situation.

When asked if the company would bereimbursing customers, Shapira said he was “focused only on fixing the technical problem, and then we’ll look at other problems.”

It currently remains unclear what caused the crash.

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Shanghai, China (AHN) – Some Chinese factories and other service establishments are experiencing a serious shortage of labor due to the high cost of living and an unchanged salary base.

Manufacturing hubs in the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas that surround the city of Shanghai and Guangzhou province are experiencing an acute shortage of migrant workers in their respective home and customer service sectors.

The labor shortage, which has already affected several companies’ expansion plans, occurred in the busiest season of the year–Christmas and New Year. Manufacturing firms were forced to decline orders because of the worker shortfall that is estimated to be more than 900,000 in Guagdong province.

On average, 40 percent of job vacancies in the Yangtze and Peal River Delta areas remain unfilled.

Stagnant salaries and the steadily increasing high cost of living have been blamed for the crisis. This has caused workers to remain in their hometowns where, although they earn little, they do not have to spend as much on living costs.

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London, United Kingdom (AHN) – A British TV spy show, “Spooks,” where many of its female intelligence operatives die violent deaths, is hampering the real MI5 in its recruitment drive for women to join the service.

When the highly rated British TV spy show, known abroad as “MI5″, airs every Monday night, there is a corresponding increase in online visits to the real MI5′s website from an average of 500 an hour to 1,500. But it has been putting off women from actually filling out the application because of the show’s portrayal of its female characters defusing bombs, chasing terrorists, getting injured in the line of duty or dying violently.

Despite an announcement of severe budget cuts, MI5 has begun an active recruitment drive for more female intelligence officers at starting salaries of just under £25,000 a year. On its website, the agency says it wants women to know that unlike the female characters in “Spooks,” they will be facing more cerebral challenges such as analyzing terrorist threats to the UK inside MI5′s Thames Intelligence headquarters.

A senior Whitehall source the Mail newspaper, “Spooks is a great TV show, but the violence can put women off applying for jobs at MI5. A career in the Service is about brain not brawn, carefully piecing together vital intelligence to protect the UK and its people.”

The Intelligence Service is made up of 41 percent women. Officials are looking for candidates with strong analytical and communication skills, patience, dedication, discretion, honesty and integrity, who work well in a team under pressure – not the ability to defuse nuclear devices or leap from exploding cars.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Employers in both the manufacturing and service sectors expect to hire more people in November, according to a report released Friday by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

Every month SHRM surveys over 1,000 HR professionals in U.S. manufacturing and service sectors for its Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE) report. SHRM ask questions regarding changes in employment expectations, job vacancies, the level of difficulty in recruiting and new-hire pay.

SHRM found that employers expect hiring to be up in November for the 13th straight month. Hiring should increase by 10.7 percent in the manufacturing sector and by 11.3 percent in the service sector.

HR professionals report that it was more difficult to recruit for key positions in October compared to a year earlier.

New-hire compensation increased in October. Pay increased by 3.3 percent for manufacturing workers and by 4.1 percent for new hires in service sector jobs.

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