Woo awarded Golden Lion

Film director John Woo won the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival Friday, becoming the first Chinese recipient of this honor, IBTimes reported. Woo, a native Chinese raised in Hong Kong, was praised by the festival "as an innovator of the contemporary language of cinema." Woo won great fame as a director in Hong Kong before he relocated to Hollywood. He was awarded a top official honor from Hong Kong in July for his contribution to his hometown's film industry. Woo's best-known films include Mission: Impossible II and Face/Off. Reign of Assassins, Woo's latest martial-arts movie, was shown out of the competition in Venice.

Bus-truck crash kills 17

At 2:30 pm Friday, a sleeper bus struck a car and then collided head-on with a truck after a sudden flat tire on a highway in Changchun, Jilin Province. 17 people were killed and 37 injured. The bus lost control after its left-front tire burst and sent the bus into the opposite lane. Both vehicles caught fire and burned for an hour. A witness said she saw a man in his 20s kick out a window and save three individuals. The man, Chen Xu, said in an interview: "I thought I could save more, but after I rescued the third person, I was so tired and I fainted." The bus was heading from Ha'erbin to Qingdao. State traffic and safety officials have been sent to the site to investigate the case.

IPowerful quake strikes New Zealand

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck near Christchurch on South Island, New Zealand, at 4:35 am Saturday, CNN reported. The epicenter was 56 km from Christchurch. No deaths were immediately reported. Roughly 100 people were being treated for minor bumps and cuts. A man in his 50s was hit by a falling chimney while another suffered serious injuries after being cut by glass. An aftershock with a magnitude of 5.7 struck not far from the epicenter about 20 minutes later. Police said there was some initial looting, but it was quickly brought under control. Officials declared a state of emergency. People.com.cn reported that power and water supply were cut to 75 percent of the city. The sewage system was severely damaged, and the airport was closed. Christchurch has a population of 372,600.

S. Korean foreign minister offers to resign

South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan Saturday offered to resign over the controversial hiring of his daughter, AFP reported. Yu offered to step down, taking responsibility for causing controversy over the issue of hiring his daughter, a spokesman for the ministry said. Yu apologized after his ministry hired his daughter for a well-paid job, which sparked allegations of nepotism at a time of high unemployment.

Student's 'psycho' ambitions

American student Joseph Thomas Hansen,18, plotted to blow up his school and cause as "much chaos, death and destruction as possible", because he wanted to become "the world's most infamous sociopath for the rest of mankind", the Daily Telegraph reported. Hansen planned to gun down any survivors of the explosion before taking his own life. The student from Sisseton High School in South Dakota was arrested in possession of a mini arsenal of guns and bomb-making equipment. When police raided his home in Claire City they found a notebook in which he boasted about the terror attack he was planning. He faces a jail term of up to 20 years.

Male insomniacs likely to die early

Men with severe insomnia are four times more likely to suffer an early death, a new study conducted by Penn State College of Medicine and published in the journal Sleep has found, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Men with severe insomnia are four times more likely to suffer an early death, a new study conducted by Penn State College of Medicine and published in the journal Sleep has found, the Daily Telegraph reports. Researchers followed 741 late middle-aged men over a 14 year period, and found that those who suffered from the condition were 4.3 times more likely to have died over that period than the others. Men who had hypertension or type 2 diabetes were seven times more likely to have died. There was no increase in mortality among women with chronic insomnia.

IBM works on medical records

IBM is helping a group of Guangdong hospitals standardize their patient records and showing them how to use the records to make statistical analyses of traditional Chinese medicine treatments, the Wall Street Journal reported. IBM's solution comes as competition in China's health-care technology industry is heating up. China's plan to spend billions on health-care reform has multinational technology companies like Dell and Microsoft racing to secure a slice of a huge potential market.

Googlers quitting for Facebook

Google is struggling to retain staff, with Facebook reportedly poaching its key workers. TechCrunch.com said one Google employee turned down a 15 percent rise on his US$150,000 salary, a quadrupling of his stock options, and a US$500,000 cash bonus to stay another year, suggesting that Facebook made an even better offer.

'Resident Evil: Afterlife' premieres

The new Resident Evil film, Afterlife, premiered in Tokyo on Sept. 2, MusicJapanplus reported. Wentworth Miller, Milla Jovovich, Nakashima Mika and Ali Larter all strolled down the red carpet. The films are based on computer games, and this latest sci-fi action horror will be in 3D and IMAX. Nakashima Mika is appearing in the movie as bloody zombie.

Panty-painting exhibition planned

Artist Natasha Zupan plans to exhibit her panty paintings at the Alexander Salazar gallery in San Diego on Sept. 24, AOL News reported. She created a similar exhibit ten years ago in a New York art gallery that closed in the aftermath of 9/11.The pieces consist of Zupan's underwear stuck to wood and canvas using latex and plaster. Other personal items in the display include playing cards and lace. Not all the underwear belongs to her; some was donated by friends. The paintings on display in San Diego will range in value from US$5,000 to $25,000. Salazar said many of the pieces have already been sold and scarcity is driving up the prices of the rest.

(China.org.cn September 6, 2010)