Article Collection March 17

China TV airs "Prison Break" for English study Thu Mar 15, 11:44 PM ET



BEIJING (Reuters) - A television station in eastern China which flouted a national ban on U.S. drama "Prison Break," said it aired the popular serial on its children's channel for "English training" purposes, state media reported on Friday.

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Like other shows with crime-related content, "Prison Break," a drama about fugitives' on the run after escaping jail, is banned in China, as part of a 2004 order "to protect the living environment of non-adults," the Beijing Youth Daily said.

The ban has failed to stop the show from becoming hugely popular in China, where pirated copies of the first season are sold openly for less than $10 in DVD shops and on street corners.

An editor at Jinan TV, a station in China's eastern Shandong province, said excerpts of "Prison Break" had aired on its children's channel as part of a regular program called "Watch Movies, Learn English," the paper reported.

"The program would show some scenes, then the host would explain the meaning of some of the words used and how they would apply in real life," the paper quoted the editor surnamed Zhang as saying.

Zhang said the show had only aired for three or four days before they were reminded by "relevant parties" not to "push the line."

"We also feared causing an intellectual property dispute, so we stopped airing it," Zhang said, adding that the show had been sourced from "English enthusiasts."

"Many TV stations have played the whole series, and also with advertisements. So, as far as we're concerned, this has become a bit of beat-up."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070316/tv_nm/china_tv_prison_break_dc_1

New York artists sue NBC over "Heroes" concept Sat Mar 17, 12:07 AM ET



NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two artists sued NBC Universal and the creators of the network's superhero drama "Heroes" in U.S. district court this week, claiming their work had been wrongfully copied on the television show.

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New York-based artists Clifton Mallery and his wife Amnau Karam Eele charged in a suit filed on Thursday in Manhattan that "Heroes" creators based their plot line -- about an artist who can paint the future -- on a short story, a painting series and a short film the couple exhibited in 2004 and 2005.

A spokesman for NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., said in a statement the network believes the suit is without merit. "We intend to defend it vigorously and expect to prevail."

The artists said in the lawsuit that two people who identified themselves as writers from NBC's "Crossing Jordan," which also developed by "Heroes" creator and executive producer Tim Kring, attended an April 2005 exhibition of their work at Hunter College in New York City. The two were believed to have taken copies of the couple's work, the lawsuit said.

The artists said their work focused on an artist who paints the future and who specifically paints the destruction of two landmark buildings in New York City. They alleged this was "strikingly similar" to the character of Isaac Mendez on "Heroes," whose paintings of the future depict an explosion in New York City.

"Heroes," a serial thriller about a group of ordinary people who discover they have special abilities, has been credited with helping to boost NBC's ratings this season.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070317/tv_nm/nbc_heroes_lawsuit_dc_1

Passport requests flood State Department By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press
Fri Mar 16, 10:51 AM ET



WASHINGTON - Overwhelmed by unprecedented demand, the State Department is warning would-be travelers to brace for lengthy delays in getting U.S. passports, even when they pay a hefty fee to speed their applications.

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The department has hired hundreds of employees to process passport requests over the past two years as tougher immigration rules have taken effect. Even so, the department says a crush of new applicants — more than 1 million a month — has inundated its staff and caused delays of up to a month-and-a-half at the peak January-to-April season when many people are preparing to travel over the spring and summer.

In addition, a regulation that took effect this year requiring Americans to have passports when traveling by air to any country, including Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean "has increased passport demand and production to record levels," the department said in a statement this week.

Applications received between October and this March have risen 44 percent over the same period in 2005-2006, the department said in a notice sent Thursday to lawmakers. Some members of Congress have received complaints from constituents about delays.

According to the notice, routine passport processing could take 10 weeks instead of the previous six, and expedited processing could take four weeks instead of two weeks.

About 12 million passport applications were processed in 2006 and as many as 17 million are expected this year, the department said.

For adults getting their first passport, the routine processing fee is $97 with an additional $60 charge for expedited service. Passport renewals for adults cost $67, with the same expedited fee.

The department said by the end of 2008 it plans to have hired 400 passport adjudicators since 2004.

The agency's 16 production facilities are also working overtime, including 24 hours-a-day in three shifts at the National Passport Center in New Hampshire. A new center capable of making as many as 10 million passports a year is to open in Arkansas in April, it said.

Some 74 million Americans have valid U.S. passports.

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On the Net:

State Department information on passports:

http://travel.state.gov/passport/passport_1738.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20070316/ap_tr_ge/travel_brief_us_passports;_ylt=Ak1wUDMPAN4.PfXSNqXf3IPMWM0F

3 'Jeopardy' contestants end up tied Sat Mar 17, 4:16 AM ET



NEW YORK - All those years of answers and questions, and it's never happened before on "Jeopardy!" What is a three-way tie, Alex?

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The three contestants on the venerable game show all finished with $16,000 after each answering the final question correctly in the category, "Women of the 1930s," on Friday's show. They identified Bonnie Parker, of the famed Bonnie and Clyde crime duo, as a woman who, as a waitress, once served one of the men who shot her.

"We've had a lot of crazy things happen on `Jeopardy!' but in 23 years I've never seen anything like this before," host Alex Trebek said.

The show contacted a mathematician who calculated the odds of such a three-way tie happening — one in 25 million.

The three contestants, Jamey Kirby of Gainesville, Fla.; Anders Martinson of Union City, Calif.; and Scott Weiss of Walkersville, Md; were all declared champions and taped a rematch that will air Monday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070317/ap_en_tv/tv_three_way_tie

Secret of horror writer's lineage broken By JERRY HARKAVY, Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 17, 7:32 PM ET



PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - Joe Hill knew it was only a matter of time before one of the publishing industry's hottest little secrets became common knowledge. He just wished he could have kept it under wraps a bit longer.

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But when Hill's fantasy-tinged thriller, "Heart-Shaped Box," came out last month, it was inevitable that his thoroughbred blood lines as a writer of horror and the supernatural would be out there for all to see.

After 10 years of writing short stories and an unpublished novel under his pen name, Hill knows that the world is now viewing him through a different prism — as the older son of Stephen King.

Hill, 34, took on his secret identity to test his writing skills and marketability without having to trade on the family name.

"I really wanted to allow myself to rise and fall on my own merits," he said over breakfast in this coastal city. "One of the good things about it was that it let me make my mistakes in private."

The moniker he chose did not come out of the blue. He is legally Joseph Hillstrom King, named for the labor organizer whose 1915 execution for murder in Utah inspired the song, "Joe Hill," an anthem of the labor movement. His parents, who came of age during the 1960s, "were both pretty feisty liberals and looked at Joe Hill as a heroic figure," he said.

"Heart-Shaped Box," a title drawn from a song by the rock group Nirvana, is a fast-paced tale of another man with dual identities. Judas Coyne, born Justin Cowzynski, is an over-the- hill heavy metal rocker with a strange hobby: amassing ghoulish artifacts.

When Coyne learns that a suit purportedly haunted by a ghost is up for grabs on an online auction site, he can't resist adding it to his creepy collection. Things turn ugly fast after Coyne learns that the suit's occupant is a spooky spiritualist bent on vengeance following the death of his stepdaughter.

The book has drawn good reviews, with The New York Times' Janet Maslin calling it "a wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror" that is "so visually intense that its energy never flags." And with its cinematic, and bloody, ending, Warner Bros. snapped up movie rights six months before the book hit the market.

As excitement percolated about "Heart-Shaped Box," so, too, did lingering questions about its author. Inklings about Hill's family background started appearing in online message boards in 2005 when his collection of short stories, "20th Century Ghosts," was published in Britain.

Similarities in subject matter and appearance — Hill has his father's bushy eyebrows and the dark beard he sported decades ago — were enough to stir suspicion among followers of the horror genre.

"It got blogged to death," Hill recalled. But only when his identity was trumpeted in Variety last year did he realize that the secret was gone for good. "That was really the nail in the coffin," he said.

Still, his pen name had a good ride. The editor of "Heart-Shaped Box" was unaware of the King connection and Hill's agent remained in the dark for eight years before the author spilled the beans two years ago.

Hill's decision to follow his father's career should come as no surprise. His mother, Tabitha King, has been turning out novels for decades. His younger brother, Owen King, came out in 2005 with a well-received novella and short story collection that is more literary than horrific and laced with absurdity.

Like Hill, Owen King wanted to cut his own path and his book did not mention his parentage. But he decided against a pen name, figuring it would be too much trouble to try to go by an alias when meeting people or having an agent, manager, publicist or personal assistant handle details of his professional life.

The only sibling who has yet to make it into print is Naomi King, oldest of the three, who has switched careers from restaurateur to Unitarian minister. But Hill said his sister is working on a nonfiction project: a book-length study of the sermon as literary text and its place in American culture.

The King children's interest in books and writing took root early on. "It sounds very Victorian, but we would sit around and read aloud nightly, in the living room or on the porch," Hill recalled. "This was something we kept on doing until I was in high school, at least."

In an era of celebrity worship, the family has prided itself on being able to maintain as normal a lifestyle as possible despite Stephen King's fame and fortune. Hill and his brother attended public high school in Bangor, Maine, before going on to Vassar College, where they overlapped for one year.

After graduation, Hill and Owen King collaborated on a couple of screenplays. They sold one, but it has yet to be made into a movie.

The first half of "Heart-Shaped Box" is set in New York's Hudson Valley, the area around Vassar, where Judas Coyne lives with his latest Goth girlfriend, who 30 years his junior, and two devoted German shepherds.

At first, Hill envisioned his tale of a suit with a ghost attached as grist for a short story. But as he added depth and back story to his characters, it ballooned into a novel 10 times longer than what he originally planned.

The choice of title was pure serendipity. Hill's initial idea, "Private Collection," went by the wayside when the 1993 Nirvana song popped up on iTunes as the author was getting ready to write the episode in which UPS delivers the haunted suit to Coyne. It was then that Hill decided to package the suit in a heart-shaped box.

"Coyne is fiction and (Kurt) Cobain was a real guy," he said, "but I felt that the song fit very well with the book. The song is about a guy who feels trapped and desperate, and the book is about how someone uses music as a hammer to beat at the bars of his own cage."

Hill and his wife, whom he met at Vassar, live in southern New Hampshire with their three children. He is reluctant to say much about his private life, recalling how a crazed fan broke into his family's home in Bangor in 1991 and threatened his mother, a frightening episode that evoked the plot of King's earlier best seller, "Misery."

Stephen King declined a request for comment on his son's novel. "He's trying to go along with Joe's wishes and let him do this on his own," said his spokeswoman, Marsha DeFilippo.

But at a recent panel discussion in New York, King told a questioner that he wouldn't rule out a collaborative book project with his son.

"I guess anything's possible," he said. "I took them on my knee, read them stories, changed their diapers, and now they're all grown up and they have become writers, of all things. I am really proud of them. I guess we'll see what happens down the road."

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Associated Press Writer Colleen Long in New York contributed to this report.

___

On the Net:

http://www.joehillfiction.com

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070317/ap_en_ot/books_joe_hill

3 children killed in Thai school attack 1 hour, 12 minutes ago



BANGKOK, Thailand - A deadly attack on an Islamic school in Thailand's restive south that left three students dead and seven injured sparked hundreds of Muslim villagers to rioted Sunday in protest.

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Police blamed the attack in the southern province of Songkhla on Muslim insurgents, but villagers said they didn't believe Muslims were behind the violence.

More than 500 protesters gathered outside the school, parading the dead children's bodies through the crowd and setting fire to two buildings at a nearby government-owned school. Some hurled stones at police.

The attack occurred late Saturday evening at the Bamrungsart Pondok school, a Muslim boarding school in Songkhla province, said police Col. Thammasak Wasaksiri.

Attackers hurled explosives onto the school grounds and opened fire with assault rifles into the sleeping quarters of the school, Thammasak said.

He said police believe Muslim insurgents staged the attack and hoped to convince local residents that authorities were behind it — a ploy to win villagers over to the insurgents' cause.

But the protesting villagers said Sunday morning they didn't believe that Muslims had staged the attack.

"The villagers are accusing paratroopers of attacking the school," Thammasak said.

Thailand's three Muslim provinces have hundreds of religious Islamic schools, some of which authorities have accused of harboring insurgents and serving as a training ground for violence.

Drive-by shootings and bombings occur almost daily in Thailand's three Muslim-majority provinces — Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, and increasingly in the neighboring province of Songkhla.

Gen. Virote Baucharoon, the army commander in charge of the restive provinces, said that security forces had recently raided an Islamic school and confiscated an M-16 assault rifle, bullets, a computer with suspicious material on the hard drive and other documents believed to be linked to the insurgency.

"This leads us to believe that religious schools are involved with the ongoing violence," he said.

Though Buddhist teachers have been targeted in the past, children have largely been spared.

The victims of Saturday's violence were identified as a 12-year-old and two 14-year-olds. Injured students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, were being treated for gun wounds and other injuries, Thammasak said. More than 75 students were in the school's dormitory at the time of the attack.

Violence in the south has increased since a military-installed government took power in September following a coup that ousted then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070318/ap_on_re_as/thailand_southern_violence

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U.N. worker injured in Afghan ambush 54 minutes ago



KABUL, Afghanistan - A U.N. mine-clearing worker was wounded by suspected Taliban militants during an ambush on Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces north of Kabul, the coalition said Sunday.

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The militants fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at Afghan and coalition forces on Saturday in the Tag Ab district of Kapisa province, said a statement from the coalition.

The U.N. vehicle carrying the mine-clearing worker, which was traveling separately from the convoy in the opposite direction on the same road, was hit in the attack.

No Afghan or coalition forces were wounded or killed in the attack, it said.

Denise Duclaux, a spokeswoman for the UN Mine Action Center for Afghanistan, said the Afghan deminer was traveling from the work site back to his base camp when the vehicle he was in drove into the firefight.

He was hit in the shoulder and treated by a paramedic traveling with him, Duclaux said, adding that his condition is stable.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070318/ap_on_re_as/afghan_violence