Jet Li Survives Tsunami
Jet Li just got through playing Hero on the big screen. Now, he's one for real.
The international action star managed to save his daughter--and himself--from the deadly tsunami that wreaked havoc on southern Asia and parts of Africa over the weekend, leaving more than 52,000 dead.
Li and his daughter were vacationing in a resort in the Maldives when the 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Sumatra early Sunday. The temblor generated waves up to 40 feet high which swamped coastal areas in nearly a dozen countries, including Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia and as far away as Somalia and Tanzania.
According to Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper, which quoted an unnamed friend of Li's, the martial artist and his daughter were in their hotel lobby when a wall of water surged into the building. Li was dinged by a piece of floating furniture and sustained an foot injury, according to the Ming Pao Daily News, but managed to scoop up his daughter and escape relatively unharmed. After reaching higher ground, he was able to call his agent and let him know they were all right.
A rep for Li confirmed to E! on Monday that the actor was vacationing in the Maldives and had managed to avoid injury.
The Maldives are a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean about eight feet above sea level. The tidal waves, which were traveling at 500 miles per hour, engulfed the islands--some almost entirely--sweeping away whole towns and villages before finally receding.
Nearly 50 deaths have been reported in the Maldives, as of Tuesday, but as with most of the places ravaged by the tsunamis, the casualty numbers are expected to rise.
Li, one of Hong Kong's premiere action exports, played the villain in Lethal Weapon 4 before landing his first major American starring role in Romeo Must Die; his other Hollywood credits include Cradle 2 the Grave, Kiss of the Dragon and The One.
Li wasn't the only celeb caught up in the tsunami tragedy.
Czech supermodel and 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue covergirl Petra Nemcova was on holiday across the Indian Ocean in Phuket, Thailand, with her British photographer boyfriend, Simon Atlee, when the raging surf tore through their beachfront bungalow at the resort of Kaho Lak.
According to the New York Daily News, Nemcova was able to keep her head above water and grab a palm tree. She clung to the tree for eight hours while the water swept other victims out to sea. At sunset, the 25-year-old beauty was eventually discovered by rescuers and hospitalized for a broken pelvis and internal injuries.
Atlee, however, is still missing.
"This huge wave just pulled us out of the house," Nemcova recounted the Daily News from her hospital bed. "It was so powerful I couldn't get up. I couldn't get out of it. People were screaming, and kids were screaming all over the place, screaming, 'Help, help.' And after a few minutes, you didn't hear the kids anymore."
She was transported via stretcher to a local hospital and then airlifted to an inland hospital.
"I was so broken, I couldn't walk," Nemcova said. "There were so many people with horrible injuries, with blood everywhere. It was like a war movie."
The killer waves also beseiged Nate Berkus, a celebrity interior decorator and frequent guest of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Berkus and his companion, Fernando Bengoechea, were asleep in their hotel in Sri Lanka when the tsunamis hit.
The two got hold of a telephone pole, before another strong wave pulled them off. Berkus, 33, managed to climb up onto a rooftop, but the fate of his friend remains unclear. After reaching safety on Sunday, Berkus managed to call his family and alert them that he was alive.
"I'm sitting here with nothing--no passport, no money, no anything, in shorts that somebody gave me," he told CNN. "The bottom line is, we desperately need help here."
Meanwhile, from the film world, Oscar-winning British director Richard Attenborough is mourning the death of his 14-year-old granddaughter, Lucy, who was killed when the waves crashed into Phuket. Attenborough's daughter Jane and Jane's mother-in-law, Jane Holland, remained unaccounted for, according to a statement from family friend Diana Hawkins.
Another granddaughter, 17-year-old Alice, survived the tsunami along with her father, Michael, and her brother Sam. Alice was being treated at a local hospital. The Attenboroughs were staying at the Thai beach on a two-week holiday.
So far, more than 80 Westerners have been confirmed dead in the catastrophe, with many still missing.
Hoping to fend off a deepening crisis, aid workers are rushing to contain the outbreak of waterborne diseases and restore basic sanitation and running water to the tsunami-effected areas.
Susan Sontag, Writer and Critic, Dies at 71
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Author and social critic Susan Sontag, one of the most powerful thinkers of her generation and a leading voice of intellectual opposition to U.S. policy after the Sept. 11 attacks, died on Tuesday at a New York cancer hospital. She was 71.
Sontag, who had been suffering from cancer for some time, was known for interests that ranged from French existentialist writers to ballet, photography and politics. She once said a writer should be "someone who is interested in everything."
She was a lifelong human rights activist and the author of 17 books, including a novel, "In America," that won a U.S. National Book award.
Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Among her best known works was a 1964 study of homosexual aesthetics called "Notes on Camp."
Fellow author and friend Salman Rushdie described her as "a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth" who insisted "that with literary talent came an obligation to speak out on the great issues of the day."
Sontag was among the first to raise a dissenting voice after Sept. 11, 2001, in a controversial New Yorker magazine essay arguing that talk of an "attack on civilization" was "drivel."
A tall and imposing figure with white-streaked, long black hair and a severe demeanor, Sontag was a fixture on the New York intellectual scene. She played herself in Woody Allen's 1983 comedy "Zelig," and directed four films of her own.
She ignited a firestorm of criticism when she declared that the Sept. 11 attacks were not a "cowardly attack" on civilization but "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."
With much of America still too shocked to consider such views, she was vilified in some quarters. An op-ed piece in the Boston Globe contended the comments confirmed what many already thought about her: "high IQ, but a few quarts low on compassion and common sense."
Sontag has since been an outspoken critic of President Bush over his response to the Sept. 11 attacks and particularly the U.S. war in Iraq.
In May this year she wrote an essay in the New York Times about the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, arguing that the shocking photographs of the abuse would likely becoming the defining images of the war.
The piece prompted an editorial writer at Britain's Financial Times newspaper to describe her as "the liberal lioness ... the pride of hand-wringing elitist liberalism."
Novelist E.L. Doctorow described her as "quite fearless."
"She was engaged as a writer. I remember she went to Sarajevo to do theater while the fighting was going on. She just marched right on in there," he said.
Born in New York in 1933, Sontag grew up in Arizona and Los Angeles before going to the University of Chicago, and later Harvard and Oxford. She wrote novels, non-fiction books, plays and film-scripts as well as essays for The New Yorker, Granta, the New York Review of Books and other literary titles.
"She was brilliant and put her brilliance to work on behalf of human rights and creativity for everybody else," said Victor Navasky, publisher of liberal weekly magazine The Nation.
Sontag was married at the age of 17 to Philip Rieff, an academic in Chicago, with whom she had a son in 1952.
A longtime opponent of war and a human rights activist, Sontag made several visits to Sarajevo and staged Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" there under siege in the summer of 1993.
From 1987 to 1989 she was president of the American Center of PEN, an international writers' organization dedicated to freedom of expression, where she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Rushdie, current PEN president, expressed his gratitude for her support over the fatwa issued against him in 1989 for his book "The Satanic Verses." "Her resolute support, at a time when some wavered, helped to turn the tide against what she called 'an act of terrorism against the life of the mind."'
FILLING OUT THE 'LOST' FAT KID
Despite all the beautiful people trapped on the mysterious island on ABC's hit drama, "Lost," fans are increasingly obsessed with the back story of the lovable fat kid, Hurley.
But they're probably going to be forced to wait until the end of the season to find out who he really is.
Web sites like Ain't It Cool News — typically a very reliable place for inside information about movies and TV shows — report that viewers probably won't learn Hurley's past until the end of the season.
Even Jorge Garcia, the actor who plays Hurley, doesn't know for sure, but thinks it could be as early as February.
Speculation on the 'Net about Hurley's past has ranged from him being a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing gamer to a deadly saboteur. A cryptic remark he made, "Back home, I'm a warrior myself," has kept fans guessing.
"I think I get to shoot it in January, and you all will see it in February," Garcia wrote on the cast and crew's official Web site, The Fuselage, about his episode.
But plans sometimes change, especially on "Lost," a hit show with a storyline so cloaked in secrecy, it rivals that of the "X-Files," in which producers distributed scripts to the actors on colored paper so it couldn't be photocopied.
Even the cast of "Lost" doesn't know in which direction the series is headed.
"We find out a few weeks earlier when we read the script [or if someone's really ambitious they sneak a peek at the treatment]," Garcia wrote. "We read it and get the new revelations, but then we can't wait to watch because little things get cut or changed from our draft.
"I assure you we are just as into it as you guys — we're just few chapters ahead," wrote the amicable actor, who has become known on the Web site for his frequent, friendly interaction with fans.
Jim Cuddy, Diana Krall say first concert can be a life-changing event
TORONTO (CP) - Do you remember the first concert you ever attended?
The crush of people, the bright lights and the ear-splitting sound? Many of us remember the night as vividly we do our first kiss. And when that first gig comes up in conversation with friends or co-workers, most of us eagerly contribute our own memory - whether it was a legendary band or the bubblegum pop act du jour.
It's because music defines our personalities, explains Jacqueline Warwick, assistant professor of music at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
"It's such an important part of how we make ourselves up and how we present ourselves to the world," she said.
The inaugural concert typically represents a snapshot of yourself and who you considered to be part of your community at that time in your life, added Warwick.
"You've made this investment of time and energy and money. You think 'These people understand me somehow. They speak to me. They get me,' " she said. "All of that is heavily freighted and becomes incredibly significant . . . making up their identity and figuring out what kind of man or woman they're going to be."
The Canadian Press asked a few musicians about their first concert.
Billy Talent's Ben Kowalewicz:
It was John Denver with my mom (in Montreal). I fell asleep half way through because it was John Denver. I was just a little one, a wee lad. But the first concert that really resonated with me and meant something to me would be the '92 Lollapalooza (at Molson Park in Barrie, Ont.) with Pearl Jam, Chili Peppers, Ministry, Ice Cube and Soundgarden. I just remember thinking it was the greatest day of my life. I was probably 16 and I was stoned out of my gourd. I was walking around thinking "This is amazing. This is what I want to do."
Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy:
The Lovin' Spoonful at the Autostad at Expo 67 (in Montreal). I was in the very, very back row and I have never been so excited in my life. When they first started I thought I was going to scream. It was the first time I realized why people scream. Obviously I'd been listening to music for a while. I was a really huge Beatles fan and I saw all the screaming on Ed Sullivan but when I was in that concert, it was almost more than I could handle.
Blue Rodeo's Greg Keelor:
Beach Boys in Montreal. I can't remember where. I was very young. Maybe '64. It was an outdoor thing.
Jazz singer Diana Krall:
Trooper was the first concert. I got gum thrown in my hair. That's when I said "No, I'm sticking with jazz." Then I went to Oscar Peterson with Ella Fitzgerald at the Orpheum (in Vancouver) when I was 16 years old. My mother made me a blue satin jacket. It was one of those life changing things. My cousin took me. I'll never forget it.
"Singer" Shawn Desman:
It's a little embarrassing but New Kids on the Block at the Exhibition (in Toronto). I was about nine years old. I loved New Kids. I'm being honest, I don't care, whatever ya'll think, I loved New Kids on the Block. It was surreal. I couldn't believe that the guys that I see on my TV everyday are actually there and I saw them in person. Hopefully my fans get that same kind of feeling. I didn't have the best seats but I could see the stage.
Singer Jann Arden:
It was Kiss, 1976. The opening act was Pat Benatar. It was in Calgary at the Corral. I went with my friend Patty. I was 14. Where I grew up, Springbank, there were 30 kids in my entire school. So you can imagine how naive we all were. My mom dropped us off. She had no idea what she was dropping us off to. I'm sure I had jeans with chicken shit on them and a T-shirt because we lived in the sticks and it was so loud I was kind of scared. People were drunk and smoking pot. Gene Simmons was drunk and would spit blood out at the crowd and there were all these pyrotechnics.
Actor and part-time singer William Shatner:
It was a Rolling Stones concert in Toronto. I was more a Frank Sinatra fan. I wasn't connected with rock and roll until much later.
Collective Soul's Ed Roland:
My dad took me to see Johnny Cash and I thought that was the coolest cat I ever saw in my life - all black, and that guitar. He was cool. I love Johnny. And then it was Liberace second. My dad took me to Liberace and then he took me to Elton John (news) and I'm like, "What is going on?" I was like, "Alright, this is what I want to do dad!"
Collective Soul's Joel Kosche:
It was Sammy Hagar on the I Can't Drive 55 tour. That was the first big rock show for me and I was already playing guitar and stuff by then. It was fun. It was an arena . . . where you get that real nervous feeling like, "Wow, something's gonna happen." Those were the good old days. A lot of shows used to give you that feeling.
Singer Leslie Feist:
Tina Turner at the Saddledome (in Calgary). I remember it exactly, the whole thing. It was the Private Dancer era. Her hair was enormous. I was a million metres away and her hair was still completely enormous.
When I played the Saddledome in 1999 with By Divine Right I was standing on the stage at the same spot. I was just looking left to right remembering exactly where I sat for Tina Turner and then Janet Jackson and Tiffany.
Singer Andy Kim:
I remember it because music was and still is my sanity. Having seen Roy Orbison play in Montreal was absolutely phenomenal. My older brother took me. I remember the first time I heard Only the Lonely. It was a moment. It was the first time you heard the moan of someone. It's like the first time you hear a bird sing. He was one of those remarkable musical spirits. He was almost operatic to me. I think I was about 12. I remember two things. The seats were not that great but it didn't matter. It was my first time in a crowd. Just to hear him, was, I can't explain it.
Man Auctions Water From Cup Elvis Used
BELMONT, N.C. - Wade Jones is a fan of Elvis Presley, but says he's not a fanatic. That's why — after a grilled cheese sandwich said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary sold on eBay for $28,000 — he decided to sell three tablespoons of water from a cup that Jones said was used by Presley during a 1977 concert.
"It's one thing to be an Elvis fan, but then you tell them you have this cup of water and they think you're a fanatic," he said. "I'm not like the people bidding on this water."
The water fetched $455 Saturday at the online auction.
Jones was 13 when he watched Presley perform in February 1977 at the Charlotte Coliseum, now the Cricket Arena. He says he watched Elvis drink from the cup while he introduced the band.
After the show, Jones went to the stage to snag a souvenir — perhaps a scarf that Presley would throw to his audience. When police wouldn't give him one, he asked for the cup and water. He stored the cup in a deep freezer for eight years, then melted the ice and transferred the water to a glass vial.
As proof of the water's authenticity, Jones provides photos of Presley during the concert in which several plastic foam cups can be seen on a stand behind him. Another photo shows Presley holding a cup.
"I'm kind of attached to the cup," Jones said. "I thought it was a little quirkier to sell the water."
Usher Leads 2004 Album Shipments
LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - To his eight Grammy nominations and slew of No. 1 singles, R&B singer Usher has added the honor of most-shipped U.S. album of 2004 for "Confessions," according to year-end certifications from the Recording Industry Assn. of America.
With 8 million units shipped to retailers (but not necessarily sold through to consumers), the set is the highest-certified album in the star's catalog. His previous best was 1997's "My Way," which is six times platinum.
Usher also picked up three honors under the RIAA's new digital awards program. "Yeah!" featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris, which spent 12 weeks atop the Hot 100 singles chart, was certified digital platinum for more than 200,000 downloads. The No. 1 singles "Burn" and "My Boo" with Alicia Keys went digital gold for more than 100,000 downloads.
George Strait earned this year's second-highest certified album, and top country album, for "50 Number Ones," which was certified five times platinum. Strait's career has yielded more than 60 million total U.S. shipments.
Norah Jones was the top female in 2004, with her sophomore effort, "Feels Like Home," shipping 4 million units. Her 2002 debut "Come Away With Me" is nine times platinum. Jones' "Sunrise" earned a digital gold award.
Top debut by a female artist went to Gretchen Wilson's "Here for the Party" and Ashlee Simpson's "Autobiography," both with 3 million shipments.
Kanye West was the year's leading male newcomer, with double-platinum honors for "The College Dropout."
In addition to earning the RIAA Diamond Award for 10 million shipments of last year's "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below," OutKast joined Usher with three digital awards. "Hey Ya!" grabbed the only multi-platinum award, while "Roses" and "The Way You Move" went platinum.
Another 2004 highlight was Ray Charles' posthumous "Genius Loves Company," which earned the artist his first platinum and multi-platinum honors.
Several other artists picked up their first multiplatinum awards in 2004, including Maroon 5, whose "Songs About Jane" went triple platinum. Earning their first double-platinum nods were Black Eyed Peas for "Elephunk"; Brad Paisley, "Mud on the Tires"; Jill Scott, "Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Volume 1"; Keith Urban, "Golden Road"; Pantera, "Vulgar Display of Power"; and Switchfoot, "Beautiful Letdown."
First-time platinum winners included Ciara, Five for Fighting, Anthony Hamilton, Jet, Josh Turner, Velvet Revolver, Michael McDonald, Yellowcard, Los Lonely Boys and JoJo.