Darren Aronofsky saw his film The Wrestler, about an athlete forced into retirement, take the 65 th Venice Film Festival’s top award, the Golden Lion, with the director dedicating the prize to wrestlers “who just want to entertain and are willing to sacrifice their bodies and their souls for it.” Sir Richard Branson, the British billionaire and Virgin Group chairman, plans to chase the record for a trans-Atlantic crossing in a single-hulled sailboat, calling the current top time of six days, 17 hours, 52 minutes and 39 seconds “the greatest sailing record of all.” Bob Brower, president of Point Loma Nazarene University, said a dormitory director at the Southern California school has been fired after protests over a hazing incident in which male students were forcibly marched to the ocean for a 2 a.m. swim, noting that state and federal law ban such “coercive behavior.” Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria’s president, returned to the West African country after more than two weeks in Saudi Arabia, where he reportedly underwent treatment for a chronic kidney condition, with Information Minister John Odey saying the leader was “strong and well.” Dannette Gillespie, 38, along with her juvenile daughter and 19-year-old Vanessa Anne Ocampo, was charged with capital murder in Pasadena, Texas, after police say she gave knives to the teens to rob bar owner Eugene Palma, 75, who was killed in the crime, which netted the suspects $ 15. Atsushi Sato, 41, a Buddhist monk in Japan who was trying to rid his Ojiya City temple of a hornets nest using lighted rags on a stick, panicked when the bugs attacked him and dropped the torch, burning the temple to the ground and leaving Sato with burns, but no stings. Cyril Wecht, 77, a pathologist known for investigating celebrity deaths, can be tried again on 41 fraud and theft counts, a panel of the 3 rd U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled, denying his bid to have the charges dropped after a mistrial was declared, but ordering that the judge be replaced to help ease the “rancor in the courtroom.” Sanjeev Nanda, 30, the son of private arms dealer Suresh Nanda and a grandson of former Indian naval chief S. M. Nanda, was sentenced in New Delhi to five years in prison after being found guilty of running over and killing six people, including three police officers, with his car in 1999.
Cheyenne Blanton, 17, was sentenced in Ohio’s Butler County Common Pleas Court to 44 years in prison for the binding and beating of mentally disabled 19-year-old Ashley Clark, whose head was shaved and who was soaked in water before being made to walk barefoot outside in the snow.
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