Kung Fu Card Hurler as a Career...

A Chinese man has carved out a new career as a card sharp - by using his kung fu training to hurl playing cards like throwing knives.

Bai Dengchun, 23, can throw cards with such force and accuracy that he can slice a cucumber or burst a balloon from 16ft away.

His parents thought his unusual hobby was a waste of time - until a slot on TV led to an opening as a performer in magic shows.

Bai, from Qingdao, northern China's Shandong Province, showed off his skills by throwing 28 cards into a watermelon from 10ft away. He can also use his card-throwing talents to break an egg or knock off the end of a lit cigarette from a friend's mouth.

"The cards are like darts to me. I can precisely hit any target within a five metre radius," said Bai, who learnt kung fu from childhood.

Ironically, he developed his talent because he was such a poor poker player: "When I was young I loved playing poker but I always lost," he explained. "I would always end up throwing my hand away and eventually I realised I could throw the cards a long way away - and very accurately.

"Three years ago I decided to give up poker and take up throwing cards instead. Each month I used part of my salary to buy cards to practise with and it's paid off."

Boy Head Stuck in a Pressure Cooker

It is not without reason that moms tell their kids to keep away from the kitchen. The case of 3 year-old Shivam, who got his head stuck in a pressure cooker while playing, underlines this. It took two hours of painstaking effort by a team of 12 doctors to release the child from the cooker, with the help of equipment like saw and screwdrivers.

Shivam, a resident of Rani Bagh in north Delhi, was playing with the pressure cooker on Monday evening when his head got stuck inside, sources said.

When all efforts failed, his parents took him to a nearby clinic. "Even doctors at the clinic failed to take his head out. Due to constant pulling, my son underwent tremendous pain. There were cuts on his eyelids and in the forehead area," said Sanjay, the child's father. The parents then took the child to Bhagwan Mahavir Hospital in Pitampura where the doctors had to cut the utensil.

"There was local swelling in the forehead and the eyelids and the child was crying constantly. We first thought of giving him anesthesia and operating on him. But, it did not work out. So, a group of doctors were called and with the help of screw drivers and large cutters the metal object was removed," said Dr Sameer Chikara, who was part of the team.

He said that the sides of the cooker had to be stuffed with cotton so that the child doesn't get hurt. Doctors said that the pressure cooker was local made and its edges was sharper than usual. Because of this, the child's head must have easily slipped inside and there was difficulty in pulling it out.

"Shivam's case should serve as a lesson for parents in future. They should not allow children to get into the kitchen and play with metal objects like these that can hurt them," said a senior hospital official.

Woman Sleeps 20ft Up in Tree

Baffled shoppers in a Chinese city couldn't work out where the snoring noise was coming from until they looked up.

And there - 20ft above them - was a homeless women curled up and fast asleep perched on a narrow tree branch.

Passers-by, in Lanzhou, Gansu province, couldn't believe the woman was able to sleep in her precarious position.

"We wouldn't have known where the snoring was coming from except one of her shoes fell off and hit someone on the head," said one shopper.

Police eventually persuaded her to come down to earth with sandwiches and a bottle of water.

China Builds World’s Largest Underground Theater

The grand opening of the Shanghai Culture Plaza Theater in coming July 2011, may or may not be attended by those busy people compiling world records at Guinness, but the Cultural Plaza Theater will nevertheless, have the distinction of being the world’s largest and deepest underground theater with the highest seating capacity of 2010.

Homeless Man Lives In Flood Pipe

Mao Li, aged 30, has lived in the pipe, which lies beside a bridge in Haikou, Hainan province, southern China, for a year.

Mao Li’s one bedroom apartment even has its own front door. Public authorities have intervened and are forcing him to evacuate only because they have decided that the front door to Mao’s very humble dwelling “lowers the tone of the area.”

Luckily the intervention will work in his favour - as to make up for destroying his home officials have agreed to move him into an actual house.

A Haikou spokesman said: "He will be taken care of and given a proper home. We are a modern city - we can't have people living in pipes.”