» AsianWeek Market Report
» Possible Hate Crime in Wisconsin Town
» For WWII Internees, UW Degrees Come After 66-year Wait
» Ferrell, Aniston Film Videos for Myanmar Campaign
» Oregon Museum Celebrates Re-opening
» Shyamalan Aims to Scare With New Movie
» Indian Politicians Blast Bush Over Comments on Food Prices
» China Tries Using Carp to Clean Up Lakes
» Taiwan’s President-elect Hopes for Student Exchanges With China
» Controversial Taiwanese Writer Bo Yang Dies
| AsianWeekMarket Report | ||||
| Asian Stock Indexes 05/06/08 |
||||
| NIKKEI_225 | Tokyo | 14,049.26 | +/- 0 | +/- 0 |
| HANG SENG | Hong Kong | 26,262.13 | + 78.18 | + 0.30% |
| KRX | Busan | 3,869.80 | + 18.45 | + 0.48% |
| SSE IX | Shanghai | 13,702.56 | - 158.22 | - 1.14% |
| BSE | Bombay | 17,373.01 | - 117.89 | - 0.67% |
| HOSE | Ho Chi Minh | 518.35 | - 2.93 | - 0.56% |
| SET | Bangkok | 845.83 | + 2.68 | + 0.32% |
| Asian American Market Report | ||||
| Yahoo! | Y | 25.72 | + 1.35 | + 5.54% |
| Citigroup | C | 25.87 | + 0.12 | + 0.47% |
| Amkor Technology, Inc | AMKR | 11.88 | +/- 0 | +/- 0% |
| Sybase | SY | 29.71 | - 0.02 | - 0.07% |
| UnionBancal Corp | UB | 53.82 | - 0.10 | - 0.19% |
| East West Bank corp,Inc | EWBC | 14.09 | - 0.14 | -0.93% |
NATION:
Possible Hate Crime in Wisconsin Town
WINDSOR, Wis. — Authorities are investigating a possible hate crime after a Hmong family’s truck was set on fire and spray painted with the letters “KKK.”
The presumed arson happened at around 1 a.m. on April 20 in a normally quiet neighborhood in the town of Windsor, about 15 miles north of Madison, police said.
Authorities discovered a pickup truck in the driveway of a duplex where neighbors said a young Hmong family moved in several months ago. The vehicle’s interior had been set on fire and smelled of gas. Both sides of the truck had been spray painted, with the letters “KKK” in red on one side, authorities said.
Police confirmed the family are Hmong and were not home at the time of the arson.
Racial tensions have occasionally flared in recent years between Hmong and white citizens in Wisconsin, particularly after the murders of hunters of both races that some saw as racially motivated.
— Portage Daily Register
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For WWII Internees, UW Degrees Come After 66-year Wait
SEATTLE — The University of Washington is planning to issue honorary degrees to Japanese Americans who were students at the school, but were forced to leave campus in the months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
A ceremony to honor the former students is scheduled for May 18 at Kane Hall on the university’s Seattle campus.
In the fall of 1941, about 450 Japanese Americans signed up to study at the University of Washington.
But Pearl Harbor was attacked in December that year, and in February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt gave the military broad powers over anyone considered a security threat.
The military banned Japanese Americans from the West Coast, forcing most of the Japanese American UW students into out-of-state internment camps.
Many of the surviving students, most of whom are now in their late 80s, told The Seattle Times they are excited about finally being recognized as Huskies — although others remain ambivalent or wonder why it has taken UW so long.
— Associated Press
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Ferrell, Aniston Film Videos for Myanmar Campaign
NEW YORK — Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston and Ellen Page are among those lending their celebrity status to a new campaign focusing attention on Myanmar’s military-run government.
Jim Carrey previously filmed a public service announcement to raise awareness about the Southeast Asian country, also known as Burma, and human-rights leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been confined by the government for 12 of the last 18 years.
But starting on May 1, the message will be on a much larger scale. A video will be released each day in May starring Ferrell, Aniston, Page, Sarah Silverman, Sylvester Stallone, Anjelica Huston, Woody Harrelson and Judd Apatow, among others.
The celebs appear solo or in scenes together on behalf of the Human Rights Action Center and the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
The spots are more like short films than PSAs, and will be blasted across the Internet on sites such as YouTube and MySpace.
— Associated Press
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Oregon Museum Celebrates Reopening
JOHN DAY, Ore. — Closed for most of the last 18 months, the Kam Wah Chung museum celebrated its reopening on May 3 following a $1.5 million renovation.
The Kam Wah Chung & Co. building served for decades as the cultural center of eastern Oregon’s Chinese community. The building is two blocks from John Day’s main street, and houses the intact store and apothecary operated by Dr. Ing Hay and businessman Lung On from 1887 until their deaths in the mid-20th century.
Hay administered care to the Chinese gold-mine workers, pioneers and others from the John Day area and beyond by using traditional Chinese remedies.
Hay and On stayed in eastern Oregon and remained community leaders long after most of the Chinese community left following the gold rush era. The two-story wood structure had been sealed after Hay’s death, but it reopened as a museum in the 1970s.
— Associated Press
ARTS:
Shyamalan Aims to Scare With New Movie
MUMBAI, India — Hollywood filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan promised on May 5 that his new movie, The Happening, starring Mark Wahlberg as an ordinary school teacher, will terrify theatergoers.
“It is an extremely scary movie — this is meant to scare you,” the Indian-born director told reporters in Mumbai.
Shyamalan, who lives near Malvern, Pa., and shoots his movies in and around Philadelphia, was visiting India to receive one of the country’s highest civilian awards for his contribution to cinema.
In his new movie, which will be released worldwide on June 13, Wahlberg plays a school teacher on the run from a natural disaster that threatens the entire world.
“The emotional center of the movie is if you knew you were going to die — that was a fact — what would your conversation be like? What would be the last thing you would say to your loved one?” Shyamalan said.
— Associated Press
GLOBAL:
Indian Politicians Blast Bush Over Comments on Food Prices
NEW DELHI, India — Indian politicians have lambasted President Bush for saying the South Asian country’s increasing prosperity is partly to blame for the rising price of food around the world.
The defense minister called Bush’s comments a “cruel joke,” and the Hindu nationalist opposition, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, threatened on May 5 to force a parliamentary debate on the matter.
Bush, in comments that praised the growing prosperity of countries like India, said on May 2 that “when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”
That Bush was expressing a view held by many economists — and that he called India’s growing prosperity “good” — wasn’t addressed by the South Asian country’s indignant politicians. They instead treated the U.S. president’s comments as an insult, and responded accordingly.
— Associated Press
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China Tries Using Carp to Clean Up Lakes
CHAOHU LAKE, China — This sprawling lake in eastern China is pleasant enough on a cool spring day. But during summer, Chaohu turns slimy and stinky as algae fed by sewage, farm and factory runoff bloom, leaving it toxic and undrinkable.
China’s pollution busters, banking on a rather unorthodox approach, are hoping this summer might be different.
Across the country, officials desperate to meet a national goal of restoring China’s severely polluted lakes by 2030 are dumping tons of voracious fish into lakes in hopes they will gobble up the algae infestations.
Other countries have tried this in sewage treatment pools or drinking water reservoirs — with mixed success — but nowhere else has it been attempted on such a large scale.
Workers dumped 1.6 million silver carp fry into Chaohu Lake in February in the largest such project in China. They expect each fish to eat as much as 100 pounds of algae as they grow, helping to ensure clean drinking water for more than a million people.
— Associated Press
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Taiwan’s President-Elect Hopes for Student Exchanges With China
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan’s president-elect says he hopes Chinese students can be admitted to colleges on the island and inspire Taiwanese students to study harder.
Ma Ying-jeou’s comment came during a May 5 meeting with Lee Kai-fu, the Taiwan-born president of Google’s Greater China operations.
Lee says he believes Chinese students study harder than their Taiwanese counterparts.
Ma will be inaugurated in two weeks. He defeated Frank Hsieh of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in March elections on a platform of improving economic and political ties with China.
The two sides split amid civil war in 1949.
— Associated Press
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Controversial Taiwanese Writer Bo Yang Dies
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwanese essayist Bo Yang, who infuriated both Nationalist and Communist authorities with his tart critiques of abusive leaders and antidemocratic behavior, died on April 29 of lung disease in Taipei. He was 88.
Bo had been receiving treatment for pneumonia at the city’s Cardinal Tien Hospital since February.
Originally known as Kuo Yi-tong, Bo was born in Henan in eastern China in 1920. He fled to Taiwan in 1949 when Ma Zedong’s Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in the Chinese civil war.
He found work as a columnist for the Independence Evening Post, a small liberal newspaper, but quickly ran foul of the one-party Nationalist dictatorship of the day after he blasted Chiang’s government for corruption and abuse of power.
Bo was jailed in 1968 following his free translation of the American comic strip Popeye, which he used to poke fun at Chiang’s refusal to conduct open presidential elections.
— Associated Press
Compiled by Lisa Wong Macabasco