Daily Dose: 12/30/08
December 30, 2008
» AsianWeek Market Report
» Smuggling of Chinese Immigrants on the Rise
» American Health Insurer Sends Patients to India
» FWN’s First Annual Filipina Salo Salo: January Restaurant
» Korean Americans Find a Home in Fullerton
» Asian American Holiday Play
» Winter Workshops at Kearny Street Workshop
» China Mulling Bid for 2018 Winter Games
» Online Piracy Menaces Pro Sports
» Taiwan Ex-President Back in Jail
» Thai PM Switches Venue for Speech
Compiled by Connie Zheng and Adrienne Aguirre
AsianWeek Market Report
| AsianWeek Market Report | ||||
| Asian Stock Indexes | ||||
| NIKKEI 225 | Tokyo | 8,859.56 | 112.39 | 1.28% |
| HANG SENG | Hong Kong | 14,235.50 | -92.98 | -0.65% |
| KRX | Busan | 2,373.06 | 7.88 | 0.33% |
| SSE IX | Shanghai | 6,558.16 | -95.04 | -1.43% |
| BSE | Bombay | 9,716.16 | 182.64 | 1.92% |
| HOSE | Ho Chi Minh | 316.32 | 7.76 | 2.51% |
| SET | Bangkok | 316.45 | 2.78 | 0.89% |
| Asian American Market Report | ||||
| Yahoo! | YHOO | 11.98 | 0.11 | (0.93%) |
| Citigroup | C | 6.57 | 0.0001 | (0.00%) |
| Amkor Technology, Inc | AMKR | 2.02 | 0.18 | (9.73%) |
| Sybase | SY | 23.78 | 0.44 | (1.89%) |
| East West Bank corp,Inc | EWBC | 14.11 | 0.03 | (0.21%) |
NATION
Smuggling of Chinese Immigrants on the Rise
HOUSTON - Attempts to smuggle illegal immigrants from China into the Houston area have increased in recent months, with the most recent effort being a scheme to fly them into the region, a top immigration agent said.
Chinese and other Asian immigrants are charged up to $25,000 to be smuggled into the United States, usually by flying them to Latin America and then transporting them on the ground to the Texas-Mexico border.
The local increase reflects a jump nationally this decade in Chinese illegal immigrants, according to a Department of Homeland Security analysis released in September of the nation’s 11.8 million undocumented residents.
Illegal immigrants from China increased 49 percent from 2000 to 2007, and homeland security now estimates there are 290,000 living in the United States.
- Houston Chronicle
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American Health Insurer Sends Patients to India
Health insurer WellPoint Inc. is starting a pilot program to send patients to India for surgery, reports Little India magazine, to cut down on costs. About 1.5 million Americans are expected to travel abroad in search of more affordable health care for non-emergency surgery such as knee and hip replacements.
But other surgeries like heart bypasses are becoming more common as well. A hip replacement, which costs $70,000-80,000 in the United States, could be a tenth the price in India. WellPoint is planning to allow employees of Serigraph Inc., a printing company in Wisconsin, to go to Bangalore and New Delhi for joint replacements and some back surgeries.
- Little India
BAY/CALIFORNIA
FWN’s First Annual Filipina Salo Salo: January Restaurant
EVENT: Intramuros Restaurant
DESCRIPTION: The Filipina Women’s Network invites you to join its first annual Filipina Salo Salo, a year-round culinary adventure to explore and appreciate Filipino heritage and cuisine. Each month will feature a different acclaimed restaurant.
DETAILS: $35-$90, Sat., Jan. 24, 6 p.m., Intramuros, 101 Brentwood Drive, South San Francisco.
CONTACT: (415) 810-9882, theintramuros.com
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Korean Americans Find a Home in Fullerton
FULLERTON, Calif. - Amerige Heights has become a destination for Asian Americans, drawn by high-performing schools, relatively crime-free neighborhoods and good jobs. According to recently released U.S. Census data, countywide, the Asian population has increased roughly 16 percent since 2000. To accommodate the residents, Korean churches, grocery stores and restaurants have popped up.
Fullerton, once a traditionally white bedroom community in Northern Orange County, has seen growing numbers of Asians moving into its middle-class neighborhoods such as Amerige Heights, where real estate agents estimate more than half of the residents are of Korean descent.
Fullerton is now 21 percent Asian American - a 35 percent jump since 2000, according to detailed U.S. Census data that averages surveys from 2005 to 2007. The increase puts Fullerton among the cities with the fastest growing Asian American populations in Southern California.
Two forces appear to be shaping the population shift. One is that many Asian Americans are moving in from other areas. The other is that many Asians are continuing to emigrate from their homelands, a result of “chain migration” in which relatives are allowed to sponsor other relatives here.
- Los Angeles Times
ARTS
Asian American Holiday Play
EVENT: “The Case of the Missing Santa Claus”
DESCRIPTION: Gil Chun, Bay Area dance teacher and choreographer, has collaborated on a dance play for the Bay Area Follies. The rest of the program will consist of other tap dances, hula, ethnic dances and ukulele playing. A large portion of the cast is Asian American.
DETAILS: $15 general; $12 for senior citizens, Sunday, Jan. 18, Matinee 2 p.m., Cowell Theatre, Fort Mason, San Francisco.
CONTACT: Gilbert Chun, dancegil@sbcglobal.net
. . . . . . . . . .
Winter Workshops at Kearny Street Workshop
EVENT: Shifting Focus: Changing Your Brain, Changing Your Poetic Practice w/ Pireeni Sundaralingam
DESCRIPTION: This workshop is split over two consecutive Saturdays and is dedicated to helping you develop a sustainable and effective practice as a poet. Incorporating ideas from neuroscience, the workshop’s aim is to challenge the way that we, as writers, engage with the world around us. In particular, the two-day workshop will explore how innovative metaphors can be used to shift our focus.
DETAILS: $60, Saturdays, Jan. 10 & 17, 11:00 a.m.-1 p.m., Kearny Street Workshop, 180 Capp Street #5, San Francisco.
CONTACT: info@kearnystreet.org
SPORTS
China Mulling Bid for 2018 Winter Games
BEIJING - Four months after successfully holding the Summer Olympics in Beijing, China is mulling a bid to host the 2018 Winter Games in the frigid northern city of Harbin, state media said on Thursday, quoting a government official.
Harbin, capital of Northeastern Heilongjiang province, has spent 3 billion yuan (US$440 million) on venues and facilities to host 4,000 athletes for the World University Winter Games in February and would use the event as a dry run, the province’s governor Li Zhanshu told the China Daily.
“If we fail again for the 2018 Games, we are determined to win the 2022 Winter Games. It’s our dream to host China’s first Winter Olympics,” Li said, adding that final sign-off for the bid would come from China’s sports ministry.
The bustling city of some five million people would face competition from Munich, which declared itself a candidate last December, and from France, where three towns - Annecy, Nice and Grenoble - have flagged interest.
- Reuters
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Online Piracy Menaces Pro Sports
After years of focusing on the pirating of highlight clips and photos on the Web, the major professional sports leagues are finding that pirated feeds of live games are now common and becoming a menace to their businesses, especially at a time when leagues are trying to build their own businesses offering live games on the Internet for a subscription fee.
That is not just because sports leagues abroad face the same issue, but also because the pirates themselves, the hubs of the peer-to-peer networks that facilitate the illicit streaming of live games, are mostly outside the United States. Often they are in China, where some of the most popular services started as student projects, say league executives who have tracked the digital trail of their pirated games.
While the biggest services are located in China, it takes a fan, often in the United States, to upload the actual stream for distribution to the wider Internet. This is done by using a PC-tuner card or by uploading the stream from a legitimate online video subscription to a peer-to-peer network.
- New York Times
GLOBAL
Taiwan Ex-President Back in Jail
Taiwan’s ex-President, Chen Shui-bian, has been returned to prison pending his trial on corruption charges, after a court reversed a bail order.
The Taipei District Court judges are reported to have said there was a risk he could collude with other suspects, destroy evidence and flee the island.
Chen left office in May and denies any wrongdoing. He was taken into custody in November and charged with embezzling government funds, fraud and money laundering.
Others among the 12 charged in connection with the case include Chen’s wife, son and daughter-in-law.
The 57-year-old former leader was first jailed in Taipei on Nov.12 while prosecutors probed his affairs.
Before being released on bail, he spent 32 days in Tucheng prison, to which he has now been returned.
- BBC
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Thai PM Switches Venue for Speech
Thailand’s new Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has delivered his maiden policy speech, after protesters forced him to switch venue.
After parliament was blockaded for two days running, Abhisit assembled a quorum of MPs at the foreign ministry.
His speech outlined “urgent measures” for “stimulating the economy.” Demonstrators loyal to the ousted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had gathered outside the gates of parliament to protest.
Under the country’s constitution, a new Thai government cannot start work officially until it delivers its policy statement to a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and Senate.
Ministers argued that the sitting did not have to take place at parliament itself, and so MPs hurried from the building to the nearby Foreign Ministry to hear the speech.
Abhisit promised he would be a healing figure who would put reconciliation between Thailand’s bitterly opposed political camps at the top of his list of priorities.
He hopes to answer his critics with policies that will have an immediate impact on Thailand’s rapidly deteriorating economic climate.
- BBC
Comments
4 Responses to “Daily Dose: 12/30/08”
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Many Americans are going abroad for minor AND major surgeries. If you have the money, you can have and get anything done. I saw a documentary on how Americans are going to India to get transplants because the wait for a kidney match, for example, is just too long here in America. It interviewed an Indian woman from a poor village who sold one of her kidneys for money only to learn later that her son is in need of one. She got $300 for it and the American patient paid something like $18,000 for the procedure. The American didn’t care where the kidney was from or how it was acquired. He just cared that he was able to live a few more years. Sickening.
Yes, Linda:
Sickening.
Indeed.
Obscene really, a drop in the Bernie Madoff bucket of sleeze and greed.
And not even that in the Israeli/American “all=out WAR” on Gaza.
Note well too, today’s GOParty note on its search for a new and more attractive “design” element, never mind its realities.
So much for the continuing Yankee lie as truth, night as day, and
might as right.
Whatever else Barack Obama may prove to be or not to be in the next four years, he has already left a less than noble footprint in his “no comment” on the Gaza outrage.
And he must be reminded of the father of FIVE daughters lost in the interim.
Just as Hillary Clinton must be faced with the Layla Anwar cream of outrage over Iraq. Is she going to be anotherr Madeleine Albright who deems the genocide of half-a-million Iraqi children a negotiatble political price?
And in today’s Gaza, half of the 1.5 millions are children, who have only the shame and disgrace of this nation’s putative “leaders” to thank for their Post Traumatic Stress nightmares.
Time for Americans to wake up and smell the stink of their complicity in the morphing of mankind’s hope into one more tinhorn dictatorship of the overfed and overprivileged and overrated, a nation of sheep led by Gollywood cadres of spinmeisters paid by the ruling oligarchy.
P.S.: And check out the London Guardian piece on Dan Rather’s upcoming court caper agaomst his cowardly erstwhle employrer, CBS. And dig the six-decade-late reference to the role of the legal establishment in re the McCarthy Follies.
We need the SAVE ACT and E-verify used for every business and to be sure illegals stay out of the Job market.
E-verify does not discriminate against RACE, Religion, SEX or physically capability only your Citizenship and your LEGAL right to be and work in United States.
If we can stop Predatory business owners from hiring then the Illegal Aliens will not Stay and return to their native Countries.
This ISSUE is not about RACE, but ALL Governments Federal/State/LOCAL not doing their jobs, because big and small business owners want cheap workers and no labor laws to bother with.
Its called GREED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Both Liberals and Conservatives need to take some pride in our Country and protect it from all invading nations citizens and corporate greed. Please, NO IMMIGRANT BASHING or HATE Crimes.
HATE only feeds the single RACE agenda groups for Open Borders and the Liberal Media
Gee, whiz!
Sic semper tyrannis?
Or, should it read?, what else is new, nu?
It took today’s lead headline on New America Media to disabuse us of the whys and the wherefors of AsianWeek’s stubborn insistence on the Daily Dose of 12=30, now that it is 1=5.
No wonder.
But I fault the Fangs for firing the entire staff, WITH benefits, one hopes.
That said, AsianWeek could do worse than follow the example of the Christian Science Monitor, along with Associated Press, one of the few remaining pillars of American :”journalism.:”
If “minority” “print editions precede the rest of the gaggle, can the Timeses and the Posts and Tribunes and Bees lag too far behind?
Maybe they will regroup and emerge as another version of periodicals of weekly or monthly or annual gestation, but the fact remains that most if not all of them have proved less than honest, much less relevant. Well,negatively, perhaps.
And, lordy lordy. this venue is almost a freebie if you can afford the URL and the website “designers.”
Besides, the ozones of worldwide webbies can project a “minority” provincial weekly into the stratosphere of international commerce and converse.
Think of it. ANYone and ANYwherescan access this freebie online venue, much like the universality of telly channels that er, ah preempt the advertisers absent from the spaces of the print press.
So, commiserate. Or rejoice.
And, oh, friend Fangs, it would be nice if you rehired with a bit more grace and compassion than you fired their predecessors.
And I also hope one and all of both former and latter will prove just as practical AND self-interested. As in a living wage AND a recognition of individual dignitas AND rights, human or otherwise. How about an in-house “union”?
AsianWeek is deader than a print door nail.
And, one hopes, more lively than a rant or diatribe online and free to one and all.
P.S.: Will past print issues become a bidding frenzy on eBay? Damn, I think I trashed all my copies some time ago.