EDITORIALS
INFLUENCE OF "MOVING PICTURES
From their first beginnings, moving pictures stirred powerful emotions, including fear. Not just fear of sometimes frightening images, audiences actually leapt out of their seats watching "The Great Train Robbery," but fear of what these images might inspire, especially among the immigrants born into America from Europe. They might not be able to read, write, or speak English, but everyone could understand moving pictures.

"THEY FEAR DEATH & LOVE LIFE. WE ARE BELIEVERS IN ANOTHER LIFE & WE WELCOME DEATH"
"People are begging [Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah's Chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah] to fight. They want to be human bombs," said a bearded Hezbollah guard. Standing watch outside the offices, he refused to give his name. "This is the difference between us and them: They fear death and love life. We are believers in another life, and we welcome death."

BUSH'S DIPLOMACY
In an unusual moment of diplomacy, Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman turned to Lebanese special envoy Nouhad Mahmoud next to him and whispered in his ear. When reporters later asked what he had said, Gillerman said he had told Mahmoud that they both wanted the same thing: to eliminate Hezbollah. "I told him, deep in his heart, he wishes he could be sitting next to me making the same statement because if we succeed, his country will be the beneficiary," Gillerman said.

SHYAMALAN ON FILMMAKING
"I make really precise, original movies. Not all of them are going to be right for everybody." 'It's about finding one's own childlike innocence, opening yourself up to the absurd, and being rewarded for that.' — M. Night Shyamalan

CLINTON AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
We Democrats have a bad habit. We're prone to think. And when people are thinking, they sometimes disagree. It's a funny thing. And you know, the founding fathers thought it was a pretty good idea," he said. (William Clinton)

FEARS OF A NEW MEDIUM
Whenever a new medium arrives, it both delights and frightens us with its power. The web, the computer, television all stirred such fears.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
Illegal immigration, for example, is a red-hot issue today, but the first immigration debates go back more than 200 years. In 1798, Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Alien Act, a law allowing the president to deport dangerous aliens on his own say-so, without trial. The stimulus was an influx of refugees from Ireland and France — countries undergoing political turmoil that many founders feared would be brought to the U.S. by the new immigrants. For more info, click HERE.

2ND GENERATION CHINESE AMERICANS
Another cause was the exodus of second generation Chinese Americans, youth whose citizenship rights enabled them to secure "outside" jobs and housing. Some were ashamed of the run-down place where their immigrant parents had been forced to live. They blamed discrimination on bad publicity emanating from the media portrayals of Old Chinatown. Note: This was in the 1930s!
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CAN MOVIES CHANGE THE WORLD?
Movies can take on the great social problems of their time, but they may be the least effective — or appropriate — medium for solving them. The more designs a movie has on us, the less willing we are to change our minds, much less our social and business practices.

WHITE MAN'S BURDEN FOR DOING GOOD
"It is great that rock stars donate their time for the needy and desperate," William Easterly writes in "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good." "Unfortunately, the West already has a bad track record [with] previous beautiful goals." Indeed, Bono seems to offer a prime example of what Easterly calls "the second tragedy" of the world's poor.
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EMANCIPATION REMAINS A WORK IN PROGRESS
Slavery, it could be argued, didn't really end in the United States until civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960's. That was a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Or the "Emancipation Approximation," as the artist Kara Walker calls it in a series of hallucinatory silkscreen prints that turn the Old South into a compassion less moral state, in which slave and master alike are adrift. For more info, click HERE.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY'S VISION
Some men see things as they are and say why, I dream things that never were and say why not. (Robert F. Kennedy)

THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WORDS OF VISION
"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind," Jefferson wrote in 1816. "As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstance, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." (Thomas Jefferson) For more info, click HERE.

ETHNICITY & DISEASE
The disease was equated with ethnicity; the low-income quarantined neighborhoods and other slums were deemed a menace to public health. "Some newspapers referred to the plague as being a Mexican disease," said Bill Estrada, a curator at El Pueblo de Los Angeles. The plague "only fanned the flames of racial attitudes that had been around a long time. Poor Mexican immigrants were accused of bringing unsanitary conditions with them."

APA & MEDIA NEWS
CALIFORNIA - PLACE FOR IMMIGRANTS
For all the attention focused of late on illegal immigration, California is by far the favorite destination of legal immigrants to the United States — about 200,000 in 2005 alone. Moreover, although the numbers fluctuate with the economy, the Golden State remains a powerful domestic magnet as well, with about 600,000 people from other states arriving here last year.
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KEANU REEVES/SANDRA BULLOCKS IN "LAKE HOUSE"
Directed by Alejandro Agresti ("Valentín") and written by David Auburn ("Proof"), "The Lake House" is a chronological brain-teaser confounding enough to keep you busy trying to figure out whether those holes are in the story or in your logic. A brief aside from L.A. Times' Carina Chocano: "I'm starting to formulate a theory about Keanu Reeves. I think he is the Al Gore of the acting world. He's thoroughly unobjectionable. He seems like a very solid guy. You want to like him, even. But he's, how do you say, wooden. A little on the stiff side."
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NGAWANG SANDROL & SRINIJA SRINIVASAN FIND FREEDOM
Immigration success stories include Ngawang Sandrol (27) - a person from Lhasa Tibet - who came for religious freedom and presently a student. Editor-in-chief of Yahoo!'s Srinija "Ninj" Srinivasan (34) came from Chandigarh India because his parents sought greater opportunities in the United States.
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SESSUE HAYAKAWA - A MOVIE SWASHBUCKLER
In 1949, Hayakawa uttered a sentiment that often echoes in the hearts of today's Asian-American actors: "My one ambition is to play a hero." In his autobiography, "Zen Showed Me The Way", Hayakawa observes, "All my life has been a journey. But my journey differs from the journeys of most men." The high-water mark left by this beautiful and inspired man has yet been equaled, even in this supposedly enlightened age.
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"NIGHT" VISION
"It's not a mermaid story, " says spookmeister M. Night Shyamalan, debunking a widespread myth that his upcoming "Lady in the Water" would involve anything as prosaic as a Daryl Hannah wannabe. "A mermaid is just one story of hundreds of stories of creatures that lived in the water. There have been stories of entities that lived in the water since the time of Babylon. In some of these stories from earlier times, these entities would lure boats to the rocks and crash them. They were a [reflection] of the psychosis of being out at sea for so long. Mine is an entirely made-up version of the sea nymph story."
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WWII INTERNEES OF MINIDOKA CAMP RETURNS
The National Park Service hosted their visit to discuss its plans to develop a 73-acre parcel set aside in 2001 by President Clinton to be an educational exhibit focusing on civil rights and the wartime experience of Japanese Americans. Minidoka was one of 10 detention camps operated between 1942 and 1946 in the Western U.S. and Arkansas. The camps held thousands of West Coast residents who had at least one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry. The forced removal of Japanese Americans was ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt two months after Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Today, only a handful of original Minidoka structures remain. For more info on the Japanese Internment Camps, click HERE
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MARK TWAIN & BRETT HARTE'S "AH SIN"
Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go (1879) and Joseph Jarrow's The Queen of Chinatown (1899) depict Chinese characters as opium pushers and enslavers of white women, who gleefully foresee an economic takeover: "By and by, no more white workingman in California; all Chinaman--sabee?" Those more sympathetic to the Chinese, such as Ambrose Bierce (whose Peaceful Expulsion satirizes the Anti-Coolie clubs and other rabidly anti-Chinese movements) generate more benign stereotypes. Harte and Twain's Ah Sin (1876) is perhaps the most influential of these plays; the mischievous, gibberish-speaking Ah Sin, the comic accessory to the white man.
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CULTURAL DIVIDE BETWEEN VIETNAMESE PARENTS & THEIR KIDS
Facing a growing cultural divide between immigrant parents and their children, the Garden Grove Unified and Huntington Beach Union school districts are offering Vietnamese classes to high school students, making Orange County one of only two counties in the nation with school districts offering Vietnamese as a foreign language elective like Spanish and French. The program originated in San Jose in 1992 after Vietnamese parents complained that their children were becoming too Western and losing their heritage.
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CHINA'S INVESTMENT HELP MN.'S "IRON RANGE" REOPEN ITS DOORS
Thanks to a hefty investment from China, the Eveleth's leading employer - Minnesota's Iron Range - was able to reopen its doors, putting more than 400 people back to work just before Christmas in 2003. The resurrection of the Evtac iron ore mine has provided a boost for this struggling northeast Minnesota community, whose main street boasts the world's biggest hockey stick, a nod to the town's role as the birthplace of American hockey.
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