Word: asia
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...Speaker Nancy Pelosi is "feeling ultra-bullish." A source in the House leadership said Democrats are also getting a boost from grassroots reform supporters who stepped up pressure on wavering Democratic members through phone calls to their offices. And on the same day, President Obama postponed a trip to Asia - he was due to leave Sunday - a move that could embolden congressional Democrats eager to see the President is committed to pushing reform across the finish line. (See pictures from the front lines of the health care debate...
...called filicide-suicides are not a new phenomenon in East Asia, but Hong Kong's relatively high number - there have been at least 15 since the start of 2008 - has raised alarm. "Three in one month is a critical warning sign," says Paul Yip, director of the Centre for Suicide Research & Prevention in Hong Kong. In the U.S., murder-suicides predominantly involve spouses killing partners before taking their own lives. But in Hong Kong, Yip says, at least 50% of cases involve the death of a child. (See "Hong Kong Roundtable: Ten Years, Five Views...
Harold Li of the Child Welfare League Foundation in Taiwan - where the filicide-suicide rate is the highest in Asia (61 reported cases since 2008, with joblessness mostly identified as the cause) - agrees that trouble arises when "the boundaries between family members are not clear." The child victims of murder-suicides in the West are typically killed in violent attacks, as one partner's way of taking revenge on the other. In Asia, on the other hand, parents leap together with their children or succumb arm in arm to carbon monoxide inhalation in a kind of ghastly euthanasia...
...world welcomed the news, but for environmentalists, the decision was a blow. "We're totally in shock," says Gemma Parkes, spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Federation. "And obviously very disappointed. This is a real setback for the survival of the bluefin." (See pictures of the tuna trade in Asia...
Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection, produced this classic of Victorian travel writing on his return from eight extraordinary years of scientific exploration throughout South East Asia. A mix of travelogue, science, ethnography, and pure adventure, it is wonderfully readable (much more so, frankly, than Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle), and reveals a Wallace forever struggling to reconcile his child-like sense of wonder at what he is seeing with the stiff-upper-lip expectations of his Victorian audience. Perhaps this conflict is best captured by his account of a previous expedition that...