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Oriental fruit flies have been found near the Los Angeles Harbor, prompting county crews to set traps to kill the pest. The Los Angeles County Department of Agriculture found a fly Tuesday in Harbor City. Three additional flies were found there and in Rolling Hills later in the week. County workers are preparing to spread insecticide-laden bait in the area. No spraying is planned, but sticky globs of poisoned bait will be stuck to power poles and high in trees. The flies usually arrive in Southern California when contraband food, fruit or plants are brought in from Asia. The pest...

A CHINESE man is suspected of being the gunman who massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech yesterday, China News Service reported today. US police are looking into the background of the man, who entered the country with a student visa last year, the report filed from New York said, quoting a report in the Chicago Sun-Times. The 24-year-old Chinese man arrived in San Francisco on August 7 on a visa issued in Shanghai, the report said. So far there is no official statement of the suspect's identity or nationality. A gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest...

THE SAMURAI AND THE AINU Findings by American anthropologist C. Loring Brace, University of Michigan, will surely be controversial in race conscious Japan. The eye of the predicted storm will be the Ainu, a "racially different" group of some 18,000 people now living on the northern island of Hokkaido. Pure-blooded Ainu are easy to spot: they have lighter skin, more body hair, and higher-bridged noses than most Japanese. Most Japanese tend to look down on the Ainu. Brace has studied the skeletons of about 1,100 Japanese, Ainu, and other Asian ethnic groups and has concluded that the revered samurai of...

CHICAGO, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- A group of U.S. victims of a Jerusalem terror bombing wants to seize Iranian antiquities at the University of Chicago for their pain and suffering. Two years ago, the group won a $71 million judgment against Iran for injuries in a 1997 Iranian-linked suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Iran has ignored the ruling, and the victims are now going after ancient clay tablets dating from about 500 B.C., held by the university's Oriental Institute. However, the institute is fighting the group, saying that setting a precedent by turning over the antiquities to the victims could endanger...

Prehistoric oriental 'Venus' carved on cliff discovered in Ningxia A figure of a pregnant woman carved into a cliff, known as a prehistoric oriental "Venus", the Goddess of love, has been discovered by Chinese archaeologists in Zhongwei county, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The "Venus" has a plump figure, full breasts and a bulbous belly. The woman, standing straight with her legs together, has slender fingers but no facial features. The image was a typical reproduction of figures of naked women carved on stone by ancients in the late Paleolithic period, said Zhou Xinhua, curator of the museum of...

<p>LOS ANGELES- Yuji Ichioka, a University of California-Los Angeles historian who coined the term "Asian American" in the 1960s, has died at the age of 66, university officials said.</p> <p>Ichioka, who helped to found the UCLA Asian American Studies Center in 1969, was considered one of the top U.S. specialists on Japanese American history. He died on Sept. 1 of cancer, the Los Angeles Times said on Saturday.</p>