“This is a platform for state legislators to speak with Asian American community and to understand their concerns,” said Helen Kim Ho, Executive Director of AALAC.

State Representative Stacey Abrams (D-Atlanta, Dist. 84), Minority Leader for the Georgia House of Representative, spoke on pending legislation to modify the mandatory E-Verify for small business owners.

“E-Verify is not a good system today. It is excessive regulation for small business and we want to postpone its use until 2015,” said Rep. Abrams.

Rep. Abrams is also working on HB 989 where state agencies are required to pay invoice within 15 days if invoices are filed electronically or to pay within 30-days if filed with paper invoices. The goal is to help small business with their finances and cash flows.

“This is not a white, black or yellow issue. This is a green issue. Georgia grows when we all grow together,” said Rep. Abrams. She is optimistic that the bill will receive bi-partisan support.

State Representative Wendell Willard (R-Sandy Springs, Dist. 49), Chairman of House Judiciary Committee spoke on the Child Protection and Safety Act legislation which will revise the Georgia’s Juvenile codes.

The audience were also briefed by Carol Henderson, Director, Business Enterprise Division, Georgia Department of Economic Development, on the contributions Asians and Asian Americans made to Georgia’s economy.

Over 150 participants attended the first annual breakfast with Georgia State legislators.

Speaking through a translator in an exclusive interview, Song Byeok shared his thoughts with Georgia Asian Times on February 19, 2012:

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GAT: Why do you choose Atlanta as your first stop in US to promote your work?

SB: First of all, I am very honored to do my first US show in the birthplace of Martin Luther King. This is where civil rights movements started.

GAT: Why do the North Korean regime choose you to be a propaganda artist?

SB: I was working in a factory and was drawing sketches on the sides. My sketches was noticed by the factory supervisor and got noticed by the Labor Party officials. They thought my sketches were good enough and recruited me to work as a propaganda artist.

GAT: Why do you choose satirical art for your work after you escaped to South Korea?

SB: In order to inform the world about the reality inside North Korea. I hope to bring attention to what is happening inside the closed country. I also hope my work will be the “voice” for the oppressed inside the iron regime.

GAT: What is the underlying message in your famous work “Take off your clothes” depicting Kim Jong Il in Marilyn Monroe’s body?

SB: The inspiration is to send a message to North Korea regime that they need to open up the “closed” society. The tadpoles and fish in the painting represents North Korean peoples trying to escape from the country and often fails in their attempts.

GAT: Where have you exhibited your work prior to Atlanta?

SB: I have exhibited my works in Seoul, South Korea in January 2010.

GAT: When and where is your next exhibition?

SB: I hope to showcase my new works featuring more humorous paintings in an exhibition in Washington DC on April 10, 2012.

GAT: What do you hope to accomplish from your exhibition in America?

SB: In this world, there a lots of people who are suffering and without any hope. I want to provide hope for the oppressed individuals. I also hope my paintings will inspire Americans to pay attention to the despair, the lack of human rights, and freedom in certain countries.

The deal was signed in July 2007 but approved by the US Congress only last October after a partial renegotiation dealing mainly with the auto industry.

South Korea’s parliament approved the free trade pact last November despite vehement protests from opposition lawmakers, one of whom set off a tear gas canister in the chamber.

The main opposition party has urged President Barack Obama to renegotiate the deal. Otherwise, it says it will withdraw from the pact if it takes power following a parliamentary and presidential election this year.

Supporters say the deal will strengthen both economic and security ties between Seoul and its closest ally.

Two-way trade was worth $88 billion in 2010 and the US International Trade Commission has estimated that Korean exports to the United States would increase by $6.4-$6.9 billion annually.

Export-dependent South Korea already has trade deals in force with the European Union, India, Chile, Peru, Singapore and the European Free Trade Association (Liechtenstein, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland).

The fine-dining SANTI — located within the casino block in the Marina Bay Sands (MBS) resort — will serve its last diner on March 11, a joint statement by MBS and Santi’s daughter Regina stated.

Santi died in February last year on the way to hospital after collapsing in the restaurant’s kitchen while serving guests gathered to inaugurate the official opening of Marina Bay Sands. He was 53.

The closure of the restaurant — which opened in April 2010 — comes as the Santamaria family refocuses its business to Santi’s native Spain, according to the statement.

“We want to build on my father’s strengths and passion to create a success of the projects that he unfortunately had to leave halfway, many of which are happening in Spain,” said Regina Santamaria, who runs SANTI.

“We’re sad to leave Singapore but we appreciate very much the support that diners have given to us.”

An as-yet-unnamed Asian restaurant will take over the restaurant’s premises “in the next few months,” the statement added.

MBS said staff working at SANTI will be redeployed across the casino complex where celebrity chefs, including Michelin-starred Daniel Boulud, Guy Savoy and Wolfgang Puck, have also opened restaurants.

Santi is widely acknowledged as the man who brought Catalan cooking to the world and his Can Fabes restaurant in the Spanish city of Sant Celoni has been rated with three Michelin stars since 1994.

The self-taught chef was given two further Michelin stars for his restaurant in Madrid, Santceloni, and another one for his Barcelona establishment Evo, and another for Tierra, in Valdepalacios, just outside of Madrid.

Santamaria was a fierce advocate of using only the freshest produce in his cooking and had been a vocal critic of the advent of “molecular gastronomy.”

The New York Knicks’ point guard has been racking up Twitter followers, Facebook fans and YouTube views as fast as he has been scoring points and dishing out assists.

Google searches for his name are more popular in recent weeks than for sports royalty such as Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods and David Beckham.

Lin’s Wikipedia biography has grown to over 5,000 words chronicling his unlikely and meteoric rise from undrafted and twice-discarded benchwarmer to stardom in Madison Square Garden, the world’s biggest basketball stage.

Lin’s dazzling run has spawned a multitude of Lin-inspired plays on words — Linsanity, Lincredible etc. — and there’s an online Jeremy Lin Word Generator at Linwords.com for anyone in need of Linspiration.

A search for “Jeremy Lin” on online auction house eBay turns up more than 15,000 Lin-related items, from “Linsanity” T-shirts for as little as $8.99 to a trading card from his rookie year with the Golden State Warriors for $68,888.

The uniform the 23-year-old Lin wore for his first game with the Knicks, in which he played just one minute and 27 seconds and missed his only shot, sold on eBay for $40,000 this week.

According to the NBA, Lin’s No. 17 Knicks jersey has been the top-selling shirt online since he came off the bench against the New York Nets on February 4 to score 25 points and earn a spot in the starting rotation.

The NBA said NBAStore.com has shipped Lin merchandise to 23 countries since his breakout game with Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia ranking third, fourth and fifth on the list after the United States and Canada.

Lin is the first US-born player in the NBA of Taiwanese and Chinese heritage and he has already developed a devoted following among many Asian-Americans and in China, Taiwan, the Philippines and other countries.

Traffic to the NYKnicks.com website between February 5 and February 12 was 550 percent higher than during the previous week as basketball fans from around the world searched for Lin news and video highlights.

It’s not just videos of the 38 points Lin dropped on the Los Angeles Lakers or his emphatic dunk against the Washington Wizards that are attracting views, although they’ve each been watched millions of times.

Goofy comedy videos made by Lin before he became a household name have been drawing attention to his previously little-known YouTube channel, TheJlin7.

One of the videos, entitled “How to Get Into Harvard,” Lin’s alma mater, has been viewed 1.7 million times. It has Lin providing tongue-in-cheek advice to Harvard applicants such as “If you already have glasses, get bigger glasses.”

Filmed during the lockout that delayed the start of this year’s NBA season Lin opens the video by explaining that he is making it because “I have no life and no job.”

Another video attracting attention is that of the nerdy handshake Lin shares before each game with Knicks teammate Landry Fields. Like Lin, Fields is also a graduate of a prestigious university, in his case Stanford.

The brief handshake features Lin and Fields slapping palms, paging through an imaginary book and miming putting a pair of glasses in their pockets.

The hoopla around Lin has seen his Twitter feed, @JLin7, explode from less than 30,000 followers on February 3 to more than 400,000, according to Twitter Counter.

Lin’s Facebook page has nearly 700,000 fans and features a status update from early January which epitomizes just how obscure he was before beginning his magical streak.

“Every time I try to get into Madison Square Garden, the security guards ask me if I’m a trainer,” Lin said, ending the message with “LOL,” the acronym for “laughing out loud.”

Doan Van Vuon and his family injured six policemen in the shootout last month and he and three relatives have been in detention ever since.

But their rare act of defiance triggered an outpouring of support — even from one of the most unlikely defenders, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

Vuon’s forced eviction and the destruction of his house on the outskirts of Vietnam’s third-largest city Haiphong were “illegal”, Dung said recently, vowing to prosecute the corrupt local officials responsible.

The prime minister’s intervention shows top officials are aware of how explosive the issues of land confiscation by local authorities and inadequate compensation payments have become in Vietnam, analysts say.

The country embarked on its first steps towards a market economy in the late 1980s. In 1993, Vietnam allowed citizens to acquire “land use rights” and handed out 20 year leases, but land is still officially owned by the state.

This has left millions of rural tenants like Vuon vulnerable to the whims of local officials, who can reclaim land for vaguely-defined “public interest” reasons, which experts say leads to widespread local corruption.

With Vuon’s case, “you have a paradigm of everything that is wrong with the land tenure system,” said David Brown, a retired US diplomat who served in several posts throughout Southeast Asia.

More than 70 percent of all complaints lodged with authorities nationwide concern land — and the problem looks set to get worse when the 20-year leases expire in 2013.

“This is basically a make or break issue for the regime,” Brown said, warning that the government had limited scope to tackle the root cause of land disputes.

A constitutional amendment, which could legalize private land ownership, or an overhaul of the land laws to allow for longer leases, is tricky and neither are likely to be passed the next year, said Vietnam scholar Carl Thayer.

“You are dealing with an explosive issue that could divide the country. You wouldn’t expect many people to take up weapons (like Vuon) but you do get riots, burning district offices, large groups of people showing up in Hanoi.”

In 1997 discontent erupted over land in northern Thai Binh province, and tens of thousands of people joined protests, during which local officials were attacked and scores of police stations and local government offices were set ablaze.

“Thai Binh province would weigh on everyone’s minds,” Thayer said.

More recently, thousands of demonstrators held peaceful protests in Ho Chi Minh City in 2007 opposing the seizure of land for a shopping centre. Smaller peaceful protests over land are regularly reported in the country’s major cities.

Dung last week acknowledged that Vietnam’s current land laws were “unclear, even overlapped or conflicting” and that the petition system was overwhelmed with a backlog of land complaints.

He also asked officials to speed up Vuon’s trial and reduce the charges against him. Vuon will get his land back and may receive compensation, official sources said.

But most likely, the government — despite Dung’s promises to reform in the wake of Vuon’s case — will buy time by simply rolling over all the leases for a few more years, Thayer said.

So far, two low-level officials have been suspended over Vuon’s eviction, but his neighbors say this is not enough.

“The authorities were in the wrong but it is Vuon’s family who is blamed, who is suffering,” said a 50-year-old female farmer in Haiphong on condition of anonymity, voicing a common sentiment in the area.

One of Vuon’s elderly neighbors said the courts should be lenient to Vuon despite him taking up arms, saying farmers were being driven to extremes as they were powerless to stand up to local officials.

“Vuon had nothing to lose. And really, we’re all in the same situation. Why have they treated him like this?” he said.

The measure sailed through the House of Representatives and the Senate with broad bipartisan support, despite grousing on both sides of the aisle over concessions made in a deal reached the day before.

The House voted 293 to 132 in favor, and the Senate quickly followed with a yes vote of 60 to 36.

The bill now goes to the White House for President Barack Obama’s signature. He has made passage of the extension through the end of the year a top priority, but the measure had long been stalled in a deeply divided Congress over how to pay for it.

“Americans are waiting and watching,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor shortly before the vote.

“Our economy is still fragile. It is crucial we prevent a tax increase on 160 million Americans. These are working Americans,” he said. “It also protects the safety of millions of Americans who can’t find work.”

The plan extends a cut in the Social Security tax rate — from 6.2 to 4.2 percent — for another 10 months, and unemployment benefits through 2012.

It will mean a salaried worker making an annual $50,000 will be getting about $1,000 more in take-home pay over the course of the year.

The measure also puts off cuts in payments to doctors by Medicare, the national health insurance program for the elderly, until after the November elections.

The cost of the package has been estimated at $150 billion.

Senate and House negotiators crafted a compromise Thursday that would pay for the bill in part with the proceeds of auctions of broadband spectrum, rather than spending cuts or tax hikes on the rich.

Unhappiness with the agreement among some members was evident in the House, with both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats expressing opposition to provisions of the bill.

“I will be voting ‘heck no’ for this conference bill,” said Phil Gingrey, a Republican from Georgia who objected to the lack of spending cuts.

Some Democrats decried the fact that a provision to pay for the bill with a tax hike on Americans making over $1 million a year had been dropped.

Reid, however, hailed the “bipartisan cooperation” that led to the rare agreement among leaders better known for unrelenting conflict with the country entering a presidential election year.

“We don’t have to have a fight on everything,” he said. “We need to come together.”

House Speaker John Boehner grudgingly supported the bill, praising it for preventing a tax hike on working Americans and the provisions for the broadband spectrum actions.

“But le’s keep in mind that aside from the spectrum provisions that have long been a part of the Republican jobs plan, this is an economic relief bill — not a growth bill.

“The only reason the provisions at the core of this measure are even necessary is because the president’s policies have failed,” he said.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the compromise a “victory for the middle class,” while lamenting it did not include a tax hike on the rich.

The path to a compromise opened last week when Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, dropped his party’s longstanding demand that the extension be paid with spending cuts elsewhere.

Democrats gave up their push for higher taxes on the rich to pay for the measures, agreeing instead to use the proceeds from auctions of broadband spectrum, in high demand with the growth in use of mobile devices.

The New York Times reported that the auctions were expected to yield about $25 billion, with $15 billion going to cover the cost of extending unemployment benefits.

Dave Camps, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and chief Republican negotiator of the compromise, defended it as a “significant victory for those of us concerned about the national debt and the culture of deficit spending that has gripped Washington for far too long.”

“All government spending in this agreement is fully paid for, and not with one dime of higher taxes,” he said, urging Republicans to vote in favor.

Representative Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, highlighted the bill’s importance to US economic growth.

“We’re recovering, and this bill would provide a boost to continue that recovery,” he said, adding that it prevents spending cuts that would have been harmful.

The recall applies specifically to one-ounce bottles of grape-flavored Infants’ Tylenol Oral Suspension distributed nationwide in the United States.

Tylenol maker McNeil Consumer Healthcare said it had received “a small number of complaints” from consumers who reported trouble with the dosing system which comes with the bottles.

Some reported that a built-in flow restrictor meant to control doses could be pushed into the bottle making it difficult to measure the correct dose for infants.

It said that if the flow restrictor remains in place there is no risk from using the medicine.

But it issued the recall as a precautionary measure.

“No adverse events associated with this action have been reported to date and the risk of a serious adverse medical event is remote,” McNeil said.

The delegation is part of the high level delegation accompanying incoming China’s leader Vice President Xi JinPing’s visit to U.S.

Georgia’s Lt. Governor Casey Cagle welcomed the delegation at his opening remark at the half-day seminar on Tuesday.

Georgia’s export to China grew by 632% from 2000 to 2010. In 2010, China registered as the second largest export market for Georgia. Georgia exports to China grew by 40% during the first eleven months of 2011, a rate much higher than global average export growth of 22%.

Georgia has opened an advisory office in Beijing four years ago and is scheduled to open a second office to be located in Qingdao, northeast of China.

Madam Yingxin Zhang, Deputy Director General of CIPA gave an introductions of the leaders of the Chinese delegation which included Mr. Jianhua Yu, China’s Assistant Minister of Commerce and Madam Erwen Xu, Consul general of Peoples Republic of China, Houston.

“China emphasize great importance to the development of trade and economic ties and look forward to the expansion of exchanges with Georgia. We expect to inject new vitality into the China-US trade and economic cooperation,” said Mr Jianhua Yu in his remark to the audience.

Chinese companies such as General Protecht Group and SANY have invested in manufacturing facility in Georgia in the past few years.

Honorable Kasim Reed, Mayor of Atlanta extended his welcome greetings at the seminar and reiterate his wish for closer cooperation between the city and China. Mayor Reed is scheduled to make his first visit to China from March 23-31 covering cities of Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. He is also scheduled to visit major telecommunications companies ZTE and Huawei Technologies in Shenzhen.

The seminar is jointly organized by the Georgia Department of Economic Development and China’s Investment Promotion Agency of Ministry of Commerce (CIPA).

The survey of more than 300 firms by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai also found executives were less optimistic about their businesses in China than a year ago, despite nearly 80 percent saying they were profitable.

Executives said rising costs were the biggest challenge to doing business in China. More than 90 percent said higher costs for labour and materials were hindering their business, threatening China’s competitive advantage.

The results of the annual survey were released as US President Barack Obama called on China to play by the “same rules” during a visit to Washington by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping.

About 51 percent of the respondents said infringements of their intellectual property rights had been a “hindrance” to their business, an issue foreign companies and governments have long-complained about in China.

“Despite continued concerns over IPR theft, piracy and other violations… China has made little improvement in IPR enforcement and protection,” the chamber said in the report.

Nearly two-thirds of companies said enforcement of intellectual property rights did not improve over the past year.

China has repeatedly defended its efforts to crack down on piracy and copyright infringement in the vast country and regularly launches high-profile campaigns against fake products in a bid to silence critics.

Foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said Wednesday that the government had made efforts to crack down on violations of intellectual property.

“At the same time, we also hope foreign companies investing in China will recognise the fact that China is a vast country and it takes time to make greater achievements in this field,” Liu told a regular briefing.