Ethnic Groups

It's technically called an egg "donation. " But if you're a young Asian woman, donating your eggs to an infertile couple can fetch enough cash to buy a used car or perhaps a semester at college. The same market forces that drive the price of cotton, copper and other commodities - supply and demand - have allowed Asian women to command about $10,000 to $20,000 for their eggs, also known as gametes or ova. Women of other ethnic groups typically get about $6,000 when they can sell their eggs, but they often can't for lack of demand, according to donation agencies and fertility clinics.

It's technically called an egg "donation. " But if you're a young Asian woman, donating your eggs to an infertile couple can fetch enough cash to buy a used car or perhaps a semester at college. The same market forces that drive the price of cotton, copper and other commodities - supply and demand - have allowed Asian women to command about $10,000 to $20,000 for their eggs, also known as gametes or ova. Women of other ethnic groups typically get about $6,000 when they can sell their eggs, but they often can't for lack of demand, according to donation agencies and fertility clinics.

For those who are fascinated by time capsules and family trees, a new  treasure trove opened up online for the first time Monday when the National Archives released the 1940 census. After 72 years hidden by a legal cloak of confidentiality, 3.8 million digital images of what Census enumerators found in 1940 became available to anyone with a computer. The National Archives, a federal government agency, partnered with Archives.com, a family history website owned and operated by Inflection, a Silicon Valley company, to create to the 1940 census website . Previous data dumps were on microfilm.

While there have been a few grudging acknowledgments in recent weeks that some things have gotten better in the 20 years since the 1992 riots, there has also been a lot of hand-wringing. Little has improved in Los Angeles over the last two decades, a chorus of naysayers insists. That's just not true. There's been plenty of evidence over the last two decades that not only have things changed for the better in Los Angeles, but they also have in the nation at large. And these positive changes have continued despite the economic ravages of the last four years.

In Mexico, the story of the country's black population has been largely ignored in favor of an ideology that declares that all Mexicans are "mixed race." But it's the mixture of indigenous and European heritage that most Mexicans embrace; the African legacy is overlooked.

Alexander Gulanerian heard the mob pounding down the hall seconds before his door was broken down and they stormed in, brandishing knives, broken bottles and lengths of pipe. Gulanerian, an Armenian living in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, said the intruders, without uttering a word, began beating him. They slashed his neck and his feet and threw him out of a second-story window.

Sean Delshad, 19, probably could have found more enjoyable things to do on a breezy Sunday afternoon. But instead he was waiting his turn at Sinai Temple -- along with dozens of other members of Los Angeles' large Persian Jewish community -- to undergo genetic testing. The UCLA student deposited a few drops of saliva in a tube handed to him by a doctor and, in four to six weeks, he'll learn whether he carries gene mutations for four disorders that are especially prevalent among Persian Jews.

The fear of Dimo Bodurov is the problem of Bulgaria and Eastern Europe itself as the region attempts to revive democracy. A petty entrepreneur in this small factory town, Bodurov in many ways is a man to be admired. He runs the local market and is an active member of the Ekoglasnost opposition group, one of many budding organizations that will challenge the ruling Communist Party as early as next May in Bulgaria's first free elections since 1946.

Disney's movie "Dick Tracy" is big at the box office, but some local Asian and Latino groups are unhappy with Disney-owned KCAL Channel 9 for reviving a 29-year-old "Dick Tracy" cartoon series that they say contains ethnic and racial stereotypes. "When you exaggerate racial and ethnic mannerisms and characteristics, that is racism, no matter how you slice it," said Raul Ruiz, Chicano studies professor at Cal State Northridge.

California Latinos have been nearly twice as likely as whites to die of H1N1 flu since the pandemic began last spring, according to statewide figures released Thursday by the California Department of Public Health. Over the same months, blacks in the state have been 50% more likely to die of H1N1 flu than whites, the report said. "Not everybody has been impacted equally" by H1N1, said state epidemiologist Dr. Gilberto Chavez, who added that statistics have shown "very important racial disparities" in H1N1 mortality and hospitalization rates.

Nearly 20 years after Los Angeles was shaken by one of the worst outbreaks of civil unrest in U.S. history, residents say the city is safer and relations between its racial and ethnic groups are significantly better than they were in 1992. Most also say L.A. is unlikely to see riots in the coming years like those that swept the city after the 1992 acquittals of four Los Angeles police officers charged in the beating of Rodney G. King, a new report shows. The survey by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University suggests, however, that many Angelenos are relatively pessimistic about the city's overall direction.

For those who are fascinated by time capsules and family trees, a new  treasure trove opened up online for the first time Monday when the National Archives released the 1940 census. After 72 years hidden by a legal cloak of confidentiality, 3.8 million digital images of what Census enumerators found in 1940 became available to anyone with a computer. The National Archives, a federal government agency, partnered with Archives.com, a family history website owned and operated by Inflection, a Silicon Valley company, to create to the 1940 census website . Previous data dumps were on microfilm.

One in five adults in the U.S. had a mental illness in 2010, with people ages 18 to 25 having the highest rates, according to a national survey. The report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Survey on Drug Use and Health , released Thursday, includes information from 68,487 completed surveys about mental illness (as defined by the American Psychiatric Assn.'s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual...

The moment Carmen Fought laid eyes on the man in the hallway of a Pomona courthouse, she was certain he was white. Then his lips parted, and Fought did an about-face. Now she was sure he was Mexican American, probably from East Los Angeles or Boyle Heights. The tell-tale signs: the drawn-out vowels in the first syllables of his words. "Together" became "TWO-gether" instead of "tuh-GE-ther. " "Going" sounded like "GO-ween. " Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College, sidled up to the man for some detective work.

Heart disease prevalence in the U.S. has declined over the last five years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. The agency mined results from a large national telephone survey called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to figure out how many people 18 years or older said they had coronary heart disease. The CDC researchers analyzed the data by age, sex, education, state and race/ethnicity and published their results in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

At least four people were killed Monday when police and protesters clashed in China's restive Xinjiang region, the official New China News Agency said. Security forces in the western frontier city of Hotan opened fire on a crowd after people attacked a police station, set it on fire and took hostages, the report said. One police official, a security guard and two hostages were killed in the incident. Dilxat Raxit of the exile group World Uyghur Congress told Reuters news service that police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, which sparked the fighting.

I am greatly disturbed by the recent trend of various ethnic groups demanding "their" own districts so that they may elect "their" candidates to legislative bodies. The argument seems to be that one can only be fairly represented by a member of one's own group. Does this mean that other segments of the population living within such a district can expect that their needs and concerns will not be addressed by their representative? Whatever happened to the idea that we are all Americans and that our representatives are elected to serve each of us impartially, whatever the color of our skin or the ancestry of our parents?

Other ethnic groups face language and cultural barriers in getting information and treatment for Alzheimer's disease. But the local chapter of the Alzheimer's Assn. is hoping a new ethnic-outreach program will change that. "Many people are suffering because there is so little in terms of reaching ethnic groups," says Maria P. Aranda, chairperson of the Los Angeles Alzheimer's Assn.'s Multicultural Outreach Advisory Board.

Before the Libyan uprising this year, Salah, a proud Arab, never would have approved if his sister had decided to marry a Berber, a long-oppressed ethnic group populating large parts of western Libya and the rest of North Africa. But the battle against Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi's rule has fused the destinies of the two people, especially in the Nafusa Mountains where Arab and Berber towns rely on one another for survival. "There is one particular Berber who I got to know after the revolution," said Salah, who asked that his last name not be published because of the sensitivity of the issue.

As little as one hour of low-intensity exercise a week could reduce the risk of colon polyps among people of various racial and ethnic groups, a study finds. The study, presented recently at the Digestive Disease Week meeting in Chicago, analyzed data on 982 patients who underwent colonoscopies. Polyps were found in 29.5% of the study subjects. Patients who hadn't exercised at least one hour a week had a polyp prevalence of 33.2%, while the prevalence rate among those who did exercise one hour or more was 25.3%.