Hong

David Joyce marched his way to the front of the U.S. immigration line using his pocketbook, sinking half a million dollars into a Vermont ski resort. The British citizen had spent years in a futile effort to secure green cards for himself, his wife and their 9-year-old son so they could relocate to sunny Florida. Then, a fellow emigre tipped him off to a little-known federal program that helps foreigners gain permanent U.S. residency by investing in American businesses. Graphic: Number of investors' visas to U.S. "In six months, we had our green cards," said Joyce, 51. "Considering everything we've been through, this was easy.

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.

A new study has found that an infusion of feces from a healthy person into an ailing patient's gut was significantly more effective than a traditional antibiotic treatment - raising hopes that the unconventional approach could one day help combat obesity, food allergies and a host of other maladies. The study, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrated that the fecal transplant cleared up a recurrent bacterial infection far more reliably than the routinely prescribed medication.

Now that a guy no longer needs a linebacker's physique, a Rat Packer's swagger or cartoon bags of money to justify the purchase of a made-to-measure dress shirt, here are a few local options - at different levels of wallet strain - worth exploring: Anto Distinctive Shirtmaker Anto has been a maker of truly custom shirts (along with neckties, robes, pajamas and boxer shorts - but no suits) for Tinseltown's well-heeled for more than five decades. Clients have included Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, Johnny Depp (at the recent Golden Globes)

Topshop, the global fashion juggernaut with more than 400 stores operating in 38 countries, has arrived on the West Coast at long last, opening a new store at the Grove in Los Angeles last Thursday. At 25,000 square feet with nearly 40-foot ceilings, the London-based brand's new flagship boasts the grandiose size and presence common to its other properties, with multiple levels housing the various women's collections under the Topshop umbrella, as well as Topman for menswear. "Topshop is one of the all-time great retailers on a global platform, and they are really planting a flag here," says Rick Caruso, chief executive of Caruso Affiliated, the developer of the Grove.

Americans have long gone to China to adopt babies. In a twist, Chinese couples are now coming here to become parents — through surrogacy. China does not permit surrogate parenting, but that country's rising affluence has given many couples the option of coming to U.S. surrogacy clinics. California, with its large Chinese American community and its courts' liberal attitude toward surrogacy, is a prime destination. Jerry Zhu and Grace Sun of Beijing have so far saved $60,000 toward the expected $100,000 cost of surrogate birth.

The brief announcement that Disney plans to add a Marvel-themed land to Hong Kong Disneyland in 2017 raises a host of questions: Will Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men be getting their own rides? When will the Marvel characters be coming to Anaheim, Paris, Tokyo or Shanghai? And why, of all places, Hong Kong? Many of the most basic questions remain unanswered, in part because the announcement was made by a Hong Kong government official rather than Disney.

National swim team coaches from the United States, Hong Kong and Australia suspect the Chinese women's team of using steroids in the wake of China's world-best performances during last month's Asian Games. Richard Quick, coach of the U.S. national team and Stanford women's team, said he felt obligated to speak out after the Chinese produced three times that rank No. 1 in the world this year and three others that are No. 2 during the competition at Beijing.

Actor Brandon Lee, the 28-year-old son of the late kung fu star Bruce Lee, was killed Wednesday after a small explosive charge used to simulate gunfire went off inside a grocery bag during filming on a movie set in Wilmington, N.C. Lee, who many believed was on the threshold of stardom similar to that attained by his father two decades earlier, had been working on the $14-million movie "The Crow," produced by Edward Pressman and Jeff Most.

SAN FRANCISCO - Meet Nick D'Aloisio, the 17-year-old British entrepreneur who just sold his popular news-reading app to Yahoo Inc. for close to $30 million, instantly becoming one of the world's youngest self-made millionaires. It's the classic Silicon Valley success story of a young software prodigy striking it ridiculously and improbably big. But this time the spotlight is shining on the other side of the pond. D'Aloisio, who taught himself to write software at age 12, built the free iPhone app Summly - which automatically summarizes news stories for small screens - in his London bedroom in 2011.