Migration

Alice Uchi slowly pushed a near-empty shopping cart down the near-empty aisles flanked by near-empty shelves in what had been the first and largest modern Japanese supermarket in Little Tokyo. "I feel lost. Sad," the retired Los Angeles registered nurse said glumly. Uchi was catching the tail end of Mitsuwa Marketplace's 50% fire sale before it prepares Sunday to shut its doors, marking an emotional transition for many in Little Tokyo.

Twenty-five years ago, Pongwon Kim turned his back on a successful life in Korea to bring his children to the United States. His greatest hope was that they would reap the rewards that their adopted country had to offer in business, academics, politics and culture. Kim left behind a successful manufacturing company in Seoul, where his factories produced shoes and sponges, to open a mom-and-pop dry-cleaning business in Sepulveda, now known as North Hills.

They said, "Go west," but many Californians are going north and east. For the fourth year in a row, more residents left the Golden State than moved here from other states, according to a report released Wednesday by the California Department of Finance. The outflow -- last seen during the economic and social struggles of the 1990s -- started when it became too expensive for most people to buy homes in the state, and has kept going throughout the bust with the loss of so many jobs.

Carved tools and ornaments from Russia paint a rare picture of the time about 45,000 years ago when modern humans migrated out of Africa to colonize Europe, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science. "The big surprise here is the very early presence of modern humans in one of the coldest, driest places in Europe," said lead author John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Russia "is one of the last places we would have expected people from Africa to occupy first."

Federal officials called Tuesday for costly improvements to four Klamath River dams, a move that could hasten removal of a hydropower system that for generations has blocked imperiled salmon from their upriver spawning grounds. Interior and Commerce Department officials said that in order to get its license renewed, Portland-based PacifiCorp would be required to install fish ladders and screens to ease the salmon's annual migration.

The wily prehistoric hunters long considered the first people of the Americas were almost certainly latecomers to the continent, researchers have concluded. For 80 years, scholars were convinced that the people known as the Clovis colonized North and South America via a land bridge from Siberia, perhaps pursuing the mammoth they preyed on so skillfully.

ARMORED dinosaurs once ruled this Gobi Desert area near the Mongolian border. Millions of years later, it became the domain of Genghis Khan and his clan. Now the land belongs to Jin Xiancong and the people from Wenzhou. Jin ships 10,000 VCRs each month into neighboring Mongolia, runs his own logistics firm and builds office properties. He will soon be mining iron and other minerals in the region, where winter temperatures can drop to 40 degrees below zero.

A new study of DNA from pigs is rewriting the history of human migration throughout the Pacific, indicating that most island residents in the region had their origin in Vietnam. Studies of pots and other cultural artifacts had previously suggested that the Polynesian and Oceanic cultures originated in Taiwan and spread rapidly through the Pacific, an idea often called the Express Train or Speedboat Out of Taiwan.

An hour before Sunday services at a Lutheran church in Chino Hills, the Rev. Andy Wu joined his congregants in front of plates piled high with boiled Napa cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, stir fried tofu and rice. Since Wu became an associate pastor in 2002, attendance at lunch and his worship services in Mandarin Chinese have doubled. So has Chino Hills' Asian population, which now makes up about 40% of city residents.