Names

The parent of United Commercial Bank, which caters to Chinese American customers, replaced its chief executive and said it would restate earnings after an internal probe found that some officers improperly modified loans and misrepresented data to auditors. The company, San Francisco-based UCBH Holdings Inc., said Doreen Woo Ho, who joined the firm in January from Wells Fargo & Co., was named acting CEO, succeeding Thomas Wu, who quit. Chief Credit Officer Ebrahim Shabudin also quit, UCBH said.

The outlook on the college basketball season promises some quality time with familiar former champions. While in past seasons relatively unheralded teams such as Oklahoma, Memphis, Florida and Ohio State were popular preseason picks, this season's contenders are basketball blue bloods. Kentucky could return to glory and raise its eighth national championship banner. Or North Carolina could go for back-to-back titles and a sixth championship. Or Kansas, the Associated Press preseason No. 1, could win its second title in three seasons.

Two decades after adding the designation, Coca-Cola Co. is removing the word "classic" from its cola sold in the U.S. The "classic" tag line was added in 1985, when the company introduced a formula that consumers called "New Coke." New Coke never caught on and was dropped in 2004.

The company that makes the popular Beanie Babies is retiring the names "Marvelous Malia" and "Sweet Sasha" from its Ty Girlz collection. The dolls have been renamed "Marvelous Mariah" and "Sweet Sydney," chief executive Ty Warner of Oak Brook, Ill.-based Ty Inc. said in a statement. The original names were inspired by what Warner called "this historic time in our nation's history," but he said the dolls were not intended to bear the likeness of President Obama's daughters. The switch is in deference to the first family after Michelle Obama said using her daughters' names was inappropriate, Warner said.

Apparently the California Institute of the Arts has a penchant for naming its performing arts venues after animals. First came REDCAT. (OK, it's technically the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater at Walt Disney Concert Hall, but who actually calls it that?) Now the cutting-edge arts school is looking into the jaws of the Wild Beast, a new music pavilion soon to open on the school's Valencia campus. CalArts recently announced a gift of $500,000 from the S. Mark Taper Foundation that will help close the funding gap for the facility, which has an estimated cost of $4 million and was designed by Culver City's Hodgetts + Fung architecture firm.

A heavyweight study of the future of soft cheese has won Britain's annual competition to find the year's oddest book title. "The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais," by Philip M. Parker, won the Diagram Prize, being awarded today by trade magazine the Bookseller. Fromage frais -- literally "fresh cheese" -- is a dairy product that originated in France and has a consistency similar to that of sour cream. The book is a 188-page study of the global retail market for the product.

An alternative middle school here was renamed in honor of President Obama this week, joining a handful of schools across the nation that have adopted the 44th president's name as their moniker. Oakland Unified School District trustees voted unanimously Tuesday to rename the Alternative Learning Community in East Oakland as the Barack Obama Academy. The school, founded in 2007, educates students who have struggled academically and socially in traditional schools. The name change was prompted by students, who said they felt stigmatized by the word "alternative."

Ginsu knives have been slicing for 30 years. Now Rhode Island drivers can use the Ginsu to cut their commute. A stretch of road in Warwick is called Ginsu Way to honor the cheap knife that's now a pop icon.

A state lawmaker under fire for saying that Asian American voters should adopt names that are "easier for Americans" has apologized for her remarks. Republican state Rep. Betty Brown issued an apology Thursday for the comments made Tuesday during a House Elections Committee hearing. Brown said the remark came during a conversation on the difficulty of translating names and that she was referring to transliteration issues when she asked a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans whether Asian Americans could adopt names that "we could deal with more readily here."

You could say Kerry Knudsen took a lichen to our new president. Knudsen, a curator of the plant-like combination of fungi and algae at the UC Riverside Herbarium, named a new species of tough, orange-colored lichen, Caloplaca obamae, after Barack Obama. "I supported him running for president, and while we were doing the collecting, the election was in its last couple of weeks," Knudsen, 58, said Thursday. "It was real suspense, so we were talking about that every day." Coincidentally, the final peer review of the paper came back on Inauguration Day, and Knudsen finished the revisions while watching the event on television, sealing the deal.