The Shay Rebellion | Christopher Shay

by Christopher Shay

Within three days, a man can meet and marry the Vietnamese bride of his dreams, one typical marriage agency claims. The Vietnamese woman will be faithful, submissive, between the ages of 18 and 25 and a virgin, the agency promises. Indeed, the potential bride’s background is much better vetted than the man’s: one popular Singapore-based marriage agency will medically examine the woman to ensure she’s a virgin — once by a doctor in Vietnam and a second time in Singapore — just to be sure. Until now, that’s been business as usual in an industry that has been facilitating thousands of marriages each year in Asia since the late 1990s, forever transforming the demographics of places like Taiwan and South Korea. But last month’s brutal murder of a Vietnamese bride has caused Seoul to rethink its approach to international-marriage brokers.

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by Christopher Shay

We’ve all heard the story by now. Fed up with his job as a JetBlue flight attendant, Steven Slater yelled obscenities over the p.a. system, grabbed two beers from the beverage cart, activated the emergency inflatable chute and slid out of his job and into his 15 minutes of fame. But the only people who witnessed it were on the plane. As with other dramatic events that didn’t get captured by a cell phone, all most of us saw on the news was B-roll and old snapshots of Slater.

One Taiwan-based news service is out to change that. Next Media Animation, which launched in September 2009, churns out more than 30 computer-animated dramatizations of news events every day. A few of these, like Next Media’s versions of Slater’s dramatic exit and Lindsay Lohan’s stint in prison, have garnered hundreds of thousands of hits from across the globe. Soon, says Mark Simon, Next Media’s commercial director, “if you don’t have an animation in your news sequence, it’s going to be like not having color photographs in a newspaper.”

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It may seem counterintuitive, but Burma has a lot going for it. Blessed with abundant natural resources, the nation is home to the last of the world’s ancient teak forests; it produces tens of thousands of tons of jade every year; it’s at the center of the global ruby trade; and most important, it has natural gas. Lots of it. Burmese gas already powers half of Bangkok, and it will soon start flowing to China, making billions of dollars of profit. For many though, it’s how the money is being spent that’s worrying. Read the rest of this entry »

by Christopher Shay

The country that invented the Walkman may be back on track to burnish its image as a technological pioneer. Right now, more than 4.7 million miles from Earth, is a revolutionary spacecraft that could be the future of interstellar travel. Japan’s space program, JAXA, confirmed on June 10 they had successfully unfurled the world’s first solar sail — a spacecraft that uses the velocity of sunlight to propel it. Then, just three days later, Japan announced what could be an even more impressive accomplishment: a spacecraft that left Earth seven years ago had returned home. Before brilliantly burning up over Australia, the ship ejected a soccer-ball-sized pod — a modest container that may contain the first fragments of an asteroid ever brought to earth and provide clues about the origins of our planet. Not bad for a spacecraft running three years behind schedule and without three of its four engines. Read the rest of this entry »

by Christopher Shay

In February 1961, Barack Obama’s parents did something that was illegal in 22 states and that 96% of the population disapproved of: they got married. In fact, interracial marriage, sex and cohabitation would remain illegal in much of the U.S. for another six years. Then on June 12, 1967, in the case Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the country’s anti-miscegenation laws, allowing interracial couples across the country to marry. Thirteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, the court took the last legal teeth out of the Jim Crow era, ridding the U.S. of its last major piece of state-sanctioned segregation. June 12 has since become a grass-roots holiday in the U.S., especially for multiracial couples and families. Known as Loving Day, the celebration commemorates the 1967 case and fights prejudice against mixed-race couples, and is a reason to throw an awesome, inclusive party. Read the rest of this entry »

It started out as an average April day, but as Dermot Tatlow drove home, he received a call that would lead to a global campaign to save his son’s life. When he heard the bad news, he knew immediately what his family was up against. “I pulled over and took a deep breath,” Tatlow says. “We thought we were out of the woods.” Tatlow’s 4½-year-old son, Devan, had relapsed. After 17 months without needing any treatment, a routine biopsy showed Devan’s cancer had returned. “Our worst fears were realized,” says Tatlow. Read the rest of this entry »

by Christopher Shay

Paul Ferber was scuba diving in Cambodia’s Sre Ambil River shortly after ships had finished dredging the area. As director of Marine Conservation Cambodia, Ferber was used to seeing the Cambodian estuaries teeming with marine life. He was shocked: Over 15 kilometers of river, he saw exactly one fish and two shrimp. “It was crazy to dive and see nothing,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

About 100 people — mostly local drug addicts — gathered at a pagoda in Phnom Penh in mid-February. A few drug users had brought their families for support, and they sat together on woven mats before a Buddhist shrine. The crowd put their hands together, bowed their heads and prayed. In a country where many drug addicts report being beaten, electrocuted and forced into military-style camps, the group prayer was organized to raise public awareness of their plight. In one prayer, Cambodia’s drug users and monks chanted together, “We pray for drug users to have access to proper, community-based, voluntary drug treatment.” Read the rest of this entry »

by Christopher Shay

Though there is no evidence that lions ever populated Southeast Asia, the Cambodians certainly took no chances. According to their legends, lions once roamed the countryside, attacking villagers and their precious buffalo, and long before the great Khmer Empire began in the 9th century, farmers developed a ferocious martial art to defend themselves against the predator. These techniques became bokator (sometimes written as boxkator). Read the rest of this entry »