By GRANT WAHL, Sports Illustrated

LOS ANGELES — The Global Sports Summit is an annual summer event in Aspen, Colo., that’s a sort of Davos for sports owners and executives from around the world. In one of the most gorgeous spots in America — the St. Regis Aspen Resort — the GSS encourages networking by quietly bringing together a cross section of heavy hitters from the NFL (Steve Ross, Zygi Wilf, Dan Snyder), the NBA (Mark Cuban, Jerry Reinsdorf, Dan Gilbert), MLB (Peter Angelos, Ed Cohen), the NHL (Jeff Vanderbeek, Charles Wang) and European soccer (Adriano Galliani, Andrea Agnelli, Bruce Buck).

President and Owner Los Angeles Football Club Tom Penn, Managing Partner and Owner Los Angeles Football Club Henry Nguyen and Executive Chairman and Owner Los Angeles Football Club Peter Guber attend a press conference to announce the new Los Angeles MLS team and ownership group at Siren Studios on October 30, 2014 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for LAFC)

MLS owners are also fixtures at the event, including Clark Hunt, Stan Kroenke, Merritt Paulson, Robb Heineman, Jay Sugarman, Andrew Hauptman and Larry Tanenbaum. Given the setting, then, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the genesis moment of MLS’ newest team — the Los Angeles Football Club, set to debut in 2017 — came during the 2012 Global Sports Summit.

At lunch one day, a Vietnamese-American venture capitalist named Henry Nguyen sat down next to MLS commissioner Don Garber. Nguyen was intrigued by MLS. Born in Vietnam, he came with his family to Fairfax County near Washington D.C., and grew up following the area’s sports teams, including Joe Gibbs’ Super Bowl winners and Bruce Arena’s championship soccer teams at the University of Virginia and D.C. United. After earning degrees at Harvard and Northwestern, Nguyen had moved back to his birthplace (where his father-in-law, Nguyen Tan Dung, is the country’s prime minister), been wildly successful (his group opened the first McDonald’s in Vietnam) and become the co-owner of the Saigon Heat, a team in the ASEAN Basketball League.

“Don, I really love the direction MLS is going,” Nguyen told Garber that day. “I’m a fan of all sports, but I realize now living outside the U.S. that there’s only one world sport, and it’s soccer. MLS has so much potential. Do you think there’s an opportunity to invest in or own a team?”

“Of course,” Garber replied. “We’re going to be expanding. We still have some current owners with multiple teams, and we want to move away from that.”

Nguyen couldn’t let go of the thought. At the end of the conference, he reached out to Tom Penn, the Global Sports Summit co-creator and organizer, who had worked as an NBA executive (for the Portland Trail Blazers and Memphis Grizzlies) and was now an NBA analyst for ESPN. “I’m going to call you about something,” Nguyen told Penn.

Soon, Nguyen checked back in: “Tom, I’m pretty serious about MLS. Can we start looking into it?”

Two years later, on Oct. 30, 2014, Nguyen and Penn stood on a stage in Los Angeles with a third principal owner — Peter Guber, a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Golden State Warriors — and a star-studded list of global investors (there are 22 in all) to announce the birth of LAFC, a new soccer club with the most ambitious of goals.

“We have aspirations to be a club that can be on a par with some of the great clubs in the world,” Nguyen said. “It won’t happen overnight, and it may not happen in a decade, but that’s the lodestar, the goal we have set. I believe that’s where soccer is going in this country. We want to be one of the clubs here that leads that.”

Two years ago, not long after Nguyen decided to pursue an MLS team in earnest, he called his friends Vincent Tan and Ruben Gnanalingam, who also attended the Global Sports Summit. Like Nguyen, both men own basketball teams in the ABL, and both have a big soccer interest. Tan, a flamboyant Malaysian, is the majority owner of Cardiff City, which played in the Premier League in 2013-14, while Gnanalingam is a co-owner of Queens Park Rangers.

Nguyen asked them what they thought about pursuing an MLS team. “They were like, ‘Wait a second: First of all, there’s no relegation? All right, you got me!'” Nguyen, 41, said with a laugh. They talked more about MLS’ single-entity structure, in which all the team owners were partners, just like in the ABL. “And it snowballed from there,” Nguyen said.

Penn, 47, was ready to dive in too. While living in Portland, the NBA guy had fallen in love with the Portland Timbers, the wildly popular MLS team with the league’s most rabid fanbase. “It’s phenomenal, one of the best sporting experiences in the world,” Penn said. “You can say that, actually, with the size and the intensity.”

What’s more, Penn was fascinated by the conversations he was having with Portland owner Merritt Paulson and other MLS owners while organizing his Global Sports Summit. “I got to meet all the guys who run the teams across all sports, and some of the best operators in sports are in MLS,” Penn said. “Somewhat by necessity, because they’re grinding it out, they’re still building, they’re in the trenches.”

Once the group decided it was serious about pursuing an MLS team, they started thinking about cities. Los Angeles was at the top of the list. “And one of our first door knocks was to AEG: Would you sell the Galaxy?” Nguyen said. “It just wasn’t available. As we kind of kept looking, Tom said, ‘Hey Henry, why don’t we look at Chivas USA?'”

Talks continued with MLS, which bought out Chivas USA owners Jorge Vergara and Angélica Fuentes in February and took over the floundering club, which was poorly run and, truth be told, poorly conceived in the first place to try to attract fans of Chivas de Guadalajara.

A year ago, Nguyen was introduced to Guber, 72, the L.A.-based chairman and CEO of the Mandalay Entertainment Group. Over 40 years in the entertainment business, Guber has produced movies like Rain Man, Batman and The Color Purple, totaling more than 50 Academy Award nominations.

“If we were going to pursue something in L.A., we needed to have really strong roots here, and Peter fit that bill perfectly,” Nguyen said while sitting next to Penn during an interview with SI.com at Mandalay’s headquarters. (Guber was out of town at the time.) “So when our ownership group got together in terms of myself, Peter, Vincent and Ruben, it was like, O.K., this clicks, this works. Tom and I were really just charged with keeping this process rolling.”

As the project accelerated this year, LAFC kept adding minority investors, including some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment: Magic Johnson; Mia Hamm and Nomar Garciaparra; Chad Hurley, a co-founder of YouTube; and the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. (See the full list of 22 below.) The group was finally ratified at the MLS Board of Governors meeting in L.A. in early October. Chivas USA would fold, and LAFC would start as an expansion team in 2017, coming into the league with Atlanta to make 22 MLS teams.

The expansion fee for LAFC is in excess of $100 million, an MLS record, and the clubs says it will spend at least $150 million on its new stadium.

“With the army of assets that we have together, it’s just such a cool professional opportunity,” said Penn, who proudly shared a bottle of the LAFC “Ignition Ale” that was produced by his friends at Portland’s Rogue Ales for last week’s launch event. “When you think about Los Angeles, so much of sports ownership is about the real estate that you end up owning, the territory you have. And this is Boardwalk and Park Place together for this sport.”

Read the full article HERE.

From CNN

It’s a familiar refrain among jet-lagged travelers, usually accompanied by a despondent shrug.

Epicure at Le Bristol (Paris). The three-Michelin starred Epicure, voted world’s best hotel restaurant by The Daily Meal, is led by chef Eric Fréchon. Considered one of the best chefs in town, his dishes include purple sea urchin with smooth egg mouse and blue lobster roasted in shell with grilled chestnuts. Photo from Epicure at Le Bristol.

“Well, I guess we could just grab a quick bite at the hotel.”

Hotel restaurants have long had a reputation for offering over-priced, unremarkable meals, frequented only by guests too tired or unadventurous to brave the streets of a new city in search of anything better.

But over the last few years, a wave of incredible new restaurants has come onto the scene to change the way we view hotel dining.

For proof, look no further than American food and drink website The Daily Meal’s third annual list of the 101 Best Hotel Restaurants Around the World.

“In recent years, hotel restaurants have stepped up their game so much so that they have become coveted dining spots for locals and travelers alike, who are often either waiting in line or booking reservations months in advance just to be able to pull up a chair at the hottest restaurant in town — which happens to be in a hotel,” says the site.

To curate the list, The Daily Meal staff considered winners and nominees from the 2013 list of best hotel restaurants, consulted the Michelin Guide and other sources for further recommendations and drew hotel restaurants from its annual lists of the 101 Best Restaurants in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Then they grouped the selections by continent and invited a panel of experienced bloggers, restaurant critics and other food and lifestyle writers from around the world to vote for their favorites in an online survey.

According to the rules, the hotel has to have at least 15 rooms and restaurants must be under the same roof as the hotel as well as the same proprietorship.

Read the full article HERE.

From Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON—U.S. payrolls grew modestly while the unemployment rate fell in October, readings that mark the longest stretch of consistent job creation since World War II but come only days after voters signaled unease about the breadth of the recovery.

A now hiring sign is posted in front of a Toys R Us store on November 7, 2014 in San Rafael, California. According to a U.S. labor department report, employers added 214,000 jobs in October, lowering the national unemployment rate to 5.8 percent. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Nonfarm payrolls grew a seasonally adjusted 214,000 last month, the Labor Department said Friday. The economy has added better than 200,000 jobs each month since February, the best such streak since 1995. It marked the 49th straight month of positive job growth, the best stretch on records back to 1939.

The unemployment rate, obtained from a separate survey of households, fell to 5.8% last month. That’s the lowest level since 2008.

October’s reading continued a streak of steady, but not accelerating, hiring. Revisions showed the economy added 31,000 more jobs the prior two months than previously estimated. Employers added 256,000 jobs in September and 203,000 in August.

The figures come just days after voters flipped control of Congress to the Republican Party, in part due to their concern about the state of the economy.

One missing ingredient needed for stronger economic gains: wages. Friday’s report offered a mixed view on that front.

Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers were up 2% in October compared with a year earlier. That’s in line with the pace recorded for most of the year and barely above the mild pace of inflation. Consumer prices rose 1.7% in September from a year earlier.

“The quality of job creation remains insufficient to translate into wage pressures,” said Lindsey Piegza, economist at Sterne Agee Group.

But the number of hours Americans are working is rising, and that’s helping boost incomes. Average weekly earnings advanced 2.6% from a year earlier, the best 12-month increase since January 2012.

There are other signs that slack in the labor market is diminishing.

Read the full article HERE.

By Thy Vo, Voice of OC

Once known as a bastion of white establishment conservatives, Orange County’s Republican Party says there’s a new face to the GOP: Asian American women.

(Left to Right) Young Kim, Michelle Steel, Janet Nguyen and Ling-Ling Chang at a dinner gathering. Photo courtesy of Shawn Steel / Voice of OC

Five high-profile Asian women — all Republicans — dominated Orange County races Tuesday night, with three candidates elected to state office and two to the county Board of Supervisors.

Supervisor Janet Nguyen, whose family fled Vietnam as refugees, won a seat in the State Senate. Former Congressional aide Young Kim, a South Korean immigrant, and Diamond Bar councilwoman Ling-Ling Chang, a Taiwanese American, were both elected to the State Assembly.

Korean-born Board of Equalization member Michelle Park Steel and Dana Point Mayor Lisa Bartlett, a Japanese-American, also won seats on the Board of Supervisors.

In Orange County and nationwide, party leaders are co-opting Democrats’ strategy of identity politics with hopes of changing perceptions of the GOP as anti-immigrant and unwelcoming to women and minority voters.

“We’re changing the face of the party. When you say Republican Party, people think, middle-aged white male,” said Michelle Steel, who sits on the California Republican Party Board of Directors. “People always portray Asian women as quiet and obedient.”

“We just proved that we are fighters.”

In the lead-up to the election, Steel’s husband, former state GOP chairman Shawn Steel, penned several newspaper editorials making the pitch that his wife, Chang, Nguyen and Kim are a testament to how the party is evolving to incorporate Asian voters with local candidates — all legal immigrants — who look like voters and speak their language.

Statewide, Republicans have failed to have a long-term presence in Hispanic and Asian communities, Shawn Steel said.

“The party needs messengers in these emerging communities – the fact that Michelle, like Young Kim, is in the Korean papers virtually every day is having a profound impact on those voters. And it’ll balance out the monopoly that the Dems have had,” Shawn Steel said.

Michael Schroeder, who served as the state party chairman from late 1997 to 1999, said that while the GOP has tried to build up grassroots minority leaders and candidates, past party leaders haven’t always put the time and funding behind it.

“Everyone has realized that you can’t be disrespectful and you have to be there. If you show up five days before the election with a mariachi band, you look like an idiot,” Schroeder said.

Schroeder says the emergence of Asian candidates in Orange County isn’t a new trend, but the result of demographic changes where successful candidates have naturally emerged.

“The Republicans in Orange County have had, for the last twenty years, numerous Asian American politicians that gave a face to the Republican party,” Schroeder said, pointing to politicians like former Vietnamese American State Assemblyman Van Tran.

Vietnamese Americans, who number more than 183,000 in Orange County, have historically favored the Republican Party. Nearly all of the county’s Vietnamese American elected officials are Republican.

On the other hand, OC Republicans have failed to successfully support and elect Hispanic candidates, he said.

“Lou Correa was originally a Republican as was Loretta Sanchez – but they didn’t get a lot of support in the Republican side,” Schroeder said of the two Democrats. “People who looked like they had real potential turned out really badly, like Carlos Bustamante.”

Bartlett, whose election makes her the first Japanese American to serve on the Board of Supervisors, says she is skeptical of the party’s message of inclusion. She was not among the Asian candidates endorsed by the county GOP.

“When it came time to endorse, we had requested that the party stay neutral, but they went ahead and endorsed my opponent,” Bartlett said, referring to her close race with Republican and former Laguna Niguel mayor Robert Ming.

“So they’re saying we need to diversify the party, and include more women, but…[there’s] a contradiction,” she said.

This isn’t the first time California Republicans have heard a pitch for supporting more minority candidates.

In 1997, political strategist Stuart Spencer, who ran Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign in 1966, wrote a memo to state GOP leaders urging them to embrace Latino candidates, or else commit “political suicide.”

Read the full story HERE.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – Một trận bão rất lớn sẽ tràn qua quần đảo Aleutian, miền Tây Alaska, vào cuối tuần  và đem nhiệt độ mùa đông tới sớm trên hầu hết Hoa Kỳ trong tuần sau.

Cơ quan Thời Tiết Quốc Gia dự đoán bão Nuri có sức mạnh hơn siêu bão Sandy đã tàn phá miền Đông Bắc Hoa Kỳ năm 2012.

Nuri là một trận bão biển (typhoon) cực mạnh với sức gió tới 180 mph (hurricane cấp 5), xuất phát từ miền trung Thái Bình Dương cuối tháng 10. Philippines thoát khỏi tai họa nhờ bão chuyển hướng về phía Bắc tiến đến  gần bờ biển miền Đông Nhật Bản. Ngày Thứ Năm bão giảm sức mạnh chỉ còn là một bão nhiệt đới sức gió 65 mph, đi về hướng Đông-Bắc tới quần đảo Aleutian. Phối hợp với luồng Jet Stream, bão Nuri mạnh trở lại ở cấp hurricane tạo nên những làn sóng biển cao 50 feet và là một trong những cơn bão lớn nhất từ trước tới nay ở vùng cực Bắc Thái Bình Dương.

Hệ thống khí tượng này sẽ ảnh hưởng tới toàn thể 48 tiểu bang lục địa Hoa Kỳ, tạo ra thời tiết mùa đông sớm với tuyết rơi ở nhiều nơi.

Tuy nhiên khác với siêu bão Sandy năm 2012 thổi qua vùng thành thị Đông Bắc, bão Nuri chỉ đi ngang những miền dân cư thưa thớt và những cộng đồng nhỏ đã quen thuộc với thời tiết khắc nghiệt.

Bão Nuri cũng ảnh hưởng tới đường hàng hải của các tàu hàng đi lại giữa Mỹ Châu và Á Châu và đặc biệt là vùng đánh bắt loại cua King Crab của ngư dân Alaska. Những tàu thuyền đã tìm bến cảng trú ẩn tránh bão và mùa lưới cua hiện nay cũng đã gần chấm dứt vì gần đủ hạn ngạch đánh bắt. Hải quân duyên phòng cho biết đã chuẩn bị đầy đủ công tác phòng chống và sẵn sàng tiếp cứu những nơi bị bão.  (HC)

By Alex Sheedy, Collegian

While most college students move away from home at 18, not many imagine moving to a different country, leaving all their family and friends, struggling with a foreign language and accepting a prestigious yet rigorous academic scholarship.

Huyen Nguyen (Photo by Darlene Wendels / The Collegian)

Huyen Nguyen, an 18-year-old from Hanoi, Vietnam, enrolled as the third international student in the Smittcamp Family Honors College’s history this fall. So far, she’s finding Fresno State most welcoming.

“What I enjoy the most about the honors college is the sense of family that we have here,” Nguyen said. “All the staff and all my friends are so supportive, and it has helped make my transition from a foreign country to here much smoother.”

Her friends within the Smittcamp community have been a great help to her, especially on her quest to improve her English, her second language.

“I find myself being, not only learning a language, but also immersed in a culture, so I really enjoy that,” Nguyen said.

This is the first time Nguyen has lived away from home. In Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, she left behind her parents, a sister and a brother. She said that it has been hard being away from them.

Unlike Fresno, in Hanoi the streets are not laid out in blocks, are much shorter and much more windy. During the weekends, Nguyen and her family would enjoy the atmosphere of the city, taking walks through its streets.

“All of a sudden, I have to manage everything that has to do with schedules, life, papers,” she said. “I feel like I’m much more independent than I was in high school.”

After high school, Nguyen also had options to attend university in Finland, Korea and Germany. The U.S. became her choice because the university didn’t require her to declare a major right away, giving her the opportunity to discover what she’s passionate about.

“Freedom to pave my path is what drove me mostly to the United States,” Nguyen said. “I guess it’s just the fact the United States is so vibrant, and there is always so many motivations and changes and opportunities that await. I think that’s what draws me the most to the United States.”

Read the full article HERE.

By MATTHEW FLEMING, OC Register

Here’s an unexpected result from the 2014 midterms:

Potential candidate for Orange County Supervisor, Garden Grove council member, Chris Phan. (Photo from the city of Garden Grove)

The potential for musical chairs on Orange County’s Board of Supervisors.

On Tuesday night, Supervisor Janet Nguyen won her bid to represent the 34th District in the California Senate. She’s replacing Lou Correa, who was termed out.

So guess who is expected to run for Nguyen’s job?

Correa.

And guess who Nguyen replaced when she got the county supervisor job back in 2007?

Again, Correa.

But Correa, a Democrat from Santa Ana, is only one of several expected to run for Nguyen’s seat.

Other potential candidates include Chris Phan, a Republican councilman from Garden Grove, who has already announced his intentions, and Nguyen’s former chief of staff, Andrew Do.

An election to fill Nguyen’s seat figures to be held in early 2015, and it will involve a broad swath of the county’s electorate. The 1st District includes Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Westminster and Fountain Valley.

According to County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley, a special election costs the county about $1.40 per voter. With some 216,000 voters in the district, the cost of filling the seat figures to be more than $300,000.

The supervisor job, which pays about $143,000, is part of a five-member board that oversees the county’s $5.4 billion budget, which pays for services like the Sheriff’s Department, the District Attorney’s Office, public health, mental health, parks, roads and other infrastructure.

Read the full story HERE.

From Times of San Diego

Pacific Arts Movement opened the 15th Annual San Diego Asian Film Festival on Thursday with the action film, “Revenge of the Green Dragons.”

The Asian Film Festival opening night film “Revenge of the Green Dragons.’ Photo by Alexander Nguyen/Times of San Diego

The film festival is now a teenager, executive director Lee Ann Kim joked during the opening remarks before the film screening.

“Revenge of the Green Dragons” is a crime drama set in 1980’s New York. Based on a true story, the film follows two young brothers who are pulled into the world of organized crime in Chinatown. Produced by Martin Scorcese, the film was co-directed by Andrew Lau and Andrew Loo. The film stars — Leonard Wu, Harry Shum Jr. and Eugenia Yuan — and Loo were in attendance and participated in a question-and-answer session after the screening.

“Basing off a true story and finding what I can put into this character, Paul Wong, who is a real person, who actually existed but didn’t have much (written about him) so I had to to develop a lot of it,” Shum said. “Andrew Lau and Loo had specific ideas about the character and I got to put a little bit of my spin on it.”

Read the full article HERE.

From Independent

Over $12,000 has been raised by a crowdfunding website set up for a Vietnamese factory worker who was scammed out of S$550 (£268) while trying to buy an iPhone 6 in Singapore for his girlfriend.

iPhone 6 (Photo from Apple Inc.)

The crowdfunding page titled We need to make this right, send him an iPhone, was set-up by entrepreneur Gabriel Kang after a Vietnamese man, Pham Van Thoai, was filmed sobbing uncontrollably after being scammed in a Singaporean phone store.

Yet, despite having raised over $12,000, Kang says he is struggling to get in touch with the Von Thoai to give him his money.

According to reports, Van Thoai, who earns only £83 per month as a factory worker in Vietnam, had saved up for four months to travel to Singapore and purchase an iPhone 6 for his girlfriend back home.

Nevertheless, when he arrived at the Mobile Airshop in Singapore’s notorious tech market, Sim Lim Square, he was told by shop workers that the original phone price of S$950 (£595) had risen to S$1,500 (£940) because of the addition of a hidden extended warranty.

On the assumption that this warranty came free with the handset, he agreed to pay, only to be told the actual price later on.

His attempts to try and get a refund fell on deaf ears and left Van Thoai on his knees begging to staff to give him his money back.

Read the full story HERE.

From Committee to Protect Journalists

New York – The Committee to Protect Journalists is greatly concerned about the safety of Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, who has been repeatedly questioned by local police in Nha Trang about her activity on Facebook, and says that she fears arrest. Vietnam currently imprisons 17 journalists, most of them bloggers, according to CPJ research.

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh ‘Mother Mushroom’ (Photo from Radio Free Asia)

“Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh is wise to fear for her safety and freedom after being hauled in for questioning by police. Vietnam’s record of abuse of bloggers is well known,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “We call on the government to stop harassing journalists and release all those in prison without condition or delay.”

In an email message Thursday to embassies and non-governmental organizations inside and outside of Vietnam, Quynh–who blogs under the name Me Nam (Mother Mushroom)–asked for international publicity of her situation to head off possible arrest. Quynh, a pioneer of Vietnam’s blogging movement, is a co-founder of the press freedom group Network of Vietnamese Bloggers.

“As you know, I am committed to my cause and want to continue to defend my civil and human rights, but I also want to take care of my daughter and my baby son,” she said.

Read the full story HERE.