What does the world look like as reported on the pages of California's growing ethnic newspapers? PNS monitors the Chinese-, Spanish-, Vietnamese-, Japanese, Korean, Arabic-language news media as well as English-language newcomer and native-born ethnic press published and/or distributed widely in California. "Gleanings from the Ethnic Media" is a regular weekly column compiled by Emil Guillermo, host of "NCM: New California Media TV" (seen on PBS station KCSM-TV60 in the Bay Area); assisted by Pacific News Service and the NCM Network. Just as the alternative news media connected the disaffected populations in the 1960s, so in the 1990s the ethnic media connects the new ethnic majority communities of California -- to one another and to the larger public forum.

SAN JOSE--NO NEWSPAPER DMZ: The battle for Vietnamese hearts and minds and loose change is heating up as a newspaper war in San Jose. On one side is the mighty Knight-Ridder owned Mercury News, which has spawned a new Vietnamese language version, Viet Mercury. On the other side are the dozens of community papers in California owned and operated by local Vietnamese.

"The media theater in Northern California has opened to a new warfare," according to an editorial by Nguyen Ninh Hoa in Calitoday (San Jose).

Hoa continued: "Viet Mercury is only charging $90 per page (in advertising)... much lower than most Vietnamese language newspapers who publish fewer copies per issue. What does this imply for those of us the same profession? Many Vietnamese language newspapers have to wonder...Is this not an effort to take over the market by using prices as a weapon? And is this not a move to eliminate its weaker competition who have lesser resources to compete with it? "

Hoa says the Mercury has cut into the Hispanic media market and has called for a meeting among ethnic newspapers that are being pressured by the Mercury's Vietnamese face.

CHINATOWN'S HISPANIC LEADER?: When district elections take place in 2000, San Francisco's Chinatown had hoped for a Chinese-American leader. But David Lee administrative director of the Chinese-American Voters Education Committee (CAVEC), thinks otherwise, according to the Sing Tao Daily (San Francisco). Lee, who for many years now has been doing intensive political demographic research in Bay Area locations, thinks that Alicia Becerril, recently appointed to the board by Mayor Willie Brown, actually has the best chance to win Chinatown unless Asian Americans mount an intensive voter registration drive.

BOMBS OVER BEIJING: The explosions in China are loud and numerous, indicative of a surprising rise in bombings on the mainland, according to the World Journal (Taiwan). Reports based on sources in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, say the increase in bombings have grown steadily since May 1998. During that period the bombings have averaged 7 every month, and have caused 29 deaths and 112 injuries.

The bombings are all the work of individuals or small groups. There is no evidence that the bombings are organized. The paper cites the growing unemployment caused by closure of bankrupt state-owned enterprises as a major reason for the bombings.

E-BRIDES ANYONE?: Mail-order bride services are outlawed in the Philippines. But now at least one company has moved into cyberspace and is being investigated by the country's National Bureau of Investigation, according to a report in the Philippine News (South San Francisco).

Heart of Asia Romance Network boasts more than 3,000 pictures of Asian and Filipino women ranging in age from 18 to 40. The company makes money on subscriptions and sells addresses of the women for $15 dollars per address. The Philippines NBI Anti-child abuse, Discrimination, and Exploitation division says violators of the country's mail order bride statutes could face up to six years in prison.

DEFERRED MAINTENANCE: Large numbers of uninsured women in California receive sporadic health care and forego important preventive services such as Pap tests and mammograms, according to a joint study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Women's Health Collaborative.

La Prensa (San Diego) reports that the study found strong connection between low income and poor health. Non-elderly Latinas, Asians and Pacific Islanders are most likely to be uninsured in California. Over 40 percent of women with incomes below the federal poverty level are in fair to poor health; 29 percent of women with incomes between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty level have poor health; 9 percent of women with incomes 300 percent or above the poverty level suffer from fair to poor health.

EXCESS ENERGY?: The New York-based Human Rights Watch last week accused energy giant Enron Corp. of complicity in the beatings and harassment of people opposed to the development of a power project in Maharastra, India. The group said the company was partly responsible for human rights abuses by its security personnel at the plant.

The multi-million dollar project is believed to be the world's largest private power project at $3.5 billion dollars, and is a symbol of the country's move to liberalize its market to foreign investments.

"We don't tolerate human rights abuses by our employees," Kelly Kimberly, an Enron spokesperson told India West (San Leandro, Ca.). She added that the company was "disappointed" by the report.

NAILED SHUT?: African American contractors and tradespeople meeting in the Bay area are calling it a state of emergency, as they complain of being shut out of the local $20 billion dollar construction business, according to a report in the Bay View Newspaper (San Francisco). Citing studies such as a recent San Francisco Airport Commission study, the contractors say disproportionate percentage of white-owned companies are getting public contracts while blacks are "jobless."

"The situation has to change," said Jim Taylor of the Bay Area Black Contractors Association. "The only way we will make progress and change is when we unite, when we build an unbreakable unity."

BUI BUZZ: Vietnamese papers are crowing over Tony Bui, a 26 year old, film maker who won three awards at the The Sundance Film Festival. Bui 's first feature film won the Grand Jury prize and audience award for dramatic feature -- a coup for a film in Vietnamese, filmed in Vietnam with only one non Vietnamese part, a small one, played by Harvey Keitel, who is also a co-producer.

Bui, who left Vietnam when he was two, grew up in the Bay Area and now lives in LA.