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.

BACK TO SUBIC, CLARK?: Despite calls to reject the measure from the country's most powerful church leader, the Philippine Senate has approved a second reading of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) that allows the U.S. to resume large-scale joint military exercises in the Philippines, according to the Philippine News of San Francisco.

"It is a threat, not a tool for peace," Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin declared last week.

Final passage is not a foregone conclusion, however. Several conditions have been attached, including a resolution on equity claims by Filipinos who fought under the U.S. flag during World War II -- a measure stalled in the U.S. Congress due to cost considerations which could affect thousands of Filipino-Americans. Other conditions call for correcting accounts of shared Philippine/U.S. history, preferential treatment for Philippine products, and U.S. commitment to stability and peace in the region.

Amendments rejected called for the U.S. to accept responsibility for nuclear cleanups and Philippine jurisdiction over offenses committed by U.S. personnel on Philippine soil.

TRANSLATING THE ZEDILLO VISIT: The much-photographed California visit of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo took a few hits in the ethnic press.

"Perhaps, Governor Gray Davis forgot that a great many Chicanos, Mexicanos and Latinos hold Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon culpable for the near warfare that has been occurring along the United States/Mexican border ," wrote Daniel Munoz in La Prensa (San Diego). " He should not be surprised at the protests that have been held and directed at President Zedillo."

Even more eyebrows were raised over Governor Davis' apparent shunning of Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante perhaps because of Bustamante's strong criticism of Davis's strange behavior regarding Prop. 187.

Wrote La Prensa: "It has not gone unnoticed that our Lt. Governor, Cruz Bustamante, has been shut out of the meetings and programs with president Zedillo. . . .

"Zedillo may have been too polite to say anything in public but you can rest assured he is well aware of this insult to the 30 percent of the California population that are Latinos."

La Opinion (Los Angeles) was a bit more positive: "President Zedillo's official visit to California confirms the arrival of a new era in bilateral relations among neighbors so unmistakably united."

The paper speaks of a ". . . the end of an era marked by anti-Latino and xenophobic animosities, which every immigrant worker suffered. The manners and bitterness of that era should never be repeated again."

SALVADORAN SALVO: A group of Salvadorans used Mexican president Zedillo's visit to California as an opportunity to denounce Mexico's mistreatment of Salvadorans and other Latin Americans traveling through Mexico on the way to the United States, reports La Opinion (Los Angeles).

The group met with Mexico's consul general in Los Angeles and wrote Zedillo a letter expressing "our concern with the constant human rights violations that Central American immigrants face on Mexican territory."

A spokesman for the group said that violations have increased dramatically since the destruction left by Hurricane Mitch.

SCHOOL SHOOTING: The recent school shooting in Georgia has only reinforced America's Chinese language press in its campaign for stricter gun control.

"Gun abuse has clearly become a cancer in American society," wrote the World Journal (San Francisco). "However, gun control legislation is still being stalled at every step even after the blood of so many children has been shed."

The paper noted the U.S. Senate had failed to pass even modest proposals.

"To Chinese Americans, it is scandalizing enough to see that even a measure requiring background checks on buyers of guns had to weather furious debates in the Senate," said the World Journal. "We believe that this amounted to a second killing of the victims of the massacre (at Columbine)."

According to the paper, Congress "is still locked in a wild-goose chase over non-essentials" because they only want to protect themselves from "a wave of public anger over a chain of school shootings, but not to effect fundamental changes so that such tragedies will not happen again. The NRA's continuing lobbying is now stripped bare of any rationale, and its real motivation, profit, is for all to see."

BLACK PRESS SHUT OUT: Ethnic media execs have long cried foul over how ad dollars tend not to flow to ethnic community media. Now the White House office of National Drug Control Policy has just signed a new contract to spend $1.2 billion in the next five years -- with no references to the black press.

According to John Warren, Publisher of the San Diego Voice and Viewpoint, writing in the San Francisco Bay View, "The message is , if there is money to be made, the white media, electronic and print, can do a better job of reaching our families, friends and neighbors than we can. White newspapers that have presented us as the personification of the drug culture in America are now being called upon to reach our children in the war against drugs.

"Isn't it ironic that the advertising industry is the beneficiary...The unending dedication of the Black press in discouraging drug use in our communities goes completely unrecognized."