China

GLENDALE — On the courts, it was business as usual for the Flintridge Prep boy’s basketball team, which used its strong guard play to overcome height mismatches, force turnovers, break down defenses and post wins in each of its four games against host Chinese teams on its recent nine-day, three-city tour of China. But, between games, the experience of traveling and staying together thousands of miles from home while visiting some of the most impressive sights of the ancient and modern worlds was anything but ordinary.

DreamWorks Animation has become the second Hollywood studio to enter into a distribution agreement with China's top online video site, Youku.com. Youku said Monday that it had signed a deal with the Glendale-based animation studio to distribute the "Kung Fu Panda" movies in China, marking the first time that DreamWorks releases have been made available in that country through the Internet. Both of the previously released "Kung Fu Panda" films, which were hugely popular in China, will be immediately available on Youku's premium on-demand service for less than $1. The movies will subsequently be available for free viewing on Youku's Hollywood Movie Channel.

A new Chinese joint venture said Monday that the third installment of DreamWorks Animation's " Kung Fu Panda " will be made in China as a co-production, the first for any major Hollywood animated feature film. "Kung Fu Panda 3," set for worldwide release in 2017, will be the debut feature-length animated film to be created by Oriental DreamWorks, a Shanghai-based entertainment company launched in February that will develop and produce Chinese animated and live-action content for distribution within China and around the globe.

"I have so much respect for my teachers," said 16-year-old Alex Findlay, who had just experienced her first teaching job. Findlay, who will be a junior this year at Crescenta Valley High School, spent part of her summer teaching English in the city of Yue Yang in the Hunan Province of China. Findlay had volunteered to travel to China to teach English to a group of Chinese students who ranged in age from 9 to 14. "It was a little difficult," admitted Findlay. Although her students did know some English and there was a translator in the room, there were times she was not certain of her teaching skills.

The Beijing Olympics wasn?t the only event in recent weeks in China to inspire sold-out crowds and international enthusiasm. The Los Angeles Children?s Chorus ? which involves 61 youths from across the Los Angeles area, including about a dozen from the Foothills ? recently returned from a two-week pre-Olympic tour to China. While in China, the young people performed with the Stanford University Symphony Orchestra, in a collaboration conducted by Beijing native Jindong Caii. Chorus members also traveled to various historic landmarks and performed to appreciative crowds across the country.

A group of state lawmakers has flown to China to see if California can learn anything from that country about building a high-speed rail system. But the lesson may be about what not to do: the state senators are arriving in a country mourning an accident last month in which two Chinese bullet trains collided, killing at least 39 people and injuring 200. The delegation includes Democrats Kevin De Leon of Los Angeles, Ron Calderon of Montebello and...

A mid China?s rapid economic growth, the government?s control of religion has reportedly softened slightly. What does the prospect of a religiously free China mean to you and your faith? ? There are many societies that claim to afford certain freedoms to their citizens while at the same time silencing the voices of those who challenge the status quo. China has a long history of religious oppression. Jesuit priest and native of Glendale John Houle was imprisoned there more than half a century ago. His crime: his Christian faith.

Global ethics and moral perspicacity were the main items of conversation at the James Thomas home in La Crescenta on a recent Sunday when a reunion luncheon was given for friends who attended the International Global Ethics and Youth Ambassador Symposium in Beijing, China this last July. Among the guests were friends from La Cañada Flintridge, La Crescenta, Glendale, Montebello, Temple City, Sierra Madre and China. They recalled their many experiences beginning in Shanghai where they first visited a deaf school for children to see spectacular dance performances presented by them in spite of their inability to hear.

Filmmakers doing business in China are often advised to avoid the three Ts, as in Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen Square. But that warning doesn't apply if you happen to be Jeffrey Katzenberg, the animation mogul who has been at the forefront of Hollywood's push into China. The chief executive of DreamWorks Animation was in Beijing on Friday to attend a news conference announcing a China film project called "Tibet Code," an adventure movie based on a popular Chinese book series set in ninth-century Tibet.

OfLa Crescenta, passed away on Saturday morning, December 22, 2012. Alvin served in the United States Marine Corps for 22 years, (in China 1947-1948 and Korea 1952-1953). After his retirement he worked for the Los Angeles Police Department as photographer for 27 years. He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Jane, and his daughters Cathryn Carr of Camas,  Washington, Janet Bender of Portland, Oregon and his grandson Corporal Benjamin J. Bisetti, USMC. A memorial service will take place at 11:00 a.m., Saturday, January 19, at Mount Olive Lutheran Church, 3561 Foothill Boulevard, La Crescenta.

A new Chinese joint venture said Monday that the third installment of DreamWorks Animation's " Kung Fu Panda " will be made in China as a co-production, the first for any major Hollywood animated feature film. "Kung Fu Panda 3," set for worldwide release in 2017, will be the debut feature-length animated film to be created by Oriental DreamWorks, a Shanghai-based entertainment company launched in February that will develop and produce Chinese animated and live-action content for distribution within China and around the globe.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent letters to at least four major Hollywood studios, including Walt Disney Studios and DreamWorks Animation, over dealings in China, a person familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak publicly confirmed Tuesday. The letters center on the studios' dealings with China Film Group, the state-run company whose responsibilities include determining which foreign movies get access to a limited number of slots each year for revenue-sharing deals in the red hot Chinese movie market, now the second-largest movie market in the world behind the United States.

The Walt Disney Co. and its Marvel Studios subsidiary said Monday that "Iron Man 3" will be a co-production with China, as the Burbank company teamed with DMG Entertainment of Beijing to co-finance and distribute the film. Robert Downey, Jr., Gwynneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle will return for the third movie in the hit franchise, whose two films grossed more than $1 billion worldwide and $42.8 million between them in China. The third installment of the movie will be directed by Shane Black unlike the first two installments which were directed by Jon Favreau.

Walt Disney Co. said it would join an initiative to develop China's animation industry, marking the latest push by Hollywood to expand into the world's most populous country. The agreement announced Tuesday unites the Burbank entertainment giant with an animation arm of China's Ministry of Culture and China's largest Internet company, Tencent Holdings Ltd. China's government has identified animation as a key area for development to boost the country's global influence, or "soft power.

DreamWorks Animation on Friday announced plans to build a studio in Shanghai, in what the Glendale-based company billed as a landmark agreement with two state-owned Chinese media companies. The creator of the "Shrek" movies said it was forming Oriental DreamWorks, a joint venture with China Media Capital and Shanghai Media Group in concert with Shanghai Alliance Investment -- an investment arm of the Shanghai municipal government -- to establish a family entertainment company in China.

A tiny leopard frozen in mid-leap. A stalking hunter. Twining leaves, coiled dragons, interlaced serpents, swooping birds and “swirling cloud scrolls” that represent “the vital energy, or qi, of everything in the universe”: These are some of the stunning designs to be found in “Ancient Chinese Bronze Mirrors From the Lloyd Cotsen Collection,” a major exhibition at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in...

Jon "The Bullet" Bales doesn't even bother guessing how many medals he's won over the years - there are too many of them. He has boxes filled with them and the walls of his Glendale home proudly display plenty more. Bales, at the age of 67, has earned quite a few different kinds of medals, from the several he was given during his one-year tour he took during the Vietnam War as a first sergeant in the National Guard to countless more he's won from competing in races. There is a small space on a wall in his living room where he's hung the most cherished prize he's ever won in a race.

DreamWorks Animation SKG aims to build an animation studio in Shanghai in a further effort to plumb the vast Chinese economy. The Glendale-based studio, which recently announced a deal with online video site Youku.com to distribute its "Kung Fu Panda" movies in China, is recruiting executives to run a studio that would produce animated movies and TV shows catering to the Chinese market, said a person familiar with the plans who was not authorized to...