This information comes to us via Jo Quiambao of the Filipino advocacy group, Katarungan.

There will be a rally TODAY (8/9/11) from 2 - 5pm in front of the White House to support the Filipino teachers of Prince George County that have had their wages stolen and are now faced with deportation.

New York may have just hit 1 million Asian American residents, but the students of New York City public schools will not have the day off for Lunar New Year anytime soon, at least not with Emperor-Mayor Bloomberg in office for his third term.  A week after State Senator Daniel Squadron (Lower East Side) and Assemblywoman Grace Meng (Flushing) sent a letter to Mayor Bloomberg requesting that the next Lunar New Year be a school holiday.  This, being a perfectly reasonable request in a city where 14% of schoolchildren are Asian American and schools are cl

Tonight, President Barrack Obama outlines his vision for the final year of his first term and makes his case to the American people for releection.  Among the issues to be discussed tonight, progressive taxation and the President's economic policies is rumored to take center stage.  

Thanks to all of our bloggers and guests that tweeted tonight.  Stay tuned to apapforprogress.org for reactions to the State of the Union Address.

To liveblog with us, end your tweet with #apapsotu

Unsurprisingly, Chinese American Republican Peter Koo, who pulled off a surprising upset in the 2009 City Council elections, will leave the Republican Party on Monday, citing the limits of the party to work in the City Council and a "lack of outreach" by the party toward Asian American communities, particularly Flushing.

As you may be aware, the President's final State of the Union address of his first term will be delivered on January 24th, 2012 at 9pm.  Most of us will be waiting to hear the President's policy goals and plans for dealing with Congress in the months leading up to the 2012 elections.  Be sure to visit APAP's blog after the SOTU for reactions to the speech, live blogging and analysis from the progressive perspective.

The following is a statement written by Angela Oh and signed by Helen Zia, Maxine Hong Kingston, K.W. Lee, Jessica Hagedorn and Don T. Nakanishi on the impending execution of Troy Davis.  We at Asian Pacific Americans for Progress support this message and urge you to stand with Amnesty International.

“At the beginning of the 1960s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country," said Ms. Merkel at the event in Potsdam, near Berlin. "We kidded ourselves a while. We said: 'They won't stay, [after some time] they will be gone,' but this isn't reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other ... has failed, utterly failed."

-       Andrea Merkel, reported by the Christian Science Monitor on October 17 2010

Hello readers and fellow bloggers, my name is Calvin Prashad.  I am a recent graduate of SUNY-Binghamton where I was the editor of our Asian Outlook Magazine and I regularly blogged for APAP.  Starting this week, I will be taking over as Editor of APAP's website.  I am excited to be a part of the team that revitilizes this organization heading into the important 2012 elections.

Last week, undercover cops arrested a worker at a Chinatown funeral supply store for attempting to sell them counterfeit merchandise.  The problem is that the merchandise was meant to be fake in the first place.  In addition, there goods were made of cardboard.

A new law passed by the New York City Council will be used to challenge the New York Police Department’s policy banning Sikh police officers from wearing their turbans and beards while in uniform.  At the present, the NYPD enforces a rigid dress code that requires, among many standards, all officers to be clean-shaven and wearing a hat.  Two Sikh American NPYD traffic officers had won the right to wear turbans on the job in 2004, but have since left the force, allowing the NYPD to revert to its previous stance.