Laborers in Indonesia, Cambodia, the Philippines and elsewhere marched and chanted en masse Wednesday, sounding complaints about being squeezed by big business amid the surging cost of living. Asia is the manufacturing ground for many of the world's largest multinational companies.

Thousands of garment factory workers in Bangladesh also paraded through the streets calling for safeguards to be put in place and for the owner of the collapsed building to be sentenced to death.

In Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, tens of thousands of workers rallied for higher pay and an end to the practice of outsourcing jobs to contract workers, among other demands. Some also carried banners reading: "Sentence corruptors to death and seize their properties" and protested against a proposed plan for the government to slash fuel subsidies that have kept the country's pump prices among the cheapest in the region.

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"Dance of the Steel Bars" was shot in the Cebu provincial prison, the same place where up to 1,500 inmates dressed in orange uniforms danced to global fame in 2007. Their choreographed act still attracts thousands of tourists who troop to the prison to watch the performance, which recently included "Gangnam Style." Some of the dancing inmates appear in the movie too.

It stars Irish actor Patrick Bergin, who played Julia Roberts' husband in "Sleeping With the Enemy," and Filipino heartthrob Dingdong Dantes.

The Dubai-based producer, Portfolio Films International, said the story follows Bergin's character, Frank Parish, a retired U.S. firefighter and philanthropist wrongly jailed for murder in the Philippines.

He befriends Mando, played by 32-year-old Dantes, a convicted murderer who denies his passion for dancing to prove his masculinity. Another character, Allona, played by Joey Paras, is a transsexual who teaches dance to his fellow inmates to contribute to prison reforms. They are caught up in a struggle between the positive changes being implemented by the new jail warden and a corrupt prison system.

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Guards and police special forces were seen carrying assault rifles outside the U.S. Embassy in the Philippine capital. Guards gestured to a photographer to stop taking pictures.

Traffic was busy as usual on a boulevard in front of the main entrance. A police pickup truck with a machine-gun mounted on the back was parked under a tree, and Philippine coast guard vessels patrolled Manila Bay around the embassy.

President Barack Obama ordered increased security at U.S. diplomatic missions overseas and vowed justice for the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed the ambassador and three other people.

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A publicist I knew in Toronto wrote: What would Manny P do? A hipster friend in Texas tweeted: I wouldn't trade places with Ricky Hatton's jaw for all the Maker's in Williamsburg. Mariah Carey observed: Pon de seats in the arena then This is really violent and then Woah. And then perhaps most strangely, several feminist critics wrote: Tagalog phrase: NANALO SI MANNY. English translation: MANNY WON.

Boxing is a disgusting sport, my mother always says. It’s all rich people watching poor people punch each other to death. Boxers aren’t poor, I say. Some get millions of dollars a match. But my mother is insistent. Look at tennis, look at golf, she says. Those are rich men’s sports; they don’t have to beat each other in the face. Yet for some reason, everyone I knew, from a vast variety of ideological backgrounds, had simultaneously fallen in love with a Filipino boxer who turns a coarse sport new again. On Saturday night, Pacquiao fights for the first time since May, in a hotly anticipated pay-per-view bout against Juan Manuel Marquez, a fighter he has battled twice before -- the first bout ended in a draw; Pacquiao took the rematch, but barely.

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Fire Officer Domingo Gastilo says the fire broke out late Thursday, possibly when gasoline a man was pouring into a container near an open stove caught alight.

The fire lasted four hours, racing through some 350 shanties in two crowded villages in Navotas city, north of the capital Manila.

Gastilo said Friday two people died. An eight-year-old girl fell to her death from a makeshift bridge as people fled the fire, and another panicked resident jumped into Manila Bay and drowned.

Thousands were displaced by the fire, but it was not immediately clear exactly how many. They are being housed in a city gymnasium and two schools.

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At least seven captives survived, four of whom were seen crawling out the back door of the bus after Philippine police stormed it Monday evening when the hostage-taker started shooting at the 15 Chinese tourists inside, said police Senior Superintendent Nelson Yabut.

He said the hostage-taker was killed with a sniper shot to the head after he wounded a police sharpshooter.

Police and ambulances were lined up next to the vehicle in the pouring rain after the standoff ended. Local hospitals reported seven bodies of hostages were brought in. One other hostage was hospitalized in critical condition, and five others were unharmed.

Two of the surviving hostages were wounded in serious condition and the remaining five are under observation, Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang told reporters in the Chinese territory as he expressed shock and anger at the police response.

The bloodshed rattled the Philippines and raised questions about police ability to deal with hostage-takings.

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At least 23 people were nailed to crosses in three villages in northern Pampanga province's San Fernando city to mark Good Friday, with foreigners banned from taking part this year except as spectators, said Ching Pangilinan, a city tourism officer and one of the organizers.

She said the ban was imposed after some foreigners took part in previous years just to make a film or make fun of the rites.

"We don't want them to just make a mockery out of the tradition of the people here," Pangilinan said.

The event Friday drew more than 10,000 Philippine and foreign spectators, she said.

Many gathered at San Pedro Cutud, a farming village where devotees dressed in robes and tin crowns walked to a dusty mound carrying wooden crosses on their backs. At the mound, men nailed their hands and feet to the crosses.

Among the devotees was Ruben Enaje, a 49-year-old sign painter who was nailed to a cross for the 24th time as his way of thanking God for his survival after falling from a building.

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Seen from a global perspective, Filipinas are kicking some serious executive booty. According to one business survey of 32 countries, Filipinas' global standing is substantially higher both in the number of executives total and the number of employers who have women in senior management. According to the Grant Thornton International survey, 97 percent of all Filipino businesses have women executives and 50 percent have female senior executives. (That's lower than the government numbers, but perhaps it defined senior executives differently.)

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With one key difference. In Brazil, ethanol is manufactured from a sugar cane, and biodiesel is made mostly from soybeans. In the Philippines, the magic feedstock is coconut.

There are a lot of coconuts in the Philippines. But 2006 was a rough year for coconut farmers. The Philippine islands were ravaged by a string of super-typhoons, devastating production. Now, reports Biopact, legislator Juan Miguel Zubiri, the author of the Biofuel Act, is suggesting that profits from the biofuel program be allocated toward the replanting of coconut plantations in the affected areas.

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If Webb's own writing indicates his priorities, then he can be expected to speak up loudly and eloquently next year when his Democratic colleagues seek to repair the constitutional vandalism wreaked by passage of the Military Commissions Act in September. Like the military officers who tried and failed to preserve habeas corpus, due process and the Geneva Conventions from the zealous authoritarians of the Bush administration, Webb believes strongly in upholding those protections and feels that the excesses of the "war on terror" have damaged the honor of the U.S. military.

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Norvasc is one of Pfizer's biggest sellers, and it wants to maintain its window of high-priced sales as long as possible; thus, the lawsuit. But on April 10, Roberto Pagdanganan, president of the state-owned Philippine International Trading Corp., turned around and filed a countersuit against Pfizer, just one day after testifying in the patent suit filed against him.

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According to Sanjuan, the patent for Pfizer's hypertension drug Norvasc expires in 2007. The Philippine officials were engaging in a practice known as the "early working" of a patent. They wanted to be ready to sell a generic version of Norvasc manufactured in India the moment the patent expired, so they were beginning the process of registering the imported version. Such a practice is entirely legal in the U.S. and many other countries, and, according to Sanjuan, while not explicitly permitted in the Philippines' Intellectual Property Code, has been standard practice for several years without previously being challenged.

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The stripper, Sarah Jane Salazar, 25, worked in the girlie bars of Pasay while at the same time raising a young child. After contracting AIDS, she became known as a crusader for treatment and prevention of the disease. She died from complications last month.

A City Council member named Justo Justo apparently "discovered" Salazar, persuaded her to go public with the disease and even negotiated a movie about her life. And then it occurred to him that a sculpture of a giant penis to commemorate her life might be a good idea. Justo submitted a sketch to the city council as a proposal for the monument and asked for 500,000 pesos (about U.S.$11,000) to build it. In Justo's ideal world, the public art would portray Salazar naked, hugging the massive phallus, while 10 naked men circled the scene. He claims the penile tower would be a "fitting tribute" to Salazar.

The City Council thinks otherwise.

"Lewd and obscene is the only way I can describe it," sputtered Greg Alcera, vice mayor. "I firmly believe that should the monument be erected, it would create an uproar not only here in Pasay but elsewhere in the country."

The controversy rages on. Justo remains steadfast in his vision, in part because he was the last non-relative allowed to visit Salazar before she died.

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In America, girls and women with enormous noses often get their beaks
trimmed to a desirable dimension at a plastic surgeon's office, where
rhinoplasty condenses a ponderous proboscis into a dainty snout, like
Jody Foster's. Small is beautiful in Caucasian countries; nobody spends
their cash here on enlarging their nasal peninsula.

Olfactory organ angst is the reverse in the Philippines, where
indigenous sniffers are generally flat, short and wide. Filipinas
crave longer, pointier noses, according to the Philippine magazine Businessworld. And now, a torturous device has been invented to aid them in their Pinocchio ambitions. Nasal inserts! An enhancement gizmo called the Cleopatra is
getting crammed into the nostril cavities of the archipelago's women. The
bullet-shaped contraption is tweezed into both orifices of a pug nose and
then spring-released. The resulting pressure propels a small bump into
an elegant, articulated, Sigourney Weaveresque peak. Each Cleopatra kit is
equipped with three different sizes that enable beaks to be jacked upwards
from 3 to 13 millimeters.

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Thus, I was nearly asleep in the sweetly rotten, sticky-cool narcotic haze of my taxi's rattling air-conditioning when the driver jolted me to my senses by speaking to me for the first time in our 20-minute ride.

"Perhaps, sir, you would like a beautiful girl to ride in this taxi with you."

Having spent the previous day walking around Manila's international Ermita district, I knew that Philippine English is rarely meant to be taken at face value. In Ermita, "Would you like to buy a newspaper?" actually means "I found this newspaper in the gutter, and I am going to use it to cover my hands while I fish around for your wallet." In Ermita, "I want to be your friend and show you my city" actually means "I want to spend 20 minutes taking you to a cash machine you could have found in two, then demand a $5 tip." Similarly, "Would you like to meet a beautiful girl?" generally means "You look like someone who might pay money to have sex with a drug addict."

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Also known as trishaws, sidecars, pedicabs, cyclos, becaks and a host of other local names, the cycle-rickshaw is much more than just a means of transportation. The 12 Asian cities visited in this book cover the whole spectrum of the rickshaw and cycle-rickshaw story. In Beijing they disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, only to reappear in the 1980s. In Penang the riders are old and fading, while in Manila they're often teenagers dreaming of moving on to jeepney driving. In Dhaka the cycle-rickshaws are both everyday transport and moving art galleries. In Singapore they're disappearing as day-to-day transport but simultaneously being reborn as tourist attractions. In Hong Kong they're both city icon and endangered species.

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But no, the atmosphere was irrepressibly upbeat at the annual gathering, where executives from government tourism organizations, airlines, hotel chains, tour packagers and travel agencies listen to experts, debate issues and, most importantly, schmooze with each other.

The conference's direction was signaled by its theme -- "Inspiring Progress: Influencing Prosperity" -- and articulated by speaker after speaker, beginning with outgoing PATA Chairman Jon Hutchison, who said in his opening address: "When I look at what is happening in the region and reflect on my 30-odd years in the travel industry, I start getting a bit of a buzz. It must be the businessman in me and the fact that in spite of what economics I was taught at university, I have learned that the first law of economics is this: 'After every boom there is a bust, and after every bust there is a boom!'" (If only he'd been around in 1929!)

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