Currently exhibited at The Johnson, Nature Observed and Imagined: Five Hundred Years of Chinese Painting, includes painting and drawing representing nature and evoking a sense of harmony.

Friday night, Cornell’s Southeast Asia and Music departments came together, sponsored by the Breaking Bread initiative, to put on Songs from 24,615 Islands, a night of Indonesian and Filipino music. The Breaking Bread initiative at Cornell focuses on bringing diverse peoples together to share culture and establish common ground. The Philippines and Indonesia are two incredibly ethnically diverse countries, and in the spirit of coming together, two musical groups – one Filipino/Western and one Indonesian Muslim – applied to Breaking Bread.

While collegiate flirting usually consists of recycled Comedy Central jokes and (barely) politically correct comments about our less-than-perfect friends and lovers, the Japanese literati of the Edo period wooed one another with art and poetry. On exhibit this week at the Johnson Museum of Art is Colored in the New Year's Light, a show featuring Japanese surimono — color wood block prints produced as holiday tokens. Surimono were traditionally commissioned by poetry societies; they were distributed at New Year's as gifts of love or friendship. Rather than that drunken text message at midnight we've all sent and received, the ancient Japanese cognoscenti sent one another delicate images of fish, elegantly clad women and mythical beasts by the ocean side.

There is calm in Northeast Asia. But it is an uncertain calm. The “hermit kingdom” of North Korea remains as reclusive, impoverished and repressive as ever, constituting a potential threat to the region--either through conflict or collapse. The fragility of the country was emphasized over the past couple of weeks with the widely circulating rumors concerning health problems of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il.

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — The Red Cross estimated Wednesday that the cyclone death toll in Myanmar could be as high as 128,000 — a much higher figure than the government tally. The U.N. warned a second wave of deaths will follow unless the military regime lets in more aid quickly.

The grim forecast came as heavy rains drenched the devastated Irrawaddy River delta, disrupting aid operations already struggling to reach up to 2.5 million people in urgent need of food, water and shelter.

"Another couple of days exposed to those conditions can only lead to worsening health conditions and compound the stress people are living in," said Shantha Bloemen, a spokeswoman for UNICEF.