Articles of Interest

Scholarships to Encourage More Japanese to Study Overseas

By MIKI TANIKAWA

Published: May 5, 2013

TOKYO — To encourage more Japanese youths to study abroad, a plan is in the works to offer scholarships to those taking short-term overseas courses, the Japanese education minister, Hakubun Shimomura, said during a visit to Washington.

The offer, which Mr. Shimomura said would be available as early as 2017, is tied to a series of education initiatives by Japan’s conservative government headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is eager to make the country more competitive internationally.

Speaking last Wednesday at a conference organized by the U.S.-Japan Research Institute in Washington, Mr. Shimomura said that the grants could give a badly needed lift to the number of Japanese students abroad, which has been declining steadily.

The number of Japanese students studying overseas peaked at 82,945 in 2004 and fell to 58,060 in 2010, according to the Ministry of Education. Fewer than 20,000 Japanese students studied in the United States in 2011, compared with 46,000 in 1999, according to the Institute of International Education.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/world/asia/Scholarships-to-Encourage-More-Japanese-to-Study-Overseas.html?nl=learning&emc=edit_tc_20130508&_r=0

Remembering Lu Lingzi

http://www.intervarsity.org/news/remembering-lu-lingzi

Alec Hill, President of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA

May 3, 2013

Boston Bombing

Two days after the Boston Marathon bombing, the media released the name of the third victim, Lu Lingzi, a Chinese student. As I read several articles, my heart stopped: I recognized the background of many of her photos—Toah Nipi, our camp in New Hampshire. This tragic story had suddenly become very personal.

Student visa system gets scathing review

By Maria Sacchetti

|  Globe Staff 

  May 04, 2013

Azamat Tazhayakov (left) and Dias Kadyrbayev (center) were in the United States on invalid visas, officials say.

Homeland Security officials have redoubled their efforts to check foreign students’ visas at airports and border crossings since a Kazakh student charged with destroying evidence in the Boston Marathon bombings used an invalid visa to reenter the United States in January.

Azamat Tazhayakov, a friend of suspected bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, passed through a security checkpoint at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport 16 days after the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth notified federal officials that his low grades had invalidated his student visa.

“How do you get back into this country without a visa?” Senator Charles Grassley, ­Republican of Iowa, said by phone Friday. “Is our system working or isn’t it?”

Federal investigators arrested Tazhayakov and his roommate, Dias Kadyrbayev, both 19-year-old students from Kazakhstan, for alleged immigration violations five days after the deadly attacks, intensifying concerns that Homeland Security is failing to properly monitor the 850,000 foreign students and their US schools at a time when student visas are soaring.

After the bombings, officials issued an order “effective ­immediately’’ telling agents to verify that every foreign student coming into the United States has a valid visa, by checking their paper records against a computer database of foreign students. Officials are also making sure that Customs and Border Protection, the Homeland Security agency that screens arrivals at airports and borders, has updated information on foreign students….

See the complete article at http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/03/federal-officials-redouble-checks-foreign-students-visas-after-marathon-bombings/7YrdYuRvduwNoyWQ9buTxI/story.html

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