This week the Susan G. Komen Foundation cut funding for Planned Parenthood, Mitt Romney made headlines when he said he wasn't "concerned about the very poor," and Florida's GOP Primary went to Mitt Romney, with Newt Gingrich clenching a distant second.

Every Friday, The Takeaway convenes a panel to look back at the week's big stories. Among the headlines, after Mitt Romney squeezed out Rick Santorum by just eight votes in the Iowa caucuses, his hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe, endorsed rival Jon Huntsman. Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann dropped out of the race after placing last in Tuesday's caucuses. President Obama and Congressional Republicans are doing battle again, this time over his recess appointment of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This week brought the end of the Iraq War and a Russia in turmoil after recent disputed elections. Also, the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucus was last night on Fox News. Joining The Takeaway for a look at this week's big stories are Jeff Yang, writer of the Tao Jones column for The Wall Street Journal and bloger for WNYC's It's a Free Country, and Farai Chideya, journalist and blogger at Farai.com.

This week, the euro zone nations agreed to a pact to deal with the ongoing debt crisis, but the U.K. will not be taking part. Newt Gingrich's comments about child labor continued to dominate the headlines. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of instigating protests over alleged voter fraud there. And Donald Trump once again became the focus of the Republican primary field as candidates slowly dropped out of a Newmax-sponsored debate he was to moderate.

This week, we've seen Newt Gingrich continue to climb in the Republican polls as Herman Cain has continued to falter. Also out of Washington, Rep. Barney Frank announced his intention to not seek re-election after his fiery 32-year career. And, a new study rejuvenates the perennial debate about legalizing marijuana.

On Thanksgiving week, the big stories were the consumer's holiday shopping start-up — Black Friday, of course. The turkey was barely cold this year before family members were out the door to hit the box stores for the biggest deals of the season. In Washington, the debt committee was the most expected failure all year. And pepper spray went from a crime deterrent to an Internet meme.

Continued gaffes from the Cain campaign, diminishing returns for the GOP from their presidential candidates, Occupy Wall Street moves out of the park, and pizza is now technically a vegetable — for better or worse — these are stories that dominated the headlines for the last week. The Takeaway has assembled a panel of analysts to rundown, dissect, and wrap-up all the major stories of the week.

Rick Perry's slow motion political gaffe, the continuing debt crisis in Europe, and the scandal that rocked Penn State University were — for better or worse — the stories that dominated the headlines for the last week. The Takeaway has assembled a panel of analysts to rundown, dissect, and wrap-up all the major stories of the week.

Herman Cain's sexual harassment woes. Greece's unstable government buckling under pressure from its debt crisis. The renewed focus on the striking disparity between rich and poor in America. And, well, Kim Kardashian's divorce. These were, for better or worse, the stories that dominated the headlines for the last week. The Takeaway has assembled a panel of analysts to rundown, dissect, and wrap-up all the major stories of the week.

It's Memorial Day weekend, and for many people that means a visit to see whatever is playing at the local movie theater. Certainly the most heavily advertised option is sequel "The Hangover Part II," the bro-tastic comedy flick featuring Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis. But some people, like San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jeff Yang, aren't happy about the way Asians are portrayed in the film. Yang and producer Kristen Meinzer join us to talk about the film.

Do you play video games? If so, what color is your avatar? Does it look like you? Or someone or something else entirely? Do you make presumptions about the identities of other players? Do they make them about you? In short, how does identity and race play out in our virtual worlds? Jeff Yang, organized a panel on this topic last week at South By Southwest called "E-Race: Avatars, Anonymity and the Virtualization of Identity." Jeff Yang also writes the Asian Pop column for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Last Friday, while Japan was being shattered by the largest earthquake in its history, I was asleep in my Brooklyn bed, oblivious to the tragedy occurring on the opposite side of the globe.

When I woke up the next morning and turned the spigots on my many digital pipelines — email, Facebook, Twitter — the first thing I saw, even before I read the news itself, was a flood of reassuring messages from friends and family in Japan: "shaken, but safe"; "terrified, but all present and accounted for."

While Japan is dealing with a rising death toll, massive destruction and a nuclear crisis in the wake of a devastating 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, some prominent media personalities, athletes and celebrities in the United States have found themselves apologizing for making insensitive comments about the tragedy. Jeff Yang, pop culture columnist, discusses the cultural implications of such remarks.

“The Last Airbender” is the live-action feature film based on the highly successful animated series on Nickelodeon. It’s also the center of a growing controversy about casting and race. The series features Asian settings, costumes, architecture, and character and location names that incorporate Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian phonemes — such as “Aang,” “Fong” and “Sing.” And yet, when casting the motion picture, the studio chose four white actors to play the leads. When one of the actors dropped out, he was replaced by Dev Patel of “Slumdog Millionaire” fame, but it’s still the case that three of the four leading actors are white.

 

"Avatar," James Cameron's highly anticipated 3-D, computer animated, sci-fi film with a $237 million price tag, goes out to wide release this weekend.

We're joined by Takeaway film contributor Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday, and Jeff Yang, trend forecaster for market research firm Iconoculture and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who tell us whether the wait was all worth it…

Disney’s first movie to feature a black princess, “The Princess and The Frog,” opens this week in select cities, and nationwide on December 11. Jeff Yang, trend forecaster for market research firm Iconoculture and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, talks with us about the challenges of marketing a film to both a wide audience and niche segments. And Latoya Peterson, who’s been tracking the black community’s reaction to a princess who spends most of the movie as a frog, relays what she’s been hearing on the ground.

The words “comic convention” can conjure up images of full grown men dressed as Jedi knights angling for a chance to get an autograph from William Shatner. While that might have been the case a dozen years ago, now Comic Con is the pop culture event of the year. Next week The 'Con opens in San Diego, but it's been sold out for weeks. Luckily, Jeff Yang, the Asian Pop columnist for the SF Chronicle and Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology found himself a ticket. Also joining the conversation is Elisabeth Rappe, blogger for Cinematical.com.

Here's the trailer for Astro Boy:

Comic books have always been a place to explore brave new worlds. Be that out outer space, inner space, or the frontiers of race and gender. Yeah, we're talking about Wolverine, but we're also talking about Dora the Explorer. That compact, bobble-headed, bilingual tot boldly went where no cartoon had gone before and actually changed the world of pop culture by introducing her life, her adventures, and her abuela to the under three feet set. So what's next? To help us explore the expanding multicultural pop culture world is Jeff Yang. He writes the Asian Pop column at SFGate.com and is the editor of a new book, Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology.

Since we won't go so far as to put Dora the Explorer on the site, let's see how Disney has done on race before. Here's their journey to China in Mulan:



And here is Pocahontas: