Hello, everyone!

President Joe Biden announced on Monday his selection of 21 individuals and organizations to receive the National Medal of Arts or the National Humanities Medal for 2021. 

Actress Mindy Kaling, fashion designer Vera Wang, and producer Joan Shigekawa will receive the National Medal of Arts. Meanwhile, author Amy Tan, known for her novel "The Joy Luck Club," will be awarded the National Humanities Medal.

The awardees will be recognized in a ceremony held on Tuesday, March 21 at the White House.

• Houston Chef Lena Trang has offered to provide free meals for a single mother of three who was paralyzed from the waist down following a violent robbery in Houston. The mother, Nhung Truong, was discharged from the hospital on Thursday and returned home as she’s now showing some signs of progress. The Houston Police and Mayor Turner announced the arrests of 17-year-old Joseph Harrell and 19-year-old Zynika Woods in Truong's case on Friday.

• Dakila, a Filipino-American band, was among the first to create an album that represented Asian Americans explicitly by singing in Tagalog on their debut album released in 1972. They were also involved in the political activism of the 1970s, playing benefit concerts to fundraise for the United Farm Workers and performing for Asian American student groups on the West Coast. Dakila's debut album was reissued in Europe last year, and they are now the subject of a documentary, “Searchin’ For My Soul: The Dakila Story,” with plans to play live concerts across the Bay for the first time since the pandemic.

• Over 1,000 juvenile long-tailed macaques in a Houston-based primate center owned by Charles River Laboratories, a U.S. animal testing company, are at risk of being killed or sent back to Cambodia, according to animal welfare groups. The monkeys are at the center of a U.S. government investigation into wildlife trafficking, and the shipment is said to be worth around $30 million. Discussions have stalled after it was learned that the monkeys would be flown out of the U.S., with options including sending them to a sanctuary, killing them, or allowing their re-export.

• “Everything Everywhere All at Once” filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as the Daniels, might have been involved in an upcoming “Star Wars” project. The Oscar-winning director duo is believed to have directed at least one episode of the Disney+ series “Skeleton Crew,” starring Jude Law. Filming for the series, which follows a “group of kids lost in the galaxy, trying to find their way home,” started in the summer last year and finished in recent months.

• Japanese company Manda Fermentation Co. earned a Guinness World Record for the world’s heaviest radish. 
   
• A lost dog in Malaysia was reunited with her owner after a video of the pet waiting outside a shop in the pouring rain went viral.
   
• Netflix has released the first teaser trailer for its anticipated political K-drama “Queenmaker.” 
   
• Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen recently unveiled and celebrated the return of stolen artifacts that had been looted from the nation during periods of war and instability.
   
• Fans of Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” can now find a unique Lego replica of the famous woodblock print in Japan.