In the cramped living spaces of Japan, when a dog barks too much and annoys the neighbors, they can get a court order to force the animal's owner to have its vocal cords removed, thus silencing it.

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By Nat Bellocchi白樂崎
China is pressing the US at the highest levels to discontinue arms sales to Taiwan, and to restrain Taiwan from making changes to its Constitution. They know well that the arms sales demand is a non-starter. But they hope that they can gain US support for their blanket opposition to constitutional reform.

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By Chin Heng-Wei金恆煒
From a number of recent polls it would appear that support for the pan-blue camp is lower than ever before, and the individual popularity of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) has fallen to shockingly low levels as well. Political commentators, both pro-green and pro-blue, are increasingly concluding that the pan-blue camp will not be able to retain its legislative majority in the year-end elections.

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Apollo Chen陳學聖
The primary elections of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to nominate candidates for the year-end legislative elections and the Kaohsiung City Council by-election took place last month. The results of these two elections can be seen as the first indicator of a possible change in Taiwan's political power distribution in the "post-320" period.

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Americans are less polarized than politicians indicate, but the power of a cunning political campaign endures
By Martin Kettle
Six years ago, the US sociologist Alan Wolfe published One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About, an essential text for understanding the pulse of modern America.

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New interpretations of the Koran claim that martyrs will only get a plateful of grapes when they reach Heaven, instead of the 72 virgins they were led to expect
By NicholasKristof
"The virgins are calling you," Mohamed Atta wrote reassuringly to his fellow hijackers just before Sept. 11.

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If cultural modernity emerged in species similar to our own, then the traditional dichotomy between the natural world and human culture can be dismissed
By Francesco D'errico
Fossil remains and genetic data suggest that modern humans come from Africa, and in the last decade anthropologists, archeologists, linguists and other scientists have tended to identify our species'

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