Sunday saw Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) become the latest member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to declare his intention to run for the presidency next year when he held a press conference at Fort San Domingo in Tamsui. In doing so, Su became the third of the party's so-called "big four" to declare his or her presidential ambitions, after former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and DPP chairman Yu Shyi-kun.

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By Li Thian-hok 李天福
On the afternoon of March 8, 1947, 10,000 troops landed in the port of Keelung in response to an urgent request for reinforcements by executive administrator Chen Yi (陳儀). Concurrently, some 3,000 troops landed in Kaohsiung. They then began a systematic massacre, shooting people on sight.

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By Shen Chieh 沈潔
To understand Taiwanese politics, it is necessary to comprehend the political earthquake set off by the 228 Incident. US president Richard Nixon said in 1972 that he did not know what the Taiwan independence movement was. Today, the US administration says it does not support measures by Taiwan to clearly distinguish itself from China. One reason for this is that they do not understand the history behind the scars left on the Taiwanese people by the 228 Incident.

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The public can contribute to its entries, and that is only part of the problem for professors who frown on its use in tests
By Noam Cohen
When half a dozen students in Neil Waters' Japanese history class at Middlebury College, Vermont, asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in "no position to aid a revolution," he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

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Japan offers a seed of hope for agricultural liberalization with a demographic crisis in which the average age of farmers has reached the retirement age
By Malcolm Cook
Last year was a bad one for free trade. The Doha Round was supposed to make agriculture the centerpiece of negotiations to assuage the deep frustrations of developing countries. But instead of breathing life into free trade in food, rural protectionism in rich countries seems to have killed the Doha Round -- and, with it, potentially the whole multilateral trading regime.

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