Shocking new research from the US predicts that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer as early as 2013, almost 30 years earlier than previously estimated.

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By Tom Tancredo
BY NOW, EVERYONE has heard about the Chinese government's refusal to allow the USS Kitty Hawk battle group and its crew of 8,000 to make a port call in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving -- as well as China's supposed reversal of the decision on "humanitarian" grounds after the flotilla had already steamed out to sea. We now know the Chinese reversed their decision when they tracked the USS Kitty Hawk's battle group sailing back to Japan through the Taiwan Strait. So much for China's "humanitarian" concerns.

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By Tu Jenn-Hwa 杜震華
PARTICIPATING FOR THE first time in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) -- held last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation in competition with 56 other countries -- Taiwan took first place in mathematics, fourth place in science and 16th place in reading performance. This excellent performance demonstrates that the nation's educational standard is above the international average, which I believe the public was rather gratified to see.

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By Dan Bloom
WATCHING THE RECENT TV news coverage of the government replacing the Chinese characters honoring Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) with characters honoring Taiwan's long march to freedom and democracy reminded this American observer of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

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By John Markoff
As a young NASA engineer during the 1980s, Milo Medin liked to irritate his managers by building scientific computer networks using freely available Internet software that outperformed more costly commercial systems.

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The black-and-white view of humanity is what's responsible for all the misery that undid the country and still haunts it today
By Putsata Reang
The appearance of the first former Khmer Rouge leader in a special hybrid court established in Cambodia to bring that movement's surviving leaders to justice provoked a question on which the tribunal's integrity will depend: should an accused mass murderer be released from prison pending his trial?

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By Alexander Etkind
Russian President Vladimir Putin's anointment of Alexander Medvedev to succeed him in what is supposed to be a democratic presidential election in March shows that Russia's leaders have not changed a whit. It looks increasingly likely that, as under Leonid Brezhnev, we will see the same names in the news for decades to come.

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