One often hears pet owners say: "I see my pet as a human being and a member of my family."

[ FULL STORY ]

Milton Liao's letter "'Taiwanese' is propaganda" (Letters, Dec. 23, page 8), in attempting to define Ben Goren's bias towards the DPP, unintentionally paints himself into the same corner.

[ FULL STORY ]

By G. Pascal Zachary
FORGET THE MASSACHUSETTS institute of Technology. Hello, Tsing Hua University. For Clothilde Tingiri, a hot young programmer at Rwanda's top software company, dreams of Beijing, not Cambridge, to realize her ambitions. Desperate for more education, this fall she plans to attend graduate school in computer science -- in China, not the US.

[ FULL STORY ]

By Lin Chia-lung 林佳龍
DURING A CABINET meeting on Dec. 19, Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) asked Minister Without Portfolio Lin Si-yao (林錫耀) to invite government institutions to participate in a task force to examine and discuss the timetable and additional measures necessary to integrate Taichung city and county and upgrade their status to that of special municipality.

[ FULL STORY ]

By Nouriel Roubini
In recent weeks, the global liquidity and credit crunch that started last August has become more severe. This is easy to show: in the US, the euro zone and the UK, spreads between Libor interest rates (for bank-to-bank loans), central bank interest rates and government bonds are extremely high and have grown since the crisis began. This signals risk aversion and mistrust of counterparties.

[ FULL STORY ]

By Kevin Hassett
Over the years, we have grown accustomed to government bailouts of financial companies. The odd thing about the current credit crunch, however, is that it isn't the US government that is doing the bailing.

[ FULL STORY ]

By Miles Brignall
It's a middle England commuter town where the chief topic of conversation is usually the weather or train delays. But now the Hertfordshire town of Letchworth, north of London, is coping with an explosion of identity theft, the victim of gangs of fraudsters who target one community, siphon as much money as possible out of bank accounts then move, locust-like, to neighboring areas.

[ FULL STORY ]