When Chinese Olympic officials said in a statement last week that politics doesn't belong on the sports field we were reminded of words spoken by International Olympic Committee (IOC) vice president Thomas Bach back in 2001: "All the members [of the IOC] are well aware that this election has a political significance and for all the members I have spoken to, human rights is an issue."

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By Margaret Shiu 蕭麗虹
A fire on Feb. 11 burned the Cloud Gate Dance Theater's painstaking efforts to the ground and, at the same time, exposed the government's indifference to arts and culture. Why was the internationally renowned troupe forced to reside in an unsafe and illegal sheet metal building for 15 years? When such an influential and well-known arts group still struggles over production funding and warehousing location, it means that it is even more difficult for other artists to earn the recognition of society a large.

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By Yang Wei-chung 楊偉中
Professional students and informants were the products of Taiwan's past authoritarian era. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) used to accuse the opposition's young cadres of being professional students for the Chinese Communist Party or the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The KMT also accused the young supporters of the opposition movement of disguising revolution with student status, or carrying out such activities by using schools as bases.

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Former Irish president Mary Robinson now chairs a club for female presidents and prime ministers. With their help, she hopes to change the world
By Patrick Barkham
Cynics might be tempted to see former Irish president Mary Robinson as a fully paid-up member of a globetrotting elite of do-gooders: those nongovernmental organization chiefs, emeritus professors and retired politicians of a liberal hue who fly around the world churning out carbon and hot air about poverty, sustainability and ethical globalization. The popular former president, recently anointed one of Nelson Mandela's 13 wise "elders," does sometimes slip into a kind of UN human rights-speak that is opaque to the rest of us. But Robinson also has a down-to-earth passion for helping ordinary families -- and she has big ideas about the ways in which the current generation of female heads of state can put a new kind of women's leadership into practice.

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It is in Europe's and the region's interest to accelerate the accession of the Balkans,including Kosovo, to strengthen the EU's territorial and political consolidation
By Wolfgang Petritsch
Kosovo's declaration of independence has put stability in the Western Balkans back on Europe's agenda. Unless the EU acts quickly, the whole region could slide backwards, with dire social, economic and security consequences. The EU needs a comprehensive regional approach, focusing on the remaining steps that would lead each country toward membership.

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In a Feb. 8 article in the Yale Daily News titled "Taiwan's desinicization policy pulls at seams of One China," Xiaochen Su criticized the desinicizing policy of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration as unjustified and an obstacle to peace and cooperation for prosperity across the Taiwan Strait.

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While on the surface there seems to be some merit to Dayal Nitai's argument (Letters, Feb. 17, page 8) that "if only women would dress modestly, they would not be groped on [the] bus or [the] MRT," in reality it is a classic example of blaming the victim. The women are not at fault; the men who grope them are. Women should not be groped, period, regardless of what they are wearing and irrespective of their status as the "mothers of mankind." Women are entitled to power over their own body. It should not be too difficult to understand that just because you can see it, it doesn't mean you can touch it.

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