When US President George W. Bush’s administration declined yet again last week to take action to regulate carbon emissions, its excuse was farcical. The US Environmental Protection Agency cited the “great complexity, controversy and active legislative debate” as reasons for postponing measures that the US Supreme Court ordered implemented last year.The news broke just days after G8 leaders — including Bush — agreed in Japan to a “vision” of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, and one day before Bush repeated his call to open protected areas of Alaska to oil drilling. Bush will be remembered as the US president who did nothing when the urgency of global warming was crystal clear.

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The popular fervor generated by the Beijing Olympics will only go so far in uniting China behind a repressive party-state, with the Communist Party continuing to call the capitalist tune as the gap between rich and poor grows larger


By Jason Burke
Behind the hills and the skyscrapers the sun is going down on another working day, but Ren Zhirong cannot stop to talk. The carpet still has to be laid on the university’s volleyball courts, the spotlights connected, the music chosen. Only then can scores of his finest pupils show Yanan, a small town in central China, “what ballroom dancing is all about.”

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By Chao Chien-Min 趙建民
Following the two historic agreements signed in Beijing by the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), the first batch of Chinese tourists traveling on direct cross-strait charter flight arrived in Taiwan.

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By Jason Liu 劉進興
In an attempt to revive Taiwan’s struggling stock market, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said on July 10 that restrictions on chip investment in China would be relaxed. But this “good news” could severely hurt the economy.

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Dang raises good points

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