As its economy grows, so does China's appetite for meat and poultry, which are raised on soybeans. The country's scramble for this resource is profoundly transforming world trade
By Alexei Barrionuevo
For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese have turned soybeans into tofu, a staple of the country's diet.

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Tchen Yu-chiou's cultural policies are intimately tied up with the DPP's desire to create and promote Taiwan's unique cultural indentity both at home and abroad
By Noah Buchan
TchenYu-chiou (陳郁秀) is a woman with a mission: she wants to use Taiwan's many cultures to create a Taiwanese identity that is inclusive. She wants to change the common misperception that Taiwan is only made up of one monolithic culture by focusing on the island's cultural diversity.

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Britain leads the world in CCTV surveillance. Now, cameras will be fitted with loudspeakers enabling controllers to castigate misbehaving citizens
By Anna Tomforde
When it comes to Big Brother surveillance, Britain is the champion of the world with the average citizen risking to be caught on CCTV cameras up to 300 times a day.

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When a dignitary attending a G-8 conference falls out of a window in Edinburgh Castle during an official dinner, the star attraction of crime fiction gets stuck in
By Janet Maslin
It's been 20 years since Ian Rankin started writing about Inspector John Rebus, the lone-wolf Scottish police detective who lives by his own set of rules. Rebus has a preferred way of conducting himself: any way he wants, and too bad if his superiors don't like it. Over time this attitude has brought Rebus exactly nothing, unless you count the satisfaction he takes in settling scores, one criminal miscreant at a time. He is now a year from retirement and not exactly resting on his laurels.

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Though no new information has emerged about Douglas MacArthur; Robert Harvey's new survey of the gutsy military commander is a compulsive read
By Bradley Winterton
I didn't expect to enjoy this book about Douglas MacArthur (discussed in parallel with Japan's Emperor Hirohito). He was, after all, a die-hard right-winger in politics, a gutsy military commander given to wading ashore under enemy fire wherever he had the opportunity, and giving rise to endless variations on his "Old soldiers never die" aphorism.

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