Just before turning 90, Jacob Ma (馬克任) passed away quietly at his home in Long Island, New York, after more than 60 years of an illustrious career in journalism, blazing a trail through a tumultuous era across the Pacific and lighting the way for a younger generation of aspiring journalists.

I'm sure few people in the East, or even outside Canada, have ever heard the name of Jack Layton, a Canadian politician and opposition leader who died last week in Toronto and was honored by an unusual state funeral.

Comet Shih (a.k.a. Kermin 施克敏), a pre-eminent journalist and diplomat, would have been 75 years old this week had he been still with us. His passing in August, 2010, in southern California, struck me virtually like a bolt from the blue because he had always been hale and hearty.

Now it appears that no news is good news for the United States, or at least good news is hard to come by nowadays. S&P has downgraded U.S. debt prospect. Government teetered on the verge of default. On Wednesday, U.S. President Obama released a “long form” of his birth certificate to quell a poisonous fire fueled by persistent rumors that he was born outside the United States. The news made international headlines.

A new buzzword, Sputnik Moment, risks becoming a cliche for overuse by such VIPs as U.S. President Barak Obama, U.S. energy secretary Steven Chu and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. But in my memory it remains as fresh today as it was more than half a century ago.

The calamitous events unfolding daily at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant have rekindled a long-dormant issue at a politically-sensitive moment in Taiwan: should this Asian industrial dynamo get rid of all its nuclear power plants to become a “nuke-free country?”

It may sound like an oxymoron to say China is a rich pauper, but it seems to have a ring of truth.

President Ma Ying-jeou's pledge to bring Taiwan a “golden decade” of prosperity looks real now that the Legislature has approved a historic free-trade pact with mainland China, which has just leapfrogged Japan to become the world's second-largest economy behind the United States.

I have been obsessed with football ever since I was a little boy. I used to saunter, after school, to a football field to watch older and bigger boys kick and run.

When lights were dimmed at many of the world's iconic buildings for Earth Hour last Saturday to mark Earth Day, the darkness reminded people of one crucial issue: energy.