On Monday, British newspaper The Guardian fired off another broadside in the cyber-spying controversy sparked by intelligence methods revealed by former U.S. National Security Agency specialist Edward Snowden. This time, another Western government is involved; the UK government apparently spied on guests at the 2009 G-20 Summit in conjunction with the NSA.

The recent case in which a 17-year-old girl and her boyfriend set fire to the girl's house, resulting in serious injuries to her father, has drawn nationwide attention.

In a feature movie released last week, Superman brought down a US$12 million drone the U.S. military deployed to locate his home. The man who is effectively an illegal immigrant for 33 years demanded that the U.S. government allow him to lead a life saving the world “on his own terms.”

Food safety is an important issue for everyone. And so the Department of Health's recently announced Special Food Safety Project, aimed at identifying the producers and resellers of substandard food products, is both significant and welcome.

Wowprime Chairman Dai Sheng-yi (戴勝益) recently gave what was reportedly a well received talk at National Chung Hsing University. In his keynote speech, Dai said that those who earn less than NT$50,000 a month can forget about saving money and should instead spend their money on building social connections.

Taiwan is set to implement its 12-year compulsory education program next year. While junior high school graduates next year are promised another three years of free education, uncertainty and an even more complicated form of senior high school admission process await them.

A young European woman residing in Taiwan has posted an article on her blog complaining about the behavior of Chinese males she dated in what she calls a “cross-cultural social experience dint.” Without mincing words, she contends that having a boyfriend in Taiwan simply “sucks.” By Chinese, she means both ethnic Chinese raised in Taiwan and their mainland cousins.

Late Sunday, an ex-CIA worker and former employee at a U.S. National Security Agency-affiliated contracting firm, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, exposed himself as the source behind the leaks on the U.S. government's tracking of phone calls and PRISM — a massive cyber-surveillance program that enables the government to collect emails, videos, chats, photos, and even login records on information traffic passing through the U.S.

What appears to have been developing into “typo-gate” has quickly ended as another small tempest in a teapot. All's well that ends well. It has whipped through the two-bit lawmakers who stirred up the storm.

When the World Wide Web came into mainstream existence in the last decade of the 20th century, it was seen as a milestone in globalization and a key step toward international multilateralism. With the rise of supranational institutions such as the Europe Union and the increasing interconnectability between Earthlings, optimists were envisioning a new brave world beyond nationalism.