South Korea and China blasted Japan last week for the visits by Japanese parliamentarians to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where close to 2.5 million men, women and children who died in the name of Japanese emperors from 1867 to the end of World War II are honored.

Two young passengers on the Kaohsiung Metro got themselves into trouble for engaging in oral sex on the train. The action of the Internet pals — he a college sophomore and she a high school senior — was filmed and posted on Facebook by a Hong Kong tourist.

In the wake of the Cabinet's approval of reforms to a pension payout on Thursday, debate has re-emerged on this critical issue.

“All patients (in my care) are treated equally” in spite of their stature, said Chou Yuan-hwa (周元華), psychiatrist at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and former member of ex-President Chen Shui-bian's medical team.

Ticket sales for the ongoing local Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) are continuing to break decades-old records.As of April 22, the CPBL had played 36 games with an average attendance of 8,676 per game, which is almost four times the number from last season, which stood at 2,432.

It would be a landmark success in cross-strait collaboration in crime-fighting if tycoon-turned-fugitive-turned-Chinese citizen Chen Yu-hao is repatriated to Taiwan to stand trial for embezzlement charges for which he has been wanted by prosecutors in Taipei since 2003. But authorities on both sides must act quickly, because, according the law governing such financial crimes, the charges will be automatically dropped in 2016, meaning the case will be closed with Chen free to travel back home as “clean” as ever.

Shakespeare composed “All's Well that Ends Well,” a comedy portraying Helena, daughter of the physician Gerard de Narbon, curing the disease of the king of France. Everything has gone wrong, but in the end Helena gets her wish to wed Bertram. That is a story in France more than half a millennium ago, but in Taiwan now, all's not well that ends well.

Your chances of tying the knot one day might depend on a lot of factors. If you are looking for your better half in Taiwan, however, there is a growing consensus that things might be more complicated as local men and women seem to be from different planets.

Several hundred swimmers taking part in the International Olympic Hengchun Open Water Swimming event were trapped in turbulent sea off the thermal outlet of the Third Nuclear Power Station yesterday and needed rescue. After swimming for about 800 meters, they were drawn offshore by a strong current. Many exhausted themselves trying to swim back on course and began to take in water and enter the early stages of hypothermia. As of press time, two were in a serious condition.

In China's eighth defense “white paper” published on Tuesday, titled “The Diversified Employment of China's Armed Forces,” (中國武裝力量的多樣化運用), for the first time, the coded numbers of all 18 army combined corps of the PLA Army were published. And through this gesture, it seemed to some that the Chinese government embarked — at least symbolically — on a new era of transparency.