Remember the Maine Incident of 1898? The USS Maine sank off Havana after an explosion and two crew members were killed. An anti-Spanish press enflamed American public opinion to a war-fevered pitch. Congress clamored for action. President William McKinley reluctantly succumbed and asked Congress to declare war. Congress did, of course. The Spanish-American War was brief, and the U.S. acquired the Philippines as a colony, which it called a territory. Is there a parallel to Taiwan now?

“This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers.

The title of a book by the late American sinologist Benjamin I. Schwartz, “In Search of Wealth and Power,” rather accurately sums up the preoccupation of generations of Chinese intellectuals, reformers and revolutionaries in modern times.

Malaysia's ruling party kept power after what was billed as the first election in 56 years in which the ruling National Front was seriously threatened. Although the National Front's share of seats in the national legislature dropped to 133, and it lost the popular vote by 48 percent to 52 percent, it won governing majority. Claiming fraud, the opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, has refused to recognize the results.

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.

“My dear son Martin has died from injuries sustained in the attack on Boston. My wife and daughter are both recovering from serious injuries.

The Boston bombings sent shockwaves across the globe and here in Taiwan the horror left us wondering what harm would have been inflicted on us had the attempted bomb attacks targeting the local public last week succeeded.

Today's world is not the Wild West, but still it is fraught with danger. A lone gunman can easily intrude into a school and unleash unspeakable carnage, and a weapon-welding local bully can terrorize an entire neighborhood by hurling verbal abuses at his rich but timid neighbors or, in some cases, inflicting physical injuries on them.

When Chiang Kai-shek came to Taiwan at the end of 1949 after he lost the Chinese Civil War, almost all his trusted political lieutenants did not come with him. H. H. Kung, his brother-in-law who married Madame Chiang's eldest sister, and her brother T. V. Soong, did not follow him, but went to the United States in exile instead.

After weeks of willfully disregarding as bluffs the exceptionally belligerent rhetoric from Pyongyang, world media are finally letting the fact of a real Korea crisis sink in.