Taipei City is preparing for the Taipei International Flora Expo, to be held from Nov. 6 to April 25. The expo aims to showcase “the essence of gardening, science and environmental protection technology,” and to “combine culture and art as parts of eco-friendly living.” Besides these eloquent goals, the expo also represents an effort by Taipei City to compete with Kaohsiung, which hosted last year’s World Games, and Shanghai, which is hosting the World Expo.

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By Andrew Huang 黃達夫

Following revelations about taxes owed by Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, newspapers have quoted doctors at the hospital as saying that they have always honestly paid their taxes and made their National Health Insurance payments according to hospital regulations, so they now find it hard to accept being labeled tax evaders.

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By Wellington K.K. Chan

Why has China succeeded so spectacularly in the span of just three decades since the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) economic reforms? The reasons that are usually cited are China’s compelling demographic, geographic and broad cultural factors. What is less understood is that China’s success has also depended on its entrepreneurs — and their deeply rooted patterns of activity.

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By James Wang 王景弘

During the Communist revolution in China, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) slogans was that “workers have no motherland.” Nowadays, capitalists advocate globalization based on the view that businesspeople have no motherland. Both are wrong, because both workers and businesspeople have a motherland. The only exceptions are the businesspeople of Taiwan: They exist in limbo, somewhere between having and not having a motherland.

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Wealthy and upper-middle-class parents are sending their children to English-only private schools because of the language’s perceived status, and the children often cannot speak Bahasa Indonesia

By Norimitsu Onishi

Paulina Sugiarto’s three children played together at a mall here the other day, chattering not in Indonesia’s national language, but English. Their fluency often draws admiring questions from other Indonesian parents Sug

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The trail of the leaked documents includes an instant messaging insider, the computer hacker who gave him up and a password based on a logo from a napkin

By Nick Davies

US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a haemorrhage of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.

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