In The News

Not Leading the World but Following It

Laurence R. Helfer June 18, 2003
On the issue of gay and lesbian rights, the US is behind the times, says legal scholar Laurence Helfer. While laws banning homosexual sex and preventing same-sex marriages are still upheld across the US, the recognition of gay and lesbian rights as human rights is increasingly part of a common global culture. Countries around the world – developed and developing, from Canada to Namibia – are...

A Mickey Mouse Approach to Globalization

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom June 16, 2003
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues for a world united by common cultural experiences. But cultural globalization, writes historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom, is not so simple as eating a McDonald's hamburger that tastes the same on every continent. Standardized products like Big Macs and Starbucks coffee hold very different meanings in different countries, argues Wasserstrom. In China...

Immigrants Here in Record Numbers

Oscar Avila June 16, 2003
The face of the American Midwest is changing. In the past decade, large groups of immigrants have moved into the Chicago metropolitan area. People are coming from around the world, but the largest group has been Mexicans, many of whom are undocumented and poorly educated. Despite their illegal status, these immigrants have made contributions to the economy and reversed Chicago's population...

How May We Put it Down?

M. J. Akbar June 16, 2003
As the US garners global support for its post-war influence in Iraq, is India willing to lend a fighting hand? As India contemplates sending its soldiers to fight alongside American and British troops, M.J. Akbar, editor of The Asian Age, strongly discourages such a commitment. In order to understand the nature of the US-led war in Iraq, Akbar thinks it necessary to look back at nineteenth- and...

Fossil Find May Back 'Out of Africa' Theory

Guy Gugliotta June 12, 2003
Scientists now have more evidence to support the claim that modern humans arose from one common ancestor in Africa. The recent discovery of the remains of two adults and a child from 160,000 years ago in northeast Ethiopia closes "a temporal and geographical gap" in the route on which human ancestors moved north out of Africa, to the Middle East and other regions of the world. Other...

Push for Rights of Singapore Women's Foreign-born

Chuang Peck Ming June 12, 2003
The proactive, modern women of Singapore are still shackled by obsolete policies, says the government-supported 'Remaking Singapore Committee'. Women and their children are subject to a vast array of double-standards that, they say, are born in the delivery-room and go on to thrive in society. These policies perpetuate the perception that women from Singapore are lesser citizens than...

A Primer for Cross-Strait Relations

Chen Hurng-yu June 11, 2003
If Taiwan ever wants to improve cross-strait relations and free itself of interference from Beijing, it will need to depart from the 1971 framework and change its foreign policy, says Chen Hurng-yu, professor of history at Taiwan's National Chengchi University. The overlapping claims of Taipei and Beijing to sovereignty over China – a dispute that has continued since the UN denied Taiwan’s...