UBC Reports | Vol. 50 | No. 5 | May 6, 2004

In the News

Highlights of UBC Media Coverage in April 2004

Compiled by Brian Lin

U.S. Ready to See Change in China-Taiwan Status Quo

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Daley recently said Washington is not opposed to a change in the status quo involving arch foes Taiwan and China but any alteration must be peaceful and mutually agreed.

UBC political scientist Paul Evans says such remarks signal a U.S. desire to see the two resume talks frozen since 1999 and thus ease tensions created by moves by newly re-elected Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian towards independence and Chinese threats to respond with force.

“I think it’s a shift not just from a year ago, but a shift from even a month ago,” Evans told Reuters News.

“That is the most direct statement I have heard from a senior American official that the U.S. government will not support Taiwan independence,” he said. “In the past it was phrased in slightly more ambiguous ways related to supporting a One China policy.”

UBC honours Three Nobel Laureates

Hollywood actress Goldie Hawn joined hundreds of others in April to see the Dalai Lama and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Iranian human rights fighter Shirin Edabi receive UBC honorary doctorate of law degrees.

“People are hungry for answers,” Hawn told CP Wire. “The human spirit, I guess you could say . . . we innately feel it’s drying up.”

Hawn, who lives in Vancouver with husband Kurt Russell, said people are more willing now to embrace the Dalai Lama’s message of compassion.

“I watch all political processes around the world,” she said. “They’re driven by fear, the need to dominate. They’re driven by ego, the need to conquer and possess. These are all very dangerous things we need to get over.”

3,000-Year-Old Story a New Pop Cult Hit

Hollywood director Wolfgang Petersen’s production of Troy will be released next month amid predictions that with a $200-million U.S. budget, a timeless story and the likes of Brad Pitt and Peter O’Toole headlining, the film can’t help but be a blockbuster.

But the Hollywood hype is being preceded on all sides by a flood of renewed interest in the epic poem about the clash of two cultures that is one of the bestsellers of the past 3,000 years.

The appeal of Troy is eternal, but the film has helped pique even more interest, UBC classics and archaeology professor Hector Williams told The Ottawa Citizen.

Williams knows of at least three Troy documentaries in the making, all timed to coincide with the release of the film.

Svend Robinson’s Fall From Grace

NDP MP Svend Robinson tearfully confessed in a news conference to “pocketing” an expensive piece of jewellery.
While no charges have yet been laid by police and the diamond ring -- valued in a report by BCTV as high as $50,000 -- has been returned to the Vancouver auction house, Robinson announced he won’t run for re-election in any near-term campaign and will be taking a medical leave from his duties in the Commons.

UBC political scientist Phillip Resnick said Robinson’s long record of zero-to-60 moral outrage may be coming back to haunt him.

“He’s sometimes taken positions that have put his own party in embarrassing situations and other times has actually been the standard-bearer,” Resnick told CP Wire. “There was a side of Svend which played to that very moralizing, high moral road on broad issues of public policy.”