The Secrets Inside Your Dog’s Mind

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

“Henry!” he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix–a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry’s collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit.

“You got it?” Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he’s standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room–neither dog nor human–can tell which cup hides the biscuit.
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Radicals Rising

The local establishment is alarmed. Will activism erode Hong Kong’s business edge?

You could call the University of Hong Kong’s student union Radical Central. A sleeping bag, discarded by a student after a late-night session plotting a political protest, lies on the floor. Loudspeakers are stacked in the corner. A banner criticizing a government law requiring police permission for protests hangs on the wall. A group of students recently was arrested — though charges weren’t pressed — for demonstrating without permission. The incident triggered a flurry of attacks on the government’s rigid approach. That, in turn, sparked rare public criticism from the city’s business establishment, who worry that street protests will disrupt commerce.

Gloria Chang, the union’s president and just over five feet tall, may look frail. But she’s a fighter. She and fellow students have taken to protesting against everything from political interference in academia to undemocratic government. “I worry about my parents — they think, ‘why can’t their daughter just go to university, study and get a job?’” says Chang. “But I know what I’m doing. We need an open government, and we want it now.”
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Patrick Swayze dies after cancer battle

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Patrick Swayze, whose good looks and sympathetic performances in films such as “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost” made him a romantic idol to millions, died Monday. He was 57.

Swayze died of pancreatic cancer, his publicist, Annett Wolf, told CNN.

Swayze’s doctor, Dr. George Fisher, revealed in early March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from the disease.

Most recently, Swayze starred in A&E Network’s “The Beast,” which debuted in January. He agreed to take the starring role of an undercover FBI agent before his diagnosis.

The network agreed to shoot an entire season of the show after Swayze responded well to his cancer treatment.

In an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters in January, Swayze said his work on that show was exhausting, requiring 12-hour workdays in Chicago, Illinois, doing his own stunts. But he said the show’s character “just felt right for my soul.”
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What College Students Don’t Know

Every Fall the professors at beloit college publish their Mindset List, a dictionary of all the deeply ingrained cultural references that will make no sense to the bright-eyed students of the incoming class. It’s a kind of time travel, to remind us how far we’ve come. This year’s freshmen were typically born in 1991. That means, the authors explain, they have never used a card catalog to find a book; salsa has always outsold ketchup; women have always outnumbered men in college. There has always been blue Jell-O.

In 1991 we were fighting a war in Iraq, and still are; health care needed reforming, and still does. But before despairing that some things never change, consider how much has. In 1991 the world watched a black motorist named Rodney King be beaten by L.A. cops, all of whom were acquitted; a majority of whites still disapproved of interracial marriage. Ask yourself, Would the people we were then have voted for a mixed-race President and a black First Lady?
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Why The World’s Poor Refuse Insurance

There are higher-yielding varieties of groundnut than those that farmers in Malawi tend to plant, but getting them to switch is tough. Better seed is pricey, increasing their risk. So researchers from the World Bank ran an experiment. With local NGOs, they offered the farmers loans. Some loans even came with a crop-insurance policy: if the season was dry and the yield a dud, the debt would be forgiven. The farmers’ risk was lowered. Of farmers offered conventional loans, 33% signed up. With the added incentive of insurance, 18% did. The researchers were puzzled.

It’s been more than 30 years since microfinance began its fantastic rise, spreading billions of dollars in credit to hundreds of millions of overlooked borrowers around the world. Insurance is the next big promise of financial services for the poor.
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Facebook Gives Birth to the Retrosexual

Elise Garber married the first boy she ever kissed. She met him at an Outward Bound–style summer-camp program when she was 15, she “sort of dated” him for the summer, and then, like most teenage romances, it ended. Twenty-two years later, they met again on Facebook.

“I don’t know why I looked him up,” says the 37-year-old former advertising-agency executive in Chicago. Garber was showing a co-worker how Facebook works, and to demonstrate the search function–a feature that allows users to search for the names of people they know–she entered Harlan Robins, the name of the first boy she kissed. At the prodding of her co-worker, Garber sent Robins a message. And then she waited. Would he respond? Would he accept her friend request? Was it weird to contact an old summer-camp boyfriend?
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Box Office Weekend: Tyler Perry’s Bad Does Good

The fall movie season has begun, and all we can say is: Bring back summer!

Like the guys who sweep up the elephant dung after the circus has paraded through town, the first autumn releases tiptoed into movie theaters. Rather, one of them sauntered — Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself, which ignored the critics and most of the caucasian movie audience to clean up with $24 million — while the rest staggered. It’s as if the longest possible summer stanza (from May 1 to Sept. 7) had finally collapsed from satiety. Hollywood would say it was a grand gorging: all-time box office records were broken both in North America and abroad.
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Go directly to jail

Is jailing an ex-president a blow against corruption in Taiwan or a sign of persecution?

TAIWAN’S former president, Chen Shui-bian, was sent to prison for life on Friday September 11th after being convicted of various crimes, including embezzlement of government funds, forgery and accepting bribes over a land deal. It is a harsh sentence for the 58-year-old who ruled Taiwan from 2000 to 2008 and who had a feisty reputation for promoting independence from China.

Officials suggest that the punishment, which includes a fine of NT$200m ($6.1m), needed to be severe because of damage inflicted on the country. Mr Chen’s wife, Wu Shu-chen, was also given a life sentence for seven crimes relating to corruption and a fine of NT$300m. The court punished several others, including former aides and the president’s son and daughter-in-law.
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Kanye West Steals Taylor Swift’s Thunder…But Not for Long

The night was supposed to belong to Michael Jackson. The MTV Video Music Awards certainly started out that way.

But after Madonna’s heartfelt speech about the fallen star and Janet’s stunning performance, a new feud was born, dominated the evening and then petered out just as quickly.

Yes, we’re talking about Kanye West and Taylor Swift.

When sweet Swift won her award for Best Female Video, besting Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Pink, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry.
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