Fourteen years ago, it was founded as a local coffee and bakery chain store in a Taiwanese night market. Today, a U.S. city mayor signed an official document creating a day in its honor. [...] Some local Taiwanese businesses saw this recognition as proof of how proactive the U.S. government had become in attracting investment." Others saw it as a more profound sign that a sector of Taiwan's soft power in the U.S. was on the rise.

The ACLU is America’s non-partisan guardian of liberty, working tirelessly since 1920 to defend the country’s original civic values, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They have no political affiliation or ideological component to their mission. Today they’re defending innocent refugee and immigrant families impacted by the recent executive orders—tomorrow they could be defending you, because they are committed to defending all of us.

When Kenyan-American Jacob Maaga moved to the United States, he realized he arrived with a unique and valuable gift: the knowledge of his homeland that could one day make him a successful entrepreneur. [...] He founded Pan Africa Exchange (PANEX), which helps East African farmers and U.S. buyers exchange the information they need to negotiate an agreeable price for coffee beans and other commodities.

In 1999, the first Starbucks café opened in China. The Seattle-based coffee chain, the world's largest, now operates a network of 1,500 shops across China, which is now its second-most-important market after the US [...] But Starbucks is facing competition. 

Will the mermaid rescue Juan Valdez? Or will she send the mythical Colombian coffee farmer and his faithful donkey over an Andean mountain cliff? That’s the question Colombians are debating following the Aug. 26 announcement that Seattle-based Starbucks plans to bring its famous green sea nymph logo to Colombia by opening 50 coffee houses over the next five years.

After buying coffee from Colombia for almost half a century, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) is finally opening a cafe there, part of its accelerating expansion in Latin America. The world’s largest coffee-shop operator will open a cafe in Bogota in the first half of next year and then five more locations later in 2014, Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said in a telephone interview. The stores will be operated through a joint venture between Alsea SAB (ALSEA*) and Grupo Nutresa SA (NUTRESA), and will sell locally sourced and roasted espresso and coffee.