Some 90 million Indians have migrated from from farms to cities in the last 10 years, part of a global tide of urbanization that has helped lift many developing nations out of poverty. But a dire slump in the Indian economy is threatening to reverse the tide, and send poor, unemployed migrants back to the countryside in search of work.
After taking a seasonal vacation, bird flu is making a comeback in Asia this winter, and the forthcoming Lunar New Year—when huge numbers of people travel between cities and the countryside—has the potential to spread it even more widely.
Facebook has a mission: Connect the world, specifically the five billion people it has not yet signed up for its gargantuan social network. The billions of dollars these connections generate in advertising revenues? Just an indirect means of keeping employees from jumping ship before the job is complete.
The best camera, experienced photographers say, is the one that’s with you—and the truth of that adage is spelling doom for many of the world’s camera brands, who are desperately trying to stay afloat as their businesses are eroded by the omnipresent smartphone.
Japan is shrinking at a record pace. The country lost 244,000 people in 2013 as births plunged and deaths soared. It faces the prospect of losing a third of its population in the next 50 years, raising fears about its economic prospects and labor market.
Viewers of the Congolese breakfast TV show Le Panier (“The Breadbasket”) got a rude shock yesterday when the studio of the state broadcaster was stormed by armed disciples of a religious leader in an abortive overthrow of the government, resulting in the death of around 100 people.
Despite all of the purges and executions of family members that have kept Kim Jong-un busy lately, the North Korean leader still found time for a New Year’s Eve visit to his beloved Masik Pass ski resort, which he vowed to have finished before the new year began. Kim ordered officials to open his pet project as soon as possible “to ensure people can fully enjoy skiing,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe raised hackles across Asia and beyond on Thursday when he made a visit to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, which honors Japanese killed in World War II, including several convicted war criminals. South Korea and China have ongoing beefs with Japan over what they see as its inability to recognize wartime atrocities. Both were quick to condemn the move—the first by a Japanese prime minister since 2006—but the true implications are likely to play out over a much longer timespan.
The downfall of senior North Korean official Jang Song-thaek—the uncle of leader Kim Jong-un who was denounced earlier this month as “worse than a dog” before being executed for “criminal acts”—has inspired consternation and befuddlement among the hermit kingdom’s allies and enemies alike.
Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara has taken on Wall Street, Al Qaeda, and the Gambino crime family, but few of his cases have aroused as much acrimony and controversy as his office’s arrest of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade, who was booked this week for visa fraud and other charges over the employment status of her housekeeper. The alleged rough handling of Khobragade, which included being strip- and cavity-searched, has triggered a massive outcry and diplomatic backlash in India.
Facebook is so ubiquitous—it has 1.19 billion monthly active users, or more than 15% of the Earth’s population—that it’s possible to detect huge migration patterns from a few snippets buried in its users’ profiles, specifically the huge tide of people moving to mega-cities around world.
Any self-respecting Hollywood studio has its own theme parks these days, preferably catering to the international customers who make up a growing share of the global box office, and soon the growing Malaysian middle class will be able to ride “Ice Age” roller coasters and enjoy other attractions from Twentieth Century Fox.
China’s brief yet torrid love affair with bitcoin is drawing to a close.
As a member of China’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee and the official in charge of the Communist Party’s internal disciplinary body, Wang Qishan is in charge of rooting any potential threats or interlopers. So if Wang is drawing inspiration from the US political drama “House of Cards” and its ruthless protagonist, Sen. Francis Underwood, his enemies should be very, very afraid.
Smog-choked skies in Asian cities are nothing new, but this winter is shaping up to be a particularly bad one for air quality. In the absence of an easy fix, some citizens are getting desperate in their attempts to keep their lungs clear of particulate matter. Unfortunately the scientific evidence behind their methods is sketchy at best, and harmful at worst:
If you think rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are scary, wait until you hear about perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA), an obscure industrial chemical that researchers have determined to be the most powerful greenhouse gas ever studied: It’s 7,000 times worse than carbon dioxide.
It took a while, but Thailand’s political troubles are finally taking a bite out of its giant tourism sector, which along with the broader economy has been largely immune to the country’s periodic bouts of unrest. A million tourists—400,000 international and 600,000 domestic—have stayed home while the country has been wracked by massive street protests over the past several weeks, which coincided with the peak year-end tourism season.
Ever since Xiaomi poached Hugo Barra from Google, the world has been waiting for the Chinese smartphone maker to sell its inexpensive, highly customized Android handsets beyond the confines of greater China. Xiaomi finally dropped the first hints about its plans this weekend in Taiwan, and they’re exactly in line with company’s reputation as a brazen challenger to established giants like Samsung and Apple.
Robbing a bank is such a hassle in the real world, with all the complicated logistics of weapons, vaults, dye packs, and getaway cars. It’s a lot more straightforward to rob digital currency exchanges and payment processors. To paraphrase bank robber Willie Sutton, that’s where the bitcoins are.
The internet practically burst into applause on Tuesday with the launch of an interactive video for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which lets viewers flip between channels on a virtual TV to watch a celebrity-studded group of lip-synchers. But it’s the only latest in a string of attention-grabbing videos from Interlude, a Tel Aviv-based start-up that is run by Israeli musician and self-professed tech geek Yoni Bloch.
It seems that Thailand and Hawaii have more in common than just being tourist paradises. Thailand is trying to get itself removed from the US human trafficking watch list, where it risks heavy sanctions if it doesn’t clean up its act. And American fruit giant Del Monte has just agreed to pay $1.2 million to a group of migrant workers—who are, ironically, Thais—in Hawaii, over some of the very same practices that have bedeviled Thailand.
The mutual love affair between China and bitcoin shows no signs of losing steam. Today two related venture capital firms invested $5 million in BTC China, the digital currency’s biggest trading platform, and the value of bitcoins surged to an all-time high, due in part to Chinese demand. But how long before Beijing turns an uneasy eye toward a currency that is explicitly designed to evade government control?
China is finally dropping its one-child policy for around one-third of the population: couples that are urban and Han Chinese in which one parent is an only child. (Couples that are rural, non-Han, or where both parents were only children were already allowed to have two kids.) The policy will remain in force only for urban Han parents who were both the product of two-child homes—a fairly small proportion.
China’s biggest bank, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), is indisputably enormous. With $2.95 trillion in assets and a $226.8 billion market capitalization, it is far and away the world’s largest financial institution, and its most profitable. As of this week, it has also taken its place on another, dubiously honorable list: For the first time ICBC has been deemed “too big to fail” by international financial regulators trying to fend off the next global financial crisis.
