Google has announced that it will open one of its startup centers in Seoul, South Korea, providing workshops and resources for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. One of the classes it’s planning, focused on Korean moms, couldn’t come sooner.
English tutoring jobs in South Korea, long the preserve of expatriates, may soon become scarce. The country’s education ministry has announced it plans to make the English portion of the national college entrance exam easier, hoping to reduce the exorbitant amount of money and time students spend on private lessons—and to address concerns that tests don’t encourage practical use of English, instead pushing rote memorization of grammar patterns.
Princess Fragrant is the eponymous star of a 104-episode animation series from China in which the Uyghur princess, alongside her brother and their Han and Kazakh friends, embark on a quest to save her captured father. The goal of the series? To show “that ethnic unity is the most powerful weapon in the face of adversity,” the production’s director, Deng Jiangwei, told the New York Times.
A simulation conducted by South Korea’s National Assembly Research Service using last year’s birth rate of 1.19 children per woman and found that the country’s 50 million population will decrease by 10 million in 2056 and by 30 million in 2100. By 2750, at the current birth rate, there will be no South Koreans.
This post has been updated.
If you thought people tweeting while watching a movie are a little much, get a load of this: a Chinese movie is allowing—make that encouraging—viewers to live-text their comments, and projecting them on a screen next to the main show.
Walk down the streets of Seoul and you’ll see a woman holding a Louis Vuitton purse every three seconds. Not literally, perhaps—but South Koreans have dubbed the luxury brand’s popular handbag the “three-second-bag,” as a reference to its ubiquity there.
“Going to Switzerland” might bring to mind the thrill of skiing in the Alps or boxes of delicious chocolates. But, at least in the UK, “going to Switzerland” has become a euphemism for assisted suicide.
While 62% of the total US population was classified as non-Hispanic white in 2013, when public schools start this fall their racial landscape will reflect a different America.
As Ferguson, Missouri, reeled from protests and police action tied to the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was killed by a white police officer, British comedian John Oliver turned his rapier wit to the town’s racially oblivious authorities.
Even though colorectal cancer is the third-most common cancer diagnosed in the US, an estimated 23 million Americans between the ages of 50 to 75 don’t get screened for it despite professional recommendations that they do. If you’ve ever had a colonoscopy, you would understand why. And if you haven’t had one, well, you just might escape ever having to go through the difficult prep and intrusive procedure, now that the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a DNA-based test for the disease.
It might look funny and a bit odd, people pressing mobile phones the size of small tablets to their ears. But across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, emerging-market consumers who don’t have a whole bunch of other devices prefer bigger-screened phones, which they use as a single hub to call, text, play games, shoot and edit photographs, read, and watch videos.
Robin Williams’ death has sparked an intense—and welcome—discussion on the connections between depression and suicide. Now, a Stanford University study points to a more unexpected link to suicide among older men: the lack of sleep.
After skewering everything from FIFA to climate-change deniers on his HBO show ‘Last Week Tonight,’ British comedian John Oliver has turned his razor wit on the payday loan industry.
If you want to map cultural hubs throughout time, you can track where history’s most notable figures—like Leonardo da Vinci, Jane Austen, and Steve Jobs—were born and died. That was the thinking of Dr. Maximilian Schich, associate professor for art and technology at the University of Texas at Dallas.
When a western mobile-games company wants to bring a game to China, there are a few factors they probably should consider: Will the game suit local tastes? Is it in a language that the target user can understand? And do phones in China have the same technical capabilities as western phones to even run this game?
Rummage through a South Korean student’s knapsack and you’ll see the usual textbooks, pens, and post-it notes. But dig a little deeper and you’ll also find everything from seat cushions to toothbrushes, silverware to curling irons.
In a victory for Chinese animal rights activists—as well as for an estimated 10,000 rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice—the Chinese government ended its mandatory animal testing for most cosmetic products on June 30. But for cosmetics companies manufacturing outside China who have made a point of forgoing animal testing, the news offers little reason to celebrate. The law only frees companies that manufacture domestically (pdf) from the requirement that they hand over samples to the government for animal tests—not foreign ones.
When the Chinese Communist Party announced Zhou Yongkang’s detention yesterday, it surprised exactly no one. The CCP has been closing in on the former head of China’s police and legal system, since at least Oct. 2012, when Xi Jinping became president. As the jails have filled up with Zhou’s cronies and Zhou himself languished under house arrest, it became increasingly clear that his official detention was a “when,” not an “if.”
Tourism brochures for Thailand showcase its stunning beaches with clear blue waters; colorful carts of fresh fruits at outdoor markets; and elephants meandering through the jungle with excited visitors on their backs. But it turns out there’s a dark side to these elephant rides.
Maybe the world’s biggest nuclear threat isn’t Iran or North Korea but the United States. Watch British comedian John Oliver make the argument on his HBO show:
China, with its rapidly urbanizing population, is the world’s biggest importer of wood products. And in its dealings with Mozambique, it is increasingly buying timber that is illegally harvested, according to a new report (pdf). The nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency compared Mozambique’s official harvest numbers to global import numbers and calculated that 93% of Mozambique’s timber was illegally harvested in 2013, up from 76% in 2007—and most of that goes to China.
Despite some recent backsliding, the total pile of US credit card debt outstanding remains far below its pre-crisis peak. New regulations, changing consumer attitudes toward debt, and more conservative lending during the Great Recession drove the change over the last few years.
US pet medical insurer Trupanion is expected to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange this morning in an offering that is raising about $70 million for the Seattle company.
