Every year, thousands of South Koreans – mostly middle-aged men – die quietly and alone, cut off from their family and friends. It sometimes takes days or even weeks before their bodies are found. These are the country’s “lonely deaths,” known as godoksa in Korean. It’s part of a larger problem of loneliness and isolation across the country, an issue ...
The Israeli military has forced Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped houses and tunnels in Gaza to avoid putting its troops in harm’s way, according to an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier and five former detainees who said they were victims of the practice. The soldier, who said his unit held two Palestinian prisoners for the explicit purpose of using them ...
Widespread flooding and landslides set off by a tropical storm in the northeastern Philippines on Thursday left at least 24 people dead, swept away cars and prompted authorities to scramble for motorboats to rescue trapped villagers, some on roofs. The government shut down schools and offices – except those urgently needed for disaster response – for the second day on ...
Growing unease over the United States’ inability to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East is prompting some of Washington’s closest Arab allies to significantly increase engagement with its primary regional adversary: Iran. Over the past few months, Arab nations have been leveraging their revived relations with the Islamic Republic to ward off a wider regional war as the US fails ...
A massive fire is ripping through a protected wetland in New Zealand, threatening its delicate ecosystem and the rare species that live there – some found nowhere else on Earth. The blaze at the Waikato wetland on the country’s North Island is 15 kilometers (nearly 10 miles) in perimeter and has burned more than 2,471 acres (1,000 hectares) since it began ...
A real Chinese blockade of Taiwan would be an act of war and have far-reaching consequences for international trade, Defense Minister Wellington Koo said on Wednesday after last week’s drills by China that practiced such a scenario. China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has over the past five years staged almost daily military activities around the ...
There is growing intelligence that North Korea has been readying itself for a more direct role in Russia’s war in Ukraine, a move that could reverberate far beyond the frontlines of the war raging in Europe. Both Ukraine and South Korea have claimed that North Korean troops were dispatched to Russia for training with the aim of being deployed to ...
“La tasweer! La tasweer!” (“Don’t film! Don’t film!”) the general shouted, his eyes flashing with anger, his jaw clenched as he stormed towards us. A couple of fighters hopped off the back of the militia’s lead truck, fanning out around our vehicle, their rifles drawn. The second truck that had been following us, tan-colored and laden with a heavy machine ...
German police busted a pizzeria in the western city of Düsseldorf that also delivered a side order of cocaine when customers asked for item number 40 on the menu. “That was one of the best-selling pizzas,” criminal director Michael Graf von Moltke told reporters in Düsseldorf. He said police were first tipped off by suspicious food inspectors in March. When ...
The impact of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip could erase “over 69 years of progress” in the enclave, the United Nations has warned in a new report, saying that measurement for indicators such as life expectancy, education, income and standard of living are projected to drop to a level estimated for 1955. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) said that without “lifting economic restrictions, ...