North Korea executes defence chief with an anti-aircraft gun: South Korea agency →

Kim had previously ordered the execution of 15 senior officials this year as punishment for challenging his authority, according to the NIS. In all, some 70 officials have been executed since Kim took over after his father's death in 2011, Yonhap news agency cited the NIS as saying.
"There is no clear or present danger to Kim Jong Un's leadership or regime stability, but if this continues to happen into next year, then we should seriously start to think about revising our scenarios on North Korea," said Michael Madden, an expert on the country's leadership who contributes to the 38 North think tank in Washington.

I was an undercover Uber driver →

Uber is run by sociopaths. It's depressing how this seems to be the way forward from the sclerotic cab system. Uber could be using its genius and data to benefit everyone; instead, its executives are getting rich by regularly cutting its drivers' rates, while sticking them with nearly all the liability.

Vatican to Recognize Palestinian State in New Treaty →

The Vatican said Wednesday that it had concluded a treaty to recognize Palestinian statehood, a symbolic but significant step welcomed by Palestinians but upsetting to the Israeli government.
Formal recognition of a Palestinian state by the Vatican, which has deep religious interests in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories that include Christian holy sites, lends a powerful signal of moral authority and legitimacy to the efforts by the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, to achieve statehood despite the long paralyzed Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Israel has grown increasingly alarmed about the increased international acceptance of Palestine as a state since the United Nations upgraded the Palestinian delegation’s status in 2012 to that of a nonmember observer state. A number of European countries have also signaled their acceptance of Palestinian statehood.
A statement from a joint commission of Vatican and Palestinian diplomatic officials, posted on the Vatican news website, said “the work of the commission on the text of the agreement has been concluded,” and that it would be submitted for formal approval and for signing “in the near future.”

Ghost Cities of China by Wade Shepard review – unpopulated replica towns explained →

Fascinating look at how China has made this at all possible:

Once built, the newly urbanised area often stays depopulated for a few years, as it is more expensive for investors to properly fit out and let their flats, so they sit on them until – as inevitably happens – the Communist party induces businesses to move to the area, usually by opening a new branch of a university and extending a metro out to each “ghost city”; benefits, such as free transport, low rents or even a couple of years rent-free are offered and are usually effective.
So few places remain ghost cities for long. And if they exemplify a problem, it is rising inequality, rather than a precarious economy. The property bubble is unlikely to burst, as local authorities are merely one (municipal) branch of the Communist party owing money to another (banking) branch, which has no interest in making its comrades bankrupt. Milton Friedman, Shepard notes, saw Pudong, Shanghai’s Central Business District, in its early form as a ghost city, or rather a “statist monument to a dead pharaoh”. It is now one of the most bustling, populated places on Earth.

95 percent of parents think their overweight children look ‘just right’ →

When researchers recently looked at data on how parents perceive their overweight young children, they learned that 94.9 percent believe the kids' size to be "just right." As startling and unsettling as that statistic may be, it had been shown before in smaller populations and wasn't the worst news out of the study.
More disturbing was what the researchers found when they compared the results with the same survey taken about two decades earlier. Over the years, they realized, the chances of a child "being appropriately perceived by the parents declined by 30%."...

The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On →

Despite hand-wringing about the institution of marriage, marriages in this country are stronger today than they have been in a long time. The divorce rate peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s and has been declining for the three decades since.
About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce, according to data from Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist (who also contributes to The Upshot).
There are many reasons for the drop in divorce, including later marriages, birth control and the rise of so-called love marriages. These same forces have helped reduce the divorce rate in parts of Europe, too. Much of the trend has to do with changing gender roles — whom the feminist revolution helped and whom it left behind.