The giant mural in the foyer depicting a smiling stone face offers a mere taste of the grandiosity within the new Angkor Panorama Museum here. Inside, a 360-degree painted vista covers an area the size of nearly four basketball courts. Over 45,000 figures populate this cyclorama, a depiction of 12th-century Angkorian history.
The museum, which opened in December, is a sweeping homage to what historians call one of the greatest cities in the world between the ninth and 15th centuries and the capital of the Khmer empire. But almost everything that went into this building — the money, the concept, the design and the artists — came not from Cambodia but from North Korea, namely, Mansudae, the largest art studio in that country.

Đã nhiều năm nay, chỉ có một hành khách duy nhất đợi tàu ở nhà gà Kami-Shirataki thuộc hòn đảo cực bắc của Hokkaido, Nhật Bản.
Hành khách là một nữ sinh trung học. Chuyến tàu này chỉ dừng 2 lần mỗi ngày – một lần đón cô bé đi học, và một lần đưa cô bé về nhà.
Đó là quyết định của Cơ quan Đường sắt Nhật Bản – đơn vị chịu trách nhiệm điều hành hệ thống đường sắt của cả nước và quyết định này đã được thực thi trong 3 năm nay.

Nếu bạn muốn xã hội Việt Nam tiếp tục kém văn minh thì đây là 10 cách hết sức hữu hiệu để làm việc đó.

The Roman Catholic Church has lost the battles over divorce, contraception and gay marriage in Ireland. But it still wields what some parents call the “baptism barrier”: influencing admission to public schools.
Almost all state-funded primary schools — nearly 97 percent — are under church control, and Irish law allows them to consider religion the main factor in admissions. As a practical matter, that means local schools, already oversubscribed, often choose to admit Catholics over non-Catholics.
That has left increasing numbers of non-Catholic families, especially in the fast-growing Dublin area, scrambling to find alternatives for their children and resentful about what they see as discrimination based on religion.

The public is fast realizing this is an intolerable situation in a country with an increasing immigrant population of non-Catholics and a rising generation of younger nonpracticing Catholics. A poll last month measured almost 85 percent public approval for changing the law so it no longer tolerates religious bias against schoolchildren.

The scope of a sexual abuse scandal at St. George’s School in Rhode Island widened substantially on Tuesday as lawyers reported that at least 40 former students had made credible reports of sexual abuse, and in some cases rape, by seven former staff members and four students over three decades.

At least 231 children who sang in a boys’ choir led for 30 years by the brother of former Pope Benedict XVI were abused over a period of almost four decades, a lawyer investigating reports of wrongdoing said Friday.
The lawyer, Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the choir to look into accusations of beatings, torture or sexual abuse, said he thought that the actual abuse was even more widespread.
At a news conference in Regensburg, Bavaria, where the choir traces its roots to the year 975, Mr. Weber estimated that from 1953 to 1992, every third member of the choir and an attached school suffered some kind of physical abuse.

The mayor of Cologne has inflamed a debate in Germany about migrants and sexual harassment by suggesting that women can protect themselves from men on the streets by keeping them more than an arm’s length away.
The remarks by the mayor, Henriette Reker, who was being widely ridiculed by commentators and across social media for putting the onus on the victims of the attacks.

A South Korean court ordered a university professor on Wednesday to pay 10 million won, or $8,262, to each of nine women who had filed suit claiming that the scholar had defamed them in her book about Japan’s World War II-era military brothels.

Ms. Zhao is a top student with ambitions to go to a top American university. She has been preparing for years, working with a private admissions agent and taking the SAT and the Test of English as a Foreign Language several times. Her parents have invested more than $30,000 in the project, hoping to give their only child a boost.