Society - THE AsiaN

High TOEIC scorers not fluent in English

Park Jai-sang, a 27-year-old college graduate in Seoul, is nicknamed a “TOEIC genius” among his peers because every time he takes the English proficiency test, he scores higher than 900. Considering his score, his level of proficiency should be excellent. When he applied to work at a major trading company,…
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Society

Calls mount to tackle favoritism for athletes

Baseball players from Kyungki and Paichai high schools compete during a national tournament held in Seoul. The recent controversy over academic privileges enjoyed by award winning athletes is touching off a debate about reform of their admission, attendance and graduation from top universities. The nation’s figure skating heroine Kim Yu-na…
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Society

Prolonged Syrian crisis widens gap among people

DAMASCUS, June 3 (Xinhua) — The longer the current crisis in Syria lingers, the wider the gap goes among the Syrian people, as the topic of who is with and who is against the government has become the main talk of the country. The 15-month bloody unrest continues with no…
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Society

Turkish pianist accused of insulting Islam

Fazıl Say, a Turkish pianist and composer with an international career who is facing a court case in Turkey for insulting Islam on account of reposting a message written by someone else on Twitter, has said, “It is unbelievable that it was made into a court case.” In Say’s much-debated…
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Society

Are privileges for elite athletes necessary evil?

This is the first in a series of articles aimed at helping determine whether the current system of rewarding outstanding athletes with privileges is still relevant or needs changing. — ED. Does Korea need to keep the current “old” system of awarding outstanding athletes with exemptions from mandatory military services…
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Mubarak given life sentence for killing protesters

The Cairo criminal court has sentenced former president Hosni Mubarak to life imprisonment on Saturday (June 2) as he was declared guilty for deaths of protesters during an uprising in January 2011. Mubarak has been under arrest at the International Medical Center near Cairo. Mubarak, his two sons, former Interior…
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Society

More grownup children live with parents

Koreans once held that when children became adults, they supported their parents. However, this is no longer the general trend, with more aging parents having to support adult sons and daughters, according to a Seoul City report Friday. The number of people in their 30s or 40s still living at…
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Politics

Turkish PM calls world attention to massacred Syrian children

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday called on the world to pay heed to the desperation of families whose children were massacred in Syria. Speaking at a summit of the Alliance of Civilizations, a forum promoting understanding between the Western and Islamic worlds, days after more than 100…
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NK denounces S. Korea’s attempt to expel pro-NK lawmakers

North Korea has condemned Korea’s ruling Saenuri Party for seeking to strip two alleged pro-North Korean lawmakers of their parliamentary seats. “The madcap smear campaign … is nothing but a ‘witch hunt’ of modern version and sordid fascist politically-motivated terrorism,” the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said…
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Society

Are they the only ‘fake’ foreign students?

KAIST kicks out 6 Indians; Suh’s experiment in jeopardy Six Indian students have been expelled from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), one of the country’s top universities, for presenting fabricated award certificates to gain admission, the school said Thursday. The students were admitted between 2009 and…
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