After decades risking arrest, South Korea's tattoo artists step into the limelight When Kim Tae-nam took the stage last Saturday in Seoul, it was a moment he had long been waiting for - the career he had chosen was no longer illegal. He couldn't stop smiling, the relief spilling into his voice: This was only possible because of our effort, all your sweat and tears. Let's hear it from everyone: Tattoos are art! They had gathered on a rooftop in Seongsu, a hip Seoul neighbourhood, for Ink Bomb: more than 90 local tattooists and artists openly celebrating body art, which had thrived in the shadows for decades. Just days before, South Korea's top court had overturned its 1992 ruling that defined tattooing as a medical act - bringing to an end Korean tattooists' decades-long fight for legitimacy.

The next Call of Duty game has been revealed, with much of the reaction focused on its campaign set around a fictional renewed conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Modern Warfare 4, due out 23 October, partly follows South Korean soldiers battling a full-scale North Korean invasion. Dr Sarah Son, Senior Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield, said the move could be controversial as it turns still-unresolved war into entertainment. Some Koreans reacted more positively, with one calling Korea's inclusion in one of gaming's biggest franchises a symbolic moment . Developer Infinity Ward said the game will be grounded in the military authenticity Modern Warfare is known for.

Rescuers in Laos have found five villagers alive inside a flooded cave after they were trapped for a week following heavy rain and landslides. Two people are still missing, rescue teams said. Footage shared by the rescuers showed cave divers crawling through narrow, muddy passageways. The seven people were part of a group of villagers who had gone into the cave in search of gold deposits and wildlife, but could not get out as the cave's entrance was blocked. Could a football match soften North Korea-South Korea relations?

Samsung averted fears of a strike after the deal was made to pay special bonuses to employees at the world's largest memory chipmaker. Samsung averted fears of a strike after the deal was made to pay special bonuses to employees at the world's largest memory chipmaker. Employees at Samsung Electronics's memory chip division are to receive bonuses averaging about £310,000 each through a landmark profit-sharing agreement, as the AI boom drives up chipmakers' profits. Fears of a strike at Samsung were averted on Wednesday after two unions for the world's largest memory chipmaker said that 74% of the 62,616 workers who cast their votes had backed the deal. The agreement, mediated by South Korea's government, means Samsung will set aside 10.5% of operating profits at its semiconductor division to pay special bonuses to its chip workers.

Samsung Electronics is the world's biggest supplier of the memory chips that go into everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to servers at artificial intelligence data centers. Samsung Electronics union members have voted in favor of a compensation deal that will hand chip workers an average bonus of about $340,000, staving off a strike that threatened to disrupt global chip supply. The company's largest union said the deal was signed after about 74% of its members voted in favor of the agreement. Workers accepted a wage proposal that was tentatively agreed by labor leaders last week, just 90 minutes before a planned strike at the world's largest memory chipmaker. Samsung's shares rose as much as 8% in Seoul on Wednesday.

History-dependent sampling can reduce long-run Monte Carlo variance by discouraging redundant revisits, but existing schemes typically encode history through empirical measure on finite state spaces, which is infeasible in high-dimensional discrete configuration spaces or ill-posed in continuous domains. We propose Score-Repellent Monte Carlo (SRMC) framework that summarizes trajectory history by a running average of score evaluations in $\mathbb{R}^d$, where $d$ is the dimension of the score and state representation. This history is converted into a surrogate target through an exponential score tilt, indexed with $α$ that represents the strength of repellence in controlling the magnitude of the history-based repulsion. The surrogate family is normalization-free in the standard MCMC sense, yielding a generic wrapper: at each iteration, any base kernel targeting $π$ can instead be run on the current surrogate $π_{θ_n}$ while the history is updated online. We analyze the coupled evolution of the history recursion and Monte Carlo estimators using stochastic approximation with controlled Markovian noise, establishing almost sure convergence and a joint central limit theorem. We further identify regimes in which the asymptotic covariance decreases as $α$ increases, with scaling $O(1/α)$, extending the near-zero-variance effect of finite-state history-dependent samplers to general state spaces with constant memory. Experiments on continuous targets and discrete energy-based models demonstrate improved estimator variance and mode coverage, while retaining $O(d)$ memory usage and modest per-iteration overhead.

Single-pass uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for classification represent uncertainty by predicting a tractable distribution over the class probability vector. While existing approaches primarily focus on enhancing the expressiveness of this distribution, they often provide limited insight into how predictive uncertainty is structured and aggregated, resulting in weak interpretability. We introduce the courtroom analogy, which conceptualizes uncertainty-aware classification as a structured debate among class-specific advocates. Each advocate forms a probabilistic opinion, and a final verdict is reached by aggregating these opinions using input-dependent plausibility weights. In this framework, each advocate's opinion is modeled as a Dirichlet distribution whose concentration parameter is decomposed into shared evidence and class-specific advocacy. This yields a structured mixture of Dirichlet distributions with semantically interpretable parameters. To instantiate this formulation, we propose Mixture of Dirichlet EXperts (MoDEX), a single-pass neural architecture that predicts the courtroom parameters, enabling efficient and expressive UQ while explicitly modeling uncertainty aggregation. We demonstrate that MoDEX enjoys strong theoretical properties and achieves state-of-the-art UQ performance across diverse benchmarks, yielding interpretable uncertainty estimates with meaningful semantics.

South Korea's stock market soars as Samsung union calls off planned strike South Korea's stock market has rallied following a last-minute deal to avert a strike that had threatened to disrupt the global supply of memory chips. Samsung Electronics and its union on Wednesday night announced a tentative agreement to settle a months-long standoff over pay, avoiding a planned 18-day walkout by some 48,000 employees. South Korea's benchmark KOSPI on Thursday soared more than 8 percent, continuing a remarkable run that has seen the index rise more than 80 percent since the start of the year. Samsung Electronics, South Korea's biggest firm by market capitalisation, jumped more than 7.5 percent. SK Hynix, the main rival of Samsung Electronics in memory chips, surged more than 11 percent.

Samsung's unionized workers may strike for 18 days starting May 21st over bonus pay disputes, potentially costing the company $700 million daily in lost memory production. PCWorld reports this strike could worsen the existing chip shortage and drive RAM prices even higher than current levels, which are already 3-4 times more expensive than last year. The disruption threatens global electronics supply chains despite Samsung's $13.4 billion profit in 2025. As if the AI data center boom wasn't causing enough problems for PC hardware, a looming strike in Samsung's home territory of South Korea could grind the memory giant's already-strained production to a halt. According to the latest reporting from Reuters, a long-simmering dispute between Samsung and its unionized labor force has boiled over, with no compromise in sight even after days of government-mediated talks.

Your cell phone can handle basic language translation, but bespoke tools can offer a much more immersive experience. Hans Christian Andersen once said, "To travel is to live," and while that's a romantic notion, he probably wasn't careening through Gyeongju, South Korea, at midnight in the back of a taxi with a driver who didn't speak a lick of English. Today's world traveler has it awfully easy when it comes to understanding the local lingo, as even a basic modern cell phone app can offer a pretty good translation of common phrases delivered in everything from Abkhaz to Zulu. Type or speak a sentence or two into the app, tap a button, and out it returns in the language of your choice. Tap another button, and your phone can even speak those sentences aloud.