Reuters Profile picture
16 Mar, 6 tweets, 3 min read
📍Boryeong, South Korea

At 10 years old, Lyoo Chan-hee wishes he wasn't one of the last three schoolkids left playing on the beaches of Nokdo island.

Instead, he plays with 66-year-old Kim Si-young, one of the last 100 or so residents reut.rs/38MTOFL 1/6
🎣 Nokdo island was once a vibrant fishing village. The decline in residency is emblematic of the demographic crisis unfolding in South Korea 2/6
🏙 After decades of national urbanisation, and a long-gone birth control drive, Nokdo's school is long shut.

‘I cried so much (when the island school closed in 2006),’ said Kim 3/6
🏠 Soaring home prices in Seoul metropolitan area, where almost half of the nation's 51 million population now live, have been blamed for fewer babies in the country. Last year, the pandemic also discouraged couples from marrying and having kids.

Homes on Nokdo island 👇 4/6
🚍 ’Seoul is so crowded, noisy and the air is not good,’ said Chan-hee. ‘Nokdo has no traffic, isn't noisy and the air is clean. I can play outside more actively, so I like it here’ 5/6
Read more about the last children on South Korea’s ageing island reut.rs/38MTOFL 📷 Kim Hong-Ji ✍️ Cynthia Kim 6/6

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Reuters

Reuters Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Reuters

16 Mar
'Here it is, the truffle, a blessing from God!' says Zahra Buheir.

She carefully digs out a desert truffle from the sandy earth and shows it off between her calloused fingers reut.rs/3bRwaKn 1/5
Braving the harsh weather of Iraq's southern desert, as well as left-behind land mines, Buheir and her family of seven have spent weeks hunting for the seasonal truffles that have provided them with an income for generations 2/5
Fetching its hunters no more than about $7 a kilo this year, Iraq's desert truffle is cheaper than its rarer European cousins that can cost hundreds of dollars or more a kilo 3/5
Read 5 tweets
15 Mar
🟪 Drenched in purple: Inspired by their native balloon flower, residents of South Korea's Banwol and Bakji Islands have painted their houses, roads and bridges in shades of the hue, and planted purple flowers such as lavender to transform their town reut.rs/30MzvUw 1/4
The tiny, tranquil islands have a little more than 100 residents and were picked for a tourism project supported by the government. Restaurants on the islands offer purple rice and serve food on purple plates. Some residents have taken to the purple project with gusto 2/4
Visitors can walk three purple footbridges connecting the two islands to the larger one near it, with benches decorated with the ‘I purple you’ slogan made popular by K-pop band #BTS’ member Kim Tae-hyung, more commonly known as V, which means ‘I trust, love and support you’ 3/4
Read 4 tweets
12 Mar
Exclusive: Myanmar’s first satellite is being held on board the International Space Station following the Myanmar coup, while Japan’s space agency and a Japanese university decide what to do with it, two Japanese university officials said reut.rs/3lbBeMC 1/4
The $15 million satellite was built by Japan’s Hokkaido University in a joint project with Myanmar’s government-funded Myanmar Aerospace Engineering University. It is the first of a set of two microsatellites equipped with cameras to monitor agriculture and fisheries 2/4
Human rights activists and some officials in Japan worry that those cameras could be used for military purposes by the junta that seized power in Myanmar on Feb. 1 3/4
Read 4 tweets
12 Mar
Reuters/Ipsos polling shows most Americans want to know who got the COVID-19 vaccine, and a majority support workplace and lifestyle restrictions for those who are not vaccinated tmsnrt.rs/3bFvszw

Let us know what you think in the polls below 👇
Do you think people should be required to get a vaccine before they can travel by airplane?
Here’s what our Reuters/Ipsos polling shows 👇
Read 9 tweets
12 Mar
At around 2 p.m. on Sunday March 7, three huge blasts and a series of smaller explosions from the Nkoantoma Military Base leveled much of Equatorial Guinea’s largest city and sent thousands of people fleeing into the countryside reut.rs/30DC8b7
The first explosion 'was so big that all of us and the people around us were shouting: "This is a bomb, this is a bomb!"' said a teacher in Bata, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals from the authorities
Preliminary analysis of satellite images from @UNOSAT suggests 243 structures were completely destroyed by the explosions. Days on, residents of Bata were still coming to grips with the full scale of a disaster that has killed at least 105 people and injured more than 600
Read 4 tweets
12 Mar
In the German town of Dessau, an institute was set up in 1921 to mass-produce vaccines that later helped strengthen the German Democratic Republic. 100 years later, the site is gearing up to produce COVID-19 vaccines for Germany’s pandemic response reut.rs/3qF4VXE
It’s just one example of a rash of efforts by governments across the globe to access fragmented vaccine production, after manufacturing setbacks deprived European Union members of drugs made on their own soil this year
The German venture has the backing of the regional government, as part of a national effort to secure supplies and add vaccines to Germany’s exports
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!