The 156-year-long journey for the royal family’s private “royal train” is set to come to an end after King Charles decided to scrap it in a bid to reduce costs. The decision taken by Buckingham Palace to decommission Britain’s royal train, a service dating back to Queen Victoria, comes as maintenance and storage were getting costlier by the day.
Victoria, King Charles’ great-great-great-grandmother, commissioned the first royal rail carriages back in 1869. The Royal Family will still travel on regular train services. According to the BBC, the annual report revealed that 141 helicopter trips were taken in 2024, costing £475,000 ($652,348).
According to Reuters, the latest incarnation is made up of nine carriages, the most recent of them added in 1986. The royal train was used just twice during the financial year 2024-25, with the two journeys together costing almost 80,000 pounds ($109,869). Speaking on the end of the royal train, James Chalmers, the king’s treasurer, said the monarch had now agreed that the train, which critics had long said was a waste of money, would reach the end of the line in 2027.
“The royal train has … been a part of national life for many decades, loved and cared for by all those involved, but in moving forward we must not be bound by the past,” Chalmers, officially known as the Keeper of the Privy Purse, told reporters.
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“The time has come to bid the fondest of farewells, as we seek to be disciplined and forward-looking in our allocation of funding.” While the king had fond memories of the train, palace officials said it would require significant funds to pay for its long-term use, although it was not clear how much scrapping it would save.The announcement came as Chalmers, on Monday, June 30, 2025, unveiled the annual report of the Sovereign Grant, the government handout that covers staffing costs, upkeep of royal palaces, and travel expenses and is currently set at 12% of the profit from the Crown Estate, a property portfolio belonging to the monarchy.In November 2024, the Sunday Times and a TV documentary accused Charles and his elder son, Prince William, of making millions from the country’s health service, army, and schools from charges imposed by the monarch’s Duchy of Lancaster estate and the heir’s Duchy of Cornwall estate.
William Bax, the chief executive of the Duchy of Cornwall, acknowledged that criticism as he detailed its annual report on Monday, saying they were making changes at a time of “reflection and evolution.” Bax said they intended to end or reduce rents charged to some community groups and charities, while the report showed William’s personal income from the Duchy had fallen slightly to just under 23 million pounds.
Anti-monarchists said the annual reports were misleading, claiming that the monarchy’s price tag amounts to more than half a billion pounds. “The cost of the monarchy is out of control, and these reports receive almost no political scrutiny,” Graham Smith, chief executive of campaign group Republic, said.
Chalmers said the global significance of the royals could not be underestimated, citing a Global Perceptions Survey that found the monarchy the single biggest influence on perceptions of the UK among international audiences.
Apple is considering using artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Anthropic or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri, sidelining its own in-house models in a potentially blockbuster move aimed at turning around its flailing AI effort.
The iPhone maker has talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, according to people familiar with the discussions. It had asked them to train versions of their models that could run on Apple’s cloud infrastructure for testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.
If Apple ultimately moves forward, it would represent a monumental reversal. The company currently powers most of its AI features with home-grown technology that it calls Apple Foundation Models and had been planning a new version of its voice assistant that runs on that technology for 2026.
A switch to Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT models for Siri would be an acknowledgment that the company is struggling to compete in generative AI – the most important new technology in decades. Apple already allows ChatGPT to answer web-based search queries in Siri, but the assistant itself is powered by Apple.
iPhones on display at an Apple store in the Huangpu district in Shanghai. Photo: AFP
Apple’s investigation into third-party models was at an early stage, and the company had not made a final decision on using them, the people said. A competing project internally dubbed LLM Siri that uses in-house models remains in active development.
The current landscape of public health in the United States is marked by a far-reaching attack on foundational scientific principles and institutions, threatening decades of progress in combating preventable diseases. Recent actions by the Trump administration, such as the abrupt dismissal of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) members and the appointment of individuals who have publicly expressed skepticism about established vaccine science, have generated profound concerns in the medical and public health communities.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has publicly questioned vaccine safety, notably by halting US funding to Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, accusing it of “ignoring the science,” without significant evidence, a move experts describe as “stunning and calamitous” and potentially costing “hundreds of thousands of children’s lives a year.” This politicization of public health measures, coupled with the spread of misinformation, risks eroding public trust and undermining critical immunization programs.
Amidst this contentious environment, a recent study published in JAMA Network Open titled “All-Cause Mortality and Life Expectancy by Birth Cohort Across US States,” by Holford et al. (2025), which analyzed 179 million deaths in the US across states and birth cohorts over more than a century, offers important insights into the social value of sustained public health investments.
This study emphasizes the utility of analyzing cohort life expectancy, a measure that more accurately reflects the “lived experiences of populations” by tracking how early-life exposures and risk factors shape health outcomes as a group ages. The cohort perspective highlights how public health interventions’ impacts can follow individuals throughout their lives.
The study, alongside other sources, underscores a period of “large gains in life expectancy” and an “unprecedented decline in mortality” in the United States during the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1950, every US state experienced a substantial increase in life expectancy. These gains continued into the 1970s. This remarkable achievement was not accidental but resulted from a combination of deliberate public health actions and medical innovations:
Public health improvements: Significant strides were made in public health infrastructure, including improvements in sanitation and the provision of clean water.
Medical advances: The introduction of life-saving medical treatments, such as antibiotics like sulfa drugs and penicillin, dramatically reduced deaths from infectious diseases.
Vaccine programs: The widespread implementation of vaccination programs played a pivotal role.
These benefits spread globally as well, with a time lag, as poorer countries sought to catch up. Measles vaccination alone accounted for 93.7 million lives saved—over 60 percent of the total 154 million lives saved by vaccination between 1974 and 2024. DTP-containing vaccines saved an estimated 40 million lives globally over the past 50 years.
In the US, routine childhood vaccinations for children born between 1994 and 2023 are estimated to have prevented 1.1 million deaths, 32 million hospitalizations, and 508 million illnesses, resulting in nearly $3.7 trillion in societal cost savings. The eradication of smallpox through vaccines is highlighted as a monumental achievement. These factors essentially ended the childhood mortality gap. In 1900, a newborn could expect to live to 48 years of age, but if they survived childhood, life expectancy dramatically increased to 61. By 1980, life expectancy at birth and after childhood were equal.
Male life expectancy by state in 1900, 1950 and 2000 cohorts. Data obtained from the study and graphics by WSWS. States arranged by highest life expectancy in 2000 cohort. Solid lines show average life expectancy in the US for respective cohorts.
However, other critical factors in the broader public health initiatives include behavioral changes, such as the decline in cigarette smoking, that have further contributed to improved health outcomes for older adults. This included broader access to healthcare, which further supported these gains.
Despite these historical successes, the Holford et al. study reveals a troubling setback in more recent cohorts. While mortality rates generally declined from 1969 to 2020, there are “wide disparities” across states and birth cohorts. Critically, some states have experienced little to no improvement in life expectancy from the 1950 to 2000 birth cohorts. States where some modicum of funding and public health services remained saw life expectancy continue to rise, while in poorer states with chronic underfunding, life expectancy remained stagnant, if not declining.
Female life expectancy by state in 1900, 1950 and 2000 cohorts. Data obtained from the study and graphics by WSWS. States arranged by highest life expectancy in 2000 cohort. Solid lines show average life expectancy in the US for respective cohorts.
This stagnation and, in many cases, reversal of progress is evident, particularly after 2010 for those without a four-year college degree, according to Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The “mortality gap” between Americans with and without a college degree has widened considerably, reaching an 8.5-year difference in adult life expectancy by the end of 2021.
College education is closely linked to economic factors affecting health, as shown by a 2016 study titled “The Changing Landscape of American Life Expectancy” by Schanzenbach, Nunn and Bauer, which provided crucial insights into the socioeconomic factors that have led to significant life expectancy disparities between the richest and poorest Americans. This report, alongside the rigorous research by Case and Deaton, underscores how socioeconomic status, particularly educational attainment, has become a primary determinant of longevity, often eclipsing traditional racial gaps in recent decades.
Adult life expectancy at age 25 for college graduates vs. non-graduates. [Photo: Brookings (Anne Case and Angus Deaton).]
The “Changing Landscape” report clearly illustrates the widening chasm in life expectancy based on income. It notes that individuals with higher incomes have substantially longer life expectancies than those with lower incomes. For instance, a stark difference is observed among 40-year-old men: those in the bottom 1 percent of income can expect to live 15 years less than those in the top 1 percent. Similarly, women in the top 1 percent of household income are expected to live a decade longer than women in the bottom 1 percent. The report highlights that high-income individuals have experienced robust gains in life expectancy over recent decades, while their lower-income counterparts have seen stagnant or even declining life expectancies.
Expected age at death among men by household income percentile in selected commuting zones. [Photo: Brookings Hamilton Project borrowed from Chetty et al. 2016.]
This divergence is attributed to several factors. The report suggests that medical advancements, safer technologies (like cars), and behavioral changes (such as smoking cessation) are often adopted first by higher-income individuals before spreading to the broader population. However, the benefits of “inexpensive medical innovations like vaccines and mass-produced antibiotics, as well as public goods like clean water and sanitation” were eventually extended broadly, indicating the historic role of public health infrastructure in universal gains. The report also links the increase in mortality among less-educated white non-Hispanics to rising rates of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and suicide. Specifically, illegal drug use (excluding marijuana) became more common among low-income men, while high-income men experienced smaller increases.
Furthermore, the report draws a connection between labor market changes and the decline in life expectancy for lower-income groups. It points to the stagnation of real wages for lower-income workers and increasing real wages for higher-income workers, suggesting that a bleak economic outlook for less-educated individuals may contribute to problems related to mental health, alcohol abuse and drug abuse, thereby depressing longevity. The report also notes that job displacement can increase mortality, with the largest impact seen on those experiencing the largest earnings losses. It explicitly mentions that increased educational attainment is causally related to longer life expectancy.
Building on this, in another study by Case and Deaton, particularly their work cited from Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides compelling evidence of a profound shift in mortality disparities. They demonstrate that while racial gaps in life expectancy have significantly narrowed, socioeconomic divides, largely proxied by educational attainment, have dramatically widened.
Expected years of life from 25 to 75 by college degree status. [Photo: Anne Case and Angus Deaton study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences in 2021.]
In stark contrast to this widening educational divide, Case and Deaton documented that racial divides in expected years lived between ages 25 and 75 narrowed by 70 percent for both black and white people between 1990 and 2018. Their research indicates that “by 2018, intra-racial college divides were larger than interracial divides conditional on college.” This means that individuals with a college degree, regardless of their race, are now more alike in terms of life expectancy than they are to people of their own race who do not possess a college degree. These findings fundamentally corroborate the axiom that the underlying health disparities are a by-product of socioeconomic factors in decaying capitalism despite the promotion of race and identity.
As stated before, the US public health system has been plagued by “chronic underfunding for decades,” severely limiting its capacity to address complex health challenges and emergency preparedness. This was never more evident than during the COVID pandemic, where a study of 3,050 US counties showed higher pre-pandemic public health expenditures correlated with a 13 to 22 percent lower COVID-19 incidence and 7 to 18 percent lower mortality.
US county-level public health expenditure versus COVID-19 measures from March 1, 2020, to February 28, 2022.
Providing concrete economic context, the study notes that for every $10 per capita increase in local health spending, deaths during COVID-19 peaks were reduced by 1.2 per 100,000 during COVID-19 peaks. And despite the ruse promoted by reactionary right-wing COVID contrarians—NIH director Jay Bhattacharya and ACIP chair Martin Kulldorff—that the lockdowns led to unnecessary deaths from the economic downturn, the limited lockdown response to the pandemic from March to August 2020 led to an estimated saving of 860,000 to 1.7 million lives.
Notwithstanding Long COVID and its broader impact on long-term population health, chronic diseases are major drivers of the US’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditure, where six in 10 American adults suffer from some ailment. Stroke and heart disease alone have led to over $100 billion in lost job productivity annually. The JAMA study’s findings, highlighting persistent disparities and a reversal of life expectancy gains for certain cohorts, serve as a critical reminder of the indispensable role of robust public health investment.
Perhaps most disturbing is the frontal attack by Kennedy and his ideologically aligned appointees and acolytes on the entire vaccination program, both domestically and internationally, which threatens the immense societal gains achieved through vaccination. Routine childhood vaccinations for children born between 1994 and 2023 in the US prevented an estimated 1.1 million deaths, 32 million hospitalizations, and 508 million illnesses. This resulted in $780 billion in direct medical costs saved and $2.9 trillion in overall societal costs.
Globally, vaccines are estimated to have averted 154 million deaths since 1974, with every $1 spent on immunization returning up to $52 in low-income countries. These benefits extend beyond healthcare, as vaccinated children are more likely to attend school and enter the workforce, and parents miss fewer workdays; these productivity gains alone account for an estimated 70 percent of the $2.9 trillion societal savings in the US. Indeed, the Yale University report on life expectancy over the century is not simply an epidemiological analysis. It is an objective and concrete measure of the immense social harm, particularly to the working class, caused by crisis-ridden capitalism.
Kennedy and Trump are not just mere deranged and demented personalities. They are the political manifestation of the terminal decline of capitalism as a world system, which is turning to authoritarian and anti-democratic forms of rule while turning its back on more than a century of the achievements of science and public health. The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg said more than a century ago, is indeed, socialism or barbarism.
PHNOM PENH – Ten cases of H5N1 avian influenza have been detected in Cambodia so fa this year. The two most recent patients are a mother and son from Siem Reap province.
On Sunday, June 29, the Ministry of Health announced that two additional cases of avian influenza were found in the same area as a 41-year-old woman who had tested positive for the H5N1 virus, as confirmed by the National Institute of Public Health the previous Monday.
An active field investigation to identify suspected cases and those exposed in Lbeuk village, of Puok district’s Donkeo commune — where the 41-year-old woman resides — revealed two more confirmed H5N1 cases: a 46-year-old woman and a her 16-year-old son.
The institute confirmed that both individuals tested positive for the H5N1 virus. They are the 9th and 10th cases of bird flu recorded in Cambodia in 2025.
“These two cases reside approximately 20 metres from the home of the 41-year-old patient. Currently, both patients are in stable condition and are being treated with Tamiflu under close medical supervision,” the ministry stated.
Interviews revealed that at the homes of the patients, as well as their neighbours and around the village, there were sick or dead chickens and ducks. The patients had reportedly handled and come into contact with the ill poultry, which they then prepared and ate.
National and subnational rapid response teams from the health ministry, in cooperation with provincial agriculture department officials and local authorities, are actively investigating the outbreak. They are also responding with technical protocols, identifying sources of infection in both animals and humans, locating suspected cases and those exposed, preventing further community transmission, distributing Tamiflu to close contacts, and launching a health education campaign for villagers.
The 41-year-old woman, the first H5N1 case in the village, had also handled sick and dead poultry at her own home and her neighbour’s, and prepared them as food five days before falling ill.
The ministry again urged the public to remain vigilant about bird flu, as H5N1 continues to pose a serious threat to public health in Cambodia.
Anyone experiencing fever, cough, runny nose or difficulty breathing, along with a history of contact with sick or dead poultry in the 14 days before symptoms began, should avoid gatherings and crowded places and immediately seek medical advice and treatment at the nearest health centre or hospital without delay.
On June 27, officers from the Provincial Livestock and Animal Health Office of the Siem Reap agriculture department, in cooperation with the National Animal Health and Production Research Institute (NAHPRI), implemented veterinary measures at the site of an earlier outbreak in Puok district and commune’s Chambak He village.
The team culled 45 eggs and 16 chickens, and disinfected coops and the surrounding area. Additionally, samples were collected from two whole chickens for further testing.
An Apple logo is displayed on a smartphone with stock market values in the background.
SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images
Apple is weighing using artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri, instead of its own in-house models, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.
Shares of the iPhone maker, which had traded down earlier in the session, closed 2% higher on Monday.
Apple has had discussions with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, asking them to train versions of their LLMs that could run on Apple’s cloud infrastructure for testing, the report said, citing people familiar with the discussions.
Apple’s investigation into third-party models is at an early stage and the company has not made a final decision on using them, the report said.
Amazon-backed Anthropic declined to comment, while Apple and OpenAI did not respond to Reuters requests.
The company had in March said AI improvements to its voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, without giving a reason for the setback.
Apple shook up its executive ranks to get its AI efforts back on track after months of delays, resulting in Mike Rockwell taking charge of Siri, as CEO Tim Cook lost confidence in AI head John Giannandrea’s ability to execute on product development, Bloomberg had reported in March.
At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, Apple focused more on incremental developments that improve everyday life — including live translations for phone calls — rather than the sweeping ambitions for AI that Apple’s rivals are capitalizing.
Apple software chief Craig Federighi had then said it is opening up the foundational AI model that the iPhone maker uses for some of its own features to third-party developers, and that the company will offer both its own and OpenAI’s code completion tools in its key Apple developer software.
Clocks might be far more fundamental to physics than we ever realized.
A new theory suggests what we see around us – from the smallest of quantum actions to the cosmic crawl of entire galaxies – could all be literally a matter of time. Three dimensions of time, in fact.
The basic idea of 3D time isn’t new. But University of Alaska geophysicist Gunther Kletetschka says his mathematical framework is the first to reproduce known properties of the Universe, making it a somewhat serious contender for uniting physics under one consistent model.
“Earlier 3D time proposals were primarily mathematical constructs without these concrete experimental connections,” says Kletetschka.
Related: Physicists Catch Light in ‘Imaginary Time’ in Scientific First
“My work transforms the concept from an interesting mathematical possibility into a physically testable theory with multiple independent verification channels.”
Something is wrong with our current models of reality. While quantum mechanics and general relativity both explain our Universe to a degree that’s uncannily accurate, each emerges from fundamentally distinct grounds – one granular and random, the other seamless and immutable.
These irreconcilable starting points make it a challenge to construct a single, all-ruling theory of physics that explains gravity in the same way as it does the other three forces. Not that theorists haven’t tried.
Kletetschka proposes a complete rethink on the basics, pulling back the fabric of space-time itself to come up with a new bedrock to base reality on.
While we use the word time to describe virtually any series of events, there’s a clear contrast in scale that extends from the near-instantaneous flitting of quantum particles to the eons of cosmic growth stretching into eternity.
On the cosmic end, time can be relative, distorting in relation to mass and acceleration. Up close, time is undecided, equally capable of looking to the past as it does to the future. And drifting in the middle is an existence as boringly predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise.
Separating these scales into their own dimensions provides us with three paths to follow, each marching to its own beat at right angles to the others.
Time flows in three dimensions in a new framework of physics. (Kletetschka, RAPS, 2025)
By embedding these timelines in mathematics that preserves cause and effect, it’s possible to link all three dimensions in a way that could explain everything from how fundamental particles pop up in quantum fields, to why we can’t experience quantum weirdness, to the expanding boundaries of the Universe itself.
“These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting,” says Kletetschka.
“Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it’s more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself.”
Related: A Fifth Force of Nature May Have Been Discovered Inside Atoms
Importantly, the framework precisely reproduces known masses of a number of particles, such as top quarks, muons, and electrons, and volunteers predictions for the unknown masses of neutrinos and subtle influences on the speeds of gravitational waves.
That means the theory could receive support from future experiments, and potentially contribute to a more united approach to physics as a whole.
“The path to unification might require fundamentally reconsidering the nature of physical reality itself,” says Kletetschka.
This research was published in Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences.
Clocks might be far more fundamental to physics than we ever realized.
A new theory suggests what we see around us – from the smallest of quantum actions to the cosmic crawl of entire galaxies – could all be literally a matter of time. Three dimensions of time, in fact.
The basic idea of 3D time isn’t new. But University of Alaska geophysicist Gunther Kletetschka says his mathematical framework is the first to reproduce known properties of the Universe, making it a somewhat serious contender for uniting physics under one consistent model.
“Earlier 3D time proposals were primarily mathematical constructs without these concrete experimental connections,” says Kletetschka.
Related: Physicists Catch Light in ‘Imaginary Time’ in Scientific First
“My work transforms the concept from an interesting mathematical possibility into a physically testable theory with multiple independent verification channels.”
Something is wrong with our current models of reality. While quantum mechanics and general relativity both explain our Universe to a degree that’s uncannily accurate, each emerges from fundamentally distinct grounds – one granular and random, the other seamless and immutable.
These irreconcilable starting points make it a challenge to construct a single, all-ruling theory of physics that explains gravity in the same way as it does the other three forces. Not that theorists haven’t tried.
Kletetschka proposes a complete rethink on the basics, pulling back the fabric of space-time itself to come up with a new bedrock to base reality on.
While we use the word time to describe virtually any series of events, there’s a clear contrast in scale that extends from the near-instantaneous flitting of quantum particles to the eons of cosmic growth stretching into eternity.
On the cosmic end, time can be relative, distorting in relation to mass and acceleration. Up close, time is undecided, equally capable of looking to the past as it does to the future. And drifting in the middle is an existence as boringly predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise.
Separating these scales into their own dimensions provides us with three paths to follow, each marching to its own beat at right angles to the others.
Time flows in three dimensions in a new framework of physics. (Kletetschka, RAPS, 2025)
By embedding these timelines in mathematics that preserves cause and effect, it’s possible to link all three dimensions in a way that could explain everything from how fundamental particles pop up in quantum fields, to why we can’t experience quantum weirdness, to the expanding boundaries of the Universe itself.
“These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting,” says Kletetschka.
“Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it’s more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself.”
Related: A Fifth Force of Nature May Have Been Discovered Inside Atoms
Importantly, the framework precisely reproduces known masses of a number of particles, such as top quarks, muons, and electrons, and volunteers predictions for the unknown masses of neutrinos and subtle influences on the speeds of gravitational waves.
That means the theory could receive support from future experiments, and potentially contribute to a more united approach to physics as a whole.
“The path to unification might require fundamentally reconsidering the nature of physical reality itself,” says Kletetschka.
This research was published in Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences.
In Korea, real estate project finance (PF) is a financing method used primarily for large-scale real estate development projects. Unlike traditional corporate finance, project finance is typically structured around a specific project, with repayment of debt relying on the cash flows and assets generated by the project itself, rather than the general creditworthiness of the developer. Unlike advanced economies where developers typically contribute 30–40% equity to real estate PF projects, Korean developers often inject as little as 5% or less of the total project cost, hence financing the remainder through debt.
Given the inherently high risk and uncertainty of PF projects, financial institutions are reluctant to lend without guarantees, placing greater emphasis on guarantees instead of conducting comprehensive assessments of project feasibility. These guarantees are often provided by construction companies. With the enhancement of the project’s creditworthiness, developers can better secure the necessary financing (Figure 1). Non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) too extended credit to the developers but they tend to focus on riskier projects in search for higher returns.
In light of these credit guarantees, a construction company is obligated to assume the responsibility in the event where financial institutions refuse to extend the loan maturity or the developer becomes insolvent. In such cases, the construction company’s deteriorating financial condition may trigger a credit crunch across the construction sector, potentially creating ripple effects that affect the broader financial system. This was evident In late 2023 when Taeyoung Construction, Korea’s 16th largest builder, entered a debt workout which fueled concerns of a funding squeeze in the construction sector leading to financial market volatility.
PF stress across NBFIs and construction
The current challenges faced by real estate PF have their roots in the mid-2010s, when a real estate boom was fueled by low rates. During this period, both banks and NBFIs aggressively expanded their PF lending. By Q2 2024, Korea’s PF loans stood at KRW 132.2 trillion, with 63.5 percent held by NBFIs and 36.5 percent by banks (Figure 2). Among NBFIs, savings banks and credit cooperatives targeted higher-risk market segments and lending to lower-credit borrowers.
However, this landscape changed dramatically in mid-2021, as aggressive rate hikes and rising construction costs inflated presale prices and dampened real estate demand. Inventory of unsold units rose sharply, especially in non-metropolitan areas (Figure 3). As unsold units accumulated, developers and construction firms faced worsening liquidity, triggering contingent liabilities and forcing costly financing or asset sales. This placed additional strain on already weakened construction companies and eroded their profitability (Figure 4).
For example, Taeyoung Construction’s debt-to-equity ratio was 258 percent, with KRW 3.7 trillion in PF guarantees (374% of its equity) as of end-September 2023, prior to filing for a debt workout in December.
As construction companies’ repayment capacity weakened, NBFIs with large exposures to PF loans saw a sharp rise in delinquencies. Particularly hit were savings banks whose non-performing loan (NPL) ratios surged from 3.4 percent at end-2021 to 11.5 percent in June 2024. Securities firms also recorded growing PF loan delinquencies, reflecting broader vulnerabilities across the NBFI sector (Figure 5).
Policy response and challenges
The accumulation of PF-related distress has led to a sharp downturn in the property market and triggered broader stress across the construction and financial sectors. In 2024, the Korean authorities rolled out extensive policy measures to reduce market uncertainty surrounding real estate PF and to ensure its orderly soft landing.
A “soft landing” package centered on differentiating viable and non-viable projects through enhanced feasibility reviews.
Broader reforms to shore up the PF sector’s structural resilience, including raising efforts aimed at bringing equity ratio in line with advanced economy standards (of 20 percent) over the medium to long term.
As a result, as of December 2024, KRW 6.5 trillion—30.9 percent of the KRW 20.9 trillion in loans to development projects classified as “attention” or “insolvency risk” had been resolved or restructured.
These efforts contributed to improvements in key financial soundness indicators, including a decline in both the NPL ratio and PF delinquency rates for two consecutive quarters. However, with the real estate market still underperforming, new non-performing assets are expected to emerge.
The authorities must therefore maintain heightened vigilance and continue with the resolution and restructuring of existing NPLs, and implementation of rigorous asset quality management frameworks across all financial institutions exposed to PF risk.
Multi-award-winning South African-New Zealander Urzila Carlson is adding an extra performance to her New Zealand tour after sell out shows!
After selling out in Auckland only days after launching her New Zealand Tour, Comedian Urzila Carlson is adding another show to her ‘You Don’t Say’ tour, Live Nation has today announced. Fans should act quickly as tickets to the new show in Auckland’s SkyCity are expected to sell out just as quickly!
Tickets for the new show go on sale to the public at 1pm local time today (1st July).
Multi-award-winning South African-New Zealander Urzila Carlson is one of Australian and New Zealand’s biggest comedy stars, and she’s bringing her trademark cheeky wit back to New Zealand stages in 2025 with the ‘You Don’t Say’ Tour.
The tour announces comes off the back of her ‘You Don’t Say’ run at Melbourne International Comedy Festival where she was awarded People’s Choice Award for the most popular show of the festival.
Urzila Carlson’s New Zealand tour will kick off 28 November at The Civic Theatre in Auckland and continue with performances at the Wellington Opera House on the 5 December and 7 December at Christchurch Town Hall.
Talking about the upcoming dates, Urzila said, “You Don’t Say” is a show born out of sarcasm and storytelling from the mind of a woman who might be slightly out of her mind! I cannot wait to tour this show and bring it to your ears!”.
2025 started with a bang for Urzila, starring in the NETFLIX rom-com ‘Kinda Pregnant’, alongside Amy Schumer and Wil Forte, and produced by Adam Sandler.
‘Kinda Pregnant’ was viewed 25.1 million timesin its first week, making it the most-watched title on Netflix from Feb. 3 to Feb. 10 and the number 1 movie globally.
An undeniable tour de force of the comedy world, in 2025 Urzila will be doing her first national tour of the USA and her biggest tour of the UK.
For complete tour and ticket information, visit livenation.co.nz
URZILA CARLSON
‘YOU DON’T SAY’
NEW ZEALAND TOUR 2025
THE CIVIC, AUCKLAND
FRIDAY 28 NOVEMBER
SKYCITY, AUCKLAND
SATURDAY 29 NOVEMBER
OPERA HOUSE, WELLINGTON
FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER
CHRISTCHURCH TOWN HALL, CHRISTCHURCH
SUNDAY 7 DECEMBER
TICKETS ON SALE FRIDAY 30 MAY, 11AM LOCAL
My Live Nation presale 10am, Thursday 29 May – 10am, Friday 30 May For complete tour and ticket information, visit: livenation.co.nz
About Live Nation Entertainment
Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE: LYV) is the world’s leading live entertainment company comprised of global market leaders: Ticketmaster, Live Nation Concerts, and Live Nation Media & Sponsorship. For additional information, visit livenationentertainment.com.
I didn’t wake up one day and just decide to ditch proprietary software for free and open-source tools. But in my transition away from Adobe, it was the natural next step. I needed a new stack of tools that not only measured up in their capabilities but also didn’t have the subscription burden, privacy concerns, or ecosystem lock-in.
Enter my new toolkit: GIMP, Darktable, Krita, Inkscape, Penpot, OpenShot, Kdenlive, and more. And I’m also self-hosting PhotoPrism to manage all my media files. This kit not only holds up, but it outperforms some of the bigger names in the creative software space. Here’s why I’ve made the shift to tools that I can host, own, and control.
Related
7 reasons why I keep coming back to open-source creative software
Open-source tools always pull me back in
5
No subscriptions
I’m not renting my creativity anymore
Starting with probably the biggest benefit of switching to free and open-source: no more subscriptions. Creative software has been the Netflix of creativity for some time now, and I was getting subscription fatigue. This is especially frustrating for tools I don’t use often but need access to on occasion, like Illustrator or Premiere Pro.
With open-source apps like Darktable for photo editing, Kdenlive for video editing, and PhotoPrism for media management, I get serious capabilities without any of the useful stuff being locked behind a paywall. There are also no features to unlock with a higher tier for most of these apps. That’s all there is to it — everybody loves a free and capable app.
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4
Local control
Actual ownership of my projects
Another big draw was the fact that I can run some of these tools on my own machine, so not just installing them, but self-hosting them. Take PhotoPrism, for example; it’s not just a media viewer, it’s a full-blown media manager that I’m running on my own PC through Docker. So it doesn’t store my projects in someone else’s cloud, and everything stays on my hard drive until I choose otherwise.
This way, I’m protected from third-party server crashes and data mining, and there’s no auto-syncing I didn’t ask for. Self-hosting also gives me a lot more customization over my apps and how I access them. Overall, local control over your files feels superior once you’ve gotten a taste of it.
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3
Privacy is an actual feature
I know exactly where my data lives
In the same vein as above, privacy concerns disappear with open-source, self-hosted tools. Usually, when I upload or sync my projects to a service like Creative Cloud, there’s a little itch of anxiety — what are they going to do with my files? And these worries are entirely valid when considering privacy policy scandals surrounding major industry players, particularly regarding user data being fed into AI training models.
With my media on my own drive, I don’t have to scour through the terms and conditions of an app to ensure it’ll remain protected. Or worry that my images are being analyzed to sell me ads. Or be surprised to find new AI training clauses. And even non-self-hosted tools like Darktable and Kdenlive don’t sell, track, or report usage; they simply work. In 2025, this kind of digital silence is refreshing.
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2
Pro features without the bloat
Lean but still powerful
I’ll give credit where it’s due – proprietary software often has better features. Photoshop has a more comprehensive masking and layering system, while After Effects’ keyframing offers greater precision. But that doesn’t mean we should sleep on open-source features.
For example, I prefer GIMP’s Foreground Select tool for its speed and efficiency, and its Cage Transform tool is also better than Photoshop’s Puppet Warp. Kdenlive also measures up to Premiere Pro in terms of its multi-format, multi-track, audio, proxy editing, and rendering capabilities. Darktable can also handle your RAW shots just as well as Lightroom.
Sure, you lose some with open-source, but you also win a lot. My new stack takes up way less space on my computer, and some of them even run faster than their paid counterparts. I’m happy to give up a handful of proprietary features for a faster, lighter app that can do the job just as well. Oftentimes, I didn’t even use most of the features in paid tools and just kept the subscription for some niche feature. Keeping a resource-hungry, space-gobbling app for a handful of features isn’t worth it.
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1
No format or ecosystem lock-in
No more one-brand workflows
Closed-source software often traps you in its ecosystem, whether through its formats, integrations, or cloud services. If you shoot images on a Canon or even your iPhone, you edit them in Lightroom, export to Photoshop, sync to the Cloud, and now you’re locked into that workflow. Open-source is a bit more like Lego — you can stack your design toolkit however you need and don’t have to worry about proprietary codecs and formats, making it easier to shift between apps.
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Open-source isn’t perfect, but it’s empowering
I’m not saying everyone should dump their favorite paid tools. If the Adobe suite works for you, there’s no need to switch. However, if you’ve been feeling boxed in, experiencing subscription fatigue, concerned about privacy, or simply bored with the same old tools, it’s worth exploring what free, open-source, self-hosted tools have to offer. I’m certainly happy I made the switch.
