Canada free trade with SouthKorea begins

Korean President Park Geun-hye, left, listens to Prime Minister Stephen Harper respond to a question during a joint media availability in September after the two leaders formally signed a free-trade agreement. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

The Canada-South Korea free trade agreement comes into force Jan. 1. The Canadian government forecasts exports to Korea will increase 32 per cent.

The agreement is especially good news for  Canadian cattle and pork producers. For example, the 40 per cent Korean tariff on Canadian beef will be gradually eliminated over 15 years.

The agreement was signed in Ottawa on Sept 22. Ottawa sees the pact with Korea as a stepping stone to other free trade agreements in Asia.

Fifty crew members still missing from SouthKorea ship

More than 50 crew members from a South Korean fishing ship that sank in the western Bering Sea were feared dead on Tuesday, as furious relatives blamed the ship’s owner and its captain for not doing enough to save their family members from the frigid waters a day earlier, The Times of India reports.

Russian coast guard helicopters and at least five fishing ships were scouring the area in search of the missing, with authorities finding at least one empty lifeboat Tuesday. Officials from the ship’s South Korean parent company said they were hanging onto a “glimmer of hope,” but with continued rough seas and bad weather, there were dwindling expectations that the fishermen would be found.

At a gathering at the company’s headquarters, relatives of the missing fishermen wondered whether the captain was too late in taking emergency measures after the ship started sinking amid high waves Monday. Some blamed Sajo Industries, the canned tuna company that owns the ship, for not ordering him to evacuate the vessel earlier, according to Kim Kang-ho, a company official.

Oppa Gangnam Style video breaks YouTube record with over 2bn views

Gangnam Style hit music video by South Korean singer, PSY, has exceeded YouTube's view limit, prompting YouTube to upgrade its counter. The video which was released in 2012, was announced to be its most watched ever and has been viewed more than 2,147,483,647 times. 

YouTube has now changed the maximum view limit to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or more than nine quintillion.

On December 1, YouTube posted a statement saying: "We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer... but that was before we met Psy."