Lily Kuo, Quartz

Gai Nyok is among the success stories from a U.S. amnesty program for refugee children orphaned by the second Sudanese civil war.

In China, where knockoffs or shanzai products are big business, manufacturers have been known to make fully functioning copies of new products even before they’re released.

Former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao wasn’t being dramatic in 1999 when he called the country’s water problems a threat to the “survival of the Chinese nation.”

 What better way to launch a war on pollution then with a fleet of smog-clearing drones?

Yesterday and today, Shanghai experienced some of the highest levels of air pollution ever recorded in China. The US Consulate in Shanghai reported levels were “beyond index”—i.e., off the charts.

Over the past two decades South Korea’s suicide rate, while experiencing occasional dips, has trended upwards. Meanwhile, most developed countries are seeing their rates fall.

For the past 10 months, children in Indonesia’s Banten province have been commuting to school on narrow bamboo rafts—along a river best known to tourists for its whitewater rapids—because local authorities still haven’t fixed a bridge that collapsed in January in a flood.

The latest market opportunity for entrepreneurs in China? Polluted air.

Among a raft of reforms China announced today was the abolition of its “education-through-labor” camps, known as laojiao. But according to Human Rights Watch, the government has considered replacing it with another system, which also allows long-term detention without trial.

Chinese state media just took aim at another foreign company: Samsung, which happens to make the most popular smartphones in the country.