“The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5,000 year-long history and culture,” said North Korean state news on Friday, announcing the country’s new “Pyongyang time” zone.

Fox News reportedly used random b-roll video of sad Asians from other places as stand-ins for actual Koreans during a segment on the Korean ferry disaster. In fairness, lots of stations use b-roll that's unrelated to the story at hand. Few do it in such a racially and ethnically tone-deaf way.

It started before a friend told me that he wanted to date white women and before another friend told me “fuck white people.” It started before two 14-year-old girls on their way to a birthday party were crushed to death on the Yangju Highway, before George Bush put North Korea on the Axis of Evil, and even before either of my parents was born.

[Illuminated portraits of North Korea's late leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il glow amid the dark buildings of central Pyongyang before dawn yesterday. Photo by David Guttenfelder via AP]

Step 1: Get in the car.

Photographs, he likes to say, are the only things that remain.

Following a joint South Korea-U.S. stealth bomber practice mission, North Korea announced that it's pointing its rockets at the U.S. and putting them on standby, and a state news photo seems to show its main targets: Hawaii, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and, uh... Austin. (Just a few weeks too late, Un!) NKNews.org points out that this photo, released in state media organ Rodong Sinmun, features a large map conspicuously labelled, "U.S. Mainland Strike Plan"; a close examination of the map shows vectors pointed toward Hawaii, D.C., L.A.... and, as far as anyone can tell, Austin.

South Korea's three main broadcasters and two of its major banks were paralyzed on Wednesday by a massive outbreak of malicious code that crashed and displayed "skulls" on some computers, thought by many to be a retaliatory cyberattack from North Korea. The television channels KBS, MBC, YTN and the banks Nonghyup and Shinhan Bank had their computer systems simultaneously shut down at around 2 p.m., with employees unable to boot up their computers or access the internet; by 4 p.m., the systems had been restored. Media outlets were able to continue broadcasting, but Shinhan found that its internet banking and some ATMs were rendered inoperable. The South Korean government has launched an investigation and upgraded its information operations condition; North Korea has been threatening to launch a cyberattack since last week, when it accused the U.S. and South Korea of hacking computers in Pyongyang. The hack is believed to have come through services provided by LG. [BBC | Korea Herald | AJE]

Senator Bob Menendez has called North Korea's nuclear threats "absurd and suicidal." That Dennis Rodman trip went great!

Our sister site Kotaku already explained the phenomenon of "Potato Parties" at length, but here's a tl;dr:

This brutal, heartbreaking love letter was found in 1998, lying on the mummified body of Eung-Tae Lee, a 30-year-old Korean man who'd died in 1586, some four hundred years before. Lee was tall and bearded — "The dark mustache made me feel that he must have had a charming appearance," says the former director of the Andong National University Museum — and left behind him a pregnant wife, the letter's author. Here it is, via Letters of Note:

Were you one of the 49 million people on the internet who watched that "Gangnam Style" video from the South Korean rapper PSY and wondered what the hell was going on? Max Fisher at The Atlantic has an excellent explainer about the "subversive message" of the video today.

Last weekend may have witnessed the geopolitical equivalent of the Kanye West-Kim Kardashian Date of the Century, when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un showed up at a couple events with a mystery woman in tow. But was it his wife, his mistress or just his boring sister at his side? And what does it all mean?

JeJu Love Land is a "whimsical erotic sculpture park" on an island in South Korea. It's been around for years, but we hadn't heard of it until Laughing Squid brought it to our attention.

What does North Korea look like? Not too different from anywhere else—just emptier.

Finding a way to assess a man's penis size with all of his clothes on has long been the holy grail of, well, anyone with a vested interest in penis size. The old standbys — hand, foot and nose sizes — have been discredited as viable indicators, the LA Times reports. (Though I'm not so sure if I buy that.) But a team of Korean researchers think they have at last unlocked the elusive Hung Code, and the answer lies in comparing the lengths of the index and ring fingers.

Privacy is no trifling matter in Korea. Seoul police raided Google's offices looking for evidence the company illegally tracked users to target ads at them. Apple and Facebook, call your lawyers.

Justin Bieber, mop-topped wunderkind of the wooded north, fell into a political booby trap at the hands of Rolling Stone, declaring himself pro-life and pro-Canada: "You guys are evil. Canada's the best country in the world." Uh oh.

As you may have heard, Cube Entertainment is hosting open online auditions for its 2011 KPOP Festival. Here's a submission by a guy named Edo—his speciality is popping—that will likely blow your socks off. The boy's got moves!

Is your vagina feeling sluggish? Maybe it needs a day at the gyno spa. A new trend in vaginal hygiene has arrived in America. It involves the words "pungent steam," "mugwort tea," and "open-seated stool." Meet the vaginal steam bath.