South Park to stream on Paramount+ after bidding war

5 days ago Share Save Osmond Chia Business reporter, BBC News Reporting from Singapore Share Save

Comedy Central/Facebook

The creators of South Park – Trey Parker and Matt Stone – have struck a deal for the long-running satirical cartoon to stream on Paramount+. Under the five-year deal, Paramount+ will show all 26 previous seasons of the cartoon and debut 50 new episodes starting this week. The move comes after a months-long bidding war a between major streaming platforms. In recent days, Paramount and its CBS network have faced criticism over the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which the firm says “is purely a financial decision”.

The deal is worth $1.5bn (£1.1bn), according to the Los Angeles Times. New episodes will first be shown on Paramount’s cable channel Comedy Central before streaming on Paramount+. The programme was previously shown on rival streaming platform HBO Max. The latest season, which was originally slated to start airing from 9 July, was delayed due to contract negotiations. The animated comedy debuted in 1997 and has become known for its foul-mouthed characters and its unfiltered humour that has often landed the show in controversy. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, also created the controversial hit musical The Book of Mormon.

The scheme, which was announced on Monday, external, will offer parents a total of up to 10,800 yuan per child.

The policy will be applied retroactively from the start of this year, Beijing’s state broadcaster CCTV said.

Families with children born between 2022 and 2024 can also apply for partial subsidies.

The move follows efforts by local governments to boost birth rates in China.

In March, Hohhot – a city in the northern region of China – started offering residents up to 100,000 yuan per baby for couples with at least three children.

Shenyang, a city northeast of Beijing, offers 500 yuan a month to local families with a third child under three.

Last week, Beijing also urged local governments to draft plans for implementing free preschool education.

The country is among the world’s most expensive places to have children, in relative terms, according to a study by China-based YuWa Population Research Institute.

Raising a child to the age of 17 in China costs an average of $75,700, the study found.

In January, official figures showed that China’s population fell for a third year in a row in 2024.

China recorded 9.54 million babies born in 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

That marked a slight increase from the year before but the country’s overall population continued to shrink.

The country’s 1.4 billion population is also ageing fast, adding to Beijing’s demographic concerns.

China growth beats expectations as Trump tariffs loom

The economy “withstood pressure and made steady improvement despite challenges”, said China’s National Bureau of Statistics in a statement.

The country has so far avoided a sharp downturn, partly due to measures announced by Beijing to help support the economy and a fragile trade truce with Washington.

Official figures show the world’s second largest economy grew by 5.2% in the three months to the end of June, compared to the same time last year. That’s better than the 5.1% forecast by many economists but lower than the previous quarter.

China’s economy has beaten expectations even as US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and a prolonged crisis in the property market weigh on growth.

Officials said economic growth was helped by a 6.4% expansion in manufacturing, with higher demand for 3D printing devices, electric vehicles and industrial robots.

The country’s services sector – which includes areas like transport, finance, and technology – also made gains.

But in June, retail sales growth slowed to 4.8% from a year earlier, compared with a 6.4% increase in May.

Also on Tuesday, official figures showed a drop in China’s new home prices in June, falling at the fastest monthly pace in eight months.

The data suggests the country’s real estate industry is continuing to struggle despite several rounds of measures to support property prices.

Analysts had expected a bigger impact from tariffs on China’s economy but the country remains “highly resilient”, said economist Gu Qingyang from the National University of Singapore.

Growth was boosted by exports, mainly due to firms rushing to ship goods before potential new tariffs or changes to China’s export strategy take effect, he added.

The second half of the year is likely be more uncertain though, Prof Gu said.

“As a result, stronger government stimulus might be needed. That said, achieving the 5% annual growth target still seems well within reach.”

But some economists expect China to miss its “around 5%” annual growth target this year.

“The real question is by how much. We believe it will defend a floor of 4%, which remains the minimum politically acceptable level,” Dan Wang, director for China at consultancy Eurasia Group told the BBC.

A tariffs war between China’s President Xi Jinping and Trump led to the US imposing a 145% levy on Chinese imports. In return, Beijing introduced a 125% duty on some US goods.

Those tariffs were paused after negotiations in Geneva and London. The two sides now have until 12 August to reach a long-term trade deal.

Washington has also hit countries with close economic ties to China with heavy levies.

Water extraction and weight of buildings see half of China’s cities sink

18 April 2024 Share Save Matt McGrath Environment correspondent Share Save

Getty Images A building subsides and collapses in Guangxi province

Nearly half of China’s major cities are sinking because of water extraction and the increasing weight of their rapid expansion, researchers say.

Some cities are subsiding rapidly, with one in six exceeding 10mm per year.

China’s rapid urbanisation in recent decades means far more water is now being drawn up to meet people’s needs, scientists say.

In coastal cities, this subsidence threatens millions of people with flooding as sea levels rise.

China has a long history of dealing with subsiding land, with both Shanghai and Tianjin showing evidence of sinking back in the 1920s. Shanghai has sunk more than 3m over the past century.

In more modern times, the country is seeing widespread evidence of subsidence in many of the cities that have expanded rapidly in recent decades.

To understand the scale of the problem, a team of researchers from several Chinese universities have examined 82 cities, including all with a population over 2 million.

They’ve used data from the Sentinel-1 satellites to measure vertical land motions across the country.

Looking across the period from 2015 to 2022, the team was able to work out that 45% of urban areas are subsiding by more than 3mm per year.

Around 16% of urban land is going down faster than 10mm a year, which the scientists describe as a rapid descent.

Put another way, this means 67 million people are living in rapidly sinking areas.

The researchers say that the cities facing the worst problems are concentrated in the five regions highlighted on the map shown.

The scale of decline is influenced by a number of factors, including geology and the weight of buildings. But a major element, according to the authors, is groundwater loss.

This essentially means the extraction of water underneath or near cities for use by the local population.

This has already been seen in several major urban areas around the world including Houston, Mexico City and Delhi.

Getty Images China’s coal producing regions have long been linked to ground subsidence

In China, the research team were able to associate the extraction of water from over 1,600 monitoring wells with increasing levels of subsidence.

“I think the water extraction is, to my mind, probably the dominant reason,” said Prof Robert Nicholls, from the University of East Anglia, who was not involved in the research.

“In China there are lots of people living in areas that have been fairly recently sedimented, geologically speaking. So when you take out groundwater or you drain the soils, they tend to subside.”

Other factors that are influencing subsidence include urban transportation systems and mining for minerals and coal.

Getty Images A large hole in the road in Zhengzhou, caused by subsidence

In the northern region of Pingdingshan, one of the largest coal areas in the country, land is subsiding at an extremely rapid 109mm per year.

The authors of the study say that a big threat going forward is the exposure of urban populations to flooding, from a combination of subsidence and sea level rise brought about by climate change.

In 2020, around 6% of China had a relative elevation below sea level. In 100 years time, this could rise to 26% of the country in a mid to high carbon emissions scenario.

The researchers say the land is sinking faster than the seas are rising, but together they would put hundreds of millions at risk of flooding.

However, research shows that there are effective strategies that can combat the slow decline.

Subsidence issues have afflicted other major urban centres in Asia, including Osaka and Tokyo in Japan in the past.

“Tokyo subsided around the port area, up to five metres in the 20th century,” said Prof Nicholls.

“But in the 1970s, they provided good piped water from other areas and they also had a law saying you will not use well water and essentially it stopped the subsidence.”

South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, at just 0.78 births per woman as of 2022. It’s likely to get even worse, with Statistics Korea, the country’s official statistics bureau, forecasting a rate of just 0.72 for 2023. That would be three times as low as the often-accepted replacement rate of 2.1, the number of births needed to keep a population at a stable level.

It’s even worse in Seoul, the nation’s capital, where the fertility rate is just 0.59. The city’s mayor has a solution: He wants city government to play matchmaker and link people together.

In a Bloomberg TV interview aired on Friday, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon said he first proposed the idea last year, but the scheme was postponed owing to concerns that a dating event wasn’t an appropriate idea for public institutions. Still, Oh hasn’t given up. “I’m thinking about trying it again,” he said, adding that some residents were disappointed that the matchmaking plan was on hold.

Other Korean city governments have tried blind dating events, such as the local government in Seongnam City, just south of Seoul, which arranged an event at a hotel for 100 South Korean men and women to meet.

South Korean officials are considering more than just matchmaking events to bolster the country’s rapidly declining birth rate.

The government is increasing its incentives for families to have children. Since 2022, the government has paid 2 million Korean won ($1,500) to parents for their first child, but starting this year, parents will get 3 million won ($2,250) for their second child and any offspring to follow. Parents will also receive a monthly payment of 1 million won ($750) for the first 12 months and 500,000 won for the following 12 months. Parents with children younger than 8 are also entitled to apply for a maximum of one year of parental leave.

Oh acknowledged that matchmaking would take a secondary role compared with other policies meant to encourage child-rearing, including increases for parental leave and financial support for couples seeking egg freezing services or fertility treatment. “Seoul will mobilize all available policies,” Oh said on Bloomberg.

The Bank of Korea, in a recent report, suggested that easing population density in Seoul could help improve the country’s low birth rate. About half of Korea’s population lives in the Seoul metropolitan area.

South Korea’s government isn’t the only one in Asia trying to reverse a trend of declining birth rates. Governments in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore are all considering or have implemented new policies to encourage families to have children. Mainland China is also rolling back population control measures as new births in the country sink to record lows.