Our daily field trip around the world

🖼️ A painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt sold yesterday for $108 million, setting a European auction record. The piece, called “Dame mit Fächer” (Lady with a Fan), represents Klimt’s last completed portrait before he died in 1918. It’s also one of the few remaining privately owned Klimt paintings, with the vast majority of his work currently on display at museums or galleries across the globe. According to Sotheby's London, the painting was bought by an unnamed Hong Kong collector following a ten-minute bidding war.

🇰🇷 All South Korean citizens will become a year or two younger starting today. For centuries, South Korea has used an age-counting system in which an individual is 1-year-old at birth, and everyone gains a year together on January 1 (i.e., every citizen’s “birthday” is New Year’s Day). But a new law that takes effect today requires all local governments in South Korea to adopt the international age standard moving forward, which the country uses for retirement, voting, and cigarette/alcohol sales.

🇨🇦🔥 Canada has already set a record for most carbon emitted from wildfires in a given year (dating back to at least 2003). That’s per a report published yesterday by Copernicus, the EU's Earth observation program, which found 160 megatons of carbon – equivalent to a quarter of Canada’s total 2021 emissions – have been released from wildfire smoke so far in 2023. There are nearly 500 ongoing wildfires spread across Canada, with an area roughly the size of West Virginia (17.7 million acres) already having burned this year. Smoke traveling south from Canada led several states in the American Midwest to issue air quality warnings yesterday, with hazy conditions expected to continue drifting south and east in the coming days.