When you grow up in England, breakfast is an event. Not in the, “Let’s do breakfast!” way that I imagine West Coast movie types emptily holler at one another across busy studio lots, but as a deep-rooted part of our cultural makeup. Take, for example, the ‘Full English,’ a centuries-old national obsession with a symbolic breakfast table heaving with bacon, sausage, and smoked fish.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper departed Sunday for South Korea, where he is widely expected to complete another long round of free-trade negotiations that his critics were denouncing as secretive and potentially bad for Canadian workers. It wasn’t known whether Harper planned to sign the final text of a free-trade deal with South Korea — a laborious, decade-long, on-again, off-again process — or was simply going to announce an agreement-in-principle in a staged photo-op.

Anti-Japan protesters lashed out at a South Korean employee of the Japanese Consulate General in Busan earlier this month as he stepped outside to photograph the protest, sources said Sunday. Japanese consular officials reported the March 1 assault to South Korean police and told them to take steps to prevent it from happening again.

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy on Thursday called on Japan and South Korea to mend their soured relations over a territorial dispute and different perceptions of history. “I think that the two countries really should and will take a lead in this process, and the United States, being a close ally of both of them, is happy to help in any way that we can,” Kennedy said in an interview aired by NHK.

It was a good old-fashioned Olympic scandal in Sochi, when South Korean figure skater Kim Yuna, known as “the Queen,” lost to a less experienced Russian. The judgment spurred millions of angry Tweets, and a Change.org petition protesting the result was the fastest growing one on site record—reportedly more than 1.2 million signatures in about 12 hours.

Not long ago, China was a soft-power juggernaut. Media accounts highlighted Chinese leaders’ thoughtful forays abroad, depicting policymakers that were respectful of others’ opinions, willing to listen, humble to a fault, and reluctant to dispense unsolicited advice. Here was a country that was content to allow its own example of success to speak for itself.

South and North Korea will hold a ‘high-level meeting’ tomorrow, Seoul announced Tuesday. The meet will be held at the border village of Panmunjom at 10 a.m., local time, on Wednesday, spokesperson Kim Eui-do said in a press release. “Though an agenda is not set before the meeting, the two sides are expected to have discussions on major inter-Korean issues including smooth proceeding and the regularization of the family reunions,” it read.

For a second time, North Korea has rescinded an invitation for a special American envoy to visit Pyongyang, the capital, to seek the release of Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American Christian missionary held in the country for over a year, the State Department said on Sunday.