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Fifty years ago, the strongest earthquake ever recorded in history rocked the city of Valdivia, Chile. On May 22, 1960, the 9.5 magnitude earthquake struck the epicenter near the city of Cañete. However, Valdivia was the hardest hit locality with nearly 40% of its building destroyed and leaving close to 20,000 homeless.

From the city of Valdivia, Betsabé Sandoval (@_Nahra) has been uploading various vintage photos at Twitpic of the destruction from the 1960 earthquake, including this photo of the damage to the Valdivia Cathedral. In total, she has uploaded 10 different photographs.

There are many Twitter users who currently live in the city of Valdivia. Throughout the day, they have been reacting to the developments of the 2010 earthquake and how their fellow residents were affected. The Twitter user @tapeks writes about the current mood of the city: Se ve el temor en la gente, todos andan intranquilos y las calles se ven desoladas, se ve tan raro #Valdivia You can see the fear in the people, everyone walks around restless, the streets are desolate, it looks unusual

More than 80,000 English language teachers in Vietnam's state schools are expected to be confident, intermediate-level users of English, and to pass a test to prove it, as part of an ambitious initiative by the ministry of education to ensure that all young people leaving school by 2020 have a good grasp of the language.

But the initiative is worrying many teachers, who are uncertain about their future if they fail to achieve grades in tests such as Ielts and Toefl."All teachers in primary school feel very nervous," said Nguyen Thi La, 29, an English teacher at Kim Dong Primary School in Hanoi."It's difficult for teachers to pass this exam, especially those in rural provinces. B2 is a high score.""All we know is that if we pass we are OK. If we don't we can still continue teaching, then take another test, then if we fail that, we don't know."

"No teachers will be sacked if they are not qualified because we already know most of them are not qualified. No teachers will be left behind and the government will take care of them. But if the teachers don't want to improve, then parents will reject them because only qualified teachers will be able to run new training programmes."

Quakes are commonplace in Chile; since 1906 and counting this most recent earthquake, Chile has experienced 28 earthquakes [es]—without counting the smaller in magnitude but still frequent seismic activity that is often felt around the country. The three biggest earthquakes that many Chileans can still remember left 30,000 dead in 1939, 3,000 in 1960, and 177 in 1985.

The Chilean government, society, and people should be praised for their readiness in dealing with such a catastrophic natural disaster…as of this writing, Chile has still not appealed for international help even though the death toll has topped 300.

I was impressed with the buildings since most of them where built under strict codes to remain standing during seismic movements. Chileans say that every decade there was a strong earthquake that left the city “la escoba” (like a broom) . That means, the earthquakes turned cities into disaster zones.

Chinese students’ obsession with learning English is apparent. Chinese cities are littered with billboards and fliers for teaching institutes, and the demand for native-speaking teachers and tutors seems endless. For many, the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language, ranks second only to the infamous gaokao college entrance exam as a driver of candle-burning study habits. Worried that this preoccupation with English is contributing to a decline in native language skills, officials at the Ministry of Education are now trying to get students to return to their linguistic roots. How? By introducing another test.

The test comes amid worrying signs of declining language proficiency in China. More than 30% of students failed a ministry-sponsored test administered last year to evaluate Beijing college students’ language skills, according to Xinhua. Many language instructors and others worry that young people in China are neglecting their mother tongue as technological advances like cellphones and computers have greatly reduced the need to hand-write Chinese characters — of which there are tens of thousands.

“In recent years, more and more Chinese people are paying attention to foreign-language studies while neglecting to polish their native language,” Dai Jiagan, director of the authority overseeing the exam, told Xinhua. “And many newly coined, nonstandard Internet phrases are confusing their Chinese.” There are around 300 million Chinese people learning English, China’s premier Wen Jiabao boasted in a 2009 speech. Last year, ETS, the creator of the TOEFL, said it saw a 30% increase year-to-year in the number of Chinese test takers.

ACAPULCO, Mexico — The message is delivered by a phone call to the office of one school, a sheaf of photocopied papers dropped off at another, a banner hung outside a third.

The demand is the same: teachers have until Oct. 1 to start handing over half of their pay. If they do not, they risk their lives. Extortion is a booming industry in Mexico, with reported cases having almost tripled since 2004. To some analysts, it is an unintended consequence of the government’s strategy in the drug war: as the large cartels splinter, armies of street-level thugs schooled in threats and violence have brought their skills to new enterprises. But the threat to teachers here in this tarnished tourist resort has taken the practice to a new level. Since the anonymous threats began last month, when students returned to classes after summer break, hundreds of schools have shut down.

“We are all scared,” said a high school drawing teacher who would give her name only as Noemi. “We are targets because we have a salary that is a bit more stable than the rest.”

Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers. “It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another. The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the West who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional languages such as Spanish or German.

China’s rapid economic rise is gradually translating into a greater presence in European and U.S. classrooms, from a very small base as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

From a marginal position 15 years ago, Chinese has imposed itself as the fourth major language behind French, Spanish and German, which, on current trends, it will overtake by the end of the decade.