A study group composed of former high-ranking officials and experts has released a report on how to best rejuvenate the Korea-US alliance.
You can get the full report at the Korea Society homepage.
How the report represents a new beginning, however, is not particularly clear to me. From the Chosun Ilbo:
The group says it was a good [...]
In Busan, a gangster doing life who was let out of prison for treatment after he intentionally infected himself with HIV is back in the pen just a month and a half later for violating the terms of his release.
The 46-year-old former underboss of the Busan-based Yutae gang, identified as Mr. Kim, was sentenced to [...]
Why the release of the doves was discontinued after the 1988 Olympic Games:
(HT to reader)
The Korea Times reports that Korea will become “No. 1 in the global skyscraper race” with some 12 skyscrapers of 100 stories or more under construction across the country.
Seoul will get six of those architectural phalloi. Busan will get four, and I believe Incheon (Songdo New City) will be getting the other two.
Not that I [...]
You know it’s not a good sign when the guy you signed on to make your country a “hub” renews his contract, but decides it best he work outside the “hub”.
The National Archive has created an online 3-D model of Keijo Imperial University (now Seoul National University) as it was during the Japanese imperial period.
The archive has also posted the floor plans of colonial-era schools, and plans to create eventually an online archive of colonial-era architecture.
Here are a couple of shots taken yesterday at Haeinsa Temple in Hapcheon, Gyeongsangnam-do.
Don’t forget to see them in full size via the Flickr slideshow.
See the rest in the May issue of SEOUL magazine.
An exhibit of painted screens (ch’aek-kori) from Korea are on display as part of an exhibit entitled “Beauty and Learning: Korean Painted Screens“.
. . . Organized by Soyoung Lee, assistant curator of the department of Asian art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s tightly focused exhibition “Beauty and Learning: Korean Painted Screens” places four marvelous examples [...]
The NYT’s Norimitsu Onishi talked with a tea-sipping President Lee Myung-bak ahead of his big road trip to Washington. The attention-getter was that Lee admitted that ties between Korea and the US has been hurt under his two immediate predecessors, although not fatally:
“During the last 10 years, this relationship, of course it hasn’t been damaged [...]
Since the launch, things are really heating up down here on Earth. I’ve been getting extremely positive responses from non-Koreans to the Yi Soyeon videos, and I generally think the reaction amongst many Korean women is positive. My Ewha FLHS girls, for example, are enamored of her.
However, certain Korean netizens are forming an attack army [...]
Yonhap quotes Radio Free Asia as saying that the US and North Korea have reached a deal in the two six party talks. I don’t have years of diplomatic training, which might be the reason why the purported deal strikes me as just plain stupid:
Under the secret agreement, reached at a meeting of the top [...]
And as a bit of an icebreaker, I give you… the web’s 10 most hated people. Frankly, I have no idea who a lot of these people are, and No. 9 on the list — Tony Kornheiser — I actually enjoy quite a bit. Listen to his podcast every day,
Via the Agenzia Giornalistica Italia
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will not be present at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 “due to other scheduled appointments”.
Spokesman Marie Okabe said this, specifying that this is the present situation and that the final decision will be taken later. In any case Okabe underlined that it [...]
Check out the photos of a 100-year-old Catholic church in the Tibetan Catholic enclave of Cizhong.
Read the history of this fascinating place while you’re at it, too.
Taking a break from bitching about how the Korea-US alliance sucks donkey cock, I give you some photos of the cherry blossoms at Jeongdok Library:
Normally, I don’t read Korea Times editorials, but this one made me chuckle — concerning US pressure on Korea to dispatch troops to Afghanistan (and pressure to increase Korea’s burned in relocating US bases), the KT said:
In this situation, President Lee Myung-bak should not let his self-declared pragmatic diplomacy be taken hostage for the alliance [...]
Ethnic Koreans in Central Asia are reportedly inspired by Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So-yeon:
If Yi So-Yeon represents everything that is youthful and optimistic about her homeland, the ethnic Koreans resident around Baikonur cosmodrome are testimony to a painful period of uprooting and hardship under the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
“My soul is rejoicing! It’s even better [...]
Sure, we put a man on the moon, but Korea has managed to combine food container and drink cup into one revolutionary piece of snack portability technology:
Proving yet again that South Korea is light years ahead of everyone else in fast-food technology is The Col-Pop. The nation that brought the world the spiral-cut potato on [...]
Korea News via Google