February 2012
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Facing chaebol opposition, National Assembly...
The legislative and judiciary committee of South Korea’s National Assembly has delayed a vote on a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions, Bloomberg reports. The delay comes as legislators come under pressure from the country’s leading conglomerates to delay introduction of the plan. Bloomberg: “The Federation of Korean Industries [the chaebol trade group] and the Korea...
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Anti-FTA protests rage on for a final day in Seoul
The Los Angeles Times reports on the last of several protests in Seoul against South Korea’s free trade agreement with the U.S.: “On Saturday night, amid a biting February wind, protesters chanted, ‘Annul Korea-U.S. FTA!’ and ‘Stop the effectuation!’ As speakers and celebrities voiced their opposition, the crowd held up signs reading ‘FTA is...
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N. Korea threatens to counter U.S. 'war of...
My, that didn’t take long. Just a day after U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy Glyn Davies wrapped up two days of talks in Beijing with North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, Pyongyang has reverted back to its usual comically overheated rhetoric. In a statement issued Saturday through the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s National Defense...
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Girls' Generation fails to catch fire in the U.S.
Can K-pop ever break through commercially in the United States? It’s a question worth asking after the recent failure of Girls’ Generation to spark much interest among American music fans. The K-pop superstars released their U.S. debut album Boys on Jan. 17, subsequently securing coveted spots on “Live! with Kelly” and CBS’ “Late Show with David...
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WatchU.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy Glyn Davies speaks with the press after two days of talks in Beijing with North Korean representatives. He doesn’t have much to report about the meetings.
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WatchU.S. Special Representative For North Korea Policy Glyn Davies speaks with reporters Wednesday after arriving in Beijing for two days of talks with North Korean officials in a bid to restart negotiations over Pyongyang’s nuclear program. On Thursday, the Associated Press quoted Davies as saying that their initial discussions were “substantive and serious” and touched on U.S. food...
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N. Korea criticizes Seoul nuclear security summit
Irony alert: North Korea throws a fit over Seoul’s planned hosting of an international nuclear security summit at the end of March, deriding it as a “childish farce,” Reuters reports.
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S. Korean police: Scammers spread false rumor...
Here are two topics that rarely intersect: North Korea and stock price manipulation. South Korean police have arrested five people alleged to be involved in an effort to profit from stock market unrest by spreading a false rumor on Jan. 6 that an explosion at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear complex had triggered a dangerous radiation leak, the Wall Street Journal reports.
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After quiet diplomacy fails, Lee Myung-bak goes...
Amid growing public criticism in South Korea over China’s plans to repatriate 30 North Korean refugees it has arrested, President Lee Myung-bak said during a press conference Wednesday that Beijing should release them. The New York Times: “Mindful of Beijing’s close ties with Pyongyang, South Korea has seldom confronted China over the issue of refugees. But in recent days, it has...
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WatchSouth Korean Trade Minister Park Tae-ho announces that the country’s free trade agreement with the United States will take effect March 15. The opposition Democratic Unity Party has said it will modify or repeal the trade pact if it wins the December presidential election. But Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, doubts the...
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Meet Jasmine Lee, S. Korean immigrant trailblazer
If South Korea has any hope of becoming a multicultural society, people like Jasmine Lee will play a leading role in helping the country make the transition. The Chosun Ilbo reports that the Filipino immigrant is being considered as a possible National Assembly candidate by South Korea’s ruling New Frontier Party. Lee left the Philippines in 1995 after marrying a South Korean sailor....
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N. Korea's ruling party to hold conference in...
North Korea has announced that the Korean Workers’ Party will convene a conference in mid-April, when Kim Jong-un is expected to assume all the top party, state and military titles held by his late father Kim Jong-il, the New York Times reports.
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K-pop group, songwriter caught behaving badly
A K-pop singing group and songwriter are making news for all the wrong reasons. First up: Block B, which apologized Saturday for an embarrassing interview with Thailand’s RYT9. The group’s worst faux pas: appearing to make light of the devastating floods that ravaged Thailand last year, Allkpop.com reports. In a far more damaging — and likely career-ending — move,...
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S. Korea shrugs off N. Korea threat, proceeds with...
South Korea conducted artillery drills Monday near its disputed western sea border with North Korea, ignoring Pyongyang’s (wholly predictable) threat of armed retaliation. According to the Associated Press, South Korea hasn’t observed any suspicious North Korean troop movements since the threat.
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Ho-hum -- another day, another threat from N....
North Korea is going — pardon the pun — ballistic over South Korea’s plans to hold artillery drills on islands off the western coast of the peninsula. One of the islands is Yeonpyeong Island, which Pyongyang shelled in November 2010, killing four South Koreans and injuring 19. The Associated Press quoting a statement by the North Korean western military command: “Such move...
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Protecting the flourishing biodiversity of the DMZ
Boise State University history professor Lisa Brady writes about efforts to protect the thriving (and wholly accidental) nature preserve that’s emerged in the Demilitarized Zone in the event that the two Koreas reunify. Here she provides an inventory: “Manchurian or red-crowned cranes and white-naped cranes are among the DMZ’s most famous and visible denizens. Nearly 100 species of...
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WatchHere’s another report on North Korea’s official commemorations during the past week of what would have been Kim Jong-il’s 70th birthday on Thursday.
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The N. Korean economy's growing reliance on...
The Washington Post has a fascinating story on the expanding role that foreign currency is playing in North Korea’s decrepit economy. Following the country’s disastrous 2009 currency revaluation, public confidence in the North Korean won collapsed, forcing everyone — even the government — to rely increasingly on foreign money, the Post reports: “Foreign currency now...
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WatchNorth Korea begins celebrating what would have been Kim Jong-il’s 70th birthday on Feb. 16 by wasting public funds on a pointlessly expensive fireworks display.
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WatchAs South Korea prepares to host the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit March 26-27, local police show off some of their special anti-terrorist skills. The demonstration seems to indicate that the summit will be in safe hands if the city is attacked by hard-headed acrobats who like beer.
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That's GENERALISSIMO Kim Jong-il to you
North Korea has posthumously bestowed the late Kim Jong-il with the title of “Generalissimo,” AFP reports. The announcement came Wednesday, a day ahead of the country’s celebration of what would have been Kim’s 70th birthday. On Tuesday, North Korea unveiled statues in Pyongyang of Kim and his father Kim Il-sung on horseback with the usual regimented fanfare.
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U.S., N. Korea to hold talks in Beijing on Feb. 23
The U.S. State Department said Monday that Special Representative for North Korea Policy Glyn Davies will hold talks in Beijing Feb. 23 with North Korean First Vice Minister Kim Kye Gwan regarding the North’s nuclear program. It will be Washington’s first direct talks with Pyongyang since the death of Kim Jong-il in December. The New York Times observes that the talks “will offer...
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Party politics and the S. Korea-U.S. free trade...
Marcus Noland, deputy director and senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, warns that South Korea’s opposition parties are creating significant political risks for themselves with their persistent calls to renegotiate or repeal Seoul’s free trade agreement with Washington: “If the opposition makes this a central issue in the campaign and wins the ...
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New York company to assist N. Korea in reopening...
North Korea has hired New York-based Korea Pyongyang Trading USA to reopen Mt. Kumgang to U.S. tourists, Bloomberg reports. Courtesy of the U.S. Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act website, read Korea Pyongyang’s certificate of incorporation and its July 2011 memorandum of understanding with North Korea’s Kumgang Special International Tourism District (page 6)....
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The Economist: Blame chaebol for low S. Korean...
The Economist notes that the unusually low price-to-earnings ratios of shares listed on the Korea Composite Stock Price Index is sometimes attributed to the risk of instability posed by North Korea. But the magazine argues that the so-called “Korea discount” is most likely the result of poor corporate governance at South Korea’s family-run conglomerates, or chaebol, like Hyundai...
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What Kim Jong-un has in common with Jon Bon Jovi...
Kim Jong-un joins celebrities like Jon Bon Jovi and Justin Bieber in having the distinction of being reported dead by false rumors on Twitter. “There’s nothing to this,” an anonymous U.S. official told ABC News about Kim’s supposed assassination. The Wall Street Journal observes that North Korea is particularly prone to being the subject of inaccurate news reports due to a vacuum of reliable...
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S. Korean lawmakers visit Kaesong Industrial...
South Korean lawmakers spent a day visiting North Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Complex, which is jointly run by the two Koreas, AFP reports. It was an unusual visit in that it marked the first time that legislators from the ruling and opposition parties traveled together to the Kaesong complex. And while they planned to meet with South Korean company officials at the complex, they had no plans...
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'Worst building in the history of mankind' to...
Pyongyang’s notoriously hideous Ryugyong Hotel may soon open for business, 25 years after construction began on the 105-floor building, the Washington Post reports. But the newspaper’s story is oddly sourced. First, it quotes a four-month-old Yonhap News item that reported the hotel will “partially open” in April. Then the Post says that while the Ryugyong...
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S. Korea bribery scandal topples National Assembly...
National Assembly Speaker Park Hee-tae has resigned his post, apologizing for a bribery scandal that has embarrassed South Korea’s ruling party, but stopping short of admitting he did anything wrong. Yonhap News explains: “The 74-year-old Park has been dogged by suspicions that he distributed cash-stuffed envelopes [in 2008] to fellow ruling party lawmakers and district party council...
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WatchShaun Cochran, head of Korea research at CLSA in Seoul, speaks with Bloomberg Television about South Korea’s vulnerability to the European debt crisis. The interview took place Wednesday shortly after the Bank of Korea left its benchmark interest rate unchanged for the eighth consecutive month.
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KBO protests Baltimore Orioles' signing of S....
The Korea Baseball Organization has lodged a protest with Major League Baseball over the Baltimore Orioles’ signing of South Korean pitching prospect Kim Seong-min, a sophomore at Daegu Sangwon High School. “We only have 50 high school teams and taking promising players away like this makes it very hard for Korean baseball to stay strong,” KBO operations manager Michael Park...
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Orascom CEO: N. Korea mobile subscribers to double...
In an interview with Reuters, Orascom Telecom Chairman/CEO Naguib Sawiris projects that his company will have 2 million North Korean mobile subscribers by early 2013, double their current level. Orascom is the majority owner of Koryolink, North Korea’s only wireless carrier. Sawiris also says that his company plans to continue operating in North Korea after its mobile deal’s exclusivity...
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Memo to Korea Times: Beware of UFO stories from...
Wild guess: the editorial staff at the Korea Times was hitting the soju pretty hard last night. How else to explain the newspaper’s decision to post a UFO story from Weekly World News on its website? “An international team of oceanic experts have found an alien ship from Planet Gootan National on the bottom of the Baltic Sea,” the Times dutifully reports. It actually gets worse:...