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East Asia
70% of mentally ill at suicide risk
Proper counseling, treatment required to tackle problem Over 70 percent of people with mental disorders have thought about killing or attempted to kill themselves, according to a report, Tuesday. With some 3.68 million people in Korea having experienced mental problems at least once in their lifetime, the country needs to…
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East Asia
Samsung posts record profit of W8.8 trillion in Q4
Samsung Electronics posted a record operating profit of 8.8 trillion won ($8.3 billion) in the fourth quarter of last year on the back of brisk sales of smartphones. It also surpassed the 200 trillion won mark in annual revenue for the first time. In its preliminary earnings estimation, the world’s…
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West Asia
“Kharabeesh,” a maker of sarcastic cartoons, becomes conspicuous with Arab Spring
After the internet became the source for any scoop and websites like Facebook and Twitter became more into journalism than into socializing. It was only ordinary when cartoons turn into one of the ways to express your opinion, maybe it’s the strongest way. “Kharabeesh” or more accurately “Kharabeesh Toon” became…
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East Asia
Korea vs. aging
Last year, I and several colleagues from the foreign correspondents’ community interviewed President Lee Myung-bak. A color photograph of the tableau ― the serious-looking president surrounded by several busily scribbling overseas reporters ― duly appeared in a vernacular daily. A friend pointed out something curious about this picture. Although he…
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East Asia
Korea is not Korean enough
Dear Madam President-elect, Like any other President, you hope to make the people of Korea happier. There are too many lonely, unhappy people in Korea today, not all of them old or handicapped although many are. When you were born, in February 1952, Korea was in the midst of terrible…
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East Asia
‘Black consumers’ to be shown no mercy
Law enforcement authorities and courts are increasingly getting tough on the so-called “black consumers” or charlatans who make international inappropriate complaints of products in order to coerce compensation from manufacturers. On Monday, the Seoul Southern District Court slapped a 15 million won fine on a 28-year-old man, surnamed Kim, for…
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East Asia
Park needs sophisticated ‘envoy diplomacy’ for China ties
BEIJING – The incoming Park Geun-hye administration should adopt a pretty sophisticated “envoy diplomacy” to patch up strained ties with China, while continuing to carefully steer Seoul’s alliance with the United States, said Shin Gi-wook, the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. “The first…
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East Asia
Chinese woman who loves Korea so much
Without any notice in advance, anybody would think that she is a Korean ― Cui Penghua, an ethnic Han Chinese, not merely speaks perfect Korean but also looks like an ordinary Korean. She majored in Japanese in Beijing International Studies University but opted to head toward Korea in 2002, affected…
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East Asia
Actress Bae Doona proud of her roles in ‘Cloud Atlas’
South Korean actress Bae Doona’s filmography is full of names of celebrated directors — Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Nobuhiro Yamashita, Hirokazu Koreeda, the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer. Unlike other fashion model-turned actresses, she wasn’t bothered by playing an insensitive apartment management worker in a yellow-hooded T-shirt with almost no…
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East Asia
Yang Hae-gue unravels Diaspora at Haus der Kunst in Munich
The year 2012 was a splendorous year for Seoul- and Berlin-based Yang Hae-gue. She participated in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany and Urdaibai Art Biennale in Spain and presented “Dress Vehicles” at the newly opened Tanks at Tate Modern in London. In November, Yang unveiled a new piece “Accommodating the…
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