DailyKorea

Sven-Goran Eriksson and Peter Trembling are heading to east Asia this week to hold final talks on a deal that could see the former England manager become the coach of the North Korea team at next summer's World Cup.

Trembling, the Notts County executive chairman, is understood to have been involved in talks with intermediaries representing the Football Association of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Those negotiations were with a view to securing the Meadow Lane director of football's services on loan.

The process is now advanced enough for Trembling and Eriksson to be travelling to Beijing later this week on an eight-day trip. The club chairman is also expected to discuss Chinese business investment opportunities in Qadbak, the British Virgin Islands-registered investment vehicle that owns County.

Read the rest here.  I wonder what happens when the North Korean loose?

Kim Yoon-ok, the wife of the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, seemed to go beyond the call of duty on Sept. 21 when she picked up a spatula to cook pajeon -- savory pancakes stuffed with seafood, scallions and slivered red peppers -- for a group of American veterans of the Korean War... more

Korean military to raise cash through secondhand gun sales

 

In the 'Korea is not a developed country' category comes this brilliant PR move by the Korean military - boosting the military budget through the sale of over 100,000 ex-Korean war rifles, marketed as collector items.

South Korea has come up with a novel way to boost its defence budget - by selling a vast stockpile of old Korean-war rifles to collectors in the US. The guns were originally sent to Korea as military aid, and some were also used during the war in Vietnam. For more than five decades, they have been kept mothballed in warehouses.

[...]

A total of 86,000 M1 rifles will be sold, and another 22,000 carbines - although these have a more patchy reputation.

Not sure whose brilliant idea it was, but hearing this on the BBC this morning, Two thoughts immediately came to mind.

First, South Korea needs to raise a bit of extra cash for its military? What the hell happened to the strong economy we keep hearing about? News that any country is resorting to raising extra cash by these kinds of strategies (essentially holding a garage sale) does not boost confidence in its economic conditions.  How much money do they expect to make from these guns?

Which brings me to my second point. While I am in on way an expert in weapon collectables, I remember being taught that what makes a collectable valuable is its relative scarcity - and offering 100,000 does not seem to be conducive to that idea.

North Korea, since the mid-1990s, has prohibited women from riding bicycles. This was due to an edict handed down after Kim Jong Il himself took exception to seeing a female cyclist while he was conducting an inspection. Subsequent enforcement has differed from region to region but, if caught by the officers of the PSA [People's Safety Agency], 20,000-30,000 North Korean won in fines has to be paid.

More about Kim Jong Il's hatred of women on bikes here.

The Wall Street Journal, in a report that reads like many Korean nationalists' naughty, late-night dreams, is reporting that not only is a united Korea economically viable, but it would be more powerful that Germany, and possibly even Japan!

A united South and North Korea could boast an economy larger than France, Germany and possibly Japan by the middle of the century, according to a Goldman Sachs Group study that may shake up conventional wisdom about unification.

Contradicting many conventional assumptions, the report argues that based on the experiences of other similar state-run Asian economies, reunification would beneficial to the peninsula's economic growth.

 

"People always look at Germany when they discuss unification of the Koreas, but if you look at China and Hong Kong, or more properly Eastern Europe, Mongolia or Vietnam, you see there are better ways of doing this."

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Mr. Kwon's study goes several steps further by suggesting that the huge growth potential of North Korea could help offset the slowing growth of South Korea, which is burdened by limited natural resources and a fast-aging population. By contrast, North Korea has huge mineral deposits and a population that is younger and growing twice as quickly as South Korea.

Using long-term growth forecasts Goldman Sachs has previously published for industrialized countries, Mr. Kwon concluded that the gross domestic product of a united Korea would be the world's eighth-largest in 2050 at $6 trillion, surpassing France around 2040 and Germany and Japan later that decade.

 

I wonder how much it would cost to get one of these installed in my apartment? Of course, hanging it would be a right pain.

The Daily Mail takes a look at the shipping industry, and more specifically, the hundreds of boats parked off the Malaysian coast, waiting for the economic crises to blow over.

 

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009.

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A couple of years ago those ships would have been steaming back and forth, going at full speed. But now you've got something like 12 per cent of the world's container ships doing nothing.'

 

Sadly, all these empty ships bode badly for Korea, the largest ship manufacturer in the world.

 

As the shipping industry teeters on the brink of collapse, the activity at boatyards like Mokpo and Ulsan in South Korea all looks like a sick joke. But the workers in these bustling shipyards, who teem around giant tankers and mega-vessels the length of several football pitches and capable of carrying 10,000 or more containers each, have no choice; they are trapped in a cruel time warp.

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But shipbuilding is a horrendously hard market to plan. There is a three-year lag between the placing of an order and the delivery of a ship. With contracts signed, down-payments made and work under way, stopping work on a new ship is the economic equivalent of trying to change direction in an ocean liner travelling at full speed towards an iceberg. Thus the labours of today's Korean shipbuilders merely represent the completion of contracts ordered in the fat years of 2006 and 2007. Those ships will now sail out into a global economy that no longer wants them.

 

Seriously! This is the future the Korea Times is offering us? I know people often remark that Korea has a strangely 80s feel to it - the clothing seen draped over older men and women (and some of the younger ones) has a distinctly discotheque feel to it...  Is the KT can't honestly claiming that 3D glasses is the latest in Korea technology?

 

Three-dimensional (3D) television is expected to be available in some South Korean regions next spring.

 

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Viewers will likely need special glasses to look at the 3D images at first, but the KCC plans to work with pay-television operators and electronic makers to develop 3D stereoscopic displays and content that don't require the goofy goggles.

I remember watching "3D" TV with goggles in the 80s - and even then they were talking about how technology would one day offer... It's good to see that we are returning to that dream now its 2009. Next I expect we will see articles on flying cars and how soon all diseases will be cured by a cure-all supplement. Oh, wait...

Nine women in Turkey have been freed from a villa they entered two months ago thinking they were taking part in a Big Brother-style reality TV show.

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According to local media, naked images of the women were sold on the internet. They were also told to fight each other, wear bikinis and dance by the pool, HaberTurk newspaper reports.

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The duped contestants are said to be aged between 16 and 24. The women had responded to an advert seeking contestants for a reality show that would be aired on a major Turkish television station, Dogan news agency reports.

 

They were reportedly made to sign a contract that banned them from any outside contact and ordered them to pay a 50,000 Lira ($33,000, £20,000) fine if they left the show before two months. The women are said to have realised they were being duped soon after moving into the villa, in the summer resort of Riva on Istanbul's outskirts.

Times they are a-changing, as Bob Dylan would say. When I was a child, my friends and I wanted to be policemen, doctors and even archeologists (Indiana Jones was responsible for that one).  Kids these days appear to have more realistic aspirations.

A reporter visiting a class in Guangzhou got a surprising reply to a favorite question. When asked what they want to do when they grow up, the class replied with...

"A photographer"

"A painter"

"A pilot"

"A fireman, because firemen can help people put out fires"

And then there was this girl:

"I want to be an official"
［Reporter:] "What kind of official?"
"A corrupt official, because corrupt officials have a lot of things."