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Shinhan Bank Executive Vice President Kwon Jeom-joo ...

Choi Jong-tae, left, CEO of POSCO Smile Microcredit Bank ...

A car is stuck in heavy rain near Dongbaek Island in Busan ...

Korea saw opportunities in building abroad

By Alan Timblick The Arab Oil exporting countries in 1973 decided to retaliate against U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. In October that year, an increase of 70 percent in the price of crude oil per barrel was announced. We may find it hard to remember just how cheap oil had been by today’s standards ― the price increase took the level up to an exorbitant $5.11! But in fact prices had been around $3 per barrel before that for almost a century and no one was prepared for such a huge relative increase. The oil shock hit the Korean economy as hard as any. The country had only just begun to build an industrial base and was virtually dependent on imports for the bulk of its energy supplies. But every cloud has some kind of silver lining. The petro-dollars being earned by the oil exporting countries, particularly in the Middle East, resulted in accumulated spending power. Much was invested into solid and safe earning assets in the advanced world, but the oil sheiks also saw that it was now possible to reinvest in their own countries by building infrastructure whic

Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) CEO Yun Yong-ro, center, ...

Kia Motor unveils its Forte Hatchback on Tuesday, which ...

Hangeul is an exceptional writing system

By Robert J. Fouser Hangeul made big news in 2009, the end of the first decade of the 20th century, with reports that the Cia-Cia people, an illiterate Indonesian tribe, adopted Hangeul as the writing system for their previously unwritten language. This is the first case of Hangeul becoming an officially acknowledged language outside Korea. Closer to home, meanwhile, the Presidential Council on National Branding adopted the branding of Hangeul and Korean language education overseas as an important project. And the much-awaited Gwanghwamun Plaza opened with a grand statue of King Sejong the Great (1397–1450), the inventor of Hangeul, sitting at its center. Compared with spoken language, writing systems generate little news. Most languages around the world use writing systems that have evolved from other systems and that are the same or similar to the system of their neighbors. People complain about the inconvenience of orthography, but they rarely stop to think about how the structure of the writing system, let alone the possibility that one writing system might be “bet

Chung Young-hwan, right, vice president of STX Offshore ...

Hyundai’s “New Avante” is surrounded by models during ...

Thirty Vietnamese women married to Korean men pose ...