DATELINE     SOUTH KOREA                                                            MAIN

Korea survives the fall-out

Perhaps it's not sufficiently dramatic for South Koreans to have the world's craziest regime as their northern neighbour, with its twitchy nuclear finger. It seems they might need to be spooked some more - and what better bogeyman than the foreign-derived global financial crisis?

East beats West in the Land of Morning Calm

CROWDED, dynamic, bewildering Seoul — the thrusting capital of Australia's third-largest trading partner; the world's most technologically wired nation-city, boasting the world's fastest broadband; home to the world's best airport; and, thanks to its kimchi-loving commuters, the only mass transit system that permanently reeks of garlic

City Life: Morning calm in financial markets despite mad Kim’s nuclear endgame

I feel like Forrest Gump, a barometer of Asian Armageddon.

I’ve come to South Korea via Sri Lanka, where the triumphant Rajapakse brothers were parading the bullet-ridden body of Tamil Tiger leader Prabhakaran on state television to the tune of Star Wars. And now that I’m comfortably billeted in Seoul’s Hotel Shilla, preferred hostelry of Korea’s old-monied corporate clans, local media report that the former president Roh Moo-hyun has just killed himself and mad Kim up north is threatening to irradiate us all in an insane endgame of nuclear brinkmanship. Have I dodged suicide bombers in Sri Lanka only to meet my maker in the last episode of the Cold War?

 

Kookmin has good news for Asian bond market