South Korea’s air transportation market will see robust growth in the next two decades largely due to growing demand for large-size aircraft for passenger traffic, a European aerospace company said Monday. “We foresee that the South Korean aviation market will have a demand for 382 new aircraft over the next 20 years, worth around $67 billion,” said Richard Carcaillet, the director of product ma...

MADRID (AFP) ― Spain is on track to miss key targets for economic growth and deficit-cutting in 2011, analysts say, a grim scenario that is pounding its credit rating. Standard & Poor’s downgraded Spain’s credit rating Friday by a notch to “AA-,” a week after its rival Fitch Ratings sliced the rating by two notches to the same “AA-” level. Both agencies judged the outlook to be “negative,” mean...

A strong sense of deja vu prevailed listening to Philip Yang, a Taiwanese spokesman, recently, as Taipei embarks on a “soft-power” offensive by promoting its local culture, indigenous people, food and other goodies. It’s no longer “politics-as-usual” in Taiwan, he quipped. The occasion was appropriate, as Taiwan recently commemorated Double Ten ― the national day of the Republic of China ― on Oc...

The international media, including South Korean newspapers and networks, has found a new celebrity in the 16-year-old grandson of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. The activities of Kim Han-sol at an international school in Bosnia are competitively covered by the European, Japanese and Korean media and even his teachers and friends are quoted to reveal more about the character of the fourth-gene...

Large numbers of North Koreans cross the Amnok (Yalu) and Duman (Tumen) Rivers into China to escape from hunger and repression. Only the privileged few get official travel permission for business or visits with their relatives but most risk their lives as they swim across narrow and shallow points of the rivers or bribe border guards to make it into the northeastern provinces of China. For most ...

At some point this month, October 2011, a child will be born and the world’s population will have reached seven billion. There is a good chance that this childbirth will take place in the Asia-Pacific region; home to 61 percent of the world’s population. If the child is born in the Asia-Pacific region, it will most likely be a boy: In 2010, among children below the age of five, there were 110 bo...

If you want to get your mind around the research that won three astronomers the Nobel Prize in physics this year, it helps to think of the universe as a lump of dough ― raisin-bread dough, to be precise ― mixed, kneaded and ready to rise. Hold that thought. Now consider Albert Einstein ― not the wild-haired, elderly, absent-minded professor he became in his later years but a young, dashing scien...