Singer-songwriter and rapper Tablo’s first solo album “Fever’s End Part 2” ranked first place on the iTunes hip hop/rap chart, as he returned to the music scene more than a year after he was embroiled in a controversy over his academic background at Stanford University.Hip hop group Epik High, of which Tablo is a member, reached top of the same chart with the album “Epilogue” in March last year.Tablo recently signed a four-year contract with YG Entertainment which boasts several K-pop idols incl

South Korea’s trade surplus shrank sharply from a year earlier in October as imports growth outpaced exports gains, the government said Tuesday.The country’s trade surplus reached $4.29 billion last month, down from $6.34 billion a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Knowledge Economy. Last month’s figure, however, was larger than the $1.55 billion surplus tallied in September.The ministry said exports grew 9.3 percent from a year earlier to $47.4 billion while imports gained 16.4 percent

South Korea’s consumer prices grew at a slower pace in October than a month earlier, falling below the 4 percent mark for the first time this year, a report showed Tuesday. According to the report by Statistics Korea, the country’s consumer price index rose 3.9 percent last month from a year earlier, slowing from the 4.3 percent on-year gain in September.The October figure marked the first time this year that the index has fallen below the government’s annual inflation target of 4 percent for 20

PARIS (AFP) ― The world’s top economies are slowing with the eurozone set to shrink briefly, and rapid action by EU leaders to enact promised rescue measures is key to global recovery, the OECD said on Monday.Days before a summit of G20 leading nations in Cannes, southern France, amid a threat of recession in some countries, the OECD called on leaders to act fast and hard to keep promises and also to boost growth.It also pressed the European Central Bank to ease its base interest rate.“Much of t

Olympic marathon gold medalist Hwang Young-jo will tie the knot with a high school teacher in December.The 41-year-old, who won the 1992 Olympic gold in marathon, told the local media that he is planning to marry a woman het met through his hometown friend. Hwang’s fianc studied computer engineering at Ewha Womans University, and now teaches at a high school in Seoul.Hwang gained his nickname “Hero of Montjuic,” during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics where he came in first to the applause from the c

The first digital revolution in Korea came with the wide penetration of broadband. Korea has been thought of as the most wired country in the world. The OECD has long been following the status Internet connections in its 34 member countries, and Korea has been steadily ranked first, with 97 percent households hooked up to a broadband Internet connection. The average for all 34 countries is 62 percent. This explains why Koreans are often frustrated by the slow and sporadic Internet connections ov

In medieval Korea, poetry was often a medium of correspondence among learned men. People addressed each other in poetry and conveyed messages metaphorically in terse four or five-line poems or three-line sijo. The recipient of the correspondence would also reply with a poem. How poetic were our ancestors’ lives in those days! Westerners may find it hard to understand, but the power of poetry was so potent in Korea that it could remit one’s debts at times and even prevent war at other times. When

FBI releases surveillance video on world-famous female spy and her associatesWASHINGTON (AP) -- Anna Chapman wasn’t just a member of one of the largest rings of Russian sleeper agents ever rolled up by the FBI, officials say. The 29-year-old former real estate agent, who became a lingerie model and corporate spokeswoman back in Moscow, represented a new breed of Russian spies adapted to the post-Cold War world.Chapman and fellow ring member Mikhail Semenko, another young deep-cover agent who wo