Loose change for February 2, 2010

 Economic news 

• If you are part of the Korean pension fund, you will soon own a piece of London's Gatwick Airport. I want free train service to/from the city centre, dammit!
• Should slim and healthy people have to subsidize healthcare for the obese? (More on this later.)
• Toyota's problems could benefit Hyundai and Kia.
• No one wants Hynix. 
• Qualcomm is going to set up a technology R&D center in South Korea. Did you know if you take com out of Qualcomm, you've got qualm. What a frickin' stupid name. Even stupider if you realize that 괄컴 means something like "company of inhospitality." Making fun of corporate names is about the extent of my economic expertise.
• South Korea misses its export targets for January and experiences a trade deficit for the first time in twelve months. International confidence in South Korea falls to zero (just kidding, but that's usually about the way things go).

 North Korea news and stuff 

• Ask A Korean has a thought-provoking piece on whether to give food aid to North Korea or not.
• UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon will send a special envoy to the reclusive North Korea in mid-February, Lynn Pascoe, who will ask Kim Jong-il to cut the overgrown grass and get the jalopies off the lawn.
• Kim Jong-il is playing up his government's failure to live up to promises to feed its people, in what the Chosun Ilbo is describing as a play for foreign food aid.
• North Korea has declared more no-sail zones off its coast. Some experts think this is a sign of more missile tests, but did anyone stop to think that maybe the Dear Leader just hates sailing?

 Other Korea-related stuff 

• College students of Korea take note: President Lee Myungbak says there will be no reward to Kim Jong-il "just for showing up" to a North-South summit.
• Controversial banners in Oakland that designated an ethnically diverse neighborhood as "Koreatown" will come down. Yeah, that's not exactly "Korea-related," but I've got too many stories under the Miscellany heading.

 Miscellany 

• A handy-dandy list of Full Metal Jacket-isms you can use when talking to people on the phone. Or in person.
• Eggs 'n Things: Waikiki's answer to Denny's and crawling with Japanese tourists. Damned good macadamia nut pancakes, by the way.
• The Los Angeles Times does a little focus on US Representative Ahn "Joseph" Cao, a Vietnamese-American Republican trying to get re-elected in a heavily Black and Democratic district.
• I should start ranking the Winter Olympics cuties, beginning with Lindsey Vonn.
• Which is better: San Francisco or San Diego?
• The US (along with China) met a Sunday deadline to sign on to the Copenhagen Accord's voluntary agreement to curb greenhouse gases.
• Will US Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts ride his fame to the president?
• Democrats in Congress are quietly putting the final touches on a strategy to resuscitate healthcare.
• Lawrence Garfinkel, the statistician who discovered the link between smoking and cancer (waaaay back), has died at the age of eighty-eight.
• A sample of one alert marijuana user proves that smoking pot has little effect on driving.
• CBS (in America) won't allow a Superbowl ad for ManCrunch.com, a gay dating site. I guess they didn't like the connection between watching big men in tight pants grabbing each other and gayness.