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Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, paid tribute to Korea’s late President Kim Dae-jung in a recent blog posting, saying she respected his vision for a peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula.

Writing on her blog earlier this week, the top U.S. envoy recalled her recent bike trip along Korea’s west coast, which included a speech at a ceremony marking Korean Memorial Day on June 6.

“We honor the memory of President Kim Dae-jung, and we remember President Kim’s vision of eventual reunification through reconciliation,” she wrote, quoting her speech. “We look forward to the day when the whole Peninsula is free and all Korean people experience a reconciliation befitting the sacrifice we honor.”

During the speech at a park on Jindo Island in South Jeolla, Stephens also looked back on South Korea’s rise from the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War to become one of the world’s leading economies.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday a decision on food aid to North Korea is on hold due to concerns over transparency in distribution and outstanding issues from the suspension of Washington's previous food shipments.

Speaking after talks with South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan on the eve of the 61st anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, she also emphasized that her government will engage Pyongyang only under the condition that the two Koreas move to resolve their own concerns and disputes.

HSBC Bank and several other European companies in South Korea plan to offer a rare internship program to dozens of North Korean defectors in a move to give them work experience, said Chun Hae-sung, a spokesman for the Unification Ministry handling inter-Korean affairs Friday.

(Yonhap News)

A stem-cell therapy for acute myocardial infarction “Hearticellgram-AMI” is expected to be approved next Friday for use at hospitals, the Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) said Friday.

Although there have been dozens of therapies already approved for the treatment of skin and cartilage diseases, the approval of cardiac stem-cell therapy will be the first in the world.

According to the KFDA, Hearticellgram-AMI developed by FCB-Pharmicell has passed all procedures required for approval, including safety tests. The move is meaningful in that it will facilitate the research and development of more stem-cell specific therapies, an KFDA official said.

However, a controversy remains over whether the stem-cell therapy is more effective than other existing therapies.

China recently registered the famous Korean folk song “Arirang” as one of its intangible cultural assets, and on Thursday, Korea's Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Choung Byoung-gug called the decision “absurd.”

Minister Choung told reporters the Korean government will collect all of Korea's different versions of “Arirang” by the end of this year and register the song as a whole on UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage by next year.

He added that China only listed “Arirang” as sung by ethnic Koreans there, not Korea's version of the song, and it is therefore not correct to say China has registered “Arirang” as a whole as its own national cultural asset.

(Arirang News)