hankyoreh

President Lee Myung-bak called Friday for sincere dialogue between South and North Korea to rebuild trust, saying that the two sides must overcome tensions heightened after the North's two deadly attacks last year.
“Though a tense situation was created due to last year’s blowing up and sinking of the Cheonan and the Yeonpyeong incident, we cannot remain there,” Lee said during a meeting of 11,500 pro-unification activists, referring to the naval vessel and the border island attacked by the North.
“In order for that, we should more than anything else restore trust by moving ahead on to the path of dialogue and cooperation with sincerity and responsibility,” he said.
“The fruits that unification will bring us will be greater and more valuable than any prices that we have to pay in the course of that.”
Meanwhile, Wendy Sherman, a former senior U.S. official on North Korea, was nominated to a lofty State Department post on Friday. The White House announced that President Barack Obama picked her to serve as under secretary for political affairs, the No. 3 post at the department.
(Yonhap News)

Lone Star to take $466mln windfall of KEB dividends
Korea Exchange Bank (KEB) decided Friday to pay out an interim dividend of 1,510 won ($1.42) per share for the second quarter, enabling US buyout fund Lone Star, its biggest shareholder, to receive dividends worth 496.8 billion won ($466 million).
This marks the biggest quarterly dividends that South Korea's fifth-largest lender has ever paid out.
The payout has reignited harsh public criticism that a foreign buyout capital reaps huge profits from once-distressed banks that received public financial aid. Lone Star owning 51 percent of the controversial KEB shares has already raked in profits of around 2.9 trillion won including dividends worth 1.7 trillion won.