JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Maryland, Oct. 27 (Korea Bizwire) – U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began a tour of the Indo-Pacific on Monday, a trip that unfolds like a map of American strategic anxieties: Hawaii, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam — and finally South Korea. His message is familiar, but increasingly urgent. The Pentagon says Hegseth intends to press [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 27 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea’s central bank is signaling that any won-pegged stablecoins introduced into the domestic market should be issued through regulated banks, warning that private issuers could threaten financial stability and weaken monetary control. Stablecoins could “unlock new possibilities” for the economy, the Bank of Korea said in a report [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 27 (Korea Bizwire) — A South Korean court has overturned a disciplinary order against a dentist who prescribed and took hair-loss medication for himself, ruling the action did not constitute unlicensed medical practice. The Seoul Administrative Court said it had sided with the dentist, identified by his surname A, who filed a suit to [...]
SEJONG, Oct. 26 (Korea Bizwire) — A major offshore gas development project in the East Sea has been thrown into uncertainty as the South Korean government moves to reassess plans that the state-run Korea National Oil Corporation (KNOC) had been pursuing with British oil giant BP. Industry officials said Sunday that the Ministry of Trade, Industry [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 26 (Korea Bizwire) — A popular bakery chain’s plan to close for a day to hold an employee sports festival has ignited an unexpected debate over changing attitudes toward workplace bonding in South Korea. Sungsimdang, a renowned bakery in the central city of Daejeon known for drawing tourists from across the country, announced that [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 26 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s Supreme Court has upheld the acquittal of four former National Intelligence Service investigators accused of illegally recording private conversations during a domestic surveillance operation nearly a decade ago. The court affirmed a lower ruling last month that cleared the men of violating the country’s telecommunications privacy law, according [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 26 (Korea Bizwire) – A clear majority of South Koreans continue to view unification with North Korea as a national goal, even as doubts persist about the prospects for renewed diplomacy with Pyongyang, according to a government-commissioned survey released Sunday. Nearly 69 percent of respondents said unification remains either “very necessary” or “quite necessary,” [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 25 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea this weekend begins a solemn experiment in shared remembrance. For the first time, the government and the families of those lost in the Itaewon disaster will stand together in public mourning, three years after a crowd crush in a narrow Halloween alley took 159 lives and scarred [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 25 (Korea Bizwire) – United States President Donald Trump has described North Korea as “sort of a nuclear power,” AFP reported Saturday, as he seeks to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during his ongoing trip to Asia. Trump made the remarks aboard Air Force One en route to Asia, AFP said, [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 24 (Korea Bizwire) — Next week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit will turn the quiet, temple-dotted city of Gyeongju into a theater of global power politics. South Korea, long wedged between the gravitational pulls of Washington and Beijing, suddenly finds itself not as an observer, but as host—and potential broker—of an uneasy regional order. For [...]