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 [...]
JEJU, Oct. 24 (Korea Bizwire) — A former high school teacher in Jeju has had his fine doubled on appeal after being convicted of making sexually inappropriate remarks to students during class. The Jeju District Court’s Criminal Division 2, presided over by Judge Oh Chang-hoon, on Thursday overturned a lower court’s ruling and imposed a fine [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 24 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean high school graduates who fail to secure employment within three months of finishing school face dramatically lower chances of landing stable, well-paying jobs, according to new research released Thursday. The study, conducted by the Korea Educational Development Institute (KEDI), analyzed 792 high school graduates who did not pursue [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 23 (Korea Bizwire) — Starting Thursday, South Korea began enforcing a revised labor law that allows employees to seek punitive damages of up to three times the amount of unpaid wages from employers who intentionally withhold pay, as part of a broader effort to crack down on chronic wage arrears. The Ministry of Employment [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 23 (Korea Bizwire) — At exactly 10:29 a.m. on Thursday, six days before the third anniversary of the Itaewon crowd crush, three shrouded photographs were revealed outside Exit 1 of Itaewon Station — the site of the 2022 tragedy that left 159 people dead. Against a deep violet backdrop embroidered with constellations, the images [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 23 (Korea Bizwire) — The Halloween night in Itaewon began like any other — laughter spilling out of bars, music vibrating through narrow alleys — until it became a tragedy that left 159 people dead and a nation in disbelief. Now, nearly three years later, a government audit has concluded that one of the [...]