A key lobbyist for a troubled savings bank has been questioned about his role in a massive influence-peddling scandal involving the bank as he voluntarily returned home Sunday after fleeing to Canada, prosecutors said Monday. Park Tae-gyu, 71, is suspected of helping the corruption-ridden Busan Savings Bank lobby senior officials and politicians so that the lender could avoid a suspension of ope...

Left-wing civic groups again protested massive layoffs by a major construction firm in central Seoul during the weekend, before they were broken up by police using water cannons for the first time in three years. A police-estimated crowd of some 2,500 people from various parts of the country staged overnight protests Saturday, joining the so-called “Hope Bus” campaign led by progressive groups d...

A total of 190 multidrug-resistant tuberculosis patients have been ordered to check in to hospitals by the government this year, the Ministry of Health and Welfare said Friday. This is the first time MDR-TB patients were forced to receive treatment for the disease by law, which was implemented in 1967. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an affiliate of the ministry, th...

A Seoul court on Thursday advised the government to cancel its decision to label a K-pop song that mentioned liquor as “harmful to youth.” The ruling is expected to have a huge impact on the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family Affairs’ plan to revise censorship criteria, which have been denounced as outdated and rigid. The Seoul Administrative Court ruled in favor of SM Entertainment, the la...

SEOUL, Aug. 26 (Yonhap) -- A Seoul man was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday for exploding homemade bombs at crowded public transportation stations in May in a plot he designed to cause a plunge in the stock market. The Seoul Central District Court handed down the jail term to the 43-year-old man surnamed Kim who was accused of setting off two explosives at the main bus terminal in sou...

A state human rights watchdog has deemed it gender discrimination for an organization to give condolence money to a female employee only when her husband’s parents die, while giving it to a male employee when his parents pass away. In Korea, it is customary for the government or companies to pay condolence money to employees when their parents or in-laws die. The National Human Rights Commissio...

A man has been arrested for randomly making numerous video calls to women, sexually harassing those who answered. The 34-year-old offender, known only by the surname Song, allegedly dialed 107 females since April, Ulsan Metropolitan Police Agency said. They said he had made calls by hiding his sender identification and intriguing the recipients by imitating the voice of a child. When the victim...

By Lee Sun-young Korean workers saw their salaries rise by an average of 5.2 percent this year, slightly higher than a year earlier, government data showed Wednesday. According to the Labor Ministry, this year’s average is 0.6 percentage point higher than in 2010, when the figure stood at 4.6 percent. Inflation seems to have factored into workers’ paychecks, ministry officials explained. Cons...