After concluding a mega licensing deal with global pharma giant Sanofi, leading South Korean drugmaker Hanmi Pharmaceutical is emerging as a rising star in the local stock market. Hanmi shares soared by around 30 percent Friday to reach 711,000 won ($624.3), lifted by a 4.9 trillion won licensing deal with Sanofi. Some stock market analysts raised the drugmaker’s target stock price to 1 million...

The presidents of China and Taiwan will meet this weekend in Singapore, the two sides said Wednesday, in the first such talks between the rivals since they split at the end of a civil war in 1949. Seen as an attempt to boost the pro-Beijing Kuomintang's chances in Taiwan's presidential elections in January, the surprise meeting is likely to rattle voters already concerned about Beijing's growing...

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) ― Mystery and confusion surrounded the final moments of a Russian jetliner that plummeted suddenly from high altitude to the Egyptian desert, killing all 224 people aboard. The airline Monday ruled out pilot error or a technical fault, but Russian aviation officials dismissed those comments as premature. Some aviation experts raised the possibility that a bomb on boar...

Turks woke on Monday to a country once again under the sole control of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, which swept back into power in a surprise election win seen as a crucial test for the troubled nation. The AKP party founded by the divisive strongman, who has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade, won 49.4 percent of the vote to secure 316 seats in ...

After years of bitter ties between Seoul and Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived at Seongnam Airbase, Gyeonggi Province, Sunday, for a trilateral meeting and his first-ever talk with President Park Geun-hye on Monday. Though previous leaders of the two countries have held summits at least once a year ― visiting each other quite on a regular basis ― Monday’s summit is the first of i...

The presumptive next speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is a onetime “young gun” of the Republican Party ― a conservative with a wonkish reputation who is clearly driven by higher political ambition. Paul Ryan was nominated by his Republican colleagues Wednesday to lead the fractious House through the end of the Barack Obama presidency and potentially beyond. It is the mos...

Apple said Tuesday that surging iPhone sales helped propel a sharp rise in quarterly profits, as the tech giant delivered a record 48 million of the smartphones. Profits rose 31 percent to $11.1 billion, while revenues jumped 22 percent from a year ago to $51.5 billion, Apple said. The California tech giant, which in September unveiled revamped versions of the iPhone, said the number of units s...

Cho Seong-jin, the winner of the Chopin piano competition, is a new classical music icon in Korea, setting recording history even before the release of his first solo album. The 21-year-old pianist’s upcoming album – a live recording of his performances at the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Poland – was the top seller across all music genres at Kyobo Bookstore, the coun...

Poland’s conservative Law and Justice party won an outright majority in Sunday’s general election on anti-refugee rhetoric and welfare promises, ending eight years of centrist rule. Analysts said the next government’s first moves would be closely scrutinized, given the risk that nationalist policies could inflame tensions with the European Union and Russia. An exit poll by public broadcaster TV...

US Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that Israel had agreed on steps to calm tensions over Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, at the center of Palestinian unrest, including 24-hour security cameras. Several hours later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated his pledge of "upholding unchanged the status quo of the Temple Mount", as Jews refer to the highly-sensitive site, which al...

Apple Inc.'s two latest smartphones went on sale in South Korea on Friday, with the industry poised to keep close tabs on the market for possible overheating on the retail front. The country's three major mobile carriers -- SK Telecom Co., KT Corp. and LG Uplus Inc. -- released the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus for sale via their respective retail stores nationwide. The iPhone 6s is available fo...

Artist Chun Kyung-ja, whose death in the past summer was revealed to the public Thursday, was a female cultural icon in Korea’s male-dominated art society. According to the Seoul Museum of Art, Chun died on Aug. 6 in New York, where she had lived since 1998. The artist, who was 91, reportedly had a cerebral hemorrhage in 2003 and had suffered from poor health since then. “It was reported to me ...

A 21-year-old Korean pianist won Poland’s Chopin competition Tuesday -- one of the most prestigious contests in the piano world and considered a launch pad for an international career. Cho Seong-jin beat 77 other young pianists from 20 countries to take home the gold medal and prize of 30,000 euros ($33,500) at the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, held every five years in th...

Canada’s Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, the son of a popular former prime minister, won the general election in a landslide, television networks projected -- a stunning defeat for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Networks CBC and CTV projected the 43-year-old Trudeau -- who ran a combative campaign and offered up what he called a bold “new vision” for the nation -- would form a majority governmen...

President Park Geun-hye’s surprising personnel shake-up on Monday was widely seen as a move to reprimand her foreign affairs team for its failed mission to persuade the U.S. to transfer fighter jet technology to Korea. Park named Kim Kyou-hyun, the National Security Council secretariat chief, as her new senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and national security. Kim replaces Ju Chul...