Iconic ’90s rock musician Shin Hae-chul, 46, was pronounced dead at 8.19 p.m. Monday at the Asan Medical Center in southern Seoul following a massive heart attack on Oct. 22, which left the singer in a comatose state for five days. Although it was previously reported that doctors were unsure of what caused the singer’s heart to suddenly fail, according to a statement from Shin’s agency, KCA Ente...

BRASILIA ― President Dilma Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla once imprisoned and tortured by Brazil’s military regime, upheld her reputation for toughness in a hard-fought campaign that won her a new term Sunday. Rousseff, Brazil’s first woman president, won a second four-year term in a tight runoff election against business-world favorite Aecio Neves. Rousseff, 66, is known as a no-nonsense...

PARIS ― Beyond the human tragedy of the Ebola epidemic unfolding in west Africa, the crisis is claiming a collateral victim: trust in the medical order. The biggest casualty is the reputation of the U.N.’s World Health Organization, which analysts fault for foot-dragging and misjudgements. Also under assault are Big Pharma, the West’s aid policies in Africa and public faith in the rich world’s ...

By picking one of its former executive members as the new chairman, KB Financial Group made it clear that it is determined to end its deep-rooted leadership strife. It has also proclaimed that it will no longer welcome government meddling in its personnel management. On Wednesday, KB Financial Group’s chairman nominee recommendation committee said it had named Yoon Jong-kyoo, former chief financ...

Conflict between President Park Geun-hye and her party has escalated, with Cheong Wa Dae publicly firing back at the party chief, after he attempted to open a discussion on constitutional revision. On Tuesday afternoon, a high-ranking official at Cheong Wa Dae criticized Saenuri Party chairman Kim Moo-sung, charging that the remark he made last week was calculated, not a mistake. “We believe th...

A giant yellow rubber duck sitting on Seoul’s Seokchon Lake has captured the hearts and minds of thousands of South Koreans, while carrying the hopes of a local retail giant trying to dampen public fears over a controversial construction project in a posh Seoul neighborhood. Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s rubber duck, weighing seven tons with a concrete anchor and pontoon that supports it, arr...

Public safety has once again gripped the National Assembly with the recent ventilation shaft accident making the ruling and opposition parties hone in on related issues. On Friday, grates covering a ventilation shaft collapsed under the weight of people watching a K-pop performance in Techno Valley in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. The accident killed 16 people, and injured 11, eight of whom are s...

The innumerable ventilation shafts around the country may be accidents just waiting to happen, with no regulations to ensure their structural integrity. With thousands of ventilation shafts, covered by metal grates, located in Seoul alone, their construction is subject to almost no safety regulation, often leaving it up to the construction companies to build according to their internal regulatio...

The appearance of North Korea’s military spy chief Kim Yong-chol at rare inter-Korean military talks on Wednesday has left many observers wondering what message Pyongyang wanted to convey through sending the hawkish figure. Some analysts argued that the head of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, well-known for spearheading provocations against the South, attended the talks to show Pyongyang’s re...

GENEVA ― The World Health Organization said Tuesday the Ebola infection rate could soon reach 10,000 a week as world leaders prepared to hold talks on the crisis at the United Nations. WHO assistant director general Bruce Aylward, describing his figures as a working forecast, said the epidemic “could reach 5,000 to 10,000 cases per week by the first week of December.” The latest death toll is 4...

PARIS ― French economist Jean Tirole is a master of game theory and industrial organization, who on Monday added a Nobel prize to a gleaming heap of honors for his work. The 61-year-old was hailed by the Nobel Economics Prize jury as “one of the most influential economists of our time” for his analysis of big companies, market power and regulation. The professor at the Toulouse School of Econom...

Homeplus, one of South Korea’s largest grocery chains, will have to explain during a parliamentary inspection what seems like an intentional leakage of its customers’ private information to third parties. Its alleged wrongdoings come at a time when public criticism is growing against the country’s weak security protection systems, following a series of information theft, leaks and monitoring. H...

Steered by North Korean defectors and activists, civic groups and their anti-Pyongyang leaflets have long goaded the Kim regime into fury at what it calls an act of hostility. The two Koreas traded fire Friday after the North began shooting heavy machine guns, apparently aiming at balloons launched by two organizations which were filled with flyers denouncing the communist regime, $1 bills, mini...

When people think of Korea, many identify the country with K-pop, TV dramas and, to a lesser extent, films. As the Korean wave, or Hallyu, has been shaped around the popular Korean culture, the country is taking the chance to prove the excellence of other aspects of Korean culture. This time, young Korean writers and editors have gathered to introduce contemporary Korean literature. Under the t...

PARIS ― Just over 20 years ago, three physicists working in two laboratories in Japan cracked a problem that had stumped rivals for decades ― how to prise blue light from a semiconductor. The feat paved the way to a low-energy source of light for illuminating homes, buildings, computers and mobile phones. On Tuesday, it earned Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura the 2014 Nobel Physi...