South Korea’s chief of North Korean affairs will visit the United States this week to discuss Seoul’s recent policies on Pyongyang and pending regional issues, the Unification Ministry here said Monday. The visit will be first to the U.S. by South Korean Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik, who took over the post from his hardline predecessor last month. President Lee Myung-bak’s appointment of Yu h...

President Lee Myung-bak is set to leave for St. Petersburg Tuesday to hold summit talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev before heading to Cannes to attend the G20 Summit. At the summit with Medvedev on Wednesday, Lee will discuss bilateral cooperation while talks are underway between the Korea Gas Corp. and Russia’s Gazprom, as well as between Gazprom and its North Korean counterpart on p...

Following the defeat in the Seoul mayoral by-election last week, key figures of the ruling Grand National Party are looking to reach out to the public, especially young voters. Former chairwoman and presidential hopeful Rep. Park Geun-hye is to present on Tuesday a complex policy model, suggesting that welfare should be realized through employment and self-support, according to officials. She w...

Four military personnel were arrested this month on charges of hacking into e-mails of a professor at Chosun University in the southeastern city of Gwangju, military investigators said Monday. The Criminal Investigation Command under the Defense Ministry said that security operatives broke into the e-mails of Gi Gwang-seo, political science professor at the university, and downloaded nearly 700 ...

Police said Monday that they have rounded up nearly 130 criminal gangsters in the first week after declaring a war on organized gangs. On Oct. 25, Cho Hyun-oh, commissioner general of the National Police Agency (NPA), ordered police officers to aggressively use all means available, including firearms, to subdue violent gang members after police officers in Incheon, west of Seoul, came under fire...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly. The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held s...

The South Korean consul general in Irkutsk, Russia, has been called home to explain his conduct at a dinner with Russian government officials, a foreign ministry official here said Saturday. “We have summoned him earlier this week,” said the ministry official. “This is the first time to summon a head of an overseas mission for misbehavior.” The consul general to Irkutsk, whose name was withheld...

North Korea on Saturday denounced large-scale military exercises under way in South Korea as a “very dangerous preliminary war for invasion,” demanding the South halt the drills immediately or face “catastrophic consequences.” South Korea launched the Hoguk exercises across the country on Thursday for a nine-day run. On Friday, thousands of troops conducted maneuvers off the country’s northernmo...

The Seoul Family Court said Saturday it has granted a divorce to a housewife and ordered her husband to pay her compensation, finding him responsible for ruining the relationship with his constant belittling comments. The 37-year-old wife, identified only by her surname Park, filed for divorce, claiming she could not continue the marriage because her husband kept finding fault with the way she c...

The cities of Daejeon and Durban have signed a memorandum of understanding to formalize their close links in a new sister city relationship. The MOU with the South African city will assist in building partnerships between the local governments and in the private and civil sectors. In the agreement, both parties made a commitment to work together to create strong economic links, cooperate in are...