An increasing number of South Korean youth suffer from depression and sleep disorders due to stress, with many of them going untreated, data showed Tuesday. According to the data compiled by the National Health Insurance Corp. (NHIC), 23,806 adolescents aged 10 to 19 nationwide received treatment for depression last year, up 15.3 percent from 20,633 in 2006. During the five-year period, the shee...

Former Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook was acquitted Monday of charges that she took illegal political funds from a builder in 2007. This is the second time the ex-premier has been found not guilty of accusations by prosecutors. Last April the Seoul Central District Court cleared her of charges that she had received $50,000 from Kwak Young-wook, former chief executive officer of Korea Express, in...

Private personal information is readily available online a month after a revision of the personal information protection law took effect, leaving much of the population here at risk. According to Internet security experts on Monday, private information including resident registration numbers of Grand National Party lawmaker Na Kyung-won, who ran for Seoul mayor, civil servants and people with di...

Pharmaceutical firms vow to defy measure designed to reduce insurance expenditures The government plans to slash the price of about half the drugs on the market by an average of 14 percent, the Ministry of Health and Welfare said Monday. The price cuts, if approved by the Prime Minister’s Office in December, will be the largest since the government took away drug sales rights from doctors and g...

Police apprehended several Chinese students studying here for using cameras, mics and other devices to cheat on the state-administered Korean language test. According to the Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency, officers have arrested a 22-year-old Chinese national surnamed Ma, along with two others for helping Chinese students here on study abroad programs cheat on the Korean Language Proficiency ...

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...

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...

Third umbrella union to launch Tuesday, vowing ‘no politics,’ more benefits Korea’s labor unions had their day. With violent strikes and street protests, they made contributions to advancing democracy and improving labor rights in the 1970s and 1980s. But those days are gone. What unions need to do now is to break away from their stereotyped militant showdown with police and find a new way to a...

300 students including Chinese and Japanese expected to join program every year Major universities in South Korea, China and Japan will launch a joint degree program next year as part of efforts to expand academic exchanges, the Education Ministry said Sunday. The Education Ministry and the Korean Council for University Education announced 10 South Korean colleges and universities chosen to par...

The bodies of two pilots of a South Korean cargo plane that crashed into waters off the southern resort island of Jeju were recovered on Sunday nearly three months after the accident took place, Jeju maritime police said. The pilots ― Choi Sang-gi, the 52-year-old captain of the plane, and Lee Jeong-wung, his 43-year-old deputy ― had been unaccounted for after their Boeing 747 cargo plane operat...

The Seoul Family Court said Saturday it has granted 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 coo...