A district court judge has requested its ruling on the constitutionality of the penal punishment for adultery. It is the fifth time the penalty for adultery has been be brought to the Constitutional Court, which ruled it constitutional in 1990, 1993, 2001 and 2008. Clause 24 of the nation’s criminal law stipulates that criminal conversation, the legal term for the offense of adultery, carries a...

Former National Police Agency commissioner general Kang Hee-rak, was on Wednesday sentenced to six years in prison for taking bribes from Yu Sang-bong, a construction site canteen operator and lobbyist. According to the Seoul Eastern District Court, he was also given a 170 million won fine and will forfeit another 170 million won he took in bribes from Yu. The former police chief received some ...

A South Korean securities company employee jumped from an apartment building to his death in a southern city on Wednesday in an apparent suicide after a recent stock market rout triggered by the grim U.S. economic outlook, police said. The 48-year-old man surnamed Seo was found lying dead in front of the gate to a high-rise apartment building in Daegu, 302 kilometers south of Seoul, at around 7 ...

Undergraduate and graduate students from 61 countries will take part in an annual model conference hosted by the United Nations at Songdo Convensia in Incheon, starting Wednesday through Sunday. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to give a keynote speech on Thursday, after which he will offer a special lecture to teenagers and college students at the nearby University of Incheon. S...

The local and central governments have come under fire for the nation’s lack of disaster readiness made apparent by the floods that ravaged the country this July. Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has also drawn criticism for his decision to continue with the already highly controversial plebiscite vote on free school lunches as scheduled despite the recent crisis. “As someone who should be managing flood...

A Korean man was found dead in an apparent suicide in an airplane lavatory on an international flight operated by an unidentified domestic air carrier, police said Tuesday. The 43-year-old man, identified only by his surname Yang, an employee of a private company, apparently hanged himself aboard the flight departing from the Chinese city of Guangzhou for Incheon International Airport on late Mo...

A woman was arrested for allegedly producing fake money in order to repay debts stemming from her lavish purchases of luxury handbags and cosmetics, police said Tuesday. The 27-year-old woman, surnamed Lee, is suspected of printing out 1.7 million won (US$1,560) worth of counterfeit bills and checks and spending them in violation of the local currency counterfeit law, according to Gangnam Police...

A Korean study has found that the prevalence of problem gambling in college students is nearly twice as high as that found by an earlier study on the general population. Daegu’s Catholic University conducted a study on 2,026 students nationwide, and found out that 11 percent of them were dependent on gambling or potential addicts. The study used the Canadian Problem Gambling Index to estimate t...

GWANGJU, Aug. 9 (Yonhap) -- Police said Tuesday that a Vietnamese woman married to a South Korean man has been booked without detention on charges of attempting to poison her mother-in-law. Last week, the 23-year-old suspect, whose name is withheld, allegedly put poison in food she had prepared for her mother-in-law in her home in Gwangju, some 330 kilometers south of Seoul, according to the Gwa...

CHEONAN (Yonhap) -- A home-made high-speed train stopped abruptly on its way from Seoul to a southeastern town Monday due to unspecified technical problems, the train's operator said. A locally-built KTX-Sancheon train was forced to pull over near Cheonan-Asan Station, 92 kilometers south of Seoul, at 7:58 p.m. Korea Railroad Corp. (KORAIL) said. The train was bound for Masan, a coastal town a...

While society moves toward the diversification of gender roles, TV commercials’ portrayals of women are still bound by stereotypes, the National Human Rights Commission said Monday. In its report on 2,046 TV commercials aired in 2010, it found that men were flexibly depicted, moving away from fixed perceptions of them in patriarchal roles. Women, however, were superficially and prejudicially por...