To attend a town hall-style meeting with President Moon Jae-in at Cheong Wa Dae, conglomerate leaders boarded a chartered bus at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry building in central Seoul. One by one, the top business leaders of the country began arriving at the building some three hours before the meeting was scheduled to start at 2 p.m. While most did not respond to reporters who as...

Seoul hosted Salon du Chocolat, a show dedicated to everything chocolate, over four days from Thursday to Sunday at Coex. The chocolate festival premiered in Paris in 1994 and has so far toured 16 countries around the world. Visitors could try their hands at dessert making at the cooking corner, shop for chocolate and drinks that go well chocolate such as tea, wine and coffee -- all of which wer...

University hospitals have notoriously long surgical wait times. Waiting periods at Korea’s five biggest general hospitals -- Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul Asan Medical Center, Samsung Medical Center, Severance Hospital and Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital -- average around two to three months. Nevertheless, a recent study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and ...

More than 18,000 people died from sudden cardiac arrest without previous symptoms or warning signs in 2017 -- making it a bigger cause of death than lung cancer, at 17,980, and road traffic accidents, which killed 5,028 in the same year. According to data released by the Korea Centers for Disease Control Wednesday, 25,859 people died from sudden cardiac arrest in 2017. Excluding accidental and s...

The Korean Bar Association said Tuesday its law license review board ruled in favor of a former judge who was convicted for secretly photographing a woman on the subway. The screening committee meeting accepted Hong’s application to be licensed as an attorney by a decision of 7-2, citing that the Attorneys-at-Law Act that does not disqualify a candidate with a criminal conviction if the punishme...

The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs’ latest report, published Monday, showed only 3 to 4 in 10 unmarried Koreans aged between 20 and 44 are dating, with even fewer tying the knot. In 2012, the percentage of men and women in a relationship stood at 33 and 37 percent, respectively, with fewer people dating as they get older. About 31 percent of men 30 to 34 years old were dating, an...

A stricter drunk driving law came into effect three weeks ago but it does not seem to have deterred people from drinking and driving. The National Assembly passed two revision bills on criminal laws and traffic laws on Nov. 29 and Dec. 7, respectively, to strengthen penalties for DUI. The amendments are widely known as “Yoon Chang-ho’s Laws,” after a 22-year-old soldier who died on Nov. 10 when ...

Over 60 percent of Koreans oppose former president Chun Doo-hwan’s interment at the National Cemetery, a final resting place reserved for those who made sacrifices for the country or other valuable contributions. In a poll released Monday, 61.5 percent of 503 respondents said Chun’s interment at the National Cemetery must be prevented even at the cost of revising the law. Some 26.8 percent said ...

An active officer at the National Intelligence Service was found dead Sunday inside his car, which was parked at a vacant lot near his home. According to a police station in western Yongin, a city located south of Seoul in Gyeonggi Province, the body of the missing NIS agent, 43, was found at 1:25 p.m. Sunday, nine hours after his family reported his disappearance. The police also found at his ...

Main opposition Liberty Korea Party on Friday launched a campaign to “deter Moon Jae-in administration’s media domination policy” and “restore normalcy at the public broadcaster Korea Broadcasting System,” claiming that the current government is “trying to seize control of the press -- including KBS.” A special committee has been launched by the party with an aim to impede “KBS’ destruction of t...

A woman in her 20s who called 119 in the midst of a suicide attempt was repeatedly doubted by the emergency service center during her request for help, but emergency services have denied that this affected the failed attempts to rescue her. On Nov. 27, a woman called the emergency services, asking to be rescued after she jumped into the Han River as an attempt for suicide. Following the call, t...

A Russian woman was found dead in a garden just outside a high-rise apartment complex in Incheon on Wednesday. The Incheon police reported Thursday that the 26-year-old cleaning service worker had fallen from the 28th floor of a building in the complex around 10 a.m. the previous morning. The police were alerted to the case by her colleague after she went missing while on duty cleaning the apar...

A divorced mother of three is facing charges following the death of her 4-year-old daughter on Tuesday. The suspect, whose identity remains undisclosed, said she found her daughter collapsed on the bathroom floor at 7 a.m. after she made the child stand in a corner as a “disciplinary measure” earlier that morning. While the girl was taken to the hospital by ambulance in the afternoon, she was pr...

Lee Soon-ja hailed her husband and former South Korea dictator Chun Doo-hwan as the “father of democracy” during an interview Tuesday with a right-wing online publication, drawing criticism from political parties on both sides of the aisle. Chun ordered an armed crackdown on a pro-democracy demonstration in May 1980, known as the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, resulting in an untold nu...

Seoul’s slogan “I.Seoul.U” meets the approval of 70.7 percent of the city’s residents, a poll conducted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government showed Wednesday. The poll, which involved 1,000 Seoulites ranging in age from their 20s to their 50s, showed 84 percent were aware of the “I.Seoul.U” brand and 70.7 percent held “a favorable view” of it. The results show a surge in citizens’ awareness sin...