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...

President Lee Myung-bak on Monday vowed to revamp the national disaster prevention system and tighten safety standards, noting that last month’s deadly downpours could be repeated next year due to climate change. “The government’s priorities include comprehensive reexamination of existing disaster-prevention systems and strengthening the safety and disaster prevention standards,” Lee said in his...

Chief of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon is due in his home country Tuesday for talks with President Lee Myung-bak and senior officials over Korea’s U.N.-related activities and pending issues regarding the Korean peninsula, according to Seoul’s Foreign Ministry. Secretary-General Ban’s visit to South Korea will be the first since he was elected to a second five-year term as the head of the intern...

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...

Korean scientists have found the genes that enable plants to grow in harsh environments in a discovery that could help to produce plants resistant to natural disasters. Knowing the genes that help plants grow even when affected by saline, cold or arid habitats could offer a way to tackle global food shortages, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said Sunday. An international resea...