Antiquated North Korean airliners have been banned from operating in European countries for six years in a row as part of the European Union’s prohibition on 21 states that have failed to meet its safety standards, a U.S.-funded private radio station reported Tuesday. Under the EU ban, Pyong­yang’s Air Koryo can only fly two new airliners it purchased from Russia last year to the E.U. member sta...

The Seoul government is set to receive a massive database from Berlin on the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany to prepare itself for “sudden changes” in North Korea. President Lee Myung-bak has assigned the Ministry of Unification, which he initially planned to merge into the Foreign Ministry, with two main jobs ― preparation for reunification with the North and taking care of the incr...

South Korea’s prosecution is looking into whether North Korea was involved in the weeks-long paralysis of the South Korean farm cooperative’s banking system after finding some suspicious Internet protocol addresses originating from China, officials said Tuesday. Traces of break-ins into Nonghyup’s servers were discovered in a laptop owned by an employee of IBM Korea, the cooperative’s computer n...

As many futurists predicted, digital is dominant in many areas of our society and lawsuits are no exception. According to the Supreme Court, 79.5 percent of the suits filed with the Patent Court since April 26 last year, when the system was first adopted, were “paperless” electronic suits. About 47.9 percent were applied for online and another 20.5 percent were transferred to the digital system...

Army, Navy, Air Force to have two vice chiefs each under reform plan The Ministry of National Defense has decided not to introduce a system to rotate the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff among four-star generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force, officials said Tuesday. The decision has triggered concerns among military experts who said that the military’s reform drive aimed at enhancing...

SELANGOR - An angry husband, who was awakened from his morning slumber, beat up and stabbed his wife, Harian Metro reported. The woman is now in a coma and fighting for her life at a hospital, the paper said. A police source told the daily that the couple in their 30s had quarrelled at their home after the wife woke him up at about 6am on Sunday and asked him to perform his dawn prayers. After ...

South Korean college students spend less time on study and are passive in class, research showed Tuesday. A report released by the Korea Educational Development Institute indicated that full-time college students don’t devote much time to studying. The institute surveyed 2,019 full-time students attending four-year universities nationwide on their study habits from June 14-July 2. The report sh...

A fire broke out at SK Energy’s oil storage facility in Incheon Tuesday afternoon. No casualties were reported. Fire fighters have been struggling to put out the fire.

HANOI (Yonhap) -- A growing number of Vietnamese students are studying the Korean language at university, mainly to work at Korean firms operating in their country, local sources said Tuesday. More than 2,000 students are studying Korean at 10 universities nationwide, including Vietnam National University (VNU) in Hanoi and another national college in Ho Chi Minh, the sources said. About 150 pr...

A woman in Gwangju requested a police investigation after she received a can of butane gas from an online seller instead of the iPod she had paid for. Kim ordered an iPod from an online second-hand vendor who offered it at half the market price. After a phone call with the seller, the woman sent half of the money to the vendor’s account. But what Kim received was a can of butane gas. Kim tried ...

The ratification bill for South Korea's free trade agreement with the European Union is expected to pass the parliament's standing committee later this week, as the South Korean government has responded positively to rival parties' demand to offer transfer tax cuts to small livestock farms, removing the last remaining hurdle to the long-stalled free trade deal, officials and lawmakers said Monday...

South Korea is extending its travel restriction to all parts of Syria amid escalating violence between the country's protesters and government forces, the foreign ministry said Monday. Earlier this month, Seoul restricted its people from traveling to Syria's western governorates of Daraa and Latakia after dozens of people were reported killed there in violent government crackdowns. The Level 3 ...