President-elect Park Geun-hye on Thursday called for future-oriented ties with Japan, saying historical issues stemming from Tokyo's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula should not get in the way, according to her spokeswoman.Park met with former Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, who in 1993 made an official apology to women who were forced into sexual slavery for Japan's World War II soldiers. The issue of the former sex slaves, euphemistically called "comfort women," has long been

Delegations from some 140 countries have agreed to adopt a ground-breaking treaty limiting the use of health-hazardous mercury, the Swiss foreign ministry said Saturday.The world's first legally binding treaty on mercury, reached after a week of thorny talks, will aim to reduce global emission levels of the toxic heavy metal also known as quicksilver, which poses risks to human health and the environment."The new treaty aims to reduce the production and the use of mercury, especially in the prod

Serena Williams says Lance Armstrong let all athletes down by doping and lying about it for so long, while No. 1-ranked Victoria Azarenka says the disgraced cyclist ``deserves everything he gets.'' Williams and Azeranka, speaking Saturday after their third-round wins at the Australian Open, said Armstrong's confession after such vehement denials cast doubt over other sports. ``I think a lot of people now look and are like, `OK, if somebody (is) that great, what about everyone else in every other

U.S. lawmakers geared up for a tough budget battle Saturday after Republicans agreed to a three-month increase to the U.S. debt ceiling but made further extensions of the government's borrowing authority conditional on steep spending cuts.   The Republican-led House of Representatives will hold a vote next week on the temporary measure, Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced at the end of his party's two-day work retreat outside Washington.The move could help defuse a fiscal time bomb that Congre

The South Korean stock market is likely to be weighed down by the effects of a U.S. fund manager's decision to gradually exclude Seoul shares from its benchmark index, analysts said Saturday.The benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) finished at 1,987.85 this week, down 0.44 percent from a week earlier.The KOSPI, which started this week on the 2,000 level, lost ground, dogged by concerns over U.S. debt ceiling talks and Vanguard Group's move to switch into a benchmark index which ex

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, agreed Friday that the U.N. Security Council should work out a strong measure against North Korea for its December rocket launch "as expeditiously as possible." "On North Korea, we shared our joint commitment to strong action in the U.N. Security Council," Clinton said at a joint press conference with Kishida after their talks here. It was the first meeting between the two since Japan embraced the conservative g

Saudi King Abdullah appointed 30 women to the previously all-male consultative Shura Council in decrees published on Friday, marking a historic first as he pushes reforms in the ultra-conservative kingdom.The decrees, published by the official SPA news agency, give women a 20 percent quota in the Shura Council, a body appointed by the king to advise him on policy and legislation.One decree amended an article in the council's statute to give women representation on the body while the other named

The death of a South Korean diplomat in Saudi Arabia last week has been confirmed to be a result of a car accident, Seoul's foreign ministry said Friday, quoting a Saudi police report.The South Korean consular official, only identified by his surname Kim, was found dead inside his car, which had tumbled down an embankment near a motorway in the Saudi Arabian capital city of Riyadh on Jan. 2."Local police concluded that the consular official's death was caused by the accident," a foreign ministry

South Korea has been working closely with the United States to reclaim its wartime operational command from Washington in 2015 as scheduled, the U.S. Army chief of staff said Friday.Gen. Raymond Odierno was in Seoul for a two-day trip which included a meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Gen. Cho Jung-hwan. The topics included ways to strengthen the allies’ deterrence against North Korea  after the planned transfer of operational command."I'm very confident that South Korea is more than ca