Author: Jae young
July 30, 2025SEOUL – South Korea will begin offering free education and child care to all 5-year-olds by subsidizing preschool institutions from July, as a step toward the government’s plan to make preschool education universally accessible by 2027.The Ministry of Education announced Tuesday that the Cabinet had approved a 128.9 billion won ($92.6 million) allocation for the second half of the year. It aims to support approximately 278,000 children aged 5 who are enrolled in either kindergartens or day care centers nationwide.This funding is part of a broader push to gradually expand free education and care to children aged between…
July 30, 2025SEOUL – With just days remaining before the US imposes steep “reciprocal tariffs,” South Korea is ramping up efforts to strike a deal, overhauling its negotiation package and closely shadowing key US officials as it tries to bring the 25 percent rate down.Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol departed Tuesday for Washington, where he is scheduled to meet US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday. Koo said he would press for a “mutually beneficial agreement,” pitching sectors such as shipbuilding as a cornerstone of bilateral cooperation.“We’ll explain our programs and explore long-term collaboration, especially in areas…
July 30, 2025SEOUL – Clad in the iconic green tracksuit from “Squid Game,” Ria dashes through South Korean landmarks, pursued by guards in pink jumpsuits. But this isn’t a teaser for a new season of the global Netflix sensation — it’s a tourism promotion video that has racked up more than 11 million views since its release on July 3.In another campaign leveraging the popularity of “All of Us Are Dead,” two high school students and Jason, a friend turning into a zombie, take viewers through major tourist attractions, blending the show’s zombie survival theme with explorations of scenic spots.The…
July 29, 2025SEOUL – Foreign Minister Cho Hyun will visit Japan and the United States this week to meet his counterparts, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday.Cho, who took office on July 21, will meet his Japanese counterpart, Takeshi Iwaya, on Tuesday. Cho is scheduled to attend a working dinner hosted by Iwaya. It will be the first in-person meeting of the two since Cho started his term.The two held their first phone talks on Thursday and agreed that bilateral cooperation is key to addressing geopolitical challenges at both the global and regional levels.South Korea’s top diplomat…
July 29, 2025SEOUL – A fatal shooting in which a father shot and killed his son during a family gathering has sparked widespread public criticism over what appears to be a delayed and disorganized police response in a country where gun violence is extremely rare.The Korean National Police Agency has launched an internal investigation into how officers handled the incident, including their response to multiple emergency calls.The shooting occurred on July 20 at the victim’s home in Incheon’s Songdo during a birthday party reportedly organized by the victim in honor of his father. Attendees included the victim’s wife, their two…
July 29, 2025SEOUL – As the Aug. 1 deadline for US reciprocal tariffs approaches, South Korea faces intensifying pressure to make politically sensitive trade concessions. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the dispute over American beef.On July 24, US President Donald Trump took to social media to praise Australia’s decision to open its beef market — including imports of cattle over 30 months old — and warned that countries refusing “magnificent” US beef were “on notice.” Among major US trade partners, South Korea now stands alone in maintaining such restrictions.What’s at stake is more than beef. South Korea…
July 29, 2025SEOUL – For more than a decade, a certain group of South Korean iPhone users passed around the same dry joke online: features like Apple Pay, call recording and transit card support would “only come to iPhone after unification with North Korea.”The comparison wasn’t literal. It was a way of saying these features felt so delayed that they belonged to the realm of the near impossible.But as of now, that punchline has expired.On July 22, Apple and T-money officially launched support for Korea’s nationwide transit card system on iPhones and Apple Watches. It was the last major item…
July 29, 2025SEOUL – Rising home prices in Seoul pushed the city’s average apartment price beyond 1.4 billion won ($1 million) for the first time, data showed Monday.KB Kookmin Bank’s monthly real estate report showed that the average price of apartment homes in Seoul reached 1.45 billion won in July, marking a 1.28 percent increase from the previous month. The figure climbed past the 1.4 billion won mark just three months after surpassing 1.3 billion in April.Apartment prices averaged 1.76 billion won in Seoul’s 11 districts south of the Han River, which bisects the city, while those in the 14…
July 29, 2025SEOUL – President Lee Jae Myung reaffirmed his administration’s push for peace on the Korean Peninsula on Monday as Pyongyang rejected Seoul’s gestures for an inter-Korean thaw.The liberal president highlighted the importance of “restoring trust” between the divided Koreas and building towards peace on the Korean peninsula, during a ceremony at the presidential office to present a letter of appointment to Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-jung said in a briefing.Earlier on Monday, South Korea’s presidential office said in a statement that Seoul will continue to take necessary actions to ensure a Korean Peninsula free of…
July 29, 2025SEOUL – Korea has proposed a multibillion-dollar project reportedly named Make American Shipbuilding Great Again, or MASGA, to the United States as Seoul makes an all-out effort to cut a better tariff deal with Washington ahead of the US-set deadline for tariff talks on Thursday, according to media reports on Monday.Citing multiple unnamed sources, the reports said Kim Jung-kwan, Korea’s minister of trade, industry and energy, presented the MASGA project and Korea’s vision for shipbuilding cooperation with the US during ministerial-level talks with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in New York on Friday.According to the reports, the MASGA…