Author: Jae young

September 30, 2025SEOUL – The South Korean government is pushing ahead with a 4.5-day workweek, a flagship campaign pledge of President Lee Jae Myung, drawing concerns from the business community, which warns that reduced hours could undermine productivity and drive up costs.On the campaign trail, Lee proposed reducing the statutory workweek from 40 hours to 36 hours without a pay cut, with a goal of bringing Korea’s average annual working hours below the OECD average of 1,742 hours by 2030. The average Korean worked 1,874 hours a year as of 2023. Lee is ultimately aiming for a 4-day workweek, or…

September 30, 2025SEOUL – Nine forest trails at the Royal Tombs of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) will be open to the public from Wednesday through Nov. 30, the Korea Heritage Service announced Monday.Since 2019, the Korea Heritage Service’s Royal Palaces and Tombs Center has opened these trails during spring and fall. The center continues to maintain and improve the paths so that visitors can walk safely and reflect on the value of the Joseon Royal Tombs, which are designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites.This fall, a total of 19.59 kilometers of trails will be accessible at nine royal sites. The…

September 30, 2025SEOUL – The familiar voice heard in Seoul’s subway system will be replaced by artificial intelligence after the voice actress who has recorded announcements for 29 years stepped down as she receives treatment for cancer, Seoul Metro said Monday.Voice actress Kang Hee-sun had long voiced a total of 26 types of Korean-language automated announcements to enhance clarity. Kang is also recognized as the Korean voice of Shin-chan’s mother in the Japanese animated series “Crayon Shin-chan.” She resigned from that role in August because of her illness.“It is sometimes not possible to update recorded announcements due to the health…

September 30, 2025SEOUL – Out of all the babies born in South Korea, only 40 percent of the babies with foreign nationality and 60 percent of the babies with Korean nationality have received a state-funded health check-up, a government data showed Monday.A total of 39,520 foreign babies born here were eligible for a health check-up as of August, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Health Insurance Service data revealed by Rep. Suh Myung-ok of the main opposition People Power Party. Of those, just 15,859 had received a health examination.The South Korean government provides a total…

September 30, 2025SEOUL – The South Korean government said Monday that it will take up to a month to fully recover 96 core systems directly damaged in Friday’s fire at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, signaling prolonged disruptions in public administration.At a press briefing at the government complex in Sejong, the Ministry of Interior and Safety’s Vice Minister Kim Min-jae said the government planned to relocate and rebuild the damaged systems using the public-private cloud cluster based in the NIRS headquarters in Daegu.The timeline the government has laid out as of Monday spans at least a month, with…

September 29, 2025SEOUL – Korean American novelist Susan Choi, best known for her US National Book Award-winning “Trust Exercise,” has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for “Flashlight.”The Booker Prize described the book as “a thrilling, globe-spanning novel that mines questions of memory, language, identity and family.”“Flashlight,” Choi’s sixth novel, opens with a haunting scene by the sea: a 10-year-old girl, Louisa, walks along the beach one night with her father, Serk. He carries a flashlight. He cannot swim. By dawn, Louisa is pulled from the tide, barely alive. And her father is gone.From there, Choi unspools a sweeping family…

September 29, 2025SEOUL – The International Monetary Fund’s latest forecast for South Korea offers a small lift laced with a warning.Growth this year is projected at 0.9 percent, a notch above the IMF’s earlier estimate and neatly aligned with the Bank of Korea’s outlook. The uptick, fueled by resilient semiconductor exports and fiscal largesse at home, is the kind of revision Seoul is tempted to celebrate.But it should not. Buried in the IMF’s analysis is a sharper verdict: Without structural reform, the government’s aspiration of 3 percent growth is a mirage.The IMF’s mission to Seoul, which concluded this week, struck…

September 29, 2025SEOUL – The Ministry of Interior and Safety said Sunday critical infrastructure had been repaired at a government-run data center where a fire forced hundreds of electronic government services offline, but weeks of work would likely be needed to fully restore the systems.The National Information Resources Service, where the fire broke out, plays a critical role in providing government services, such as identity verification and issuing public records. The shutdown blocked access to government-run websites as well as public services such as Korea Post, Government24 and the mobile ID application.President Lee Jae Myung apologized in a meeting with…

September 29, 2025SEOUL – From Fifty Fifty and EXO-CBX to NewJeans, the ever-popular K-pop scene has recently been overshadowed by tampering disputes that insiders warn could shake the foundation of the industry.Tampering, in K-pop, refers to unauthorized contact by an outside party — typically a rival agency or producer — with an artist still bound by an exclusive contract.While such cases were sometimes overlooked in the past, the massive investments required to launch an idol group, and the increased rewards that come with the industry’s growth, have made a quiet settlement an increasingly tall order.Fifty Fifty dispute sets precedentThe most…

September 26, 2025SEOUL – Unification Minister Chung Dong-young once again acknowledged that South and North Korea function as “two separate states in reality,” while stressing that this did not mean permanent division, as South Korea’s ultimate goal remains unification.“Recognizing the two Koreas as separate states does not mean accepting permanent division. This is a pragmatic and realistic perspective, a flexible approach to managing inter-Korean relations,” Chung told reporters on Thursday during a briefing.“In reality, we are two separate states, and what we are doing is acknowledging statehood within the special relationship that has emerged as we move — albeit temporarily…