Authorities on Wednesday decided to lift the evacuation order on the high-rise office building and its adjacent shopping mall, despite being unable to discover the reason behind Tuesday’s tremors.　“Through emergency inspections for the past two days, we have not found any major issues with the structure of the building,” said Park Jong-yong, vice chief of the Gwangjin district office.“In order to

The nation’s financial regulator is investigating four major commercial banks on suspicion of unauthorized lending, banking sources said Wednesday.The four facing a probe are Kookmin, Woori, Shinhan and Hana, and the Financial Supervisory Service has recently completed its preliminary examination of the banks, the sources said.The unauthorized lending practice refers to banks’ demand that borrower

The newly-elected chairperson of the ruling Grand National Party Rep. Hong Joon-pyo expressed concerns over the party’s recent outspoken comments on conglomerate policies.“The key point in backing small- and medium-sized businesses is to come up with active measures to help them, not to extort from large businesses,” Hong said in a radio interview on Wednesday.By this, he referred the party’s poli

The government is considering levying health promotion tax on alcohol and junk food in a bid to cut snowballing medical costs for treating chronic illnesses. A Ministry of Health and Welfare committee on Wednesday considered the new tax as a way to extend the country’s disability-adjusted healthy life expectancy to 75 years by 2020. According to the World Health Organization’s definition, the DAHL

Chey Jae-won, SK Group’s senior vice chairman and younger brother of Chairman Chey Tae-won, has been banned from travelling overseas on allegations that he amassed tens of billions of won in illicit slush funds. The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, which leads the probe, suspects that the younger Chey raised the funds by falsifying the value of transactions between the group’s subsidiar

The European Union will send 50 personnel fluent in Korean to North Korea soon to tighten the monitoring of the donated food there, a U.S.-funded radio station reported Wednesday. The plan comes as the EU announced earlier this week it will send food aid worth 10 million euros, or $14.5 million, to North Korea to feed the starving people. The first batch of food will be distributed in four of Nort

WASHINGTON (Yonhap News) ― North Korea or unidentified forces aligned with the communist nation may be preparing for full-fledged cyber-terrorism against South Korea or the United States, based on its “test” attacks in 2009 and earlier this year, a U.S. Internet security firm said Tuesday.In a special report, McAfee Inc. said North Korea or its “sympathizers” seem to have been responsible for the

On food aid...Food is a basic human need with water, shelter, education and primary health care. It is a prerequisite for health -- the most important component of human resource development. Food security is now listed among the social determinants of health which is clearly a determinant of HRD - life, dignity, civil society, progress, justice and sustainable development. As an awakened academic