President Yoon Suk Yeol returned to Seoul on Sunday following a three-day official trip to the Czech Republic, setting the stage for a South Korean consortium to finalize a nuclear energy deal worth 24 trillion won ($18 billion) in the central European country next year. Laying the groundwork for further discussions and procedures before the final signing of the contract, hopefully in March 2025, Yoon, Czech President Petr Pavel and Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala "reaffirmed their commitme

PRAGUE -- South Korea is poised to inject $37 million in joint research and development projects with the Czech Republic in the next decade, according to President Yoon Suk Yeol's office on Friday. Park Sang-ook, senior presidential secretary for science and technology, told reporters in a briefing in Prague that Seoul's estimated annual R&D budget spending will translate into a 20-fold surge compared with the level in the past from 1995 to 2015. Park added that the spending will g

PRAGUE -- South Korea and the Czech Republic will increase nonstop flights for the first time since 1998, as President Yoon Suk Yeol's visit to Prague is expected to offer people from the two countries more opportunities for exchanges. The growing potential of strengthened ties between the two countries -- partly with a South Korean group being selected as the preferred bidder for the 24-trillion won nuclear export deal in the Central European country in July -- led to a decision to "i

PRAGUE -- President Yoon Suk Yeol and the Czech Republic's Prime Minister Petr Fiala on Friday adopted action plans to implement the strategic partnership between the two countries for the next three years, seeking a wider range of cooperation beyond South Korea's potential nuclear export to the Czech Republic. Under the new action plan, effective 2025 -- or the 10th anniversary of the bilateral strategic partnership -- the area of cooperation between Seoul and Prague will no longer be limited t

PRAGUE -- The governments, state-run firms and private-sector companies of South Korea and the Czech Republic signed 13 memoranda of understanding to team up with one another for the entire process and delivery of the nuclear power unit construction project. According to the presidential office, these documents will allow South Korean and Czech entities to collaborate on the preconstruction, construction and postconstruction stages of nuclear power units, if a group of South Korean firms clinch

First verdict for Lee Jae-myung nears in his four legal battles, foreshadowing potential political shifts

Former President Moon Jae-in lambasted the North Korea policies of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration on Friday, saying they have led to the "most dangerous" state on the Korean Peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean War. Moon, a liberal whose North Korea policies centered on bringing lasting peace through diplomacy, attacked the policies of his conservative successor at a conference held in the southwestern county of Yeongam to mark the sixth anniversary of the Pyongyang Joint Declaration h

Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho on Friday called on North Korea to "immediately and unconditionally" send a detained South Korean missionary and five other nationals back home, condemning the North's yearslong arbitrary detention as grave human rights violations. South Korea's top point man on North Korea issued a rare statement marking 4,000 days after missionary Kim Jung-wook was arrested in Pyongyang in 2013. He was sentenced to hard labor for life on charges of spying fo

The presidential office on Thursday rejected former President Moon Jae-in's call for reviewing its approach to unification with North Korea, saying the previous government's dialogue-focused peace initiative is "unrealistic." A senior presidential official who accompanied President Yoon Suk Yeol on a trip to the Czech Republic made the remark after Moon criticized the Yoon administration's hard-line policy on North Korea and called for efforts to ease inter-Korean tensio

PRAGUE -- The presidential office denounced claims by opposition parties that the South Korean consortium, which became a preferred bidder to build at least two nuclear power units in the Czech Republic in July, had proposed an extremely low bidding price that could waste taxpayers' money following a rise in construction costs. The administration instead claimed that the pricing of the South Korean consortium, led by the state-run Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, was made at a reasonable level. It

PRAGUE -- President Yoon Suk Yeol's office on Thursday denounced liberal politicians' emphasis on the peaceful coexistence of two Koreas, reiterating the conservative administration's goal of achieving ultimate peace through reunification as enshrined in the "Unification Doctrine" in August. Contrasting reunification of the separated nations with coexistence, an official of the South Korean presidential office said in Prague on condition of anonymity that the peaceful reunification of

Seoul, Prague sign MOU to encourage companies to join Ukraine's postwar reconstruction projects

A parliamentary subcommittee passed a bill Thursday that calls for tougher punishment for digital sex crimes using deepfake technologies against children and teenagers. During a subcommittee legislative review session, the National Assembly's gender equality and family committee made the bipartisan decision to pass the revision of the act on the protection of children against sex crimes. The proposed bill calls for sentencing of at least three years imprisonment for blackmailing young people usi

South Korea's National Assembly on Thursday passed three contentious bills pushed ahead by the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, including one that mandates a special counsel probe into multiple allegations against first lady Kim Keon Hee. The special counsel probe bill passed 167-0 by the opposition-led parliament during Thursday's plenary meeting is an updated version of the one vetoed by President Yoon Suk Yeol in January. The previous version focused on appointing a specia

A bill has been introduced to lower the weekly working hours for underage entertainers, as related concerns such as young entertainers' health issues remain unaddressed. On Sept. 11, Rep. Kim Jun-hyuk of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea proposed a revision to the Popular Culture and Arts Industry Development Act to reduce the working hours of juveniles working in cultural industries, and apply different working hour caps for different ages. The revision would cap weekly working