An instructor with U.S. citizenship was acquitted on the charge of secretly taking photos of a woman on public transportation, the Seoul Central District Court said Monday. According to the court, the 42-year-old man identified by his surname Kim was charged without detention for alleged sexual violence in October 2012.He was caught after taking a picture of a 20-year-old passenger sitting on the subway train at Gasan Digital Complex Station. The woman was wearing a short-sleeve dress with her l

Politicians and historians are pushing to gain UNESCO recognition for documents listing Koreans forced to work for the Japanese during the colonial period (1910-45). The records include the names of hundreds of thousands of Korean victims pressed to serve in the Japanese military or other types of forced labor, in three separate copies each compiled by the Korean government since 1953.The move came shortly after the South Korean government discovered new copies that identified 229,781 Korean war

The financial regulator has widened its probe into alleged corruption at a local bank to an all-out scrutiny against former heads of four major banking groups here, amid growing criticism over their arbitrary management, regulatory officials said Monday.The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), began to look into managerial-level malpractices involving the former chairmen of four banking firms -- KB Financial Group Inc., Hana Financial Group Inc., Woori Finance Holdings Co. and Shinhan Financial

Conflicts are escalating over new history textbooks as their authors vowed to defy a government order to revise them. “We won’t follow the order since the revision of history textbooks is beyond (the government’s) authority,” the group of authors of seven out of eight newly approved history textbooks said in a joint statement on Friday.The announcement came hours after the Ministry of Education ordered modification of 41 cases of what it claimed were “obscure and imbalanced” descriptions of hist

Prosecutors said Sunday they had charged nearly 30 people for involvement in dogfighting.Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office said it had arrested nine people, including gangsters suspected of hosting fights between pit bull terriers. Eight other organizers were added to the wanted list.Another nine, including dog owners and gamblers, were also indicted without detention, and 11 more participants were summarily indicted. They were found to have held some 30 dogfights over a year, largely i

A lower court on Friday ordered unionized workers at Ssangyong Motors to compensate the company and the police for inflicting financial loss and casualties during a 77-day strike staged in 2009.The Suwon District Court said it has ordered senior members of the union and umbrella union groups who led the protest to pay 3.3 billion won ($3.1 million) and 1.3 billion won to the carmaker and the police, respectively, saying their actions were “violent, illegal and unjustified.” In the 2009 strike, t

One of South Korea's most wanted fugitives and former gang boss, Cho Yang-eun, was extradited from the Philippines Friday.Cho, the former boss of one of the three major criminal syndicates in the 1980s, arrived in Seoul around 4:15 a.m. and was immediately taken into custody.Cho has been on a wanted list for charges of fraud after he fled to the Philippines through China in June 2011, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency (SMPA) said. He was arrested inside a casino in the northern Philippine cit