The Seoul metropolitan government said Monday it will introduce new subway trains with wider seats beginning late next year. To be first introduced on Seoul subway's No. 2 line, each seat will be widened so that six people can sit in a row instead of the current seven.According to the Seoul city administration and Seoul Metro, each seat will be widened to 480 millimeters from present 450 and made of non-combustible materials.The exterior of the train will feature a white design, according to the

The number of college graduates outside the labor force has more than doubled over the past 15 years due to a rise in those who gave up looking for jobs amid a prolonged economic slump, government data showed Monday.South Korean college graduates who are neither employed nor unemployed reached 3.35 million in 2015, compared with 1.59 million in 2000, according to the data by Statistic Korea.From a year earlier, the number rose 4.7 percent."Companies recruit fewer workers due to lower global dema

A local movie about the abhorrent suffering of the Korean women who were forced into sexual enslavement by imperialist Japan during World War II topped weekend ticket sales, data showed Monday."Spirits' Homecoming" attracted 767,071 moviegoers from Feb.26-28, the first weekend after its cinema launch on Wednesday, according to cinema ticketing services. During the same period, the film was put on the silver screen 8,956 times nationwide and accounted for 30.4 percent of all weekend ticket sales.

China is likely to tighten its enforcement of U.N. sanctions against North Korea as the North's nuclear test and rocket launch this year appear to change a calculus of the Chinese Communist Party on how to solve the North Korean problem, according to a Chinese scholar on Monday. Last week's agreement by the United States and China on a draft U.N. resolution, which includes a ban on the supply of aviation fuel to North Korea, was evidence of the shift in Beijing's stance towards its only treaty a

President Park Geun-hye congratulated three South Korean athletes for winning medals at the International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation World Cup, Cheong Wa Dae said Monday.The bobsleigh team of Won Yun-jong and Seo Young-woo captured their second career gold medal, while skeleton slider Yun Sung-bin won silver at the eighth and final International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation World Cup in Konigssee, Germany, on Saturday.Park said in a message to the three athletes that she hopes that they

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed serious concern while in office in 2010 after learning that North Korea showed an American nuclear scientist a uranium enrichment plant in operation, according to newly released Clinton emails.Clinton called the development "very disturbing," according to a Nov. 13, 2010, email sent to her deputy chief of staff after he forwarded to her a report that Stanford University professor Siegfried Hecker wrote about his trip to the North that incl

The State Department made all-out efforts in 2011 to break a hold that a senator had put on the confirmation of then-nuclear envoy Sung Kim as ambassador to South Korea, newly released emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed.After serving as special envoy for the six-party talks on ending North Korea's nuclear program, Kim was nominated by President Barack Obama in June 2011 to be his top envoy in Seoul.The nomination, which had widely been expected to be confirmed easily by t