Adding to renewed tensions between the two Koreas, North Korean soldiers guarding the truce village appeared armed Tuesday, as Seoul expressed its willingness to reciprocate Pyongyang’s redeployment of surveillance posts and heavy weapons along the shared border. Reports said Tuesday that North Korean soldiers stationed in the Joint Security Area were armed with pistols, in the latest in a string of moves by Pyongyang to resume military activities paused by the 2018 inter-Korean agreement

South Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Park Jin is to meet with his Japanese and Chinese counterparts in Busan on Sunday. The upcoming meeting in the South Korean port city will mark the first gathering of the top diplomats of the three countries in four years and three months. The Foreign Ministry in Seoul said in a release Friday that Park will be speaking with Tokyo’s Yoko Kamikawa and Beijing’s Wang Yi over the weekend to discuss a possible trilateral summit of the count

Another South Korean government-run online service suffered an outage Friday, marking the fourth such failure within the past week. A website and mobile applications providing online ID services went down, according to the Ministry of Interior and Safety. Friday’s breakdown in the government’s e-ID service comes a day after a website run by the Ministry of Economy and Finance-affiliated Public Procurement Service crashed on Thursday. The PPS website used by all government institution

North Korea said Thursday it would step away from an inter-Korean military agreement reached on Sept. 19, 2018, vowing to deploy new and more advanced weapons along the shared border. In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Thursday, North Korea’s Defense Ministry said its forces “will not be bound by” the agreement that created a buffer zone around the fortified border, and that all military measures “will be restored immediately” in a

Waleed Siam, the non-resident ambassador of Palestine to South Korea, said Monday that there was no connection between Hamas and North Korea, amid continued speculations of the Palestinian militant group’s alleged ties with the rogue country. “I can say in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinian authorities that there is no contact between Hamas and North Korea,” the permanent general mission of Palestine said in an interview with The Korea Herald in

As the April 2024 general election approaches, a crowded field of well-known names and familiar faces is anticipated to vie for a National Assembly seat. Minister of Justice Han Dong-hoon is widely considered a powerful card to play in the ruling People Power Party’s deck in the upcoming election, according to news reports and observers. Before he was appointed minister in President Yoon Suk Yeol's Cabinet, Han was a celebrated prosecutor who led criminal investigations into corruptio

South Korea, which boasts of being a world leader in digital government strategy and services, underwent a system failure of an unprecedented scale lasting nearly two days until Saturday. The outage forced the government operate manually while civil services were paused. The Ministry of Interior and Safety, which oversees the e-government systems, said Sunday that the operations should be able to get back to normal on Monday. The ministry added that “glitch in the network” was believ

As the 2024 general election looms, new third parties are emerging in Seoul as potential challengers to the established parties. The nascent third parties say they are launching their bids to challenge the country’s two major political parties -- the ruling People Power Party and the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea -- and to woo a considerable niche of voters who identify as independents. According to polls, support for the two main parties is hardly 50 to 50, with around a quart

South Korea’s Prime Minister Han Duck-soo made a final push to woo support for South Korea to host the World Expo 2023 during his trip to Paris, his office said Wednesday. The prime minister, who was in Paris from Sunday, met with 61 representatives from 50 countries to ask them to back Busan, the South Korean port city bidding to be host of the expo, with the vote less than two weeks away. “Unlike sporting events like the Olympics where countries compete for medals, expositions shou

Rep. Ha Tae-keung of the ruling People Power Party said Wednesday he submitted a bill allowing the South Korean government to place groups and individuals on the foreign terrorist list in the absence of a United Nations designation. Ha said the proposed amendment to the laws on counter-terrorism would let the prime minister, whose role is largely administrative and ceremonial, designate Hamas as a terrorist organization without having to wait for a designation by the UN. Hamas is an Islamist mil

Since its establishment in 1961 as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service has not only collected intelligence on cases related to North Korea, but also investigated them. Come January, the South’s most important intelligence headquarters will be barred from investigating cases related to North Korea. Rep. Kim Byung-kee of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, a former high-ranking official at the NIS, says prohibiting the intellig

South Korean ruling party’s reform committee is facing the possibility of an early disbandment amid an internal backlash over its unpopular demands. The People Power Party’s reform committee was formed on Oct. 26 to lay out a vision for realigning the party for the 2024 general election, and headed by a party outsider -- Yohan Ihn, a third-generation descendant of a US missionary who gave humanitarian aid during Japanese colonial times. Ihn has announced a series of reform measures i

South Korea’s Ministry of Justice on Tuesday held a high-level seminar with the International Criminal Court to mark the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute -- the founding treaty of The Hague-based war crimes court. The regional seminar, held under the theme of the “ICC and the Asia-Pacific: past, present and future of the Rome Statute -- vision for the greater regional solidarity,” was hosted in Seoul by the Justice Ministry and the Supreme Court on Nov. 14-1

South Korea’s spy service suspects Chinese agencies are behind the operation of fake websites posing as well-known South Korean news outlets to spread propaganda. The National Intelligence Service said Monday that Chinese press relations agencies Haimai and Haixun created phishing websites that look like websites of news outlets here and then generated a series of stories it said are “pro-China” and “anti-US." Some of the examples of the stories circulated by the pho

South Korea is likely to begin a trilateral discussion on the 52-hour weekly work cap, with the government moving to resume talks as the labor umbrella union returns to the dialogue for the first time in five months. The discussion will include the government's latest proposal on allowing exceptions to the legally set maximum of 52 hours of work per week. The Ministry of Employment and Labor said Monday that employers may be given more flexibility in arranging the work schedules on a weekly