The South Korean professional football will have its earliest start to a season in 2022 to accommodate participation in the FIFA World Cup in November, the league office announced Thursday. The 2022 K League 1 season will kick off Feb. 19, the fastest opening to a season by eight days. The 2010 and 2021 campaigns both began Feb. 27. The dozen teams in the top flight will play 38 matches. They w...

The Gwangju Metropolitan Government will review legal measures to restrict Hyundai Development Company from participating in building projects in Gwangju, the city mayor said Thursday. “If legal measures allow, we will exclude HDC from participating in construction projects in the city for a fixed period,” Gwangju City Mayor Lee Yong-seop said during a briefing held on Thursday. Lee added that ...

Taking last year’s momentum of Genesis expanding its global presence, Hyundai Motor’s standalone luxury brand expects to increase its sales by 10 percent this year with its new lineups and electrified versions of high-end vehicles, its chief executive said on Tuesday. “We are expected to (sell) between 215,0000 to 220,000 (in numbers) of Genesis vehicles,” Genesis CEO Chang Jae-hoon told reporte...

Foreign investors' net purchase of South Korean securities was the biggest in 12 years last year due largely to their buying spree of local bonds, central bank data showed Thursday. Foreigners bought a net $38.71 billion worth of Korean securities last year, sharply up from $3.47 billion the previous year, according to the data from the Bank of Korea (BOK). It marked the largest figure since 20...

The delinquency ratio on loans extended by banks in South Korea inched up in November from a month earlier, the financial watchdog said Thursday. The rate for banks' won-denominated loans more than 30 days overdue stood at 0.25 percent as of end-November, up 0.01 percentage point from a month earlier, according to preliminary data from the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS). Compared with a ye...

South Korean banks' household loans declined in December due to the central bank's rate hike and tight lending rules, data from the Bank of Korea (BOK) showed Thursday. Outstanding bank loans to local households had come to 1,060.7 trillion won ($982 billion) as of the end of last year, down 200 billion won from the previous month, according to the BOK. The December reading compared with a 2.9 ...

The main opposition People Power Party (PPP) on Thursday sought an injunction to stop a TV station from broadcasting the recordings of alleged phone calls between the wife of its presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol and a reporter. According to news reports, Yoon's wife Kim Keon-hee spoke by phone with the person who works for the YouTube channel Voice of Seoul for a total of seven hours last ye...

Rescue workers found one person trapped under the rubble at an apartment building collapse site in the southwestern city of Gwangju on Thursday, but his fate is not yet known. The unidentified man was discovered near the handrail of stairs on the first basement floor of the damaged building in Gwangju, about 330 kilometers south of Seoul, and rescue workers were trying to remove concrete debris ...

President Moon Jae-in on Thursday ordered aides to come up with measures using excess tax revenue to help small merchants and self-employed people suffering from the economic fallout of COVID-19. Moon gave the instruction after he was briefed about last year's excess tax revenue, presidential spokesperson Park Kyung-mee told reporters. In the first 11 months of last year, tax revenue rose 55.6 ...

Doosan Bears' sidearm pitcher Choi Won-joon likes to live high in the strike zone. He threw his fastball about 58 percent of the time last year, and about 40 percent of those pitches sat in the top of the zone. Until last year, Choi wasn't always getting strike calls on those pitches. But things are expected to change this upcoming season, with the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) set out to ex...

The Seoul city government said Thursday it will invest a total of 345.9 billion won ($291.4 million) this year in projects harnessing such cutting-edge digitization technologies as metaverse, big data and artificial intelligence (AI). Up to 1,067 projects, including those to be pursued by the city's 25 districts, will benefit from the city's investment plan for "paradigm shift to digitization," ...

"Squid Game" creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has said he still believes in a humanity that moves people to put confidence in a better and more just society even under the life-and-death pressure of social survival games. "We are living in a society where people dare to tread on other people to survive," he said Wednesday in a pretaped interview by the Seoul-based Corea Image Communication Institute. "Bu...

President Moon Jae-in expressed his condolences Thursday to the family of an Air Force pilot who died after his F-5E fighter crashed into a mountain earlier this week. "I pray for the repose of Major Shim Jeong-min, who died in the line of duty while defending the nation's sky, and offer my deep condolences to the family members," Moon said in a message posted on social media. The aircraft cras...

Sixteen Cabinet members resumed their schedules on Thursday after they all tested negative for the coronavirus after attending the same meeting with an infected member. The members had to take virus tests and cancel their schedules on Wednesday after they attended the same Cabinet meeting with Second Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-moon, who tested positive for COVID-19, in Seoul the previous da...

South Korea will consider introducing a new visa category for foreign startup entrepreneurs to vitalize the domestic startup ecosystem, according to Seoul's justice minister. At a South Korea-Germany startup industry roundtable meeting in Berlin on Wednesday (local time), Justice Minister Park Beom-kye said Seoul will "review the adoption of a startup visa." "In order to vitalize our startup ec...