Korea Times Politics & City Reporter
Anna Jiwon Park has been covering the politics at The Korea Times since the summer of 2024, when she joined the press pool for the Office of the President in Korea. Prior to that, she spent about five years reporting extensively on financial markets, regulatory authorities and the financial industry. She joined The Korea Times in 2019 after spending eight years as a broadcast journalist at Arirang TV, Korea’s leading global broadcaster, covering politics, defense and culture.
The Constitutional Court held its first official hearing on the impeachment trial of former acting President and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo on Wednesday, 54 days after his impeachment by the National Assembly in late December. The trial follows the fallout from President Yoon Suk Yeol’s controversial martial law declaration earlier that month.
Chinese social media app, Xiaohongshu — known as RedNote in English — has been flooded with unfounded anti-Korean claims, warned professor Seo Kyoung-duk, a longtime advocate of Korean culture.
The Constitutional Court decided Tuesday that it will proceed as scheduled with the 10th hearing in President Yoon Suk Yeol's impeachment trial on Thursday, despite a request by Yoon's lawyers to postpone the session. Yoon did not attend the ninth hearing, which began at 2 p.m. Tuesday.
A fire broke out at a resort complex construction site in the southeastern city of Busan on Friday, killing at least six people.
Following President Yoon Suk Yeol's emergency martial law declaration on Dec. 3, the ruling People Power Party (PPP) experienced a sharp decline in its approval ratings. However, since the end of that month, support has been rebounding, with recent polls at times placing the PPP ahead of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), raising questions about the factors behind the trend.
U.S. President Donald Trump reaffirmed the principle of "complete denuclearization of North Korea," outlining his administration's policy for the Korean Peninsula, Friday. This is the first time since his inauguration on Jan. 20 that the phrase "complete denuclearization of North Korea" has been explicitly included in an official U.S. diplomatic document.
Lt. Gen. Kwak Jong-geun, former leader of the Army Special Warfare Command, reaffirmed, Thursday, that it was President Yoon Suk Yeol himself who ordered him to remove lawmakers from the National Assembly on the night of Dec. 3, after the president made a surprise announcement declaring martial law.
A growing number of Korean government ministries have begun blocking officials from accessing DeepSeek, a Chinese open-source language model that has raised concerns about excessive user data collection and the potential for information leaks.
The National Assembly's planned on-site questioning session at Seoul Dongbu Detention Center, aimed at directly questioning key figures involved in the Dec. 3 martial law declaration, was canceled after former Minister of National Defense Kim Yong-hyun refused to cooperate.
President Yoon Suk Yeol urged key ruling party lawmakers, who visited him at the Seoul Detention Center on Monday, to unite conservative support. The president has been held at the facility in Uiwang, Gyeonggi Province, since mid-January.