Netflix's product, tech, legal and human resources teams would be the most impacted, according to a memo from co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos.

Netflix's product, tech, legal and human resources teams would be the most impacted, according to a memo from co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos.

September’s Consumer Price Index report will keep pressure on President Trump and the Federal Reserve to tame intensifying price pressures.

The final inflation report before the 2026 election — showing price increases and stagnant wages — spelled bad political news for the White House.

This week, large swaths of Southern California will see Santa Ana winds. In the windiest mountain locations, gusts could reach 70 mph. Those winds can bring an increased fire risk, experts say.

U.S. inflation accelerated last month as gasoline and many other goods and services became more expensive just a few weeks before midterm elections.

Leaders of the EU’s 27 member states will instruct Brussels to “urgently” come up with new weapons to counter the imbalances they believe are caused by China’s economic policies, at a meeting in the Belgian capital on Thursday. The instruction – part of a draft statement being negotiated ahead of this week’s European Council summit – comes after the European Union and China reached a surprise deal in Beijing last week that will cap the number of Chinese hybrid cars imported to the bloc at...

Social Security benefits will increase by 3.6 percent in 2027, the Trump administration announced Wednesday. With the latest cost of living adjustment (COLA), Social Security retirement benefits will increase by $75 per month on average, according to the Social Security Administration (SSA). Last year’s COLA was 2.8 percent. The COLA applies to the nearly 72...

In her first briefing Zacharia read directly from a script. She paused and grinned when she uttered the words “Department of War" and mixed up the words “husband” and “president.”

'A journey that began 62 years ago,' Canadian folk legend Joni Mitchell captioned an Instagram post, while holding an American flag.

Hong Kong’s Fire Services Department has extended a scheme allowing property owners to install smart fire alarm systems rather than traditional safety equipment to another 6,000 old buildings, but conceded that no installations had been completed although the policy was rolled out over five months ago for 3,600 blocks. Lai Kin-mo, acting deputy chief fire officer for building improvement, said on Wednesday that while 300 buildings had expressed interest in installing the system, which can send...

Energy prices have surged since the start of war with Iran, lifting inflation in the United States.

In July 2025, Choi Min-kyeong brought an unusual suit against someone few would have tried to lodge a case against: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. It was the first time a North Korean defector filed a lawsuit against Kim, seeking damages for the torture and sexual violence she suffered in North Korea. "People around me said filing the lawsuit made no sense," Choi, 55, president of the Imprisonment Victims' Family Association, said in an interview with The Korea Times. "At first, a police officer who took my complaint thought it was ridiculous and dismissed it." However, in August, the Seoul Central District Court sided with Choi in her damages suit against Kim, awarding the full 50 million won ($37,210) she had sought. "I was happy and proud when I heard the ruling. I risked my life filing this lawsuit because I couldn't get my eldest daughter out. The 50 million won is just symbolic, calculated from court fees and legal costs, since even 500 billion won wouldn't satisfy my anger," Choi said, adding that the ruling established a legal basis to arrest Kim if he ever enters South Korea.

Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun marks six years at the helm on Wednesday, spearheading the automaker’s transformation into a global top-three auto player by sales and steering it into a key future mobility player focusing on robotics, autonomous driving and artificial intelligence (AI). The next phase of his leadership, however, will hinge on whether the group can turn its physical AI ambitions into profitable businesses. Chung is also tasked with addressing mounting pressure on its core automotive operations and labor relations. Since taking the top post in 2020, Chung has overseen Hyundai Motor and Kia’s rise to the world’s third-largest automotive group by vehicle sales, behind Toyota and Volkswagen. The group maintained that ranking for four consecutive years through 2025. Hyundai Motor and Kia’s combined annual sales also surpassed the symbolic mark of 300 trillion won ($223 billion) for the first time last year. The expansion reflects a strategy that combined electrification with a stronger focus on high-margin vehicles, including SUVs and Genesis luxury m

WASHINGTON — Hanwha Defense USA (HDUSA) and the U.S. Army have officially designated the American version of Hanwha's K9 self-propelled howitzer as the XM1776 Mobile Tactical Cannon (MTC), the company has announced. According to HDUSA, a U.S. subsidiary of South Korean defense giant Hanwha Aerospace Co., the company held a naming ceremony for the XM1776 at the Association of the U.S. Army's (AUSA) 2026 Annual Meeting and Exposition on Tuesday in Washington. In August, HDUSA was selected to provide prototypes based on a wheeled variant of the best-selling K9 Thunder self-propelled artillery system for the MTC program, which aims to develop a highly mobile 155-millimeter artillery system to replace the Army's aging M777 towed howitzers. HDUSA also announced that the U.S. Army has ordered a total of nine prototype XM1776 systems, with an option for nine additional units. The XM1776 is a wheeled artillery system designed to support the U.S. Army's modernization efforts, including improvements in mobility and long-range precision fires capabilities. "The XM1776 Mobile Tactical Cannon represe

When Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Yoo Mi-young was assigned to Udo Island, it was not the well-known tourist destination off Jeju but a much smaller island off Ganghwa in Incheon, near the inter-Korean maritime border. The scenery immediately caught her eye, but so did the significance of serving at one of Korea’s front-line military outposts. It is during nighttime guard duty, with the coastline quiet around her, that Yoo feels the weight of that responsibility. “When I look out over the coast in the stillness of the night, I feel a strong sense of responsibility for guarding the country’s front line,” Yoo said in an interview with The Korea Times. Yoo serves as deputy platoon leader of the Marine Corps’ Udo Guard Unit, part of the Yeonpyeong Unit, where her duties include coastal security operations, training and equipment inspections. Commissioned in July 2023, Yoo said she joined the Marines to challenge herself and serve her country. She was drawn to the demanding training and the chance to push her limits alongside fellow Marines, despite her family’s initial concerns about h

Students from the Department of Smart City Architectural Engineering at Chungnam National University donated all proceeds from the sale of locally themed merchandise at a regional festival to the university’s development fund. The university said five students met with university president Kim Jeong-kyoum on Tuesday and donated 728,000 won ($544) to the fund. The students — Shim Byeol, Park Ji-bin, Oh Yun-seo, Lee Yeon and Jang Seo-hee — were accompanied by their faculty advisers Kim Gyu-young and Lim Seung-cheol. As part of the Living Lab Capstone course, the students designed and sold merchandise at a regional festival as members of a team called “Oncheon Osungi.” Their products combined the appeal of Yuseong Hot Springs with Daejeon’s identity as a science city. The students ran an interactive booth at the 2026 Midsummer Night’s Yuseong Music Festa, held Aug. 7-9. They showcased keycaps inspired by Yuseong Hot Springs and the local specialty Pongdang Bread, as well as merchandise featuring the university mascot, Chacha. The university said the students designed and produce

A parent demands full marks for a written English answer, citing an email from a professor at an American university. In another case, a private academy challenged an English test score, and the dispute later led to a lawsuit over partial credit. These incidents, described in a casebook recently released by the National Secondary School Teachers’ Union, show the challenges facing discussions about introducing written-response and essay questions into Korea’s College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), potentially aided by artificial intelligence (AI) grading. The casebook accompanied a survey of 2,427 middle and high school teachers conducted from Sept. 7-30. Middle and high school teachers nationwide say persistent grading complaints have pushed them to set questions with fixed answers. They warn that expanding essay-based assessments could worsen disputes and increase their workload. Several teachers described a tension between encouraging diverse, well-reasoned answers and creating grading criteria precise enough to withstand complaints. One English teacher reported that a dispute inv

A Seoul district court on Wednesday sentenced independent lawmaker Kang Sun-woo to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges of receiving money in exchange for an election nomination. The Seoul Central District Court handed down the sentence for Kang, formerly a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), also ordering her to forfeit 100 million won ($75,000). Prosecutors had sought a four-year prison term for Kang, accusing her of accepting 100 million won from former Seoul city councilor Kim Kyung in January 2022 in exchange for a DPK nomination ahead of the local elections that year. Kang served as a member of the DPK's nomination committee for Seoul city councilors at the time. Kim was selected as a DPK nominee and was elected in the 2022 local elections. The court sentenced Kim to one year in prison and a former aide to Rep. Kang to an eight-month prison term, suspended for two years, for arranging the meeting between Kang and Kim. The court ordered for Kang and Kim to be immediately placed under custody, citing concerns of flight and possible destruction of evidence. The two were b

Korea is bringing together archivists and cultural experts from 16 Asia-Pacific nations in Jakarta, Indonesia for an international workshop focused on preserving historical records and preparing them for global recognition under UNESCO’s documentary heritage program. The 2026 UNESCO Memory of the World International Capacity-Training Workshop, running from Tuesday to Friday, is hosted by the Korea’s Heritage Service and Korean National Commission for UNESCO at the National Archives of Indonesia. Launched in 2009, the annual program provides practical training for countries seeking to identify significant documentary heritage and prepare nominations for UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, with particular attention to nations underrepresented on the international list. Over 17 years, 18 documentary heritage items from participating countries have been added to the register, while 11 others have entered regional registers, organizers said. This year’s workshop is the largest yet, drawing participants from Timor-Leste, Laos, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Sri Lanka, Uzbek

A special counsel team on Wednesday raided the National Election Commission (NEC) over suspicions of bid rigging involving around 5 billion won ($3.7 million) worth of election supplies. Special counsel Lee Tae-han's team said it sent investigators to the NEC's office and four other locations, including election supplies companies, to search for and seize evidence in connection with the allegations. Lee's team said it has found signs of alleged collusion between the NEC and the companies regarding polling station supplies for the presidential election last year and the local elections in June. The special counsel team launched last month to investigate ballot shortages reported across the country during the June 3 local elections in addition to other allegations of misconduct by the election watchdog.

Employees at a government-funded research institute responsible for national cybersecurity have been disciplined after they were caught playing video games together during work hours. According to data obtained by Rep. Hwang Jung-a of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's Science, ICT, Broadcasting and Communications Committee, from the National Security Research Institute (NSR), an affiliate of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), five employees at the institute's Cyber Security Training Center were disciplined after an investigation found that they had spent as many as 90 hours connected to Battle.net, the online gaming service used for StarCraft, during work hours. StarCraft is a strategy game developed by U.S. video game company Blizzard Entertainment. The five employees repeatedly accessed the game server on their work computers between September and December 2024 when their supervisor was away on vacation or business trips. One employee was connected for as long as eight hours and 53 minutes in a single day. Another was co

President Lee Jae Myung on Wednesday appointed the head of the National Tax Service (NTS) as his new chief of staff, his office said. Outgoing chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik announced the appointment of Lim Kwang-hyun as his successor, weeks after he offered to resign amid Lee's falling approval ratings and controversy over the qualifications of two Cabinet nominees, who ultimately withdrew. "(Lim) is a former economic official-turned-politician with both abundant administrative experience and political acumen," Kang told a press briefing at Cheong Wa Dae. "With experience across the National Assembly and government, he is the right person to more broadly incorporate the people's voices into the running of state affairs and speed up state achievements through cooperation between the ruling party, government and Cheong Wa Dae," he said. Lim served in various posts at the NTS before being elected a lawmaker of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea by proportional representation in 2024. He gave up his parliamentary seat upon taking office as NTS chief in 2025. Standing alongside Kang, Lim told

Korea has launched an ambitious national search for candidate sites to construct next-generation multipurpose indoor stadiums, aiming to address a chronic shortage of premier venues capable of hosting international sporting events and global K-pop concerts year-round. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said Wednesday that it will accept bids from regional local governments and public institutions through Dec. 8. The government plans to select two candidate sites by the end of December — one for a large-scale dome capable of seating at least 40,000 spectators and accommodating over 50,000 people for concerts, and another for a medium-scale venue designed for 20,000 to 40,000 seats. The multibillion-won initiative, targeted for completion in 2034, reflects the government’s broader policy agenda to expand public access to sports and culture while establishing iconic, world-class landmarks to draw international tourists and stimulate regional economies. The drive comes as Korea’s cultural and entertainment industries grapple with an acute lack of covered, mega-capacity arenas

A POSCO Future M employee introduces an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered integrated materials management system during the company's AI Festival event in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, Tuesday. The company said Wednesday that the event was held to share employees' achievements in using AI, with the company planning to select outstanding projects and apply them to actual operations by the first half of next year. The battery materials firm is introducing AI agents and AI-based factories across its operations, targeting a 30 percent improvement in manufacturing productivity and a 50 percent reduction in product development time by the first half of 2028.

SK hynix projected Wednesday that the performance scale of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure will grow roughly 20-fold by 2030, driven by rapidly rising demand for AI inference. Ahn Hyun, head of development at the Korean chip giant, made the projection during his keynote speech at the 2026 Semiconductor Exhibition (SEDEX), which opened earlier in the day for a three-day run in southern Seoul. Ahn said the AI inference market is expanding simultaneously in three areas — task complexity, the amount of information processed at a time, and the volume of inference requests. The interaction of the three factors is rapidly increasing demand for AI infrastructure, he said. As demand for AI inference surges, memory is becoming increasingly important for storing and transferring large volumes of data. In particular, the growing capacity requirements of key-value (KV) caches, which store and reuse information previously processed by AI models, are requiring data to be distributed across different types of memory, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM)

Hanwha Group said Wednesday it has appointed an independent director as chair of the board at Hanwha Corp., the group's holding company, adding that other listed Hanwha affiliates will also appoint independent directors as board chairs. During a board meeting, the holding company appointed Kwon Ik-hwan as the new chairman of the board, replacing Kim Woo-seok, who is the company’s construction division CEO. Kwon is a former prosecutor who served as head of the Ministry of Justice's Planning and Coordination Office and chief prosecutor of the Daejeon and Seoul Southern District Prosecutors' Offices. Since joining Hanwha Corp.'s board in 2022, Kwon has chaired the internal transactions committee and been a member of the audit committee and environmental, social and corporate governance committee. Hanwha Corp. said Kwon is expected to lead the board's decision-making transparently based on expertise in law and capital markets. The group said defense electronics unit Hanwha Systems and shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean will also appoint independent directors as chairs of their respective boards. Bot

Sung Jung-yong, a veteran bartender educator known in Korea’s drinks industry as a mentor to generations of bartenders, has been inducted into Keepers of the Quaich, one of Scotch whisky’s most prestigious international honorary organizations. Diageo Korea said Wednesday that Sung received the distinction in recognition of his contributions to the Scotch whisky industry and efforts to broaden understanding of whisky culture. Founded in 1988, Keepers of the Quaich is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Scotch whisky’s heritage and standing, with members active in more than 100 countries. Membership is reserved for individuals who have demonstrated sustained expertise and made significant contributions to the industry, with candidates nominated and selected through a rigorous review process. Sung began his career as a bartender at The Shilla Seoul and started training other bartenders in 2008, building a reputation as an influential educator in Korea’s hospitality industry. Since 2014, he has served as Diageo Korea’s brand ambassador and head of the Diag

LG CNS, the information technology services affiliate of LG Group, signed a memorandum of understanding with Japanese telecom company KDDI to work together on artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation projects across the Asia-Pacific region, the Korean company said Wednesday. KDDI is one of Japan’s three major telecom operators. It provides consumer mobile and internet services as well as business IT services such as AI, cloud and network infrastructure. It runs business operations at 19 sites in 15 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The partnership combines LG CNS’ AI and digital transformation expertise with KDDI’s telecom infrastructure and global network to find new business opportunities in AI, smart cities, telecommunications and integrated IT system management. The two companies will explore developing agentic AI services — AI systems that can carry out tasks on their own — tailored to local businesses in KDDI’s regional markets. The services will be based on AgenticWorks, LG CNS’ agentic AI platform. They will also consider working together on autom

Netflix generated more than 1 trillion won ($730 million) in revenue in Korea last year, but sent 81 percent of that sum to its U.S. parent company, leaving its Korean operation with an operating profit of just 20.3 billion won, according to an analysis of its financial statements. Rep. Han Jun-ho of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly’s Science, ICT, Broadcasting and Communications Committee, analyzed the audit report of Netflix Services Korea and found that the company’s domestic revenue rose to 1.0542 trillion won in 2025, up from 631.7 billion won in 2021. The figures highlight a widening contrast between Netflix’s growth and the financial struggles of domestic streaming platforms, with Tving reporting an operating loss of 69.8 billion won last year and Wavve losing 12.2 billion won. Netflix also dominated paid streaming subscriptions, with a usage rate of 46.7 percent, compared with 13 percent for Tving, according to the Korea Media and Communications Commission’s 2025 survey on broadcast media use. Of Netflix Korea’s 1.05 trillion won in reven