Roberts, who is an author and was last seen in a telenovela five years ago, says this new role is so meaty that she couldn't resist it.

Donald Tusk, the head of the European People's Party and the former president of the European Council, says the coronavirus crisis could spell the end for the EU. He urges Germany to show more solidarity with weaker countries and hopes to prevent Hungary from becoming a dictatorship.

Iceland has the coronavirus pandemic better under control than most other countries. In an interview, Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir explains the next important steps for her country.

The first coronavirus infection in the United States was confirmed in Seattle 100 days ago. A team of DER SPIEGEL reporters has documented what has happened since, following a dozen people as they struggle to come to terms with the health catastrophe.

A growing number of people in Germany are resisting lockdown measures imposed to contain the coronavirus. The rift between those who support the measures and those who are critical of them is growing.

On March 4, Pakistan national Muhammad Gulzar was shot and killed at the Greek-Turkish border. Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the bullet came from a Greek firearm. An investigation into the tragedy at the edge of Europe.

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Ahead of the lower court decision on the definition of ordinary wage involving Kia Motors as a defendant, the nation's car makers warned that they would move their plants overseas if Kia loses the lawsuit. The Korea Automobile Manufacturers Association whose members include Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, GM Korea, Renault Samsung, and Ssangyong Motor, said in a statement, "If Kia Motors must pay an additional labor cost of 3 trillion won after the ordinary wage litigation, we have no choice but to c...

ZZQC International Business Group, China's major investment firm, will likely take part in Cityscape Korea 2017, the nation's largest international real estate trade show, signaling that it is moving into the Korean market in earnest. According to the secretariat office of Cityscape Korea on August 8, ZZQC will set up a booth in the Korea Economic Daily-sponsored exhibition and send five top executives to meet local developers and public agency officers. During the trade show period, the C...

Daehan Shipbuilding, a mid-sized shipbuilder in Haenam, South Jeolla Province, is seeing its order booking volume rise fast. During the first half of this year, the company won orders that exceeded twice the annual goal. Unlike any other shipyards that stopped operations of docks, Daehan has secured orders worth more than two years. It is also increasing hiring, which is rare in the shipbuilding industry. Daehan clinched deals of building 14 "Aframax" ships (115,000 metric tons) during the fi...

President Moon Jae-in said on August 15, "Another war in the Korean Peninsula must be resisted at any cost. Military action on the Korean Peninsula can only be decided by South Korea and no one else can decide to take military action without the consent of South Korea." In congratulatory remarks in celebration of the 72nd Liberation Day in Seoul's Sejong Culture Center, he said in relation to the North Korean missile crisis, "The government will do everything it can to prevent a war with Nort...

The Moon Jae-in government has decided to pay 100,000 won (US$88) a month per child younger than 5 years beginning in July next year. The basic pension payment of 200,000 won currently given to low-income (lower 70% of income scale) senior citizens older than 65 years will be increased to 250,000 won from April next year.  The additional expenses for these two items will be 13.4 trillion won for children's allowance and 29.5 trillion won for senior citizen pension payments for the next...

Samsung Engineering said on August 16 that it won two petrochemical power generation projects worth 550 billion won jointly with PTT Public Company Ltd., a Thai state-run oil company. This has been less than a week since the Korean company announced a large-scale oil refinery building project in Oman worth more than 1 trillion won. The project calls for building a petrochemical plant and an electricity generation plant in Rayong, Thailand's largest industrial city 150 kilometers southeast of ...

LG Siltron, a wafer maker acquired early this year by SK Group, held an extraordinary shareholders meeting on August 17 and decided to change its name to SK Siltron. Back in January this year, SK Corp., SK Group's holding company, decided to purchased a 51-percent stake in LG Siltron at 620 billion won and has since completed merger tests with competition authorities in major countries including China. SK Siltron was ranked No. 4 in the world last year in the 300-mm wafer area. The semiconduc...

President Moon Jae-in said on August 17, "The denuclearization bid by the current government is not so radical. It will take more than 60 years for us to reach that goal." In an interview in celebration of the 100th day since taking power, President Moon said, "The design life of nuclear reactors that were launched recently or under construction is 60 years. We plan to close reactors one by one as soon as their design life expires." His remarks are in reponse to criticism that his government'...

Hyundai Merchant Marine is pushing forward with a plan to attract an investment of up to 1 trillion won from BlackRock, the world's largest asset management firm. According to investment banking industry and shipping industry sources on August 20, the company is currently in talks with BlackRock to bring in an investment of 600 billion won to 1 trillion won. The investment will be made in the form of BlackRock taking part in a capital increase by Hyundai. Once the deal is successful, the equi...

The Thailand unit of Samsung Life, which has continued its presence in the Southeast Asian country even after most Korean financial service firms had withdrawn, turned to the black for the first time in 20 years. Samsung Life said on August 22 that Samsung Life Thailand's net profit for the second quarter was 340 million won. Given the Thai subsidiary is doing quite well in the third quarter, it is expected to post a positive net profit for the whole year. Back in 1997 Samsung Life establishe...

The household debt balance has rapidly increased to approach 1,400 trillion won (US$1.24 trillion) as of the end of June this year. It is estimated the balance may have surpassed the 1,400-trillion-won level by mid-August. As the amount of household debt reaches 90 percent of the gross domestic products (1,637 trillion won at the end of last year), economists began warning the high debt level may pose an obstacle to further growth.According to the Bank of Korea on August 23, the balance of house...

Hyundai Motor is currently in the works to develop a pickup truck model for the U.S. market. Michael O'Brien, vice president in charge of product planning for Hyundai Motor America, said on August 22 in a press conference, "The top management approved a project to develop a pickup truck model." Pickup trucks are highly popular in the United States. There is only one pickup truck model available in Korea, which is Ssangyong Motor's Korando Sports.Hyundai Motor unveiled a pickup truck concept mode...

Despite the record-high results, the R&D investment level of the nation's petrochemical industry is still miserably low. According to industry sources on August 28, the amount of R&D investment of Lotte Chemical, which achieved a record-high sales revenue of 7,849.4 billion won in the first half, fell short of 44.5 billion won. This is only 0.57 percent of the total sales. Even last year when the company posted the highest operating profit (2,547.8 billion won) among all petrochemical...

SK Engineering & Construction has won a large-scale petrochemical plant project in Thailand. The company said on August 29 that it clinched a deal worth US$210 million to build polyol plant within the Hemaraj industrial zone in Thailand's Rayong. This followed news that the company signed a $1.6-billion project to modernize an oil refinery in Iran earlier this month. The plant, located 150 kilometers southeast of Thailand's capital Bangkok, is commissioned jointly by PTT Global Chemical, ...

Global furniture and home furnishing company IKEA has earned 365 billion won in sales for the past one year in Korea. The company said that it would open a total of six stores in Korea starting with a second store in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, followed by Yongin (Gyeonggi) and Gyeryong (South Chungcheong) by 2020. Andre Schmidtgall, president of IKEA Korea, said on August 29 in a press briefing held in Bread Comma in Seoul's Yeonnam-dong that his company's sales revenue for the 2017 fiscal ye...

After phone calls with Korean President Moon Jae-in on September 1 and 4, Donald Trump U.S. President said the Korean government agreed to purchase American-made weapons and military equipment worth several billion dollars. The White House revealed the news on September 4 that in phone calls between the two leaders "President Trump approved in principle to lift the weight limit of missile warheads the Korean military can mount." In a September 1 announcement, the White House also said simi...

The negotiation to sell off Kumho Tire to China's Double Star Tire broke apart. The creditors including Korea Development Bank held a shareholders meeting and decided not to accept a request by Double Star to lower the price. A Korea Development Bank official explained, "As Double Star made demands we can't accept including an additional 10-percent discount from the original price of 800 billion won, we had to say no to the offer." In July this year, the Chinese tire maker began making dem...

The market value of LG Group companies has moved up to the third place after overtaking that of Hyundai Motor Group following Samsung and SK. Hyundai Motor lost out to LG after giving away the second place to SK Group in June this year. According to the Korea Exchange on September 6, the aggregate market capitalization (including that of preferred stocks) of LG Group's 16 publicly listed affiliates was 96,883 billion won as of the end of September 5. On the same day, the value of 16 publicly ...

As international coal prices are on the rise, Hanwha Chemical's prospect is getting brighter. That's because the Korean company uses naphtha to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC) while its rivals in China are largely based on coal, which will make it more price competitive vis-a-vis the Chinese chemical producers. According to Korea Resources Corp. and chemical industry sources on September 10, the freight-on-board (FOB) price of bituminous coal out of the Chinese port of Qinhuangdao was US$95....

LG International Corp., Korea's leading general trading company, is set to kick off the operation of a cement factory in Myanmar for which it has invested for two years. This is part of the company's strategy to preempt the rapidly growing Myanmar market by becoming the first general trading firm to build a cement plant in the Southeast Asian nation. According to industry sources on September 11, LG International is currently making a pilot run of the cement plant in the erstwhile reclusive c...

Park Sam-koo, chairman of Kumho Asiana Group, will submit a self-rescue plan for Kumho Tire that includes the sell-off of Chinese plants to the creditors by September 12. In addition, he will sell off a 4.4-percent stake in Daewoo Engineering & Construction worth 130 billion won while asking executives to return their pays as part of the restructuring measures. An industry official familiar with the matter said on September 11, "Kumho Asiana will soon deliver to the creditors a high-inten...

Central bank governors of three East Asian countries including China, Japan, and Korea will get together and discuss issues such as debt and macroeconomic soundness. But the issue of the Korea-China currency swap deal which will expire on October 10 won't be one of the official agendas in the meeting. Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol, People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, and Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda will meet in Incheon's Songdo for two days on September 13-14 in th...

The government is pushing forward with a plan worth US$8 million to help out vulnerable people in North Korea. Meanwhile it won't raise a lawsuit against China with the World Trade Organization in relation to the latter country's retaliatory measures after Korea's decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile defense system in its soil. Baek Tae-hyun, spokesperson for the Ministry of Unification, said on September 14, "We are reviewing a plan to give $8 milli...

Private-sector power generators are complaining mightily about the government's pressure on them to switch coal-fired power plants they are building into ones based on liquefied natural gas. That's largely because the government is mum about the sunk cost and other costs to retrofit the plants estimated to be as high as 2.6 trillion won. According to private-sector power generation industry sources on September 17, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy requested to POSCO Energy, SK Gas,...

MBI, a Korean manufacturer specializing in making transmissions, will build an electric car plant in Hanoi, Vietnam, jointly with local firm N&G Group. The two companies will invest a total of US$1 billion for the next seven years. The companies said on September 21 that the heads of the two companies signed an agreement to establish a joint venture called Viko Motors in South Hanoi next month. Earlier in June this year, MBI was promised by the Vietnamese government and the Hanoi city gov...

The government has decided to give support to North Korea worth US$8 million in programs helping its vulnerable people including children and pregnant women indirectly through international organizations. It, however, has not decided when to start sending money and exactly how. This is interpreted as a choice to deflect criticism that it is undertaking an aid project at a time when North Korea is causing an international storm by launching a series of missile tests. On September 21, the gover...

As the government pronounced illegal on the practice of companies relying on subcontract workers for a long time such as the cases in Paris Baguette and Mando-Hella, the whole industry in shock. This is not just restricted to manufacturers but is spread to services and the food franchise industry as well. The corporate sector expected on September 24 that companies like Tous Les Jours, Samsung Electronics service centers, and LG U+ will likely face the same problem any time soon after the Min...

As Korea and China are set to improve their relationship that was rocked by the controversy over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, Korea's tourism and duty-free shopping industries are raising their hopes of better days.The tourism industry believes that the Chinese government's group tour ban to Korea would be relaxed soon. A travel agency in Hebei posted an Internet ad recently for a group tour program to Korea in November at the price of 1,4...