Free Republic

The U.S. hybrid vehicle market is experiencing a clear rebound, fueled by a sharp rise in gasoline prices that is rapidly changing consumer buying habits across the country, according to industry data. Data from market research firm Cox Automotive showed that hybrid vehicle sales in the country surged in the third quarter, led by substantial gains among Asian automakers. Korean automaker Hyundai reported a 39-percent year-on-year increase in hybrid sales, while Kia, another Korean automaker, saw its hybrid sales more than double, rising 152 percent. In contrast, demand for fully electric vehicles has cooled over the past year, with Tesla...

Over the past decade, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) has advanced its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, which has raised the threat Pyongyang poses to the United States, U.S. allies in East Asia, and U.S. interests. In April 2026, a U.S. defense official testified that “North Korea’s nuclear forces are increasingly capable of targeting the U.S. Homeland, and its missile forces can strike South Korea and Japan with nuclear or conventional warheads.”Since 2022, Russian and Chinese policies toward North Korea have shifted. The U.S. Forces Korea commander said in April 2025 that in return...

A weapon discovered in 2023 on Mount Geumseong in southwestern South Korea has been identified by researchers from the Naju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage as a Hwangja Hwatong, a handheld gunpowder weapon that fired arrows or pellets, ZME Science reports. The 600-year-old bronze weapon measures about nine inches long and weighs about two pounds. Engravings on the handle record the weapon’s name, weight, manufacturing supervisor, craftsman, and an incomplete date. When researchers compared the inscription with historic records of firearm production, they determined that this weapon was made in either 1377 or 1437. “It comes from a crucial...

Ever wanted to know what happens behind closed doors in Kim Jong-il’s mega mansion? In this video, Kang (his former personal bodyguard) spills all of the juicy secrets for the first time!

If anyone needs another reason not to buy a smart appliance, Samsung just pushed a toxic update to their smart fridge systems and bricked them all. ... Affected fridges ‘suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after' trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung's smart home platform. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge's internal display was stuck showing the message ‘Checking SmartThings app during update.' Without refrigeration, the customers' food spoiled. As a silver lining, the problem seems to be limited to South Korea. ... The problem was exacerbated...

WASHINGTON — Dennis Rodman is worming his way back into the spotlight. The Basketball and WWE Hall of Famer is expected to join President Trump on a midterm campaign trip to the bad boy’s college town later this week — as Trump considers more engagement with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Rodman, who traveled to North Korea at least five times between 2013 and 2017, is scheduled to take part in a campaign event in Durant, Okla., where he attended Southeastern Oklahoma State University in the mid-1980s, sources say. “After the midterms, Trump wants to refocus again on North...

"The Fetus Is a Life Worthy of Dignity and Protection" Calls for Expanded Support for Women in Crisis Pregnancies, Single-Parent, and Disabled Children’s Families As the government moves forward with the phased introduction of abortion medication, Protestant organizations have joined the Catholic Church in voicing their opposition. They argue that, before the approval of such pharmaceuticals, there should first be comprehensive legal and systemic reforms encompassing the scope of permissible abortions, safety management, and protections for women facing crisis pregnancies. On September 17, the United Christian Churches of Korea issued a statement calling for the government to halt its planned...

The South Korean Catholic Church has expressed "deep concerns" over government plans to formally introduce abortion pills and urged for a reconsideration. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea (CBCK) made the call in a statement issued Wednesday after the government announced plans to allow the use of abortion pills by women up to nine weeks pregnant. "The CBCK voices deep concerns as this measure would only institutionalize abortion in an 'orderly' manner, without changing its fundamental nature, while allowing a disregard for life to be more deeply rooted in our society," the organization said. The Korean Catholic Church said the...

New system used 357,000 tokens on 2026 test, beating rivals with design that reuses earlier reasoningAn analysis showed OpenAI's new artificial intelligence (AI) model earned a perfect score on the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) for the first time. While top-tier AI models have previously posted near-perfect scores, this result is drawing attention because it used fewer tokens than existing models. According to results posted on GitHub on Sunday, OpenAI's new GPT-6 Astra was the only evaluated model to score a perfect 450 in the 2026 CSAT LLM Solution Log. The evaluation tested models on questions from the 2026 CSAT...

A Canadian nonprofit’s website that mails abortion pills to women worldwide will stay blocked in Korea after a Seoul court ruled that the government’s ban was not unlawful, according to legal sources on Saturday. The Seoul Administrative Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Women on Web against the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), seeking to overturn the regulator’s corrective order ㅑon June 12. The block is “hard to see as unlawful because Women on Web’s provision of abortion pills that were not manufactured, imported or approved for use in Korea violated the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act,” the court said. It therefore...

Former national football team head manager Hong Myung-bo and eight players were met by angry and disappointed fans on Tuesday morning, when they returned home following Korea’s group-stage exit from the FIFA World Cup 2026. Hong, who announced his resignation at the team’s training base in Mexico the previous day, arrived at Incheon International Airport with Jo Hyeon-woo of Ulsan HD; Kim Min-jae of Bayern Munich; Hwang In-beom of Feyenoord; Hwang Hee-chan of Wolverhampton Wanderers; Paik Seung-ho of Birmingham City; Kim Moon-hwan of Daejeon Hana Citizen; Lee Kang-in of Paris Saint-Germain; and Seol Young-woo of Red Star Belgrade. Though they...

South Korean police are preparing huge security measures at the airport hosting the arrival of their World Cup football team - after the resigning manager faced a threat to his life. Hong Myung-bo, 57, oversaw a Korean team who won just one game and failed to get out of Group A behind hosts Mexico and South Africa and has resigned after the nation's president demanded an investigation into their poor performance. The situation has now escalated, with the Incheon Metropolitan Police Agency announcing they are sending 160 riot and airport police for the return of the national team in Korea's...

South Korea’s president is not taking their World Cup elimination lightly. The team was widely expected to emerge from a group including Mexico, Czechia and South Africa, but suffered a surprise defeat to the latter on Wednesday and missed out on being one of the top eight third-place teams to advance to the Round of 32. On Sunday, the country’s president, Lee Jae Myung, said he was “utterly baffled” by the team’s performance and blasted head coach Hong Myung-bo as “incompetent” as he called for the government to investigate the early exit.

The Communist Chinese government rebuked a U.S. Army general for using the words “dagger” and “shield” to respectively describe regional allies South Korea and Japan. Four-star Gen. Xavier Brunson, the commander of the United States Forces Korea (USFK) and United Nations Command, made the analogy during a May 22 podcast interview conducted by the United States Army War College, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) first reported. Nearly a week later, the Chinese embassy in South Korea responded by issuing what it called a “solemn warn[ing]” to the general, claiming his use of figurative language to characterize the U.S.’s East...

A couple sisters who defected from North Korea visit a gun range in the U.S.

Polish state defence firm Bumar-Łabędy has signed an agreement with South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem setting out the terms of production in Poland of dozens of South Korean K2 tanks. It will be the first time in almost two decades that Poland will manufacture tanks domestically. The agreement, signed on Monday, formally defines the division of work and payments under a wider 2025 contract in which Poland ordered 180 K2 tanks and 81 support vehicles, some of which were to be produced domestically. Under the plan, Bumar-Łabędy will assemble 61 Polish-configured K2PL tanks and 72 support vehicles. The first K2PL tank...

A genetic study of the remains of four 2,000-year-old dogs recovered from two archaeological sites on the Korean Peninsula suggests that the canines belonged to a lineage separate from other dog populations in East Asia, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. It had been previously thought that dog populations in East Asian shared a single lineage. Hyeongcheol Kim of the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Suyeon Kim and A-reum Yu of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, and their colleagues determined that ancient Korean dogs resembled the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog. Korean dogs...

Muslim street takeovers in the name of ‘prayers’ have become a global problem from New York to London to Moscow, they’re creating conflict in India, and, less expectedly, in South Korea. On a Friday afternoon, dozens of men stream out of a five-story building in Ansan’s Danwon-gu, some dressed in long white garments and caps, quietly walking away or chatting in small groups along the street. The building they emerge from looks like an ordinary commercial property, but it is the Ansan Islamic Center, one of 21 mosques operated nationwide by the Korea Muslim Federation. The crowd, made up mostly...

How could the country that is now the foremost persecutor of Christians in the world have emerged from the work of a dedicated Christian missionary? Jonathan Cheng’s history of North Korea, "Korean Messiah," sets out to explain... Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary who arrived in ‘the Hermit Kingdom’ of Korea in 1890, built a vast mission compound in Pyongyang. His ministry helped spark the great Christian revival of 1907, which led to Pyongyang being called the ‘Jerusalem of the East’ with great churches and crowded Wednesday prayer meetings. Moffett ran a world-class seminary, and his theology carried a message of...

The incredible story of Yang Kyoungjong is all the more phenomenal because, while there's very little proof that he ever existed, our need to believe that he did has been so urgent that facts seem to matter very little. But that hasn't stopped at least three reputable historians from telling Yang Kyoungjong's story with confidence, and the premise of his life even became the basis for My Way, a multimillion-dollar South Korean action movie, albeit one embroidered with its own fictions. Yang Kyoungjong's story begins just after D-Day when, in an interview made for historian Stephen Ambrose years later, an...