Top court schedules another deliberation for ex-PM's martial law trial, raising likelihood of release

The Korea Times - Nov 10, 2026

The Supreme Court on Tuesday scheduled another deliberation session on former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo's appeal on insurrection charges, raising the likelihood of his release when his detention period runs out next week. The top court said it would hold the second deliberation round on Han's appeal on Nov. 19, a day before his six-month detention period expires over his role in former President Yoon Suk Yeol's failed martial law bid. Given the schedule, Han, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison by an appellate court, is likely to be released when his detention period runs out as it can no longer be extended. Supreme Court proceedings for Han's appeal have been drawn out after the court referred the case to its full bench in August, citing the public's high interest and its historical importance. A Seoul district court sentenced Han to a 23-year prison term in January after convicting him of multiple charges, including playing a key role in an insurrection under Yoon's short-lived declaration of martial law on Dec. 3, 2024. An appeals court reduced his sentence to 15 years in May aft

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Nov 10, 2026

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16 short-form playwrights to face off in Seoul Players' 10-Minute Play Festival

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Seoul's international theater community prepares for battle once again, as the 10-Minute Play Festival (10MPF) takes to the stage to find this year's top playwright. This will mark the 13th year of the contest, brought to the stage at Dulwich College in southern Seoul by Seoul Players, a not-for-profit, volunteer-run English-language theater group founded in 2001. For this year's contest, they received 410 submissions sent in March and April from 354 playwrights based all over the world. The number of submissions has exploded in recent years, peaking at more than 500 for last year's festival in just two weeks, before submissions had to be closed early. "Last year, one of the board [members] felt that many of the hundreds of plays we got were AI-generated," said Lorne Oliver, a producer for Seoul Players. He didn't disagree with the assessment, but he explained why it didn't affect their final decisions: "I just thought most of them were not up to snuff." He added, "We did not bother to run them through an AI check; we just went with the assessment results, since cream floats." This year, th

Korea's economy is booming. Why isn't President Lee's popularity?

Nov 10, 2026

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String of drug busts shatters Korea's drug-free myth

Nov 10, 2026

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[57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards] Poetry Commendation Award: To Unfold a Bird

Nov 10, 2026

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Nov 10, 2026

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Nov 10, 2026

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Nov 10, 2026

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Nov 10, 2026

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For Noh Hye-yeon, returning to poetry began with opening old files and rediscovering a pleasure that corporate work and anxiety over artificial intelligence had pushed aside. An in-house translator at an automotive company, Noh spent this summer revisiting poems by Lee Su-myeong that she had first translated in graduate school. Revising them brought her back to the literary ambitions she had struggled to sustain. “Flipping through my Roget’s Thesaurus again, I realized just how much I was enjoying translation and how much I’d missed it,” Noh said in a written interview with The Korea Times. “For the first time in a long while, I was doing something that genuinely brought me joy.” Her translations of 10 poems by Lee won the poetry Commendation Award in this year’s Korea Times Literature Translation Awards. The recognition follows her fiction Grand Prize in the competition in 2023. In the intervening years, however, her confidence in a future as a literary translator had faltered. “The arrival of GPT felt like a natural disaster to me as a translator,” she said. Noh continu

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