Today's headlines_Dec 8

- Seven out of ten South Koreans think GNP will win in the next presidential election. A CBS radio program conducted a poll on 761 people and found out 69.7 per cent of respondents answered a candidate from the opposition party was likely to be elected.

- US’s North Korea human rights committee polled 1,300 North Korean defectors living in China and found out 43 per cent of them were unaware of international community’s food aid to the North, and only 3 per cent of those who knew it actually received food aid. International society including South Korea has been supplying food for the last ten years that could feed one third of impoverished North Koreans.

- Korean Air and Asiana Air are set to raise international flight fee from Dec 11 up to as high as 5.7 per cent due to increasing oil prices.

- UN Human Rights Committee recommended the government provide some kinds of compensation to two people who spent one and half years in prison after a court had ruled that their rejection to serve in the army for the reason of ‘religious conscience,’ was against law.

- Sean McCormack of US State Department countered North Korea’s argument that the US deployed nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. He said the US government has consistently confirmed that there was no nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1994, and the US had no intention of invading the North with either conventional or nuclear weapons.

- Seoul citizens are found to save a certain amount of money out of their income in the most systematic and regular manner among 6 Asian cities’ citizens of Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Kula Lumpur.

- Hyundai Asan will focus more on domestic construction business amid increasing ‘North Korean risk factor.’ Currently the company gets half of its revenue from North Korean business and the rest from domestic one.