NEWS BRIEF

[Anchor Lead]

Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha on Wednesday attended a UN-led video conference to discuss digital cooperation in battling the coronavirus pandemic. During the meeting, Kang introduced South Korea's approach to tackling the COVID-19 outbreak while maintaining a balance between containment and human rights protection.
With COVID-19 continuing on, South Korea's April exports of IT products declined 15.3 percent year on year to less than 13 billion U.S. dollars. The nation's shipments of semiconductor chips dropped over 15 percent to roughly 7.3 billion dollars. Exports of memory chips and systems each decreased nearly 15 percent and 13 percent.
Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki says that the government will draw up measures to create 1.56 million jobs in the public sector. The jobs include 945,000 positions that the government had already planned to create.
Senior presidential secretary for social policy Kim Yeon-myung has raised the possibility of intruding telemedicine for the post-coronavirus era, citing some positive assessments. Kim revealed the stance during a forum held for the ruling Democratic Party's lawmakers-elect at the National Assembly on Wednesday.