Pres. Park to hold first press conference early next week

President Park Geun-hye plans to hold a news conference at 10 a.m. Monday at the press room in her office Cheong Wa Dae to brief the public on her ideas about running the country in the second year of her five-year term in office. It will be her first news conference since she was elected president in December 2012.

In the news conference, the president plans to discuss her ideas regarding the economy, job creation, public sector reforms, inter-Korean issues and a grand bargain among labor, management and the government. Attention is being drawn to what topics she will bring up after she expressed her commitment to a strong reform drive in 2014, saying late last year that "reform is more difficult than a revolution."

On Friday, President Park hosted a New Year`s meeting at Cheong Wa Dae with some 230 people, including senior government officials and political leaders. The annual meeting was attended by the chiefs and senior officials of various government organizations, including the speaker of the National Assembly and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, as well as the ruling and main opposition parties. Kim Han-gil, chairman of the main opposition Democratic Party, also visited the presidential office for the first time since he took helms of the party in May last year.

"Serving the office of the president over the last 10 months, I learned that running the country is the same as a two-legged or three-legged race," she said. "No matter how fast the government tries to run ahead, it cannot take a step forward if any of the National Assembly or local autonomous governments slows down or stops, and it is the public that will suffer."

Noting that 2014 is "the first Year of the Blue Horse" in 60 years in accordance with the Chinese zodiac, the president said, "In this valuable year, we must build peace on the Korean Peninsula where tensions and the pain of division persist and must open the era of unification."