annual

SEOUL, April 10 (UPI) — The Korea Federation of Community Credit Cooperatives said Friday it launched a savings product that offers an annual interest rate of up to 12% in an attempt to boost childbirth.

The one-year installment savings product provides a base rate of 4%, which increases by steps to 12% depending on the number of the customer’s children. It is subject to a deposit limit, though.

For savers with a newborn in areas experiencing population decline, the country’s top apex organization said that the maximum 12% interest would be guaranteed regardless of the number of children.

“We have introduced dedicated financial products every year since 2023 in an effort to help address the low birth rate,” cooperative Director Cho Bong-eop said in a statement.

“As a community-based financial institution, we will keep fulfilling our social responsibilities by supporting vulnerable groups and revitalizing local economies, in addition to tackling the low birth rate,” he added.

South Korea has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, which fell to 0.72 in 2023, according to Statistics Korea. The figure rebounded slightly to 0.75 in 2024 and 0.8 last year, still far below the replacement level of 2.1.

This means that for every 100 South Korean women, only 80 babies are expected to be born over their lifetimes, leading to a gradual population decline. The country’s population stands at 51.6 million.

To address the challenge, the Seoul government has funneled a huge amount of money over the past decades to little avail. In recent years, even private companies stepped in, providing bonuses and various benefits to employees who have a baby.

Last month, Statistics Korea reported nearly 27,000 births in January, the highest monthly figure in nearly seven years. However, the fertility rate still remained below 1.

ATLANTA — The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state’s voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground.

The lawmakers’ failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session.

“They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature.

Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes.

But state law still requires counties to use the machines. No money has been allocated to reprogram them, and lawmakers failed to agree on a replacement.

“We’ll have an unresolvable statutory conflict come July 1,” said House Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Victor Anderson, a Cornelia Republican who backed a proposal to keep using the machines in 2026 that Senate Republicans declined to consider.

House Republicans and Democrats backed Anderson’s plan, which would have required that Georgia choose a voting process that didn’t use QR codes by 2028. Election officials preferred that solution.

“The Senate has shown that they’re not responsible actors,” Draper said. She added that Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for governor, seemed more interested in keeping Trump’s backing than “doing right by Georgia voters.”

A spokesperson for Jones didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.

Joseph Kirk, Bartow County election supervisor and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, said he’ll look to the secretary of state for guidance and assumes a judge will rule to instruct election officials how to proceed.

“This is uncharted territory,” he said.

Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also running for governor, said officials are “ready to follow the law and follow the Constitution.”

Republican House Speaker Jon Burns told reporters that his chamber was seeking to minimize changes this year.

“You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream,” Burns said.

Burns said he would meet with Gov. Brian Kemp and “take his temperature” on the possibility of a special session. A spokesperson for Kemp didn’t answer questions about what the outgoing Republican governor would do.

Anderson said without action, the state could be required to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in November.

Election officials say switching to a new system within just a few months, as advocated by some Republicans, would be nearly impossible.

“They made no way for this to happen except putting a deadline on it,” Cherokee County elections director Anne Dover said of the switch away from barcodes. Dover said one problem under some plans is that a very large number of ballots would have to be printed.

Lawmakers seemed more concerned about scoring political points than making practical plans, Paulding County Election Supervisor Deidre Holden said.

“If anyone is resilient and can get the job done, it’s all of us election officials, but the legislators need to work with us, and they need to understand what we do before they go making laws that are basically unachievable for us,” Holden said.

Supporters of hand-marked paper ballots say voters are more likely to trust in an accurate count if they can see what gets read by the scanner.

Right-wing election activists lobbied lawmakers for an immediate switch to hand-marked paper ballots, but the House turned away from a Senate proposal to do so.

Anderson said he wasn’t sure if a special session could escape those political crosswinds, but said Georgia lawmakers must fix the problem.

“This is a legislative problem,” Anderson said. “It’s a legislative solution that has to happen.”

Kramon and Amy write for the Associated Press.