Author: GIKorea

I did not know that Camp Market had not already been handed over, the facility has been closed for years:

The site of Camp Market, a former U.S. military base, in Bupyeong, about 25 kilometers west of Seoul, is seen in this photo taken Dec. 20, 2023. (Yonhap)

The U.S. military in South Korea fully returned its former base, Camp Market, to the Asian country Wednesday, the defense ministry said, as part of a broad relocation scheme to consolidate its bases across South Korea.

The U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) handed over about 257,000 square meters of land in Camp Market near Seoul to South Korea, four years after returning some 216,000 square meters of land in the base in the first phase.

The agreement was made in a meeting of the South Korea-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement Joint Committee, which governs the legal status of the 28,500 American soldiers stationed in South Korea.

“As the rest of the site of Camp Market, which was used for a bread factory and warehouse, has been returned, the return process of a total of 473,000 square meters of land has been completed,” the defense ministry said in a joint statement with the ministries of foreign affairs, environment and land.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here is USFK’s latest response to North Korea’s provocations:

The United States flew long-range bombers for joint drills with South Korea and Japan on Wednesday in a show of force against North Korea, days after the North performed its first intercontinental ballistic missile test in five months.

The trilateral training off South Korea’s southern island of Jeju was meant to strengthen the countries’ joint response against North Korean nuclear threats, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.

The exercise involved B-1B bombers and South Korean and Japanese fighter jets, the statement said. It said the B-1Bs’ flyover is the 13th time that a U.S. bomber has been temporarily deployed near and over the Korean Peninsula this year.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

This predictably did not go over well:

A team led by Andrew, comprising James, Chris and Lisa, engages in lively conversations about work while addressing each other by their first names.

This atmosphere is something that some Korean companies are trying to emulate by mandating all employees to use their preferred English name while at work.

The rationale is that they need to move away from the Korean language’s emphasis on honorifics, position titles and other formalities, to facilitate horizontal communication. The thinking is that, by ditching Korean names and the complex honorifics system attached to them in the Korean language, employees should be able to engage in more open and effective communication, encouraging innovation.

But does it actually work?

Predictable resistance

As one can imagine, not all employees welcome mandatory name-change policies with open arms.

At Kyobo Life Insurance, skepticism hangs over the company’s four-month-old English-name policy.

“It’s ridiculous,” said one employee who requested anonymity.

“Communication hasn’t improved, and some colleagues can’t even pronounce the English names, so we’ve had to post Korean pronunciations next to them on our company’s intranet.”

Korea Herald

You can read about all the examples of how this policy worked out at the link. It appears the younger the workforce is the more likely this policy will have better results.

The COVID madness may be returning to a country near you:

A man takes pictures of a mask wearing a face mask in front of the Marina Bay Sands hotel and resort in Singapore on Feb. 18, 2022,. Governments across Southeast Asia are bringing back measures to limit a rapid resurgence of respiratory infections. (Roslan Rahman, AFP via Getty Images/TNS)

Governments across Southeast Asia are bringing back measures to limit a rapid resurgence of respiratory infections such as COVID-19, including installing temperature scanners at airports and encouraging people to wear masks again.

The goal is to slow the spread of a variety of germs, as a confluence of COVID, flu and other respiratory pathogens may set off wider outbreaks that ultimately stretch healthcare systems.

But it can be a fraught process, with the public highly attuned to the risk of draconian measures, which were put in place early in Asia at the start of the pandemic in 2020 and which lasted for much longer than in other parts of the world, coming back.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

It is good to see that the police caught the idiots responsible for putting graffiti on the Gyeongbok Palace walls. Hopefully they receive strict punishment to serve as a deterrent to anyone else thinking of doing this as well:

Police on Tuesday arrested two teenagers for drawing 44-meter-long graffiti on the walls of a historic palace in central Seoul last weekend, officials said. 

Police caught a 17-year-old male at his home in Suwon, 30 kilometers south of Seoul, on Tuesday evening before arresting his 16-year-old female accomplice nearby minutes later, according to the Seoul Jongno Police Station.

On Saturday, the suspects repeatedly sprayed the phrase “free movie” in Korean with red and blue paint on both sides of the western gate to Gyeongbok Palace and palace walls near the National Palace Museum of Korea.

Also sprayed were the names of illegal video-sharing and streaming platforms, with similar graffiti also found on the walls of the nearby Seoul Metropolitan Agency.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The complaints about this training sound like a whole lot to do about nothing. If these athletes cannot do morning physical fitness training or row a rubber boat they probably should not be Olympic athletes to begin with:

Members of South Korean women’s national handball team perform a team-building exercise with rubber boats during a training at a boot camp for the Marine Corps in Pohang, South Korea, on March 30, 2016. South Korea’s Olympic chief has defended a decision to send hundreds of athletes to a military camp next week as part of preparations for the 2024 Games in Paris, citing a need to instill mental toughness in competitors. (Choe Dong-joon/Newsis via AP)

South Korea’s Olympic chief has defended a decision to send hundreds of athletes to a military camp next week as part of preparations for the 2024 Games in Paris, citing a need to instill mental toughness in competitors.

About 400 athletes, including women, will arrive at a marine boot camp in the southeastern port city of Pohang on Monday for a three-day training aimed at building resilience and teamwork, the Korean Sport and Olympic Committee said.

The program, pushed by the committee’s president, Lee Kee-Heung, has faced criticism from politicians and media who described the training camp as outdated and showing an unhealthy obsession with medals.

Officials at the committee have played down concerns about the potential for injuries, saying the athletes will not be forced into the harsher types of military training. Morning jogs, rubber-boat riding and events aimed at building camaraderie will be on the program. Sports officials are still finalizing details of the camp with the Korea Marine Corps., committee official Yun Kyoung-ho said Thursday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.