Author: GIKorea

This is a bizarre accident I have never heard of happening before:

An escalator ran reversely at a subway station in Bundang, south of Seoul, on Thursday, leaving 14 people injured, police said.

The accident occurred around 8:20 a.m. when the upwards escalator leading to exit 2 of Sunae Station on the Bundang Line reversed suddenly and went backward for several seconds, according to police and fire authorities. 

Three people were transported to a hospital after sustaining injuries on the back and legs. Eleven others sustained minor injuries, received treatment and were sent home. None of them were in life-threatening condition.

Police are looking into the exact cause of the accident but said there is little chance of someone using the escalator’s manual operating system to reverse its direction. 

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It makes me wonder if their were marital difficulties and the wife defected knowing what the consequences for her husband would be:

Authorities in Vladivostok, a port city in the far eastern region of Russia, have launched an investigation into the disappearance of two North Koreans, Russian news outlets reported Tuesday.

The missing North Koreans are believed to be wife and son of an official working at the North Korean consulate general there, according to the Arguments & Facts weekly owned by the Government of Moscow.

The two — 43-year-old Kim Kum-sun and 15-year-old Park Kwon-ju — were last seen leaving the North Korean consulate general office in Vladivostok on Sunday morning and have been unaccounted for since, the report said.

The report said the cab driver who picked them up outside the consulate general office told authorities he dropped them off near a building on the city’s Russkaya Street, which was confirmed by closed-circuit TV footage.

The investigation was opened following a missing person report filed by the North Korean consul general office.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

The Seoul Queer Culture Festival will go on as planned this year, but in Seoul’s Euljiro neighborhood:

This year’s Seoul Queer Culture Festival (SQCF) will be held as scheduled on July 1 in downtown Seoul’s Euljiro area due to the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s disapproval of its event taking place at Seoul Plaza, according to the festival organizer, Wednesday.

“The (festival’s) use of Seoul Plaza was disapproved by the discriminatory administration of the Seoul Metropolitan Government,” Yang Sun-woo, chairperson of the SQCF organizing committee, said during a press conference in Seoul, Wednesday. “The 24th SQCF and parade will be held in the Euljiro 2-ga area.”

The SQCF, which was launched in 2000 with around 50 participants in the capital’s northeastern Daehangno area, grew in size over the years, eventually settling in Seoul Plaza in 2015, one of the biggest public squares in the capital. This will be the first edition of the event to not be held there since 2015 except for the two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as the city government rejected the committee’s request to use the city square in favor of a youth concert by the Christian Television System (CTS) Culture Foundation instead. 

In response, the committee filed a notice of assembly for the Euljiro area to secure an alternative venue. One month prior to the event, 64 activists and supporters took turns lining up at three police stations in the jurisdiction of the locations for 89 hours to receive police authorization for use of the public space. As permission is granted on a first-come, first-serve basis, they had to compete with Christian activists also lining up to book the same spaces in order to deny them a venue, according to Yang. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

This is a big win for President Yoon to secure this seat on the U.N. Security Council at a time of increasing tensions with North Korea:

South Korea was elected Tuesday as a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for a two-year term, expanding its foothold in the U.N. body to better address the North Korean issue and other global security challenges.

As the only candidate nation in Asia, Seoul was chosen in a vote at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, returning to the UNSC in 11 years after last sitting on the council in 2013-14.

South Korea won the seat after garnering 180 votes among 192 member states during the assembly.

This marks the third time for South Korea to serve as one of the 10 nonpermanent UNSC members. It previously served in the seat during the 1996-97 term.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Considering this happened 59 years ago the fact this woman was punished for fighting back to excessively and injuring this rapist is not surprising to me. This is because back in 2004 a 19-year old U.S. Soldier was raped by a Korean taxi driver and the man was let go because she did not fight back enough. Fortunately Korea seems to be taking rape more seriously and hopefully this woman can get some justice after all these decades:

Choi Mal-ja, 77, is awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision on her request for a retrial of her sexual assault case nearly 60 years ago. This photo, taken May 2, shows Choi partaking in a press conference in front of the Supreme Court in southern Seoul that day. Choi was assaulted by a man in her hometown of Gimhae, South Gyeongsang, in 1964. She bit off his tongue in what she said was an act of self-defense. The court issued a stronger sentence on her than on the man. [NEWS1]

Choi Mal-ja, 77, is still expressing rage at the courts nearly six decades after she was sexually assaulted by a stranger.    
   
On May 6, 1964, Choi was an 18-year-old walking down a street in Gimhae, South Gyeongsang, when a man surnamed Roh, three years older and a complete stranger to her, asked her for directions on the road.  
   
Choi, trying to show him the way, walked a little with him, then in an alleyway, Roh suddenly turned and pushed her to the ground.   

She tried to fight back but he threw her to the ground, at least three times, according to her testimony in court.    
   
The next thing Choi knew, she was on the ground on her back and Roh was on top of her. He pinched her nose so that she had to open her mouth and was trying to forcibly kiss her.  
   
Choi bit hard, though she later told the court that she didn’t even know she was biting off the man’s tongue, before running away from him. (………)

The police, without the power to indict, passed over Choi’s case to the prosecution, asking them to indict Roh on the charges. But the prosecution dropped the charge of attempted rape and indicted Roh for trespassing and intimidation with weapons.    
   
Choi told the court that all the actions she took were out of self-defense. Still, the court handed down a stronger sentence on Choi, giving her a suspended sentence of 10 months for inflicting a serious physical injury to Roh.  
   
In contrast, Roh received a suspended sentence of only six months for trespassing and intimidation with weapons.    
   
Choi’s case has regained traction in recent years after she requested a retiral of her case. Her case was dubbed on social media a “59-year-old Me Too case.”  
   
Experts have said that the prosecution’s decision to drop the attempted rape charge on Roh may have made a difference in the final rulings, significantly weakening Choi’s case against Roh.    
   
The court at the time had said that Choi’s actions of self-defense were “excessive.”  
   
“Even if her action was that of a young woman to protect herself from forced kissing, her act of self-defense went so far as to cut off the tongue of the perpetrator and inflicted a lifelong injury that bars him from speaking,” said the court in its ruling. “Such defensive action was deemed, both generally and objectively, excessive compared to what the laws allow.”  

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Another area of trilateral cooperation has been announced:

The insignia of the United States Space Forces Korea can be seen in this photograph taken of the command’s establishment at a ceremony held on Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi, on Dec. 14. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

The space command of United States Forces Korea (USFK) will be tasked with sharing information from the U.S. military’s reconnaissance satellites with South Korea and Japan, following recent plans by the three countries’ defense chiefs to heighten missile defense cooperation against the rising military threat from the North.  
   
A USFK spokesperson told Radio Free Asia (RFA) that the United States Space Forces Korea, known as SPACEFORCE-KOR within the U.S. military, will be charged with operating a shared early warning system (SEWS) with U.S. allies in the region.  
   
“SPACEFOR-KOR is also responsible for establishing international partnerships within their area of responsibility, including those efforts to establish real-time trilateral missile warning information sharing between the U.S., ROK, and Japan,” an official from the command told RFA, referring to South Korea by the acronym for its official name, Republic of Korea. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.