Author: GIKorea

So it was okay to investigate and jail former Presidents Park and Lee for corruption, but not okay to investigate Lee Jae-myung for arguably equal to or worse corruption:

The main opposition Democratic Party (DP) staged a large-scale rally in central Seoul on Saturday to protest against the prosecution’s widening corruption probe into its embattled leader. 

Tens of thousands of party members joined the rally, as DP leader Lee Jae-myung is currently under investigation over corruption allegations surrounding a massive development project pushed for in Seongnam, south of Seoul, when he was the city’s mayor.

During the event, Lee accused prosecutors of hampering democracy by targeting him, President Yoon Suk Yeol’s former rival in the last presidential race. 

“Prosecutors are taking major posts in the government, and they are threatening people with arrest warrants, instead of soldiers’ guns and swords,” Lee said during his closing remarks. “Politics is giving its place to violent ruling.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this protests shows that Lee must think he is close to being charged and headed to jail.

Via a reader tip from Korean Man comes this news of some pretty cool anti-drone technology being developed by KAIST. Hopefully is works because drones are clearly going to play a major role in future warfare as we are currently getting a preview of in Ukraine:

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced on Tuesday that its researchers had developed a counter-terror anti-drone technology for use in urban areas.

After finding that drone makers’ control function components have different electromagnetic sensitivity, the research team analyzed the sensitivity-maximizing frequency by drone brand.

With this, the research team proved that the use of narrowband electromagnetic pulse waves can instantly neutralize target drones remotely.

Unlike existing anti-drone technologies, the use of electromagnetic pulse waves with a specific frequency in a narrow bandwidth can minimize the impact on nearby electronic devices.

Even when a group of drones using the same control function components attack, this technology can make the drones fall straight to the ground.

In other words, if 100 enemy drones fly together with 100 ally drones, this technology can take down the enemy drones without influencing ally drones.

Korea Biz Wire

You can read more at the link.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

This missing child and murder case is totally bizarre and it is only a matter of time before this is turned into a movie:

A woman was given a suspended prison term in a retrial on Thursday in connection with the mysterious disappearance and deaths of two 3-year-old girls.

Reversing an earlier prison term of eight years, the appellate division of the Daegu District Court sentenced the 50-year-old woman, surnamed Seok, to two years in prison, suspended for three years.

The court acquitted Seok of charges that she had switched her 3-year-old daughter with her granddaughter of the same age years ago in the southeastern city of Gumi. 

The case first surfaced in 2021 when the mummified remains of a 3-year-old girl was found at the former home of Seok’s daughter, surnamed Kim. The girl is suspected to have died from starvation up to six months earlier.

However, it was only later found through DNA tests that Kim is not the mother of the girl, but her older sister. The child’s supposed grandmother was in fact the biological mother.

Based on the DNA results, prosecutors added child abduction and switching charges against Seok by alleging that the two women gave birth around the same time and that their babies were switched at birth. 

Prosecutors alleged that Seok had unloaded her newborn onto her eldest daughter to raise with her then husband. Kim had raised her younger sister by thinking that she was her daughter.

Seok, however, said she had not given birth to another child, insisting the DNA results are false. The whereabouts of the missing child remain unclear.

In previous rulings, the district and appeals courts had acknowledged the biological relationship between Seok and the dead girl, convicting her of switching the babies. 

The Supreme Court, however, struck down the verdict, saying the DNA test results cannot stand as evidence for Seok’s alleged switching of the babies. 

On Thursday, the appellate court sided with the top court, acquitting Seok of switching babies and only convicting her of attempting to dispose of the body.

Yonhap

What I don’t get is why Seok would switch the babies around the time of birth to just likely kill her granddaughter after the switch? If she was going to kill a baby why didn’t she just get an abortion? Also how did the daughter Kim not notice she had a different baby? The daughter was sentenced to 20 years in jail for killing the baby when she reached age 3 that uncovered this whole sorted affair.

I think this qualifies as a first world problem:

While the increasing imports of sex dolls serve to comfort lonely men in Korea, they’re also frightening some men, particularly garbage collectors. 

According to the Kookmin Ilbo, a Korean-language daily newspaper, a garbage collector recalled his frightening encounter with a sex doll at work.

“I saw a bit of hair in the trash pile and pulled at it assuming it to be a wig,” the newspaper quoted him as saying in an online post. “What I got was a beheaded woman. Can you imagine how much that frightened me at first (assuming it was a real dead body)?”

He went on to say that instead of throwing away the doll as a whole, “the owner dismembered the doll and wrapped the parts separately. The head wasn’t wrapped tight enough. When I saw the decapitated head, my heart stopped. My hands are still shivering. Those wishing to buy sex dolls, please think also about how to properly dispose of them.”

It’s not the first such incident, according to the newspaper. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

This is pretty atrocious police work and makes you wonder if even today how well these criminals with ankle monitors are being tracked:

A Seoul court on Wednesday ordered the state to pay more than 200 million won (US$162,500) in compensation to family members of a woman killed after an attempted rape by a man wearing an ankle monitor for sexual crimes.

In 2012, the woman in her 30s was murdered by Seo Jin-hwan, who broke into her house in Seoul’s Gwangjin district in an attempt to rape her. It was only later found out by police that Seo had committed a similar crime just 13 days earlier and that he was wearing an electronic ankle monitor at the time.

The family then filed a compensation suit against the state, claiming Seo’s crime could have been prevented if police had properly managed DNA evidence found from the previous crime scene and if his ankle bracelet had been properly monitored.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.