Author: GIKorea

It is official, the COVID vaccine mandate has been repealed for all U.S. service members:

But the bill also ends one of Biden’s former top priorities in making the coronavirus mandatory for U.S. service members. Republican lawmakers successfully included the measure that rescinds Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 order requiring troops to receive the coronavirus inoculation or face punishment, including dismissal from the military. Some 8,200 service members were discharged from the military this year for refusing the vaccine. 

Republicans also tried to include a measure in the NDAA that would force the military services to reinstate those service members who were discharged because of the mandate, but that effort failed. 

The Pentagon has not said what it plans to do now that the vaccine requirement has been ended. Defense Department spokespeople this week said they could not yet comment on the issue.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and an even better New Year!

It is hard to believe it is almost Christmas. I hope everyone has a great holiday! Leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

In a game of oneupmanship, the ROK has released a much higher resolution spy satellite photograph of Pyongyang than the one the North Koreans released of Seoul:

South Korea on Thursday released a photo of Pyongyang taken from one of its own satellites after North Korea published imagery of Seoul using what it claimed was a military spy satellite.

The color photo, taken with “land satellite No. 1,” clearly shows Kim Il-sung Square and its surrounding facilities, including a history museum, an art museum and a department store.

By contrast, the North Korean photo released Monday was in black and white, and barely showed the outlines of bridges across the Han River and a port in the western city of Incheon.

The North’s Korean Central News Agency said the camera fitted on the “test-piece satellite” built for military reconnaissance purposes had a resolution of 20 meters.

Experts here said a reconnaissance satellite must have a resolution of at least 0.5m, making the North’s equipment impossible to use for its stated purpose.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but give the North Koreans time and they will probably get a high resolution spy satellite eventually into orbit as well.

This would not be surprising at all if the Chinese had a secret police station in South Korea. I would assume though they would be running it out of their embassy to avoid detection:

Seoul is looking into the alleged presence of a secret Chinese police station in Korea, the Foreign Ministry confirmed Tuesday.  
   
“We have been communicating with relevant departments on the matter,” a Foreign Ministry official told the press in Seoul on Tuesday. “At this point we do not have anything significant to share.”  
   
The nongovernmental human rights organization Safeguard Defenders announced earlier this month that China’s local-level public security bureau based in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, was running at least one police station in Korea, though it couldn’t confirm its exact location. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but these secret police stations are suspected in 53 nations are and are used to monitor Chinese nationals in these countries.

This is why I don’t have cameras inside of my house, they are just too easy to hack:

A hacker in his 30s was arrested on charges of infiltrating built-in home cameras at over 600 different apartment complexes and distributing recorded footage, police said Tuesday.

In South Korea, it is common for internet-connected home security devices with cameras to be installed in apartment complexes. A wall-pad device, which is attached to the wall, can activate other devices inside the house.

The hacker, only identified by his surname Lee, is under suspicion of hacking wall-pad devices of more than 400,000 households in 638 different apartment complexes between August and November of last year, according to the National Police Agency (NPA).

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.