I feel for anyone that has to battle Chuseok traffic. I have had to do it once before and I said never again:
Most highways and roads were clogged with heavy traffic early Sunday, as people were traveling back home on the third day of the four-day Chuseok holiday.
Chuseok, the Korean autumn harvest celebration, is one of the country’s biggest traditional holidays and serves as a chance for family members to get together. Chuseok is celebrated on Aug. 15 in the lunar calendar, which fell on Saturday this year.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
I highly recommend watching the entire news clip below of Russian propagandists trying to explain the defeat of their forces in Northeast Ukraine. In the clip the propagandists also make the case that North Korea should join Russia in an anti-Imperialist coalition against the west in Ukraine. I mentioned this before that it appears that the Russian propaganda apparatus is trying to will aid from North Korea into existence.
The Kim regime may be a lot of things, but they are not stupid. They will probably happily sell munitions to the Russians, but I don’t see them sending personnel and equipment in what is increasingly looking like a lost cause. The final statement from the show doesn’t exactly inspire confidence either, “Stalin called for ones who panic to be shot”.
Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.
It is going to be interesting to see how this turns out because can you imagine what would happen if politicians were indicted every time they lied during a campaign?:
Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung was indicted on Thursday for allegations that he violated the election law by making false statements related to two land development projects in Seongnam, just south of Seoul, while campaigning for the presidential election last year.
Korea Times
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office charged Lee, the chairman of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), with election law violations, one day before the expiry of the statute of limitations for his cases.
Lee is suspected of spreading false information related to a land development project in Seongnam’s Daejang-dong, in violation of the election law, by denying knowing a key figure of the project during his presidential campaign.
In a TV interview on Dec. 22 last year, Lee denied acquaintance with Kim Moon-ki, a former head of Seongnam Development Corp.’s project development team, during his time as Seongnam mayor between 2015 and 2016.
Kim was found dead the previous day amid an investigation into his alleged involvement in the Daejang-dong scandal. Civic groups filed complaints against Lee after photos were released showing Lee together with Kim and several others, including some from an extended overseas business trip in January 2015. But Lee has claimed that he did not know Kim because he was a low-level municipal employee.
You can read more at the link.
At this point it is pretty clear that the first lady did rely on plagiarism for her Phd dissertation, but I don’t know what this group is hoping to accomplish that hasn’t already been done. She has already been mocked & shamed publicly and she apologized for her actions:
First lady Kim Keon-hee has come under fire again, as a group of professors has reignited the allegations that she plagiarized her Ph.D. dissertation and other published papers. She had been cleared of the allegations last month following an eight-month probe by her alma mater, Kookmin University, which stated ultimately that the “statute of limitations of five years for verifying the papers has expired.”
Korea Times
The group of 16 professors from 14 academic associations, called the Pan-academic National Verification Group for the Verification of Suspicions of Plagiarism of First Lady Kim Keon-hee, held a press conference to unveil their findings verifying Kim’s academic misconduct at the Press Center in Seoul, Tuesday. The group claimed that all of Kim’s academic works are “indisputably entangled with plagiarism,” and that they all violate basic academic standards.
According to the group’s findings, a total of 220 out of the 860 sentences in Kim’s Ph.D. dissertation that she produced when she attended Kookmin University’s Graduate School of Techno Design in 2008 were copied and pasted without citing the original sources.
Here appears to be the real reason this group has been formed:
Meanwhile, the ruling People Power Party (PPP) questioned the credibility of the Pan-academic National Verification Group’s findings, claiming that the group supports the DPK and has political intentions.
“As the group’s name may suggest, the verification group pretends to make a scholastic presentation on behalf of the academic community … However, the bottom line is that it is merely a political organization that supports DPK leader Lee Jae-myung,” PPP spokesperson Rep. Park Jung-ha commented on the PPP’s website, Tuesday.
Park said that some of the 14 academic associations that are part of the organization had openly supported Lee during the presidential campaign earlier in March and called on them to “stop deceiving people under the pretext of academic investigation.”
You can read more at the link, but this appears to all just be in retaliation for the ongoing investigation into Lee Jae-myung’s wife.
This is all the more reason why all the COVID testing at the airports should be stopped, to prevent testing fraud:
The Korean Embassy in Vietnam has stepped up efforts to prevent a coronavirus testing-related scam, with such fraud cases on the rise targeting Korean tourists in the Southeast Asian country when they return to Korea.
Korea Times
According to the embassy and the Korean foreign ministry, Wednesday, two embassy staffers visited the office of Vietjet Air in Hanoi two days earlier and took issue with the budget airline’s rejection of Korean travelers’ negative COVID-19 test results, which left them exposed to rapid antigen test fraud. Vietjet Air is a Vietnamese low-cost carrier (LCC), based in the capital city of Hanoi. (………)
The embassy’s complaints came as more Korean travelers in Vietnam have fallen victim to the rapid testing scam, sparking an outcry among them and raising the need for the Korean government to step in.
Until Sept. 2, all inbound travelers to Korea had to hand in negative PCR test results conducted within 48 hours or from rapid antigen tests within 24 hours preceding their departure for the country, but this rule has been lifted amid the overall recent downward trend in the number of daily new cases. However, a mandate to take a PCR test within one day after arrival in Korea remains unchanged.
According to the embassy, Vietjet frequently rejected Korean passengers’ negative test results, even if they were valid, and on-site brokers received a premium to give them an emergency last-minute test.
You can read more at the link.
