Author: GIKorea

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.

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.

Korea Times

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.”

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.

Korea Times

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.

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. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

It is amazing how many people died trying to save cars that could have easily been repaired or fixed with insurance:

Nine people have been pulled from a flooded parking garage in the southeastern city of Pohang, two of them alive, with the seven others having died after being found in cardiac arrest, as the search continued for any remaining victims in the wake of Typhoon Hinnamnor.

All of them had been trapped in the underground parking lot at an apartment complex in Pohang, about 270 km southeast of Seoul, after going there to move their cars amid heavy downpours brought on by the typhoon.

Rescue workers searched the flooded garage and pulled the nine people out of the water.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It is arguable that the use of the occupied Kuril Islands for this military exercise is to signal to Japan that China will help Russia defend them in a contingency. With the Russian military so bogged down in Ukraine it is likely Russia could not hold these islands if the Japanese made a move on them:

 Japan has protested to Russia over multinational military exercises being conducted on Russian-held islands claimed by Japan, and is seriously concerned about shooting drills by Russian and Chinese warships off Japan’s northern coast, an official said Monday.

Beijing has been increasing its military cooperation with Moscow, and has been taking part in the multinational “Vostok 2020” drills since late August at a number of locations in Russia’s far east.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno criticized Russia for holding exercises on two of the four disputed islands, which Japan calls the Northern Territories, in the Kuril chain off Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido. It was not clear whether China was part of the exercises on the disputed islands.

He said Japan’s Defense Ministry spotted six Russian and Chinese warships firing machine guns into the Sea of Japan about 190 kilometers (118 miles) west of Cape Kamui on Hokkaido on Saturday.

“Japan will continue to monitor the movements of these ships with serious concern, and will take all possible measures to conduct warning and surveillance activities in the waters surrounding Japan,” Matsuno said at a news conference.

SF Gate

You can read more at the link, but Russian and Chinese warships also passed through the Soya Straight between Honshu and Hokkaido once again demonstrating how they are trying to intentionally be provocative towards Japan.

I just don’t understand why people cannot just stay inside and wait until the storm passes. It seems every typhoon the casualty are caused by people not bunkering down inside:

Three people were found dead and eight others went missing in South Korea after Typhoon Hinnamnor passed by the southern part of the country Tuesday, authorities said.

Pohang city officials said seven people were reported to be out of contact after entering the inundated underground parking lot of an apartment building in the city at around 6:30 a.m. to remove their cars. 

Rescuers are currently carrying out an operation to drain the parking garage and find those missing. 

A 66-year-old woman who was unaccounted for after entering the underground parking garage of another apartment building in Pohang in the morning was found dead six hours later, the officials said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.