Fortunately this did not lead to a bigger incident:
A South Korean soldier has mistakenly fired a machine gun during training near the border with North Korea, and the military has immediately informed North Korea that the shooting was not intentional, military officials said Sunday.
The South Korean military said four live rounds were fired from the machine gun during a training session by an Army unit along the inter-Korean border in the eastern province of Gangwon at 6:27 p.m. on Saturday.
All of the bullets landed in the southern side of the Military Demarcation Line and no damage was reported. No firings were planned for the training.
The military unit immediately informed North Korea via broadcasting on several occasions that the firings were not intentional and stepped up emergency readiness posture, the officials said.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
I can remember the days when 18,871 COVID cases in South Korea had people in a panic and now people are just accepting it like the flu. However, I still expect Koreans to continue to wear their masks for quite some time even though the mandate has ended:
South Korea’s new coronavirus cases fell below 20,000 on Sunday, just a day ahead of the country’s planned lifting of a mask mandate for indoor places that has been in place for more than three years.
The country reported 18,871 new cases, including 37 from overseas, bringing the total caseload to 30,149,601, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).
The daily caseload had been above 30,000 for the second straight day Friday due to increased tests after the Lunar New Year holiday that ended Tuesday, before falling to 23,612 on Saturday.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.
The birthrate continues to decline significantly in South Korea:
A total of 18,982 babies were born in November, plunging 4.3 percent from the previous year, according to the data from Statistics Korea. It marked the lowest number for any November since the statistics agency started compiling related data in 1981.
South Korea remains dogged by a chronic decline in childbirths as many young people delay or give up on having babies in the face of an economic slowdown and high home prices.
Over the January-November period, a total number of 231,863 babies were born, down 4.7 percent from a year earlier.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
This is a great deal by Ford to get their battery manufacturing facility built in the US by SK:
Rain had wetted much of the clay soil on the ground — rich terracotta earth colors — creating small and large puddles everywhere around a gigantic steel structure, densely embedded with millions of steel beams.
Yet it was another busy Sunday for many of the 800 engineers and construction workers, who had turned up for work to “get moving” on schedule for the electric vehicle battery manufacturing plants, under construction in Glendale, about 84.5 kilometers south of Louisville in the U.S. state of Kentucky.
The 6.28 million-square-meter construction site, unveiled to South Korean media on Jan. 8, is where South Korean battery producer SK On Co. and Ford Motor Co. are building what will be the biggest EV battery plants in the United States for such a facility built on a single site. (………..) The project is part of the US$11.4 billion investment the two companies’ joint venture, BlueOval SK (BOSK), announced in September 2021, to build twin EV battery plants in Kentucky and a third one in Tennessee.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but I wonder how much of the rare Earth minerals being used in the battery construction is still coming from China?
Some interesting quotes from Kim Jong-un in Mike Pompeo’s new book:
North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un are not bothered at all by the U.S. military presence in South Korea, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued in a memoir published Tuesday.
They rather consider U.S. troops in South Korea as a protection against Chinese dominance, according to Pompeo.
Pompeo said the North Korean leader had raised the issue of U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises during their first meeting in Pyongyang.
“I insinuated that he was a little hypocritical to get worked up about them, given how his planes and rockets could within minutes, or perhaps seconds, lay waste to the city of Seoul, South Korea, a city of ten million people and only a few dozen kilometers from the demilitarized zone (DMZ),” he wrote. (…..)
Pompeo said he had also told Kim that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had “consistently told the United States that American forces leaving South Korea would make Chairman Kim happy.”
“At this, Kim laughed and pounded on the table in sheer joy, exclaiming that the Chinese were liars,” wrote Pompeo.
“He (Kim) said that he needed the Americans in South Korea to protect him from the CCP, and that the CCP needs the Americans out so they can treat the peninsula like Tibet and Xinjiang,” he added.
Pompeo also offered to U.S. policymakers: “expanding U.S. missile and ground capabilities on the Korean Peninsula won’t bother the North Koreans at all.”
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but Kim also told Pompeo that he was willing to denuclearize which I have never believed. So saying that he doesn’t mind the US military presence in the ROK just may just be something Kim may have thought Pompeo wanted to hear.
