Author: GIKorea

The modern day comfort women crisis of sexually exploited North Korean women in China continues and hopefully this new book will help draw a focus on it:

Every year, an unspecified number of North Koreans risk their lives for the chance of a better life outside the impoverished nation. They secretly cross the border to arrive in China, hoping to go to a third country for a new life free of fear and starvation. If caught, they must pay the price: they may be executed or sent to labor camps notorious for their appalling human rights conditions.

For some, particularly women, their audacious decisions to escape to China are based on false promises. They are lured by human traffickers to cross the border for “jobs.” 

Once arriving in China, their lives are no longer under their control. They may be raped by traffickers, who are Chinese or ethnic Koreans who were born and raised in China, before they are sold to poor, older Chinese farmers. Some are forced into prostitution or to perform online pornography. Scared by death threats or potential harm to their family members left behind in the North, they find it impossible to end the sexual bondage by themselves.

Sylvia Yu Friedman, an award-winning filmmaker and investigative journalist who chronicled this modern-day sexual slavery in Asia in a documentary series, raised fresh worries about the ramifications of such enslavement: the traumas of victims’ lives are passed down onto their children.  

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but Friedman has written a book documenting the stories of the sex trafficking going on in China. I wonder if this quote in the Korea Times article will cause her to be sued and her book banned in Korea for providing a balanced history:

“It’s a wicked cycle repeating in a way, since Korean women were dragged as wianbu or comfort women to China and all over the Asia Pacific on the frontlines of war to comfort the Japanese soldiers before and during World War II,” she said. “There were Korean brokers and collaborators involved in recruiting young Korean women as comfort women and the same type of opportunists today deceive and lure vulnerable North Korean women into bride trafficking and online pornography in China.”

I don’t expect many activists to help these modern day comfort women because there is more money to be made in attacking the Imperial Japanese’s comfort women system from over 75 years ago.

The COVID daily death toll is the number that really needs to be focused on more than the case numbers the media seems to like to highlight the most. It appears that the elderly are passing away due to the efficacy of the vaccine wearing off after six months:

 President Moon Jae-in called Saturday for speeding up booster shots for the elderly as the country struggles to tackle the fast spread of coronavirus infections, including cases of the new omicron variant.

The country added 6,977 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total caseload to 510,538, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA). 

Daily infections soared to a record high of 7,174 cases on Wednesday and remained above 7,000 for the following two days.

The number of critically ill patients came to 856 on Saturday, up four from a day ago, while the death toll hit a daily high of 80, pushing the total up to 4,210.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

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

Considering the Moon administration’s chummy relationship with the thugs in Pyongyang, it should be no surprise they will not take a stand against the democracy crackdown in Hong Kong, crushing of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the aggressive territorial expansion activities of the CCP:

South Korea is seeking to play its “role as the previous host nation” of the Winter Olympics, First Vice Foreign Minister Choi Jong-kun said Thursday, alluding that Seoul is less likely join the US in a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Games. 

Choi made the remarks during an interview with local radio station TBS, stressing that the upcoming Beijing Olympics are a “relay of Northeast Asian Olympics from PyeongChang to Tokyo and Beijing and are very meaningful.” 

His remarks suggest that Seoul is tilting toward opting out of the US-led diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games slated for Feb. 4 to 20. But he clarified the “government has not yet made any decisions.”

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

You have to figure since the prosecutors are controlled by the Moon administration that there really isn’t anything they can remotely find that would stick to Yoon:

Prosecutors on Tuesday decided to not pursue an investigation into main opposition People Power Party (PPP) candidate Yoon Suk-yeol, diminishing the likelihood that either presidential nominee will have their prospects affected by a prosecutorial probe.  
   
The Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office said that they decided to drop a probe into allegations that Yoon and his wife, Kim Keon-hee, violated the Improper Solicitation and Graft Act when Kim’s company garnered a great number of sponsors for an exhibition held at the Seoul Arts Center in December 2016 after Yoon was named prosecutor general.  
   
Prosecutors looking into the allegations decided that there were no charges to pursue against the couple because Yoon was still the chief of the Daegu District Prosecutors’ Office at the time of the exhibition, and the anti-graft law does not address actions by a public official’s spouse. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.