Author: GIKorea

For anyone that thinks Democrats and Republicans are irresponsible spenders, this guy may have the craziest presidential platform I have seen yet:

 Pompously clad in a Joseon-era general’s suit of armor, a longsword in hand, Huh Kyung-young, honorary chief of a little known political party, showed up on horseback at an historic battlefield site northwest of Seoul in August to declare his presidential bid in yet another bout of his unique political gimmickry.

Enacting the Joseon army’s heroic victory over invading Japanese forces at Haengju Fortress in one of the major Imjin War battles (1592-1598), the 71-year-old made a spectacle by playing the role of a national hero who slices the enemies to death and saves the country, in front of journalists and supporters. 

He then changed into a sleek business suit and glided back to the audience in his famous Rolls Royce to declare his campaign pledge to run in the 2022 presidential election, solemn-faced throughout the whole event.

The pledges blatantly included a one-shot payment of 100 million won (US$85,258) to everyone aged 18 and above in emergency livelihood assistance upon his presidential victory, along with 1.5 million won in “public dividends” every month.

Huh also promised to give a newlywed couple 100 million won each as a subsidy, plus another 200 million won as a no-interest loan to help them buy a home. Giving birth will bring in another 50 million won per baby, he promised.

Huh said he will do away with 90 percent of the state penitentiary facilities, adopt a system to levy fines proportional to offenders’ wealth and collect “anti-tax evasion taxes” to bankroll his splurge of subsidies if he becomes president.

“Our nation is the world’s 10th-strongest economy, but the level of people’s lives is in 100th place. This attests to the fact that the country is not short on money, but it has a lot of thieves,” he rashly claimed.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but it only gets wackier about Huh Kyung-young. He even went to jail before for lying about being engaged to former President Park Geun-hye.

The Stars & Stripes has an update on the case of the Filipina bartender who murdered a 3-year old son of a USFK service member left in her care:

 Jamaica Eblacas, 30, a Pyeongtaek bartender who admitted killing a U.S. soldier’s 3-year-old son, is refusing a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation or to cooperate with her defense attorney, the attorney told Stars and Stripes on Wednesday.

“We’re frustrated,” attorney Jung Wang Jae told Stars and Stripes in an interview Thursday. “We feel a bit bad for our client. This is a big case, and she has a baby as well.”

At her arraignment Nov. 5, Eblacas admitted killing Noa Calhoun, the son of Army Pvt. James and Kourtney Calhoun, after his father left the child and his 7-year-old brother in her care two months earlier. 

James Calhoun is assigned to the 61st Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Company at Camp Humphreys.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but in court she admitted to stabbing and beating the young boy. Other news is that she got into an unrelated fight with an elderly Korean man before this incident and her ex-husband who is Korean says she is not mentally well. No word on what the U.S. Soldier was doing leaving his kids in the care of a juicy girl that night though we can speculate.

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

That didn’t take long, just a week ago the Korean government was saying it was no longer going to use case numbers to make COVID decisions. The Health and Welfare Ministry even said that cases would not matter if they even reached 10,000 a day. Now that case numbers have hit 2,500 they are backtracking:

 South Korea may not further ease its coronavirus restrictions, the country’s top public health official warned Thursday, amid a spike in COVID-19 cases.

South Korea began easing virus curbs in November in the first of the three-phase “living with COVID-19” scheme. It had planned to move to the second phase in mid-December after a two-week evaluation period.

Jeong Eun-kyeong, commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said it may be difficult to move to the second phase of the scheme if new cases continue to grow.

The country reported 2,520 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total caseload to 388,351, the KDCA said.

Thursday’s tally marked a slight hike from the previous day’s 2,425, which marked the first time in six days that daily infections exceeded 2,400.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

This guys breaks into a home where he finds his wife cheating on him with another man and pulls out his camera to record it. This causes they guy to be convicted of being a sex offender:

A man was found guilty of a sex crime for filming his wife as she engaged in an extramarital affair. The couple was in the midst of divorce proceedings.

The appellate department of Ulsan District Court sentenced a man in his 50s to a fine of 1 million won ($850) and 40 hours in a sexual violence treatment program for the violation.

The man was indicted for breaking into a studio apartment in Ulsan on an early morning in August of last year, inflicting violence on his wife and the man who was with her, and filming them with his smartphone. He used a ladder to climb up to the window and gain entry to the premises. 

He had secretly followed his wife, who had left home after an argument. He then broke into the premises she had entered and was infuriated to find her with the man, both in their underwear. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but this is just another example of a bizarre court ruling that comes out of the Korean courts at times.