Author: GIKorea

It looks quite a storm system hit Pyeongtaek:

 Several Army helicopters were damaged in a storm that battered this U.S. base 40 miles south of Seoul on Friday evening, according to the 2nd Infantry Division.

The division declined to provide specifics on the damage, citing operational security policies, but the command was “conducting maintenance checks across the fleet,” according to a statement to Stars and Stripes on Monday.

The helicopters were not in the air during the storm and no injuries were reported, Lt. Col. Ryan Donald, the division’s public affairs director, said Saturday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

The Kim regime continues their strategy of wooing the Moon administration to pressure the Biden administration into a deal:

 South and North Korea restored their direct communication lines Monday, raising hopes for the resumption of stalled inter-Korean dialogue amid a drawn-out deadlock in denuclearization talks.

The two sides had contact through a military hotline and a separate joint liaison office channel, according to South Korean officials.

Hours earlier, North Korea’s state media announced that the lines would be back to normal operation as of 9 a.m. on the day.

Last year, North Korea blew up a liaison office in its border town of Kaesong and unilaterally cut off all inter-Korean communication lines in anger over anti-Pyongyang leaflets sent from South Korea.

The hotlines were briefly back in operation in late July before being suspended by North Korea in protest of an annual combined military exercise of South Korea and the United States. The North has long denounced the allies’ annual military exercise as a rehearsal for invasion.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

If you are wondering why your Facebook account is down, here is what is currently going on:

Facebook Inc. services experienced widespread outages Monday morning, adding to the social network’s miserable day.

Facebook FB, -4.88% shares dropped as much as 6% to an intraday low of $323, which would be their worst single day decline since a 6.3% fall logged on Oct. 30, 2020. The stock outpaced a 1.5% loss on the S&P 500 index SPX, -1.30%and a 2.3% loss on the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index. COMP, -2.14%

The decline followed a national broadcast of a whistleblower’s allegations that the social media network placed profits before safety. Late Sunday, ViacomCBS Inc.’s VIAC, -1.97% news program “60 Minutes” interviewed former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen, who alleges that the social-media giant has been deceiving investors about how it has been dealing with hate speech and misinformation on its platform.

Haugen provided thousands of pages of documents to The Wall Street Journal, which formed the basis of the publication’s The Facebook Files series. Haugen is scheduled to testify before Congress on Tuesday morning and is also seeking whistleblower protection in complaints filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Adding to all of that was a widespread outage of Facebook services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, that started just before noon Eastern time. Even the status dashboard Facebook uses to communicate its availability to developers was not working Monday.

Market Watch

You can read more at the link, but I also read reports that Facebook employees were having a hard time getting into their offices because the security system used to scan cards for access was down as well.

Singapore has abandoned the zero COVID strategy some countries are pursuing and instead focusing on hospitalization rates and not case numbers:

Singapore reported a total of 93 deaths from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic through Wednesday. Across the narrow Straits of Johor, neighbor Malaysia counted more than double that number on Wednesday alone.

Malaysia has reported 798 COVID-19 deaths per million residents since the start of the pandemic; Singapore fewer than 16.

After one of the most successful vaccination rollouts in the world, and the pandemic brought well under control with strict regulations and aggressive testing and tracking, Singapore began in August what it calls a “transition journey to a COVID-19 resilient nation.”

In doing so, the wealthy Southeast Asian nation of 5.5 million people tacitly conceded that reducing cases to zero was not a possible long-term solution, and instead decided it could start a gradual return to everyday life, said Tikki Pang, a visiting professor of infectious diseases at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore and a former World Health Organization researcher.

“In the longer term, it is really going to become the norm,” he said of the approach. “Because I think most governments of most countries will accept the fact that this virus is not going to go away, it’s going to become endemic and we’re just going to have to learn to live with it like the flu.”

Associated Press

You can read more at the link, but Singapore’s high vaccination rate is helping it keep its hospitalization and death rate well below neighboring countries. This has given the nation confidence to reopen and try to return to normal.

Has anyone ever gone outside to smoke a cigarette and been attacked by a ninja? Well that is what happened to a Special Operations soldier while training in California:

Nonlethal rounds failed to stop a sword-wielding man dressed as a ninja who authorities say injured two special operations soldiers, then brandished his blade at sheriff’s deputies last month at a California airport, according to authorities. 

Deputies from a Kern County Sheriff’s Office substation in Ridgecrest, Calif., responded to a call of an assault with a deadly weapon Sept. 18 at Inyokern Airport, the office said in a statement posted Friday on Twitter. The airport is located in the Mojave Desert, near Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. 

When deputies arrived on the scene, they found some 26 special operations soldiers training at the airport “hunkered down” in the hangar after an attack by a man dressed as a ninja, Ridgecrest Police Department records show. Stars and Stripes first reported details of the incident, which was revealed in a military report leaked on social media, earlier this week.

Officers discovered the suspect had assaulted one victim with a sword and hit another victim after tossing a rock through a hangar window, the sheriff’s office said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but the wannabe ninja assassin was arrested after the attacks and appears to be a nutjob.

One of the things I love about South Korea is the high number of self-employed mom & pop stores that are few and far between in America now. The COVID protocols are really crushing these businesses now:

In the hit Netflix series, “Squid Game,” the main character, Seong Gi-hun, joins the fight-to-the-death challenge, driven by the 400 million won he owes, after the failure of his restaurants, a business he started after losing his job at a car manufacturing company. Hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and changes in the economy, many small business owners say they are no different from Seong. 

In an internet forum on the country’s top search engine and platform, Naver, where the self-employed share information, a man who runs a small sushi restaurant said he could not take his eyes off the show. “The show depicts in detail what it is like to be on the edge of a precipice,” he wrote. Another said he felt like he was living right in the middle of the game. The only difference is that “there will be no prize money even if I win,” he commented.

According to the National Self-Employed Emergency Response Committee, at least 22 small business owners have taken their own lives since the coronavirus pandemic began. One of them retrieved the deposit for her one-room studio apartment so as to pay her part-time workers before committing suicide. For many, even if the business is continuously incurring losses, immediately shutting down is not an option because they cannot terminate their rental contract without losing additional deposit money.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.