Author: GIKorea

There is now one less major mobile phone manufacturer:

LG Electronics said Monday it will withdraw from the mobile business after years of money-losing performance amid intensifying competition with bigger rivals. 

The South Korean tech powerhouse said in a regulatory filing that its mobile communications (MC) unit will no longer produce and sell handsets after July 31, citing its long slump and fierce competition in the industry. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but according to the article LG Electronics has accumulated $4.4 billion in debt from the lack of mobile phone sales.

It seems like a pretty big unforced error for Sery Kim, but who knows maybe this is what the people in the district she is running for want to hear. Additionally it has given her national media attention because I have never heard of her until now:

Multiple U.S. media outlets reported that Young Kim and Steel issued a joint statement to say they cannot continue to support Sery Kim, who is running to represent Texas’ sixth Congressional District.

“As the first Korean American Republican women to serve in Congress, we want to empower and lift up fellow members of the AAPI community who want to serve their communities,” the lawmakers said in the statement CNN reported on Saturday. “We talked with Sery Kim yesterday concerning her hurtful and untrue comments about Chinese immigrants, and made clear that her comments were unacceptable.”

Sery Kim is currently mired in controversy, after she answered a question about U.S. immigration during a forum on Wednesday. “I don’t want them here at all,” she said, referring to Chinese immigrants.

“They steal our intellectual property, give us the coronavirus, and they don’t hold themselves accountable,” she said. “And quite frankly, I can say that because I’m Korean.” The candidate also lashed out at China, claiming that the coronavirus was created at a lab in Wuhan, according to a YouTube video recording of the event uploaded by Kim’s election camp.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

By not having their athletes at the Olympics this will more easily allow the North Koreans to make trouble this summer. What better time to start a provocation cycle that will get the world’s attention on you than the Olympics:

North Korea said Tuesday it will not participate in the upcoming Tokyo Summer Olympics to protect its athletes against the coronavirus pandemic, dashing South Korea’s hopes to use the games to kickstart the stalled peace process with Pyongyang.

The decision was made during a general assembly meeting of the North’s Olympic Committee held in Pyongyang on March 25, according to Sports in the DPRK Korea, a website on sports affairs in North Korea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but will the U.S., ROK, and Japan cut a deal to end a provocation cycle before the Olympics just to get the Kim regime to behave? I guess we will see what happens.

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

Via a reader tip comes this interesting read about Lee Hak-rae who was a convicted war criminal from World War II who served as a prison guard during the construction of the Thai-Burma railway line:

The last Korean to be convicted of war crimes after serving in the Japanese military during World War II has died without receiving the apology and compensation he insisted Tokyo owed him for his suffering. Lee Hak-rae, 96, died on Sunday.  (…….)

Interviewed in 1988, Lee said he had never abused prisoners in his charge and that he had been frightened of them because of their stature. 

That claim was undermined by the diaries of Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, the Australian army colonel who served in the Medical Corps and was captured at Java in 1942. In one passage, Dunlop wrote that he had become so incensed at the brutal treatment by “The Lizard” – the nickname the POWs gave to Lee – that he found a length of wood and hid alongside a jungle path he knew Lee would be taking. His intention was to kill Lee and conceal the body in the undergrowth, but he changed his mind after realising that he and other POWs would be held accountable for Lee’s death. (……)

“The Japanese guards were bad, but the Koreans and the Formosans were the worst,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “These were men who the Japanese looked down on as colonials, so they needed to show they were as good as the Japanese. And they had no one else to take it out on other than us POWs.”

South China Morning Post

You can read more at the link, but Lee after the war was originally sentenced to death for abusing prisoners and on appeal it was reduced to jail time. He ended up serving 11 years in prison and was released in 1956.