The Japanese have responded to the Chinese escalation over the Senkakus:
Japan on Friday matched a move by rival China and will permit its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels attempting to land on the Senkakus, two square miles of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
The two countries’ coast guards regularly face off around the chain as Chinese vessels arrive to shadow or intimidate Japanese fishing vessels and Japan’s coast guard arrives to drive them away. Japan controls the islands, although Taiwan and China, which calls them Diaoyu Dao, also make claims.
It looks like some messy driving conditions on the Donghae Expressway:
Hundreds of cars were trapped on some parts of a highway along the east coast Monday as heavy snowfall caused a traffic gridlock, the road authority said.
Gangwon Province received about 10 centimeters of snowfall earlier in the day, which caused many cars returning from a three-day holiday to be stuck on the snow-covered Donghae Expressway, according to Korea Expressway Corp. (KEC)’s regional office.
It will be interesting to see if the US government does anything to try and seize North Korean assets to pay this court settlement:
A federal court has awarded $2.3 billion to several crewmembers and families of the USS Pueblo, a Navy ship taken hostage by North Korea more than 50 years ago.
Split evenly for compensatory and punitive damages, the amount is among the largest ever awarded in a state-sponsored terrorism case, according to Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, the Washington-based law firm that filed the case three years ago on behalf of 61 crew members and 110 family members in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
You can read more at the link and learn more about the USS Pueblo Incident at this link. I doubt the surviving crew members and the family members will ever see any money from North Korea, but at least this ruling will make it harder for the engagement crowd to make their case that aid for little to nothing in return should be U.S. policy with the Kim regime.
Rare photo of Korean independence fighters A group of Korean independence fighters are seen in a military formation greeting an entourage of Kim Gu, leader of the Korean independence movement against Japan and a reunification activist under the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, on Nov. 5, 1945, at the Shanghai Jiangwan Airport in this rare photo provided by the Shanghai Library. (Yonhap)
The start of vaccinating health care workers in South Korea against COVID-19 has begun:
Chung Mi-kyeong (2nd from R), a sanitation worker of the National Medical Center, receives a Pfizer vaccine at the hospital in central Seoul on Feb. 27, 2021, while Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun (3rd from L) looks on. She became the first South Korean to get the Pfizer product. (Yonhap)
About 18,500 people received a vaccination for COVID-19 in South Korea on the launch day of the nation’s public vaccination campaign against the pandemic, a government agency said Saturday.
The latest “me-too” clone movement in South Korea has taken out two big name athletes:
South Korean women volleyball twin stars Lee Jae-yeong, left, and Lee Da-yeong, right, of the Heungkuk Life Insurance Pink Spiders posing after they selected as all-stars before a V-League game at a gymnasium in Incheon. This picture was taken on January 26, 2021.
South Korean volleyball twins Lee Jae-yeong and Lee Da-yeong have been dropped from their national and club sides amid claims of teenage bullying. The 24-year-old sisters, two of the country’s best known female athletes, have both apologized after being anonymously accused of bullying previous students at their school. In Jae-yeong’s apology she referred to “actions and images from her teenage years.”
You can read more at the link, but the alleged bullying happened 10 years ago in middle school. Because of this they have been dropped from playing in the Olympics this summer and suspended from their club team. This seems like something extreme to do based off of anonymous social media accusations.
I had things happen to me while in school that would be considered bullying, especially since I was an athlete just like these twins and hazing was a right of passage back then. I don’t condone hazing and I think it is good that it is going away, but I don’t wish people that hazed me to be cancelled. Heck I have enough self esteem I don’t need or expect any apology. That is why I think these accusations say just as much about the accusers as the Lee twins. If you read the article the accusers actually consider themselves “victims”. This seems like another example of the cult of victimhood where people search to be part of some kind of victim class to bring attention to themselves, especially in the social media age.
These twins being premier athletes who received a lot of attention in middle and high school probably were jerks. However, people change significantly between middle school and adulthood. Are they still jerks? I don’t know the article doesn’t ask anyone they play with now. It seems like if they were still jerks teammates would be telling their stories to the media.
It seems like this could have been something handled with a statement of apology from the twins and their pledge to lead an anti-bully awareness campaign. It seems like this would have been more helpful to addressing bullying than cancelling them.
U.S. spy ship in N. Korea This undated Yonhap file photo, released by the Korean Central News Agency, shows the USS Pueblo spy ship being displayed along the Daedong River in Pyongyang for anti-American propaganda purposes. North Korea seized the 906-ton ship and its 83-strong crew in January 1968. According to foreign reports on Feb. 25, 2021, the Washington federal court ordered the North to pay US$2.5 billion in damages to the crew, who were tortured and mistreated for 11 months after their seizure. (Yonhap)
