It will be interesting to see if the Blue House wants to continue to not hold the combined exercises regardless of if it makes them less prepared to take over OPCON:
South Korea and the United States should continue to stage large-scale combined military exercises in the face of North Korea’s evolving nuclear and missile capabilities, U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) commander Gen. Robert Abrams said Wednesday.
In a speech during a forum held in Seoul, Abrams also noted that more work needs to be done for the planned transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) of South Korean forces from Washington to Seoul.
“Unfortunately, we had to postpone our theatre-level combined post command training this year due to the ongoing global pandemic. While we have been able to conduct important leader development training, that in no way replicates the rigor and realism of our semi-annual theatre-level training events,” Abrams said.
In February, Seoul and Washington announced their decision to indefinitely postpone their key springtime exercise due to COVID-19, and discussions are under way to fix the schedule and program for their summertime combined exercises.
“We must continue to conduct combined live trainings … with rigorous scenarios,” the commander said, vowing to further discuss with the South Korean side about ways to maintain a staunch readiness posture.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
Dr. Tara O has another nugget on the appeasement of North Korea by the Moon administration:
At the 70th Anniversary of the Korean War commemoration event in South Korea, the North Korean anthem was played prior to the South Korean national anthem. The annual event, which is usually held during the day, was held late at night for the first time on June 25, 2020, with Korean War veterans and foreign guests. The U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accountability Agency (DPAA) sent the remains of 147 Republic of Korea (ROK) soldiers who died during the Korean War; the remains were initially returned from North Korea. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, after skipping the event for the first three years of his presidency, attended the commemoration event for the first time.
East Asia Research Center
You can read much more at the link, but this is like playing verses from Horst-Wessel-Lied as part of the Star Spangled Banner during a Normandy Commemoration.
For some expats living in Seoul you may be getting a check from the City of Seoul soon:
Foreigners living in Seoul will receive a one-time Covid-19 relief payment, a city official confirmed Wednesday.
Joong Ang Ilbo
During a plenary session Tuesday, the Seoul Metropolitan Council passed a supplementary budget bill that included plans to allocate 33 billion won ($27.4 million) for a program to dole out emergency funds to foreigners.
But the city has been light on basic details, including the timing and payment amounts.
Seoul’s decision to provide Covid-19 emergency payments to foreigners came less than a month after Korea’s human rights watchdog, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, issued a policy recommendation to the metropolitan government of Seoul and the provincial government of Gyeonggi not to discriminate against foreigners when providing Covid-19 relief.
You can read more at the link.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out because in the U.S. universities did not give discounted or refunded tuition to students that were forced into online learning either:
South Korean university students have joined together to file a class action lawsuit against the Ministry of Education and schools, seeking partial tuition refunds for disruptions to learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Movement for Tuition Refunds, a student group formed by the National University Student Council, held a press briefing on Wednesday in front of the Seoul Central District Court to call on universities to refund part of their spring tuition.
Some 3,500 students from 42 universities nationwide have participated in the class action lawsuit, according to the group.
The global crisis caused by the novel coronavirus has created a major disruption in the way the country’s higher education institutions offer classes. As schools shut down and classes are being offered remotely, there have been continuing complaints from students that they are not getting what they paid for.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
It seems inevitable that the coronavirus is going to infect kids at school and I am surprised it has taken this long for it to happen:
Three infection cases of school kids in Daejeon have sent officials and educators to scurry for measures to curb transmission among young children Wednesday, as they might be the country’s first school transmissions.
Three fifth-graders at Cheondong Elementary School in Daejeon, about 160 kilometers south of Seoul, were confirmed to have tested positive for the new coronavirus, according to city officials.
One is a classmate of the school’s first patient, who was confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 on Monday. The two students took classes at the same cram school, but their schedules were found not to have overlapped.
Another student was found to have come into contact with the first patient at a gymnasium. The two students are known to be quite close to each other, visiting each other’s houses frequently.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but the infection may have happened outside of the school as well. Bottomline though is that schools just need to have a plan in place in how to deal with infections when they happen because they will.
There should be more of this antibody testing done in the U.S. as well to get a better idea of how wide spread the coronavirus actually is:
The South Korean quarantine authorities are gearing up efforts to conduct a nationwide COVID-19 antibody testing to determine what percentage of the population has been infected and has acquired immunity.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(KCDC) said on Tuesday that tests and surveys on around three-thousand serum samples, including those collected from coronavirus patients in Seoul, are underway.
Kwon Jun-wook, deputy director general at KCDC, said a thousand people in Daegu and its surrounding North Gyeongsang Province, the two hardest-hit areas in the country, will also be surveyed in July and August.
Under the government plan, blood samples will be collected from seven-thousand people across the country.
While the antibody testing is expected to be completed around December, Kwon speculated the result will be little different from other countries, where immunity rates were found to be low.
KBS World Radio
