Instead of a foreign spouse learning how to speak Korean, now the Korean spouse can also learn to speak their partner’s language for a visa:
A foreigner applying for a spousal visa in South Korea will have a higher chance if the Korean spouse learns his or her native language, the Ministry of Justice said Monday.
The ministry has eased the assessment criteria for a foreigner’s spousal visa application if his or her Korean partner takes classes in the spouse’s native language for more than three months, or passes a proficiency test in that language, it said in a statement.
Until now, the foreign spouse had to obtain a Korean proficiency test certificate or take Korean lessons for over 120 hours to be eligible for the visa. [Korea Times]
Inspectors look around a charred oil storage tank in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, Monday. /Korea Times photo by Hong In-ki
The recent explosion of an oil tank in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province ― and the ensuing fire that consumed 2.6 million liters of gasoline over 17 hours ― has revealed the lack of adequate safety regulations at oil storage sites in the country.
The explosion on Sunday was caused by a sky lantern released by a young Sri Lankan migrant worker, about 300 meters from the oil storage site, police said.
The grass around the storage compound caught fire as the sky lantern, lifted by a burning flame inside, landed there, CCTV footage showed.
As there were no fire detectors installed outside the oil tank, the operators were unaware of the danger until the explosion came 18 minutes later, the police revealed in a briefing Tuesday.
Police suspect the explosion occurred as fire sparks from the grass made contact with oil and natural gas vapors emitted from the tank’s ventilation hatch. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but it seems it should take much more then a fire lantern to blow up a huge oil tank like this. I try to look at this from the perspective of a North Korean saboteur. If a sky lantern can do this much damage imagine what a coordinated North Korean sabotage attempt against the nations oil storage infrastructure could do?
Even if this is the cause of the fire, I have to wonder what the safety measures are around these fuel tanks if a “sky lantern” can blow one of these oil tanks up:
A blaze erupts at a gasoline storage tank operated by a state-run oil pipeline company in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, Oct. 7. Yonhap
The police have arrested a Sri Lankan national in its probe of a recent explosion at a local oil storage facility, police officials said Monday.
The arrest came one day after an explosion at the oil storage facility in Goyang, just north of Seoul, consumed a large storage tank with 2.66 million liters of gasoline, enough to fill 250 tank trucks.
The police said the 27-year-old Sri Lankan is believed to have accidentally caused the fire by releasing a sky lantern in the vicinity of the oil storage facility.
The police believe the sky lantern may have started the fire when it fell on the lawn of the oil storage facility, causing flames that later spread into the ventilation system of the oil tank, causing the explosion.
The 27-year-old is said to be a construction worker currently working at a site near the facility. [Korea Times]
The South Korean left’s war on conservative media continues, but credit to the New York Times for taking notice of what is going on in South Korea:
Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon of South Korea in Seoul in August. He said misinformation about his visit to Ho Chi Minh’s compound in Vietnam had been “vicious.”
South Korea announced a sweeping crackdown on “fake news” on Tuesday, calling it “a destroyer of democracy.” Conservative critics of the government, however, cried foul, accusing it of trying to impede freedom of speech.
Speaking at a cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon said that fake news had spread so widely in South Korea that it was stymying not only citizens’ privacy but also the country’s national security and foreign policies, including its relations with North Korea.
Mr. Lee did not offer examples. But he was furious last week after he visited Vietnam for the state funeral for its president, Tran Dai Quang. While in Hanoi, he visited the stilt house of Ho Chi Minh and wrote in the visitors’ book at the compound that he felt “humble” before the “great” Vietnamese leader. South Korea fought against his Communist forces alongside the Americans during the Vietnam War.
So of course the Prime Minister has declared war on fake news and wants a new law to regulate the news:
Mr. Lee encouraged government agencies to report fake news to the law enforcement authorities for investigation. He also called for a new law regulating such information, which some lawmakers in his Democratic Party had already been advocating.
Opposition lawmakers denounced the government’s move as an attempt to silence criticism, especially YouTube videos used by conservative critics to attack the progressive government of President Moon Jae-in, whom they often call a North Korean stooge. Progressives have long criticized those channels as a main source of inaccurate and unfair information.
“They can already punish distribution of false information under the existing laws,” Park Dae-chul, a legislator affiliated with the conservative opposition Liberty Korea Party, said in a statement. “I cannot help suspecting that this is an attempt to crack down on right-wing podcasts. They want to shut down the voices the government doesn’t want to hear.”
ROK Drop readers may recall how the Korean left has already taken over control of most of the mainstream media in the country through union violence and those they don’t control they have threatened with legal action. They have even had conservative journalists arrested for libel.
The Moon administration is taking these actions because they need to change the South Korean public’s opinion of North Korea and Kim Jong-un. Conservative critics who keep bringing up North Korea’s poor human rights record, past atrocities, terrorism, and other inconvenient truths have to be silenced to continue to shape pro-North public messaging.
The Moon administration’s ultimate goal is a confederation with North Korea and he can’t realize that without the support of the South Korean public.
I may not be a nurse, but this sure seems inappropriate to pressure someone to have an enema:
A senior nurse shows how to insert needles into blood vessels, with a new nurse as the subject, during a training session at Daejeon St. Mary’s Hospital in this February photo. It was disclosed recently that at some nursing schools students are forced to receive an enema in front of classmates as a guinea pig, raising issues of human rights infringement. / Yonhap
A human rights violation controversy has emerged after it was found that some nursing schools here force students to act as guinea pigs by receiving an enema in front of classmates.
Act Now Nurse, a group advocating nurses’ human rights, said it plans to file a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission of Korea against seven schools for human rights infringement.
The practice became known after a student accused one school of randomly picking one student each from four- to five-member groups to become the “patient of the day” for the enema training.
“One student in each group is picked by drawing lots, and it is the atmosphere that the selected student cannot say no. Having to show my anus to others because of bad luck in the lots… I think this is an issue of human rights, and I wonder if other schools do this too,” the student said anonymously in an online community of nurses, Sept. 18. [Korea Times]
Here is a reminder to all my readers in South Korea, seatbelts are now mandatory to wear:
Starting tomorrow, all car passengers will have to buckle up.
The National Police Agency said Thursday that a new enforcement ordinance requiring all car passengers to wear seatbelts on Korea’s roads will come into force on Friday.
A driver will be fined 30,000 won ($27) if any passenger violates the rule. The fine will be 60,000 won if the passenger is 13 or younger.
Police said they are planning to start cracking down on seatbelt violations in December, after a two-month awareness campaign. [Korea Times]
Here is another study that shows the high quality of life the people in South Korea enjoy:
South Korea has improved its quality of life to become the world’s 18th best this year, a survey by a U.S. non-profit organization showed Thursday.
According to the survey conducted by the Social Progress Imperative, South Korea earned an overall score of 87.13 out of 100 in its “social progress index” survey for 2018, making it 18th of 146 nations surveyed across the globe. Last year, the Northeast Asian nation ranked 26th.
The index aggregates 51 social and environmental indicators that track three aspects of social progress: basic human needs, foundations of well-being and opportunity. The organization began compiling such data in 2013.
“South Korea earned relatively high scores in its solid education and IT infrastructure among others, but needs more efforts to improve environmental quality and to promote social inclusiveness for minorities,” said Cho Yong-ho, an official of international consultancy Deloitte Anjin which works with the non-profit group for the study.
Norway topped the list this year with 90.26 points, followed by Iceland, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Germany and New Zealand. (Yonhap)
Interestingly according to the study South Korea has a higher quality of life than the United States. Also notice that they did not even include North Korea on the list. Here is the full list where South Korea’s arch rival Japan ranks 6th in the world in:
I don’t see any angle on how this rise of illegal immigration into South Korea during the Moon administration gives him any political advantage, unlike in the US. Does anyone have any ideas why the Moon administration is allowing a rise in illegal immigration?:
The number of foreign nationals staying in South Korea illegally increased by nearly 100,000 on-year to surpass 330,000 this year, government data showed Sunday.
According to the data by the Ministry of Justice, 330,005 foreigners were staying in the country without a valid visa as of July, up 97,834 from 232,171 logged July of last year.
The data — which showed the number of illegal aliens over the past 10 years — was submitted to the National Assembly.
The annual average number of reported crimes committed by foreigners came to 43,635 over the past five years, the data showed.
The number came to 34,460 in 2013 and steadily increased to peak at 53,151 in 2016 and slightly down to 45,671 in 2017. [Yonhap]
You have to like how the former ROK Culture Minister was quietly released from jail during Chuseok:
Former culture minister Cho Yoon-sun was released from prison Saturday.
An appeals court sentenced her to two years on charges of ordering the blacklisting of cultural figures during the Park Geun-hye administration.
The third of three extended detention deadlines expired Friday at midnight, as she awaits a Supreme Court review of her case.
The blacklist she was convicted of ordering targeted individuals critical of the former president for exclusion from state support. [KBS World Radio]
It is interesting how she was tossed in jail for having a blacklist of artists the government would not give funding to, but the Moon administration has their own blacklist where they have cut funding to think tanks they don’t agree with and launched libel lawsuits to silence opposition media critics.
