Korean TV channel asks: why are you stupid foreigners (Benedict Cumberbatch, Anne Hathaway, Keanu Reeves) coming here and doing a namaste to us? Is this your standard “oriental” greeting? https://t.co/6gHOTXMPGf
The two-year-old Welsh Corgi was found killed and eaten by neighbor. / Yonhap
A missing dog has been found killed and eaten by a neighbor.
According to the Pyeongtaek Police Station, Tuesday, a woman in her 30s reported to the police that her lost dog might have been eaten by someone.
She lost her two-year-old Welsh Corgi in Cheongbuk-eup, Pyeongtaek City, Gyeonggi Province, March 4.
The woman offered 1 million won ($936) as a reward to find the dog and put up signs in the streets.
While she was searching for the dog, she got a tip from a friend who said, “Someone has eaten the dog.”
The suspect was a 63-year-old neighbor.
He told the police that the dog was barking too much in the yard so he threw a rock at it. Then the dog was knocked out so he strangled him with electric wires. [Korea Times]
Cho Hyun-min, 35, the sister of Cho Hyun-ah (Heather Cho), the Korean Air heiress who made headlines around the world for the 2014 “nut rage” incident, has been caught up in her own rage controversy.
She has been accused of throwing a cup of water into the face of an employee from an advertising agency at a recent meeting.
According to local media outlets Thursday, Cho, a Korean Air executive, was dissatisfied with the agent’s performance for its new advertisement, so she “yelled and threw a cup of water at the employee.”
Korean Air denied the accusation. “It is true that she yelled and threw a cup to the floor,” a Korean Air official told The Korea Times. “But she did not throw the cup at the employee. After a while, she apologized to the person and others who attended the meeting.”
If the accusation is true, she could be prosecuted for assault. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but throwing a cup on the ground is nothing; I once saw a senior military leader throw a chair across the room that hit a wall to make a point of how displeased he was.
This may end of backfiring on the Moon administration:
Robert Gallucci, head of the USKI
The U.S.-Korea Institute (USKI) stated it will close next month due to a cut in funding from the South Korean government, media outlets reported Tuesday.
The USKI is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It runs the website 38 North specializing in North Korea affairs.
The USKI received 2.1 billion won ($1.87 million) in annual funding from the government, through the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP) affiliated with the Prime Minister’s Office.
This is about 60 percent of its total budget, according to a KIEP official. The USKI also receives funding from Johns Hopkins University, she said.
According to AP, USKI Chairman Robert Gallucci said the think tank will close in May, after rejecting “utterly inappropriate meddling” in its academic affairs.
Earlier, the government stated it would stop funding the institute starting in June, citing problems with transparency in accounting and selecting visiting scholars and interns.
The USKI claimed there had been pressure from Cheong Wa Dae to oust the institute’s director Jae H. Ku, due to his conservative inclinations that were out of line with the liberal Moon Jae-in administration. Ku has headed the think tank since 2007. [Korea Times]
The silencing of the US-Korea Institute I think may backfire because they have been largely friendly to the Moon administration’s policies. Now that the organization is no longer funded by the Korean government their may be more of a willingness to take on the Moon administration. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
A sign with Donald Trump's face at the demonstrations in support of disgraced former South Korean president Park Geun-hye: "All Koreans love USA. Please save Korea's ex-president PGH" https://t.co/5umsrnQbLPpic.twitter.com/0xWtFcwGU0
It looks like some apartment complexes in South Korea are having mountains of recyclable waste building up around them as private companies are having a harder time making money from recycling the waste:
A worker at a recycling company examines piles of compressed plastic bottles in a yard in Chuncheon, Gangwon, on Thursday. [YONHAP]As the confusion over recyclables continues in apartment complexes in Seoul and Gyeonggi, the Ministry of Environment on Thursday began an emergency round of checkups to find out which private companies are refusing to retrieve plastic and Styrofoam waste.
Forty-eight private recycling companies announced last week they would no longer retrieve plastic and foam waste because they could no longer make a profit from it. Paper collection was not affected.
The announcement threw people into confusion over how to discard their recyclables until Monday, when the Environment Ministry said in a statement that after negotiations, all 48 waste disposal companies agreed to resume regular services.
But the agreement may not have been as final as the ministry thought.
According to the Gyeonggi provincial government on Wednesday, 20 out of 31 local governments in the province said the companies were collecting recyclables the same way as before.
The rest are “in the process of negotiating.”
“We are in the process of negotiating to resume regular services, but some apartment complexes may experience inconveniences for a while,” said an official from the Resource Recirculation Division of the Gyeonggi provincial government. “We will try to reach agreement as soon as possible, and if we cannot, then we will have the city governments and county offices provide the services instead.” [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but the main issue appears to be the decision by China to cut the import of many types of recyclable waste. China had been taking the waste and making solid fuel pellets for it to burn in factories or heat homes, but to decrease air pollution they have cut the import of the recyclables.
I would be surprised if this happens in South Korea:
Starbucks and other coffee sellers in California must warn customers of a potentially cancer-causing chemical in coffee, following a ruling from a Los Angeles judge last week.
Now the global coffee chain is concerned that the impact of the decision may go beyond the U.S. state.
“The ruling aroused concern among company employees,” a senior Starbucks Coffee Korea official told The Korea Times Wednesday. “But we have not taken any specific measures in regard to the issue, given that the ruling is not final. This matter is affecting the whole coffee industry, not just Starbucks.”
The comment came several days after Starbucks’ China unit said it would ensure it provided quality and safe products to consumers in a response to the ruling.
A nonprofit organization, the Council for Education and Research on Toxics, sued 91 coffee companies, including Starbucks, for failing to warn consumers of a chemical that could cause cancer.
The chemical is acrylamide, which also can be found in some foods and cigarette smoke. It is a byproduct of roasting coffee beans that is present in high levels in brewed coffee.
Korean customers are exposed to the same health risk as Californians, given that the way coffee is produced is practically the same. However, a Starbucks Korea PR official said Korea does not have the same regulations that would enforce such a requirement ― yet.
Lee Hyun-ki, head of a civic group for food safety, reportedly said he thinks Starbucks Korea needs to review the necessity for such a requirement here. “If any of the U.S. states make efforts for food safety, Starbucks needs to consider doing the same for Korean consumers … They have the right to know about acrylamide,” he said.
L.A. Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle said in a decision that Starbucks and other coffee firms had failed to show that the level of acrylamide produced in the coffee roasting process does not pose a significant cancer risk. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but acrylamide is also found in other foods such as french fires, potato chips, bread, and other foods. So will California require other food products to have warning labels as well for acrylamide?
The whole “7-Hour Mystery” talking point involving former President Park Geun-hye and the sinking of the Sewol has never made any sense to me and the revealing of the actual timeline by investigators only further confirms this:
On the day of the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, then-President Park Geun-hye spent crucial early hours when people could have been saved in her bedroom. As the hours passed, Park met with confidante Choi Soon-sil and got her hair done before starting to deal with the unfolding tragedy, according to a prosecution announcement on Wednesday.
The prosecution concluded that the entire timeline offered by the Park administration about her activities the day of the accident, which killed 304 people, was a fabrication aimed at covering up her slow responses.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office announced the outcome of its investigation into the Park government’s handling of the ferry disaster. Park’s absence in the critical early hours of a lackluster rescue operation generated enough controversy to be branded the “seven-hour mystery.” [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Here is how the timeline played out:
According to the prosecution, the Sewol sent its first distress signal at 8:58 a.m. on April 16, 2014, and the Blue House’s crisis management center noticed the situation around 9:19 a.m. through a media report. The situation was shared among presidential aides at 9:24 a.m. using a text message system and the crisis management center completed its first situation report at 9:57 a.m. by contacting the Coast Guard.
That report was sent to Park’s residence around 10:12 a.m., but did not reach her. She was in her bedroom and the report was left on a table outside the room.
Around 10 a.m., Kim Jang-soo, who was head of the National Security Office, tried to telephone Park but she didn’t answer. He contacted An Bong-geun, a presidential secretary, and An drove to the residence and called to the president from outside her bedroom, the prosecution said. Park then came out from the bedroom and telephoned Kim around 10:22 a.m.
The prosecution said the first telephone briefing of Park, therefore, took place at 10:22 a.m., although the Park Blue House had earlier said the call took place at 10:15 a.m. Although Park ordered Kim to make sure there were no casualties in the accident, the most crucial hours of rescue operation had already passed, the prosecution said.
So the first report was sent to her at 10:12 AM, but was left outside her door. The supposed Golden Time for rescue operations ended at 10:17. Even if the first report to her was immediately received at 10:12, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, what difference would it have made?
If a rescue was going to happen it was going to have to be by first responders from the ROK Coast Guard. The Coast Guard office in Mokpo immediately sent a vessel to the accident site after receiving emergency phone calls from passengers. The vessel arrived at the scene before the sinking, but did not order the passengers to evacuate:
West Sea Coast Guard station ship 123 was tasked with patrolling the waters in Coastal Zone 3 near Jindo, South Jeolla Province the morning of the accident on Apr. 16. After the first 119 emergency call on the sinking from high school student Choi Deok-ha (who was later found dead), the Mokpo Coast Guard station situation room issued an order at around 8:57 to send ship 123 to the scene. At roughly 9:14, the vessel’s captain, surnamed Kim, was appointed commander for the accident scene. The boat was tasked with surveying the accident and performing a swift rescue effort according to the Coast Guard search and rescue manual.But after arriving at the scene at 9:30, Kim issued no evacuation order for the Sewol, despite ship 123 having a microphone system rigged up.
The manual’s instruction for capsizes is to “confirm the response from remaining personnel on the vessel and send a signal via loudspeaker.” Instead, the 47 minutes of “golden time” until the Sewol’s deck was fully submerged at 10:17 were wasted.The revelations about Kim‘s lack of urgency while in charge of rescue efforts at the accident scene were seen by many as especially disturbing. At the Gwangju District Court trial of Sewol crew members, Park Hyeong-ju of the Gachon University Interdisciplinary Skyscraper Disaster Prevention Center presented simulation findings showing all passengers could have been evacuated in six minutes and 17 seconds if ship 123 had given the order when Sewol captain Lee Jun-seok, 69, was rescued at 9:45. [Hankyoreh]
This was incompetence by the ROK Coast Guard that was clearly unprepared to deal with such an accident and not something Park Geun-hye was going to be able to resolve in 5 minutes from the Blue House. If people want to criticize her for lax government regulations that allowed the overweight ferry to operate and the poor disaster response by the Coast Guard I think that is fair. However, to claim she could have personally did something to save those people that morning, but instead hung out in her bedroom is completely unfair in my opinion.
It is definitely yellow dust season again in South Korea:
Korea was blanketed with the worst toxic smog so far this year over the weekend, forcing many people to cancel outdoor activities.
“Without rain or winds, accumulated pollutants from outside and inside the country caused a high density of fine dust,” the Environment Ministry said.
As of 1 p.m. on Sunday, the concentration of ultrafine or PM2.5 dust particles was “very bad” at 101 ㎍/㎥ and higher in Seoul, Gyeonggi Province, and North Chungcheong Province. The fine dust density went even higher in most regions on Sunday.
The ministry decided to implement emergency measures for the Seoul metropolitan area for the fourth time this year as the fine dust density exceeded 50 ㎍/㎥ in Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi as of 5 p.m. Sunday and is expected to surpass the level again on Monday.
Some 27,000 civil servants in the Seoul area are only allowed to drive cars with even number plates on Monday. [Chosun Ilbo]
I doubt the car restriction on the civil servants would do much of anything to the fine dust level. I am willing to bet that President Moon could declare a national holiday and keep everyone at home and it would do nothing to the yellow dust level since the source of the problem largely lies across the border in China. The ROK government can’t do anything about that, so restricting a few cars at least allows the government to look like it is “doing something”.
