A woman was rescued from a house crammed to the ceiling with discarded goods collected from the streets, police said Tuesday.
Rescue workers found the woman, 79, slumped in a trash-packed room after they struggled through tons of hoarded items on Friday.
They took nearly 40 minutes to reach her just meters away from the entrance, Yonhap News Agency reports, citing rescuers. She was taken to a hospital, and has recovered.
For five years, the son had habitually brought home abandoned clothes, paper boxes, plastic bottles and other items, filling the 42-square-meter dwelling to the ceiling with what neighbors called “trash.” Police said the woman lived with her only son, 58, who had a hoarding disorder, in Songtan, Gyeonggi Province. [Korea Times]
From my anecdotal conversations with South Koreans they were more worried about what President Trump starting a war than what Kim Jong-un. However, as recent events have shown it appears that President Trump like past presidents has come to the conclusion like many South Koreans that war with North Korea would be too deadly for all involved for anyone to start one:
Sirens wailed across Seoul and other South Korean cities on Wednesday, signaling the start of a nationwide civil-defense drill to prepare for a possible threat from the North.
But Lee Buny, a 42-year-old broadcast writer, was more interested in getting to work than finding a bomb shelter. Like many South Koreans, she’s used to threatening rhetoric from the North but doesn’t believe the communist state will ever follow through on threats to conduct an attack on the divided peninsula.
“I’m not worried because it’s the same story I’ve heard since I was born. North Korea keeps saying the same thing over and over again,” she said. “I don’t think North Korea will do anything.”
South Korea regularly holds civil-defense drills to make sure its citizens know what to do in case of an emergency such as a national disaster or an attack from the North, which is believed to have tens of thousands of soldiers and a massive artillery force poised near the heavily fortified border that sits just 35 miles from Seoul. [Stars & Stripes]
South Korean civil defense: in nuclear attack, get down but keep your tummy off the ground (because the shaking will hurt your organs) pic.twitter.com/Ibv938ij1m
Is this something the United States should consider doing considering how many of the mega-churches seem like multi-national corporations now with the amount of revenue they bring in:
The government will press ahead with the plan to impose taxes on clergy members beginning next year. Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon told lawmakers that the government will implement a revision to tax code that will enable it to levy income taxes of between 6 percent and 38 percent on churches, temples and other religious organizations beginning next year.
Kim said he will meet with leaders of religious groups to minimize confusion and ensure fair taxation.
“The government will take all preparatory steps before implementing taxation on religious groups,” Kim said. [Korea Times]
Maybe it is just me but it seems like there is something inappropriate about a “Hunger Games” theme park considering the movie involves teenagers hunting each other to the death:
Audiences that raved about novel-based science fiction adventure film franchise “Hunger Games” will be able to experience the thrill at a theme park on Jeju Island.
Landing Jeju Development, a wholly owned subsidiary of Landing International Development Limited, said Wednesday it signed with the United States’ Lionsgate, the franchise’s distributor, to build “Lionsgate Movie World” as part of recreational resort complex Jeju Shinhwa World now under construction.
The theme park, built over 122,000 square meters, will be Lionsgate’s first branded outdoor park and the biggest among the studio’s location-based entertainment businesses.
The park will have seven zones, each themed around different blockbuster movies and featuring reproduced streets and towns, rides, 4D experience halls, restaurants, cafes, souvenir shops and entertainment performances. The thematic movies include the “Hunger Games,” “Twilight Saga” and “Now You See Me” franchises and “Robin Hood,” to be released next March. [Korea Times]
Here is a good article in the Joong Ang Ilbo about the difficulties Korean adoptees are having tracking down their birth parents in South Korea:
Left: Lida Bouts returned to Korea in February 2016 as an exchange student at Sungkyunkwan University, 22 years after she was adopted by a Dutch couple. Her search for her family failed as there was no response to letters sent by her adoption agency to her birth parents. Middle left: Bouts’ adoption document drawn up in 1993. Middle right: Megan Green as a 2-year-old before an adoption that sent her to the U.S. state of Nebraska in 1986. Right: Green’s adoption document drawn up in 1986. [LIDA BOUTS, MEGAN GREEN]Korea Adoptions Services collects all family search requests from private adoption agencies. It reports that in 2016, there were 1,940 requests from Korean adoptees trying to find their birth parents. Only 102 of them, or 5 percent, ended up meeting their biological parents. The year before, the figure was 91 out of 2,012 requests, or 4.5 percent.
And such reunions are getting harder with time. Parents who gave their babies up after the Korean War were poor and had no choice – and were more likely to agree to meet them two or three decades later.
But adoptions processed in the 1980s and later often involved single mothers, who were afraid of the social stigma attached to unwed mothers. “They have probably found someone to marry after sending children away for adoption, and now have a family,” said Kim. “They are much more reluctant to be reunited.”
In 2016, 880 children were put up for adoption both domestically and internationally. Of the total, 808, or 91.8 percent, were born to unmarried couples.
“While it is important for an adoptee to trace his or her family roots, it is equally important for parents to keep their privacy,” said an official at the adoption bureau at the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
“We have many single mothers in the country, and a large number of birth parents who wish to hide their adoption records. Many have moved on and have families on their own,” the official continued.
Bouts is frustrated because she has a lot of information about her birth family from the time of her adoption, but can’t do anything with it. “I know full names of everyone, birth dates and even the region they lived in,” she said. “I’m not angry at my birth parents for anything. I can even accept that my parents wouldn’t want to know or meet me. I would just really want to meet my sister.”
Bouts’ adoption document mentions a sister seven years older than her.
“I think it would make me more complete if I would meet them,” she said. “I would like to tell them that they made the right choice and that I’m living a very happy and blessed life.” [Joong Ang Ilbo]
I agree that the National Intelligence Service should not be organizing people to leave comments in support of a political party, but I doubt this had much if any effect on the election:
A newly formed investigative team in the National Intelligence Service (NIS) announced Thursday that the former intelligence chief, Won Sei-hoon, who served in the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration, orchestrated a smear campaign to help former President Park Geun-hye get elected.
Park ultimately won out against current President Moon Jae-in by a small margin, though it is unclear how much impact the NIS had on public opinion at the time.
The team, which launched their probe last month after Moon became president in a snap election in May, has yet to mention whether it will hand over their evidence to prosecutors or formally ask them to dig deeper, which would likely affect the prosecution’s own trial with Won.
Last week, prosecutors requested a local court hand down a four-year jail term. A verdict is expected to come later this month.
The NIS team said Thursday that Won was found to have led a group of civilians from 2009 to 2012, who were ordered to post online comments slandering liberal politicians and presidential candidates. The group, according to the NIS, was funded through state coffers.
The so-called “commentary troop,” a term coined by the local media, gathered members from all over the country, said the NIS team, from office workers and CEOs to students and housekeepers.
The troop grew over the years, peaking at nearly 3,500 members in 2012 by the time Korea held its presidential election.
Their tasks ranged from tracking North Korea’s espionage attacks on the country’s most popular search engines to leaving right-leaning comments on online posts. Some 200 million won ($177,800) was collectively paid to troop members every month, according to the internal probe. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
