Here is a win in the courts for the foreign English teacher community in South Korea:
A court has recognized foreign tutors at a private language institute as “employees” entitled to severance pay, rejecting the institute’s claim that they were self-employed.
Judge Oh Sang-yong of the Seoul Central District Court ruled in favor of five native English teachers at an unidentified private language institute in Seoul, Monday.
He ordered the institute to offer them 180 million won in severance pay and other unpaid allowances.
The institute had claimed the tutors were”self-employed” teachers paid by the hour so they were not entitled to severance pay. But the court ruled that the five were “employees” who had to act upon their contracts regulating their working hours, curriculum and other details. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but I would think the hagwons in South Korea will just modify the contracts in some way to get around this court ruling.
Mt. Surak is the large mountain that rises above Camp Stanley. This fire though appears to be burning on the northern Seoul area of the mountain opposite from the camp:
A big fire broke out on Mount Surak in northern Seoul Thursday, firefighters said, with no casualties having been reported so far.
Firefighters said they were struggling to contain the fire that started at around 9:08 p.m., with a long ribbon of fire forming near the top of a ridge.
The exact cause of the wind-fed forest fire is not yet known, but the size of the blaze is quite large, they added. [Yonhap]
Chung Yoo-ra, the daughter of former South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s close friend, speaks at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, on May 31, 2017, after being extradited from Denmark a day earlier. The 21-year-old Chung, who had been held at a detention center in the northern Danish city of Aalborg since January, was taken to the prosecutors’ office in Seoul for questioning over allegations she received undue academic and financial favors based on her mother Choi Soon-sil’s ties with the former president. (Yonhap)
The daughter of former President Park Geun-hye’s close friend involved in a corruption scandal returned to South Korea on Wednesday after she was extradited from Denmark where she was in custody for five months.
Chung Yoo-ra, the 21-year-old daughter of Choi Soon-sil, arrived at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, at around 2:40 p.m. She was arrested by local authorities on a flight from Amsterdam where she transferred.
She denied any knowledge of the allegations against her, including inappropriate academic favors and financial support, during a brief news conference at a security area at the airport.
“I don’t know anything about what happened between my mother and the former president but on my personal level, I feel that it is unfair,” she said.
“(People) say that I received all this special treatment, but there isn’t much that I know,” she said. “I keep trying to put the puzzle pieces together, but it does not work all the time.” [Yonhap]
Here is my favorite line from her interview with the media:
Regarding the university’s decision to revoke her admission, Chung said she “understandably accepts” it.
“I don’t even know what my major is and I never really wanted to go to university, so I don’t have much to say about the nullification of admission,” she said.
It seems the school is really the one at fault here not Chung. If they were willing to let in Chung based on who her mom is that is the university’s problem. As far as the alleged criminal activity her mom is accused of I have yet to see any evidence that Chung was in on it. This all seems like a show to parade her around to the public in handcuffs. I would not be surprised if later she is quietly released after the media attention dies down.
It is pretty amazing that South Korea only established their first national park 50 years ago and it was the actions of local residents that made it happen:
Left: Woo Du-seong, 65, president of a conservationist association for Mount Jiri. Right: Members of Yeonhaban, a hiking group of residents of Gurye, South Jeolla, gather around. After multiple appeals to the National Assembly, Mount Jiri was designated the first national park of Korea in 1967 due to their efforts. [OH JONG-CHAN, WOO DU-SEONG]No matter where you are in Korea, a mountain is likely to be somewhere in the vicinity. There are over 45 million visits to Korea’s national parks in any given year. Jirisan National Park itself accounts for nearly 3 million visits. However, just 50 years ago, Mount Jiri, the second-tallest mountain in South Korea, was the site of rapacious deforestation and likely would have continued to be without the initiative of one local hiking association.Born around Mount Jiri, 65-year-old Woo Du-seong, the president of a conservationist association for Mount Jiri, spoke on Monday as he recollected the events that took place in his youth. It is now 50 years since Mount Jiri was designated the first national park in Korea on December 1967.
“We collected 100,000 won from 10,000 households paying 10 won each,” said Woo. “In 1963, the money could have bought a house in this neighborhood.”
National parks were nonexistent at the time and the first to embark on conservation originated from the bottom-up by Gurye, South Jeolla, residents, including Woo’s father, Woo Jong-su (now deceased).
“According to residents in the area in the early 1960s, in just Gurye alone there were 250 trucks carrying loads on the streets daily. Portable sawmills with circular saws connected to the top of military-grade truck engines were everywhere in valleys.”
Feeling the hurt more than anyone else were the residents of Gurye who had spent their entire lives under the majesty of Mount Jiri. Among them, members of Yeonhaban, a local recreational hiking club, were especially indignant at the sight of these brazen sawmills. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but today Korea’s National Park system is really impressive with many great trails and facilities that began with the establishment Jirisan National Park fifty years ago.
Via Popular Military comes a video filmed by Korean-American servicemembers serving in USFK. They interviewed random South Koreans in Daegu on what they thought about the US soldiers in their country. The opinions on the whole were largely favorable with most criticism being soldiers spending too much time in clubs, womanizing, and not learning Korean.
If President Moon scraps the comfort women agreement with Japan it will be very interesting to see what the Japanese reaction will be. It seems to me the Japanese government would be furious if it was to happen considering the political capital Shinzo Abe used to get the deal completed:
South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Thursday hinted at possibly scrapping an agreement with Tokyo over Japan’s sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II, insisting that most South Koreans could not accept the deal reached by the former Seoul government.
“President Moon noted the reality was that most of his people could not accept the agreement over the sexual slavery issue,” Moon’s chief press secretary Yoon Young-chan said of the president’s telephone conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The conversation came as Abe sought to congratulate the new South Korean leader on his election this week. Moon came into office Wednesday, only one day after winning the presidential by-election caused by the March 10 ouster of his predecessor Park Geun-hye over a massive corruption scandal.
The thorny issue of sexual slavery apparently took center stage of the conversation after the Japanese premier urged the new liberal Seoul government to honor the agreement signed by its conservative predecessor. [Yonhap]
A ROK Drop favorite Robert Neff has an published in the Korea Times that explains how the yellow dust problem that has been plaguing Korea has actually been worse in centuries past than what has been seen recently:
Namdaemun circa 1911.
For the past several days, the air quality in Korea has been horrible _ filled with dust and pollution. Many blame desertification in China due to its rapid industrialization but this phenomenon is not new _ it is one that has plagued the Korean Peninsula for hundreds of years.
Historical records from the Three Kingdoms period indicate dust storms occurred at least as far back as 174 A.D. One powerful dust storm in the early sixth century left the capital of Baekje shrouded in darkness as if it were night and a couple of decades later, Silla suffered one that lasted for five days. Perhaps the strangest of these weather phenomena took place in 644 when a red-tinged snow fell in Pyongyang.
The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty provide even more examples.
In November 1412, a horrendous dust storm mixed with fog blanketed the land. The visibility was so bad that people could not even see the person standing in front of them and the sudden spring-like weather melted the ice on the rivers. [Korea Times]
Mr. Neff provides more examples of the bizarre weather created by the yellow dust at the link. What I found of interest was that if this same bizarre weather happened today people would be claiming it is because of global warming.
