Category: Korea-General Topics

This probably does not come as much of a surprise to most Korea watchers that Korean students are very stressed out in regards to their studies:

Korean kids are the most stressed about their studies in the world, a study reveals.

A whopping 50.3 percent of Korean kids are stressed about their studies, the highest proportion among 30 countries surveyed, according to an analysis by Kim Mi-sook of the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.

Relatively high stress was also recorded in Spain (49.4 percent), Slovenia (48.9 percent), and Portugal (47.2 percent). The least stressed kids were in the Netherlands (16.8 percent), Hungary (18.4 percent), Slovakia (19.1 percent), Austria (20 percent), and France (20.8 percent).

Only 18.5 percent of kids in Korea said they are “very happy” at school. Korea comes fifth from the bottom after Estonia (9.2 percent), Italy (14.8 percent), Finland (15.3 percent), and Czech Republic (17.3 percent).  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

It is too bad these idiots won’t face punishment in South Korea for this.  The Korean government says they are not going to request extradition because property crimes don’t warrant it.  Regardless what a disgrace:

On Feb. 2, four Australians in baseball caps and hoodies appeared around Wangsimni Station, eastern Seoul, at three in the morning. They carefully scoped out the area and then stopped in front of a ventilation window behind a bus stop. They cut the bars of the window and swung down to a temporary garage where a car for the Line No. 5 subway was idle.

Using spraypaint, they covered the car with graffiti art and then moved on.

Two days later, they penetrated Anam Station, northeastern Seoul, and left graffiti that read “FEDUP” in giant letters on a subway train. The following day, the four men did the same thing at the Sinnonhyeon Station on Feb. 5, leaving the declaration “ERROR” on a Line No. 9 train.

It was only after they flew back to their home country on Feb. 7 that the police identified the four Australians with security camera footage. They matched their faces on security footage from the airport and then checked immigration records.

The four men were found to have spent 10 days in Korea – dedicating at least three of those nights to spraypainting Seoul subway cars.

“We don’t understand how foreigners who never traveled to Korea before knew so expertly the subway stations’ structures,” said Shim Mun-sik, chief of a crime investigation department of the Seongdong Police Precinct.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

With stories like this I can understand special legislation to deal with these situations on a case by case basis, but it does not require mass amnesty for illegal immigrants sweeping across the border to address this:

The pending deportation of Adam Thomas Crapser, an undocumented Korean American adoptee and survivor of severe child abuse, has sparked a dialogue on a major loophole in immigration law, according to NBC News.

When Adam first arrived in the U.S. in 1979 as a Korean adoptee, his childhood quickly turned into a nightmare. He and his biological sister were adopted by the Wright family in Michigan, where he suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In 1986, the Wrights relinquished their parental rights to Child Services without completing Adam’s naturalization paperwork. As wards of the state, Adam and his sister became separated from each other. After living in a group home for a year, Adam was formally adopted by Thomas and Dolly-Jean Crapser in Oregon.

The Crapsers, along with their biological sons, subjected Adam and seven other foster children to years of heinous abuse and torture. In an interview with Gazillion Strong, Adam revealed that he would get choked, beaten or burnt on a daily basis during the five years he lived with his abusive adoptive family. In 1991, the Crapsers were arrested and convicted of multiple counts of child abuse, child sexual abuse and child rape.

Adam, now a husband and father of three children, faces possible deportation because both sets of adoptive parents failed to complete his naturalization process and refused to provide him with his adoption papers, according to the blog Reappropriate. As an undocumented American, Adam has struggled to attend school or find work for most of his adult life. If deported, he will be sent to a country where he does not even speak the language.  [KoreAm Journal]

You can read more at the link, but hopefully this gets worked out for Adam Crapser, especially since the US government is to blame for his situation considering they allowed him to be adopted without naturalization paperwork and then not once, but twice put him in abusive homes.

It is kind of sad that an app needs to be developed because this problem has gotten so bad in South Korea:

This makes me wonder if this is the wave of the future where hackers will extort companies for money in return for not releasing sensitive information to rivals or other countries?:

A hacker who had posted inside information on South Korea’s nuclear power plants made a fresh threat Thursday, demanding money in exchange for not handing over sensitive information to third countries.

Using an account under the name of the president of an anti-nuclear group in Hawaii, the hacker posted additional files on Twitter, which reportedly included documents concerning the country’s indigenous advanced power reactor 1400.

“Need money. Only need to meet some demands… Many countries from Northern Europe, Southeast Asia and South America are saying they will buy nuclear reactor information. Fear selling the entire information will undermine President Park (Geun-hye)’s efforts to export nuclear reactors,” the posting said.

The hacker did not say how much money he wanted but warned that South Korea will end up losing much more if it tries to save a few hundreds of millions of dollars.

Officials from the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) said the documents released Thursday did not include any sensitive information and that they may have been obtained before the company boosted its security measures early last year that included completely cutting off its internal servers used to operate nuclear reactors from all outside access.

They earlier said they were not able to determine the nature or sensitivity of the released documents as safety protocol was blocking the downloading or opening of the files.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I can understand the ROK government’s viewpoint on this, but if the activists do not get media attention for their activities then they will have a hard time receiving support to sustain their operations:

South Korea expressed concern Tuesday over civic groups’ plans to publicly send leaflets to North Korea, indicating that it will try to block them.

Days ago, a group of civic groups announced their plan to send anti-Pyongyang leaflets to North Korea on March 26, the fifth anniversary of the North’s torpedoing of a South Korean Navy ship in March 2010.

Civic groups involved in the leaflet campaign have often pre-announced their campaigns so their activities could draw media and social attention. Such campaigns intended to spread dissenting messages, however, often lead to wild indignation and military reaction from Pyongyang.

“Believing that spreading leaflets publicly is not right, the government has been urging prudent and wise decisions (from civic groups),” a unification ministry official told reporters on condition of anonymity. “I think there needs to be expression of such a government stance through whatever means, including person-to-person contact.”

Still, scattering leaflets basically falls in the sphere of a constitutionally given right to free expression, which the government cannot regulate with force, the official said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

This was not a fight Uber was going to be able to win against the powerful taxi lobby in South Korea:

Uber, a taxi-hailing app operator, has suspended its popular ride-sharing service in Korea, succumbing to mounting concerns by Seoul authorities and angry taxi drivers.

The San Francisco-based start-up last week announced it was suspending its UberX budget service that allowed passengers to hail the company’s registered drivers through its smartphone application.

Its premium Uber Black, a limousine service for foreign nationals, senior citizens and handicapped people, will continue operating in accordance with local laws, the company added.

“We stay committed to cooperate to reach a compromise with the city and taxi industry, and look forward to working together to bring regulated options to Seoul,” Uber said Friday in a statement.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

Korean robots of yesteryear @ #TaejonExpo, 1993. Don't miss a truly retro transfomertive moment about 30 seconds in: https://t.co/KQuRWwt2wk

— Aidan Foster-Carter (@fcaidan) March 8, 2015

The Philippines would definitely be a much cheaper option than sending kids off to an English speaking country to attend school:

Over the past three years alone, roughly fourteen thousand Koreans have traveled to the Philippines to study the language at private academies for a fraction of the price of classes in many other English-speaking nations.

Kang Tae-won is among a group of 11 students from the city of Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, who are spending their winter vacation at the Widest Asian Learners English School, or WALES, in Baguio, 250-kilometers north of Manila.

On a recent morning, the 17-year old came down from his dorm room into the “English Speaking Zone” where for the rest of the day he practiced conversational English with several Filipino ESL teachers.

Mr. Kang said that after a few weeks of studying here his English has improved. Baguio, he says, “has a good atmosphere for learning English” so that Koreans can get higher test scores.

South Korean families spend billions of dollars a year on private education to prepare their children for standardized tests that are required for entrance into university, study overseas and many white collar jobs. Those include English competency exams like the TOEIC. Some parents believe that total emersion into English speaking countries will give their kids an advantage in taking those tests.

Yoo Moon-young, the owner of the EZ Foreign Language School in Pyeongtaek, brings some of her pupils to Baguio every winter. On average, a high school student’s family pays $5,200 for an all-inclusive, two-month sojourn in a learning environment she describes as “Spartan. Students study, eat and sleep in the school, with supervised excursions out of the academy only on weekends.  [Wall Street Journal-Korea Real Time]

You can read more at the link.

You can tell Ambassador Lippert is playing to the crowd while he recovers:

Doctors at Yonsei University Severance Hospital said Sunday that U.S. Ambassador to Korea Mark Lippert is recovering fast and may go home as early as Tuesday afternoon.

“Ambassador Lippert feels overwhelmed by the messages of support for him,” the embassy’s minister-counselor for public affairs, Robert W. Ogburn, said during a press conference. “The ambassador said kimchi is helping him recover.”

Dr. Yoon Do-heum, the head of the hospital, said during a media briefing that the 80 stitches Lippert received for a facial injury would be removed today, and the pain in his left wrist was easing.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link such as Ambassador Lippert saying he is reading the “Two Koreas” by Don Oberdorfer while he is recovering.  This book in my opinion is the best modern Korean history 101 book out there.  With that said I would of thought that Lippert would of read this book before becoming Ambassador?  Either that or is he just playing to the crowd again?