Category: Korea-General Topics

Korean mafia is involved in video gambling:

Adult game arcades and distribution of gift certificates were discovered to be dominated by crime organizations, which used the profit to fund illegal activities.

The market for adult only game arcades and commercial computer rooms reaches 88 trillion won annually, with tax evasion rates estimated to be 8.8 trillion won.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) submitted a report on July 11 to Cheong Wa Dae on Addressing Social Evils – Dismantlement of Commercial Game Arcades Urgently Require

According to the report, Ahn, a middle boss from the Yeonggwang crime family in South Jeolla Province, is in charge of national distribution of H Gift Certificates, the third largest producer of certificates, while Seobang crime family deputy boss Oh is operating two illegal casinos which generate daily profits averaging 100 to 500 million won.

The report stated, Tax evasion rates from illegal money exchange are estimated to amount to 4.5 trillion won for adult-only arcades, and 4.3 trillion for commercial computer rooms.

Who would of thunk it?

Here is the understatement of the month; that Japanese and South Koreans don’t trust each other:

A record-high 59 percent of Japanese believe ties with South Korea have been strained in the past year, and more than half of Japanese regard the country as untrustworthy, according to a joint survey by The Yomiuri Shimbun and major South Korean daily Hankook Ilbo.

Regarding the current state of bilateral relations, 36 percent of Japanese respondents gave positive responses, a plunge of 24 percentage points from a similar survey conducted last year. However, the proportion of Japanese gloomy about ties with Seoul leaped 24 percentage points to 59 percent, the highest figure in five surveys conducted since 1995.

Here is what the survey determined of what South Koreans think of the Japanese:

According to the survey, many South Koreans were critical of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine and most were pessimistic that the countries could resolve their dispute over the Takeshima islets (called Dokdo in South Korea). The Yasukuni and Takeshima issues appear to have cast a shadow over public sentiment in the two countries and tainted perceptions of the other, according to the survey.

In late June and early July, 3,000 eligible Japanese and 1,000 eligible South Korean voters were surveyed by the newspapers. Of the Japanese, 1,867, or 62.2 percent, gave valid responses.

In South Korea, only 12 percent of respondents thought bilateral ties were good while 87 percent said the relationship was strained. The figures were almost unchanged from the previous survey.

My only questions with these results are, who the hell are the 12% who think things are going well for the Korea-Japan relationship? I haven’t met a Korean yet that thinks relations are good between Japan and Korea, but according to this survey they are out there.

Read the rest of the article for more survey results that pretty much confirm everything you already suspected about various issues between Japan and Korea.

Is it just me or does this just encourage more hostage taking of Koreans?:

The Seoul government refused to disclose the ransom, but Somali elder Abdi Ilmi told AFP on Monday that 800,000 dollars (about 627,000 euros) had been paid for the release of the ship and crew.

The foreign ministry confirmed late Sunday that the released South Korean ship was escorted by a US warship from Somali waters to Kenya.

Dongwon Fisheries, owner and operator of the ship, said all 25 crew were unharmed and allowed to return home soon after medical checks in Kenya.

The ship — carrying eight Koreans, five Vietnamese, nine Indonesians and three Chinese — was hijacked by local militiamen on April 4 in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast.

The New York Times had nice overview article about the whole stem cell controversy involving Dr. Hwang Woo-suk. A couple of things in the article did jump out at me. First of all how much did the Roh Administration know about the forgery before the MBC report?:

An indication of Dr. Hwang’s good connections to the government was the inclusion of Dr. Park Ky Young as a co-author of his 2004 report on human cloning. A botanist by training, Dr. Park may not have contributed much scientifically to the task of cloning of human cells. She is, however, the science adviser to Roh Moo Hyun, the president of South Korea.

Did Dr. Park know what was going on and maybe this is why the government was trying so vigorously to discredit the MBC report?

Here is the other thing I found interesting:

“Clearly the scientific credibility of Korean investigators has been compromised,” said Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell expert at Johns Hopkins University and a member of Science’s board of reviewers. He referred to the fact that duplicate and misidentified photos had turned up in articles by other South Korean authors besides Dr. Hwang.

This just makes me curious about what other cases of scientific fraud has been published by Korean scientists. Is this a systematic problem in Korea or are Korean cases of scientific fraud similar to the amount of fraud cases in western countries?

Here are some statistic about Korean traffic safety that I have chronicled before that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone:

Overcrowded roads, jaywalkers and motorcyclists who use sidewalks as shortcuts make South Korea the most dangerous place to drive among 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to a report issued in late December. The data, gathered from 2003 statistics, showed 137 car accidents per 10,000 cars on the road. South Korea also ranked worst for number of vehicle accident deaths for the year; for every 100,000 people involved in vehicle accidents, 15 died.

South Korea has topped the list since joining the organization in 1996, according to Lee Ui-yong, chief of the Traffic Accident Analysis Division with the Road Traffic Safety Authority.

None of these stats should be surprising to anyone who has spent time on the roads here in Korea. In response to the continuous traffic safety problems the Korean authorities have plans to launch a traffic safety campaign:

In many countries, the horse-drawn carriage set the traffic culture foundation for the eventual transition to motor vehicles. South Korea, however, experienced the vehicle boom in a relatively short period of time as the economy developed after the Korean War, leaving its people without a real sense of what to do on the roads, Lee said.

Lee said unsafe drivers aren’t the only problem. A lack of guardrails, correct traffic signals and pedestrians who jaywalk or dart into traffic add to the danger.

He said South Korea is going to launch a safety campaign this year to lower accident and fatality rates and promote the importance of traffic laws.

If their safety campaign is just going to consist of policemen waving flags at intersections it will have no effect because cars just run the red lights anyway. If the police want to improve safety start writing tickets, especially for people parking illegally causing additional congestion in the already crowded streets. Than expand from there and write tickets for the mopeds driving on the sidewalks. I could go on and on with suggestions but if they just did these two things it would greatly improve the traffic problems here.

Why am I not surprised by this:

Korea has been named to the deputy leadership position in an international audit of tsunami disaster relief donations.
It was named to the position on a task force set up to audit the relief funds by the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions, a group of national auditors. The announcement was made at the group’s meeting in Norway.

The task force was set up after questions were raised in many countries about the use of the funds donated to help victims of the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Critics have charged that of the funds that Indonesia and Sri Lanka received for disaster relief, only 10 percent has found its way to the victims.
Jeon Yun-cheol, the chairman of the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea, was a leading proponent of the special auditing task force within the organization.

It shouldn’t come as no surprise that much of the donated money would be swindled similar to what happened with the 9/11 funds. Hopefully the Korean taskforce can uncover where all the money went.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get stranger in the Dr. Hwang case, now fellow cloning hoaxers and the alien loving Raelian cult has offered Dr. Hwang a job:

The U.S. biotech firm Clonaid has sprung to the rescue of the embattled cloning scientist Hwang Woo-sook with an offer to join a research partnership at its secret research facility. Clonaid was founded by the Raelian Movement, a cult-like religious group that maintains humans were created by aliens and claims to have cloned a human being. The company is represented by French scientist Dr. Brigitte Boisselier.

A press release from the company on Monday said Boisselier has written to Hwang to outline the proposal. Boisselier said she believed Hwang’s discoveries to be original and that groups opposing stem cell research such as the Catholic Church conspired to undermine Hwang by making it appear as though the scientist concocted his data. She said he had become a victim of a conservative anti-scientific faction, according to the press release.

Ah yes, blame the Catholics. That is about as original as blaming the Americans for someone elses trangressions. Why can’t the kooks just admit Hwang lied and move on?

TIME magazine this months has a pretty good article about the Korean stem cell controversy for those who haven’t been following it very closely. TIME does try to explain why Hwang lied about his results:

But why it happened is still a mystery. By all accounts, the tales of Hwang’s dedication and personal discipline are all true.

(…)

Hwang insisted he had no interest in profiting from his discoveries; indeed, he turned over his patent rights to the university and the government.

That being the case, it seems unlikely that Hwang set out to perpetrate fraud. But it wouldn’t be surprising if he, or someone in his lab, believed strongly enough in the work to be willing to cut corners. If that’s true, the precipitating event could have come last January, when some of his stem-cell samples became contaminated, possibly by a fungus circulating in poorly shielded air vents.

Hwang claims it took six months to recover from the disaster. But it also might be that Hwang’s team couldn’t recover quickly enough and began taking shortcuts to fill the gap. Under pressure from the government and the university, and with a deadline looming for publication in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, the temptation to stretch the truth might have been irresistible. “I can only speculate that Dr. Hwang was driven by ambition. He may have thought he could manipulate the data to secure research funding and compensate for his actions with follow-up results,” says Ki Jung Kim, a political scientist at Seoul’s Yonsei University. In short, fudge it now, fix it later.

This explanation probably makes the most sense of why he committed a fraud that was bound to be uncovered. He gambled that he could get the real results before the forgery was discovered and he lost. Just makes you wonder if he wasn’t so hyped by the media and given so much money by the government in order to speed up scientific results; that maybe he would of spent the time necessary to conduct experiments ethically and more carefully so that he could have avoided the ethical violations that began the investigation and prevented the cells from becoming contaminated during the scientific process?

The Joong Ang Ilbo is reporting that the Blue House actually knew about the stem cell fraud back in November:

President Roh Moo-hyun addressed the emerging controversy over allegations of unethical practices by MBC on the Blue House Web site on Nov. 27, even before the network had aired the program. He made no mention of any doubts about Dr. Hwang’s research, not surprisingly because the doubts had only been communicated to a junior official the day before.

But on Dec. 5, one day after the YTN television network reported details of alleged PD Notebook threats to researchers in the course of gathering their information, Mr. Roh was quoted as saying in a meeting with his senior aides that he hoped “problems regarding verification of Dr. Hwang’s achievements could be put to rest at this point.” The science minister, Oh Myung, told reporters on Dec. 8 that those with doubts should blame Science, adding that talks of verification of Dr. Hwang’s research should no longer be brought up “for the sake of Korea’s science.”

How in the world can Korea’s science minister blame Science Magazine for Dr. Hwang’s fraud? Then he says that the allegations shouldn’t be brought up anymore? He sounds like someone more interested in a cover up than actually determining the truth.

In other stem cell news apparently about 1/2 of the Korean population wants Dr. Hwang to go back to work at Seoul National University and continue his stem cell work:

Nearly half of South Korean people still support disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who is accused of fabricating his research on tailor-made cells featured by the U.S. journal Science in 2005, a recent survey showed.
The survey conducted by The Korea Times on Dec. 27-28 last year found that 45.6 percent of respondents said it is desirable to give the former professor at Seoul National University (SNU) “one more chance’’ for his cloning work.

More than 70 percent of those surveyed were also skeptical about the government’s support for the World Stem Cell Hub at SNU, initiated by the cloning expert last October, without Hwang’s involvement, the poll suggested.

About 95 percent of respondents want the government itself to continue its financial support for the stem cell research rather than redirect the support to a private or scholar level.

As past experience has taught me, I don’t put to much credence in polls conducted in Korea. So take these results with a grain of salt, but it does tell us that there is still a sizable number of Koreans willing to overlook Hwang’s past trangression in hopes of future success. Hwang has actually played this whole crisis towards Korean nationalism very well and in the end he may still walk away with a job and research money some where. I don’t think SNU would take him back, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he resurfaces somewhere else to carry on his experiments when he still has a large amount of public backing.

For those familiar with South Korea you often hear about how Koreans possess superior dexterity compared to other people due to their skill with chopsticks. Koreans skills with chopsticks are what is allegedly responsible for producing top professional female golfers, world class pottery, top table tennis players, master archers, and until recently even top stem cell scientists.

Well here is yet another reference to Korea’s allegeded chopstick superiority:

John Gearhart, also a Hopkins researcher, said another impediment is that Hwang’s lab has not shared enough details of its technology to allow other labs to duplicate it. And apart from technical acumen, few labs in the world have permission to do work that would build on the Korean report, he said.

Maybe some labs have tried and failed but kept quiet about it, Civin said, because the scientists “didn’t feel like saying they weren’t as good as the South Koreans.”

Indeed, the technical expertise of Hwang’s lab has often been mentioned as a crucial ingredient in its reported success. Hwang has attributed his lab workers’ dexterity to lots of practice with steel chopsticks.

Visitors to Hwang’s lab report “they have technical competence and abilities far beyond what most American labs have, and I think that’s true,” said Thomas Cech, a Nobel Prize winner who heads the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “People have actually watched them manipulate these cells … and say they’re really extraordinarily dexterous and skilled technically.”

So if other scientists can’t get such experiments to work, he said, they may conclude “I’m not surprised because I saw these people from Korea and they’re so much better at manipulating cells than I am.”

So how come the Japanese can’t replicate the stem cell experiments if clumsy non-chopstick using American scientists can’t replicate it? Maybe because it is a fake along with the rest of Hwang’s work. Not being skilled with chopsticks is an even lamer excuse than the appeal to Korean nationalism being used before to defend Hwang’s work.