This story of a Columbian man assaulted by a Korean man at a Busan Costco just continues to confirm my long held advice that foreigners need to swallow their pride and walk away from confrontations with Koreans.  This is because the odds are high that the police will side with the Korean and that the foreigner will end up being the one arrested which is what happened in this case.

To summarize a Columbian man and his Korean wife were walking back to their car at the Busan Costco when the Korean wife yelled loudly for a car to stop which saves the life of little kid who can in front of it. The grandpa of the little kid gets angry at the Korean wife for yelling at the kid and then eventually tries to assault her.  However Columbian husband gets in front of him to stop the assault and the grandpa pushes the Columbian to the ground and begins to punch him.  While this is going on he is yelling racist remarks the whole time. The assault is caught on camera and yet the police side with the Korean grandpa who is lying and yelling racist remarks the whole time.  The police arrest the Columbian man and say this can all go away if he does not pursue the assault charge on the Korean man.  The charges are dropped after the Columbian man agrees to not pursue the case against the grandpa and everyone goes home.

The best thing the Columbian man did was not to try and fight back despite being pushed to the ground and having the Korean man on top of him punching him.  In Korea you do not have the right to self defense like people in the United States for example may be use to having.  If he would have punched the guy back he would likely be in jail for assault.  What he was not smart about was trying to pursue the assault charge against the Korean man.  He should have just left after the assault was broken up because the odds of the police siding with a foreigner are very low.  This is where the swallowing your pride and walking away is the best thing to do.  It lets the Korean man save face while the foreigner doesn’t have to worry about getting arrested.

Unfortunately there are plenty of people in South Korea that actually believe this nonsense, fortunately they are a small, but vocal minority:

North Korea on Friday urged South Korean political parties, organizations and people from all walks of life to rally against the U.S. and war via its nominal political party’s letter of plea sent to them in an apparent bid to defend its stance on tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

“All the parties and people from all walks of life in South Korea should rise up in the anti-U.S., anti-war struggle for peace, clearly seeing through the nature of the U.S., the chieftain of aggression and disturber of peace,” the letter, sent by the Central Committee of the Korean Social Democratic Party, said.

Inter-Korean relations remain so tense due to the ongoing South Korea-U.S. “rehearsals for a “nuclear war” which have gone beyond the critical phase, said the letter, carried by the North’s Korean Central News Agency. The rehearsals refer to Foal Eagle and Key Resolve against North Korean provocations that began on March 1 for a two-month run in the South.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

Naver Unveils Self-Driving Car https://t.co/fsmrmzJymq pic.twitter.com/pzNwGoFbY4

— The Chosun Ilbo (@EnglishChosun) March 31, 2017

This photo, taken on March 29, 2017, shows a cupful of puffy cereal soaked in liquid nitrogen that a tourist bought from an eatery in Seoul. The dessert, called Dragon’s Breath, makes the people who eat it exhale smoky nitrogen vapor. (Yonhap)

NBC News is going to be putting the spotlight on USFK this week:

NBC’s Lester Holt will anchor Nightly News from South Korea Monday and Tuesday for what NBC calls “unprecedented access to the U.S. military’s combined air, ground and naval capabilities.”

Holt’s reporting trip comes as tensions rise in the region and a day after Defense Secretary Mattis said North Korea must be stopped from its ability to threaten a nuclear attack.  [TVNewser, hat tip Jodi]

After reading this article about the slave labor conditions these North Korean workers in Russia are facing; I couldn’t help, but think that this sounded like the conditions many juicy girls used to face not too long ago in South Korea:

A North Korean slave laborer died building a soccer stadium in Saint Petersburg, Russia, for the 2018 World Cup, Norwegian football magazine Josimar reported Thursday. He was one of at least 110 North Korean slave laborers that toil at the building site.

Josimar and Western human rights groups are demanding that FIFA, the international football governing body, delve into abuses of the North Korean workers there.

Josimar found out about them when it was covering the construction of the Krestovsky Stadium, which was completed last month in time for the FIFA Confederations Cup in June.

The North Koreans lived in containers set up in a waste ground 200-300 m from the stadium. They worked at the site from 7 a.m. till midnight every day without a day off, Josimar said.

Their passports had been confiscated and they were under surveillance around the clock, banned from contacting workers from other countries. The site was surrounded by iron fence and barbed wire. A Russian supervisor at the site said the workers were “like robots” and looked deeply unhappy.  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

The yellow dust this year has been absolutely horrible in Korea and it seems to get worse every year:

Image from the Korea Herald.

Korean consumers’ concern about fine dust, which is believed to come from China, seems to be legitimate as confirmed by a report published Thursday in the peer-reviewed international journal Nature.

About 30,900 people in Korea and Japan die prematurely every year due to fine dust from China, according to the study jointly conducted by researchers in China’s Tsinghua and Peking universities, the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Irvine.

Analyzing the number of early deaths from heart, lung and blood vessel-related diseases and the density and movement of fine dust, the researchers found out that 411,100 people worldwide died prematurely due to fine dust from outside their countries.

The researchers especially pointed out that China, as the largest producer of fine dust particles, causes the greatest number of deaths because of the high population density of itself and its neighbors.

“It costs less to manufacture goods in places like China and Southeast Asia, mostly because those places have cheaper labor than the West,” Steven Davis, co-author of the paper, said. “But they also tend to have less stringent environmental protections.”  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Today's cherry blossoms by Yeojwacheon Stream 😍
Don't miss out on the Starlight Festival tomorrow!
For more info👉https://t.co/QXlPohCLSs pic.twitter.com/vMu2gGymRT

— VisitKorea (@KoreanTravel) March 30, 2017

This still photo broadcast by the North’s Korean Central TV on March 28, 2017, shows the country’s top leader Kim Jong-un affectionately greeting Hwang Sun-hui, an anti-Japanese revolutionary fighter, during his visit to the remodeled Korean Revolution Museum. Hwang, curator of the museum, was a comrade of Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the current leader and the founder of North Korea. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)