Finally someone confronted Donald Trump on the false claims he has been making that the South Koreans pay the US nothing for assisting with their defense. Unfortunately Trump was allowed to now claim the South Koreans pay peanuts which is not true. The ROK has historically been paying anywhere between 43% – 47% of the cost of the US-ROK alliance. This year the ROK is paying $861 million which is not peanuts. Like I have always said, if someone wants to have an argument that the ROK should be paying more, that is a valid argument, but to claim they pay nothing or now pay peanuts is not accurate. However, Mr. Trump likely knows this, but is just making a political argument that sounds good to uninformed voters:
The discrimination against Asian-Americans in the admittance process into US universities has long been a problem with Congressman Ed Royce is now speaking out against:
Being Korean American should not be an obstacle to receiving a top university education. It’s sad I have to make that clear in 2015.
Earlier this year, a coalition of 64 Asian American organizations filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights against Harvard University. The coalition argues that Harvard has set hidden racial quotas and a higher admissions bar for Asian American students, including Korean Americans.
Supporting this case is a mountain of evidence. While the population of Asian Americans has grown rapidly in the United States over the past 20 years, the admission rate for Asian Americans at Harvard University has stayed between 15 percent and 20 percent. This suspiciously flat number is also at odds with data that shows a much higher proportion of high-performing American high school students are of Asian descent. “We have data that suggests that 55 percent of kids with SAT scores of 2300 or higher are Asian,” says scholar Edward Blum, who launched another lawsuit against Harvard last year, accusing the school of racial discrimination in its admissions process.
Harvard claims it does not discriminate against Asian American students, which would be illegal. Instead, Harvard argues that it uses an “individualized, holistic review” process to select students, and that “diversity” is but one of many factors considered.
But Asian American parents are right to be suspicious when their hard-working, high-performing children are shut out of top schools and their less qualified peers are accepted instead. [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but one’s skin color should not be the deciding factor of who gets to attend a university.
This persistent disease continues to afflict one Korean who is the last known MERS case in South Korea:
The patient once thought to be the last South Korean with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) has been rediagnosed with the viral disease, officials said Monday.
The 35-year-old patient, who had tested negative for the MERS virus in two tests on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, has been infected again, the Health Ministry said.
Earlier in the day, the ministry said the patient had been admitted to Seoul National University Hospital with a high fever. Doctors and relatives who had come in contact with the patient, 61 individuals in total, were quarantined.
After the patient had tested negative, the government was to officially declare the end of the MERS outbreak on Oct. 29, 28 days after the test results became available.
No additional cases or fatalities from MERS had been reported since July until Monday. [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but this year a total of 36 people died of MERS in South Korea which had a mortality rate of 19.4%.
This undated photo, released on Oct. 10, 2015, by the Cultural Heritage Administration, shows a printing woodblock for the Collected Works of renowned Confucian scholar Toegye Yi Hwang, which is included in a set of Korea’s Confucian printing woodblocks that UNESCO has added to the “Memory of the World” list. The U.N. body also added to the list a decades-old local TV program to reunite families separated by the Korean War. The woodblocks are comprised of 64,226 pages of 718 kinds of books written by Confucian scholars during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), when the ideology served as the ruling philosophy. (Yonhap)
This is a pretty amazing coincidence that these two separated sisters were able to find each other after meeting at the same Florida hospital they both were working at:
Two Korean women who were separately adopted by American families when they were children miraculously reunited as they happened to work on the same floor of an American hospital, The Herald Tribune reported Saturday.
Meagan Hughes and Holly Hoyle O’Brien, who started working at Doctors Hospital of Sarasota, Florida, earlier this year, have discovered through DNA tests that they are blood-related sisters. [Korea Times]
Singers from the Moranbong band and musicians from the State Merited Chorus perform in Pyongyang, North Korea, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2015. The performance was part of the 70th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party. WONG MAYE-E/AP
Going to see North Korea’s most popular musical groups is kind of like a night at the concert anywhere — except for just about everything.
There will be a pretty good light show. The skill of the performers will be unquestionable, their melodies pleasing to the ear. The arena will probably be packed and the crowd will rise to their feet several times to applaud. But for most non-North Koreans, that’s where the feeling of familiarity quickly tapers off.
In authoritarian North Korea, everything must have a political message — even, and perhaps especially, its state-sponsored entertainment.
After a spectacular military parade and mass rally in Pyongyang to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the country’s ruling party on Saturday, North Korea’s capital was filled with the sound of music Sunday as some of its most popular performers took the stage, one of which was built specifically for the festivities and floats on a river.
Headlining the effort to give the normally dour capital a more celebratory mood for the next few days are the State Merited Chorus and its orchestra, who on Sunday shared the stage with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s own hand-picked girl group, the Moranbong Band.
Yet to be seen is the Chongbong Band, which remains somewhat mysterious but has been hailed by the state-run media as the next big thing on the North Korean music scene. [Associated Press]
This photo taken on Oct. 9, 2015, from an observatory in the South Korean border city of Paju, north of Seoul, shows the North Korean national flag flying on the top of a blue steel tower in Kijong-dong, a propaganda village in the northern sector of the 4-kilometer-wide zone that separates the two Koreas. North Korea will hold a military parade and other events the next day to mark the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. (Yonhap)
The University of Phoenix has long had low education outcomes for its graduates and is currently under investigation by the FCC, but what appears to have finally gotten the university on the bad side of the US military is its use of “challenge coins”:
The Pentagon temporarily has barred the University of Phoenix from recruiting students at U.S. military bases and will not let new active-duty troops receive tuition assistance for the for-profit giant’s courses.
The move is another blow to the University of Phoenix, which said it is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and California Attorney General Kamala Harris related to recruitment of members of the U.S. military and the California National Guard.
Apollo Education Group, the university’s parent, said the Defense Department notified it of the move this week.
The university’s participation in the department’s tuition-assistance program has been placed on probation in part because of the FTC and California investigations, the filing said.
Military members who are enrolled in university courses can continue to receive tuition assistance, but new enrollees or transfers will not be allowed, the filing said. [Stars & Stripes]
Here is the part about the challenge coins:
But the Apollo Group filing said another reason cited by the Defense Department in its letter was the university’s sponsorship of “various events at military installations” without the proper approval and the distribution of so-called “challenge coins” without approval to use trademarks.
Challenge coins are small coins popular in the military as signs of membership in service branches and are given to promote morale. They have emblems of military service branches.
Apollo said the university “immediately discontinued the use of challenge coins” in July after the Defense Department raised objections. And Apollo said it has discussed the issue of approval for events at military bases with the Defense Department and noted all previous events had been approved by base officials.
You can read the rest at the link, but the University of Phoenix is far from the only for profit school that makes a lot of money off of federal and US military dollars with little education outcomes for its students.
