Lee Jay-hyun, chairman of the food and entertainment conglomerate CJ Group, enters a courtroom at the Seoul High Court in Seoul on Sept. 12, 2014. The court commuted the jail term of the 54-year-old tycoon to three years from four years, convicting him of embezzlement and tax evasion. Lee was indicted for misappropriating 165.7 billion won (US$156 million) in company assets to offshore slush funds and dodging taxes in the process. (Yonhap)
It will be interesting to see who is going to get deployed to do this mission, but this shows the US government must be very concerned that the ebola outbreak could get much worse to deploy this many personnel to try and stop its spread:
Amid criticism that the U.S. has not done enough to block the spread of the Ebola virus across West Africa, President Barack Obama will announce a “significantly ramped up” campaign Tuesday that relies heavily on the U.S. military, senior administration officials said.
The Defense Department will work with local governments to plan and build 17 new Ebola treatment units, for a total of 1,700 new beds, while military medical staff will begin training a target of 500 health care providers per week in care and prevention of the lethal virus, an official said.
The scaled-up effort, along with current programs, will be run through a U.S. joint command center to be set up in Monrovia, Liberia, the country facing the most troubling transmission rate, officials said.
Pentagon officials expected the command center to eventually oversee about 3,000 military personnel on the ground handling logistics, engineering, distribution of supplies, and coordination with other government agencies and international organizations, one official said. [Stars & Stripes]
From the North’s perspective why would they want to globalize the Kaesong Industrial Complex? It has worked as a great bargaining chip for them over the years to get what they want from the South Koreans:
South Korea called on North Korea to be more cooperative in luring foreign investors to their joint industrial complex in the North on Monday, the eve of the first anniversary of its reopening.
Seoul’s unification ministry said the operation of the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) has been almost fully normalized despite a six-month hiatus from March last year.
The North, however, has maintained a lukewarm attitude toward agreed-upon working-level meetings to discuss ways to develop the facilities, where 125 South Korean firms employ more than 52,000 North Korean workers, according to the ministry.
“The globalization of the KIC has made little progress due to North Korea’s uncooperative stance,” it said in a press release. “North Korea will have to do what it should do for dialogue (on the future of the KIC) and its globalization.” [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but to the South Koreans globalizing Kaesong likely means getting as many Chinese companies as possible in there to make it harder for the North Koreans to shut down again.
This is an example of how absurd the competitive between Korean companies can get when things get this petty:
Samsung washing machine image via Flickr user SamsungTomorrow.
Following recent news that Korean alcohol company execs personally orchestrated a rumor-mongering campaign against the competition on Korean home turf, the bizarre story of an LG executive allegedly vandalizing Samsung-made washing machines in two Berlin appliance shops earlier this month leads one to question whether the country’s highly-competitive industries are taking it all a little too seriously.
On September 3rd, sales staff at the two different appliance shops in Berlin found five display models on the showroom floor with broken doors. The sales staff called local police after CCTV allegedly showed Jo Seong-jin, the president of the Home Appliance Division of LG Electronics, heavily leaning on the door hinges of the Samsung Crystal Blue washing machines so that they would be unable to close properly. The LG team was in town for the 2014 IFA electronics show. [Busan Haps]
South Korean Marines reenact the historic amphibious landing operation in the Yellow Sea during the Korean War on Sept. 14, 2014, the eve of the anniversary of the Incheon Landing. The 1950 operation, commanded by U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, turned the tide of the war against the invading North Korea. (Yonhap)
Talk about a bunch of hyperbole from the mayor of Uijongbu:
The Uijeongbu mayor boycotted a friendship concert at Camp Red Cloud last week after a 2nd Infantry Division soldier allegedly assaulted a taxi driver.
A second incident further exacerbated simmering resentment among local residents at what they see as a never-ending string of crimes by American soldiers, said a spokesman for Mayor Ahn Byung Yong.
2ID commander Maj. Gen. Thomas Vandal apologized in writing and in a telephone conversation with Ahn. Brig. Gen. Richard Kim, assistant division commander for maneuver, met with the mayor.
The soldier, identified by Uijeongbu police as a sergeant, is suspected of assaulting a taxi driver shortly after midnight on Sept. 2 on a road near the base’s back gate. The driver was taken to a hospital after losing control and running onto a curb. No information on his injuries was available………….
Another soldier was accused of flirting with a 26-year-old South Korean woman around 10 p.m. on Sept. 7 at Hoeryong Station, one stop from Uijeongbu, then shoving her toward a wall………………
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say people can’t step out onto the street at night. But they are nervous, and they are scared (of U.S. soldiers),” he said. [Stars & Stripes]
So two minor drunken incidents involving US soldiers means there is a crime wave and Koreans need to run in fear of every soldier they see? With thousands of US soldiers stationed and rotating through Korea there is always going to be crime committed by US soldiers just like there is crime committed by Koreans. Has the mayor eliminated all crime in Uijongbu? You know how many drunken Koreans I have seen on the subway push people? Heck how many drunk ajushis have gotten into shoving matches just on the sidewalks? Is the mayor going to grandstand and make an issue of that?
What matters in all of this is how these incidents are dealt with. There is no doubt that the 2ID leadership takes these incidents very seriously and will comply with the SOFA to have them properly investigated compared to if a Korean gets pushed on the subway by another Korean likely nothing would ever come of it.
There is a lot of race baiting in the media now a days in order to drive ratings and page views and now the Army Times has resorted to this tactic as well with the below article about the low number of black officers in the infantry, armor, and field artillery branches:
Command of the Army’s main combat units — its pipeline to top leadership — is virtually devoid of black officers, according to interviews, documents and data obtained by USA TODAY.
The lack of black officers who lead infantry, armor and field artillery battalions and brigades — there are no black colonels at the brigade level this year — threatens the Army’s effectiveness, disconnects it from American society and deprives black officers of the principal route to top Army posts, according to officers and military sociologists. Fewer than 10 percent of the active-duty Army’s officers are black compared with 18 percent of its enlisted men, according to the Army.
The problem is most acute in its main combat units: infantry, armor and artillery. In 2014, there was not a single black colonel among those 25 brigades, the Army’s main fighting unit of about 4,000 soldiers. Brigades consist of three to four battalions of 800 to 1,000 soldiers led by lieutenant colonels. Just one of those 78 battalions is scheduled to be led by a black officer in 2015. [Army Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but don’t bother because you can easily predict the way it is going to go. I expect the race baiting from a major newspaper, but you would think that the Army Times would try and provide more context about why the numbers are the way they are. To be fair the Army Times did try to provide some context on why black servicemembers tend to flock to combat service support positions because of the job training opportunities. However, the Army Times makes it appear like the Army was specifically picking on black officers to separate as part of the recent force draw down:
The downsizing of the Army is having a disproportional effect on African-American officers. From the pool of officers screened, almost 10 percent of eligible black majors are being dismissed from the Army compared with 5.6 percent of eligible white majors, USA TODAY reported in early August. The Army is cutting 550 majors and about 1,000 captains as the Army seeks to reduce its force to 490,000 soldiers by the end of 2015.
The reason the black officers were disproportionately separated has nothing to do with the narrative of the big, bad racist Army, but instead the fact that black officers tend to join combat support branches. The areas that were selected for the highest number of officer separations was in the combat support branches. You can see the statistics on Slide 10 of this presentation. Remember the logistics support tail is much larger than the number of the trigger pullers that it supports; so of course they were going to see a larger number of separations. There is nothing stopping anyone (other than females which will soon change) from joining the infantry. If a black officer wants to join combat support jobs there is nothing wrong with that and they should feel encourage to do so instead of people pushing them to join the infantry which may not be something they want to do.
Instead of taking the race baiting angle the Army Times should have asked the question why higher level command positions are dominated by infantry, armor, and field artillery officers? Why can’t a division be commanded by officers from other branches to include service support? Does anyone want to make the argument that someone like General Ann Dunwoody was not competent enough to lead a division despite her logistics background? Opening up division command positions to more candidates other than mostly from infantry, armor, and field artillery would allow more minorities and women to compete for higher level general officer positions.
South Korea’s military confirmed Sunday it has detected signs of North Korea’s development of a submarine-based ballistic missile launch system.
In a report to an opposition lawmaker, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said there is an indication that the North is developing a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM).
“There is no intelligence yet that North Korea has an SLBM in operation. But the possibility of a North Korean submarine equipped with an SLBM has been detected recently,” the JCS said in the document submitted to Rep. Jin Sung-joon of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but developing a submarine based missile launch capability is very difficult and why so few nations have this capability. It just makes me wonder if the North Koreans are just putting out fake mock ups in order to confuse intelligence analysts. They have been accused of doing this in the past.
