Can someone tell me what is being celebrated at this ceremony celebrating five years since the 2000 inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang? Are they celebrating the governmental corruption under former President Kim Dae Jung that passed the millions of dollars to Kim Jong Il to allow the summit? The Korea Times article didn’t say much besides the delegation has been reduced which of course America was blamed for and that Unification Minister Chung Dong-young would lead the delegation. I can’t think of a better person to kiss Kim Jong Il’s butt for three days.

Korea plans on building a new casino that will focus on Chinese gamblers:

“South Korea is betting on a new US$120 million casino project to lure more Chinese gamblers to a market that has traditionally focused on Japanese high-rollers.

“There are currently 13 casinos in South Korea that draw about 600,000 gamblers a year, mostly Japanese and Chinese.

“With about a half billion dollars in annual revenue, South Korea’s casino industry is still far behind the former Portuguese colony of Macau, which is about to surpass Las Vegas as the world’s richest gambling venue. Macau reportedly attracted 16.7 million visitors last year who spent about $5 billion.

Former US Army deserter Charles Jenkins may decide to visit the US with his family to visit his 91 year old mother.

Jenkins has asked to travel to the United States to see his 91-year-old mother who lives in a nursing home in North Carolina, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The Kyodo news agency says Jenkins may head to the United States as soon as Tuesday next week.

North Korea and Japan played each other in a World Cup qualifying game in Bangkok, Thailand last night. What was unusual about this game is the fact that no fans were allowed to attend due to North Korean fan violence during a match against Iran..

In a rare move, the World Cup governing body FIFA moved the game from Pyongyang to Bangkok to punish North Korea after unruly crowd behavior during the country’s game against Iran in Pyongyang in March.

Nearly 500 members of the Japanese press and thousands of supporters are expected to watch the match from outside and in nearby hotels.

Japan defeated North Korea 2-0 to qualify for the World Cup.

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) – Japan defeated North Korea 2-0 at Bangkok on Wednesday to qualify for next year’s soccer World Cup.

Late goals by Atsushi Yanagisawa in the 73rd minute and substitute Masashi Oguro in the 88th minute gave Japan the win and made it the first team to join host Germany at the 2006 finals.

Colorado Rockies pitcher Byung-hyun Kim continues to display why he is the perfect Rockies pitcher. Kim has actually improved his ERA since my last posting from 9.64 to a for him a good 6.38. Don’t go write his name on your All-Star ballot yet. He also has an 0-5 record.

Here is a further update on the fall out from the Daniel Hong article in the Korea Times. I orignially posted about this article a couple weeks ago and I provided an additional update last week.

Today the Korea Times had an opinion piece criticizing the Daniel Hong article. The op-ed is well written and makes many of the points about Daniel Hong that was exposed through the blogosphere. Here is a quick snippet:

So, now we are left with some questions: Did this alleged conversation with Prasso actually occur? How can we trust the words of an author who claims another’s words as his own? We might be suspicious that such a person might claim a conversation that never happened as well. Perhaps Ms. Prasso will have chance to read this and comment on the veracity of the author’s use of her name and words. Prasso and Hong both make use of stereotypes as the basis for their writing. Prasso discusses the stereotypes that Westerners have of Asians and some of the problems associated with those stereotypes.Hong, however, simply borrows (scratch that, steals) Prasso’s views in order to attack a subset of westerners for which he has obvious distain. The difference here is that the former is provocative and compelling for the intelligent reader and the later is racist and offensive.

It would be interesting to hear from Ms. Prasso her self on this topic because we have already read enough from Daniel Hong. I doubt we will be reading anything from him in the future now that he has been exposed as a plagarist. Then again this is the Korea Times were talking about so who knows.

This Saturday 4,000 protestors from the union representing USFK workers rallied near Yongsan Garrison in Seoul to protest the planned job cuts due to base consolidation and a budget short fall due to the Korean government cutting the amount of money it pays to up keep the alliance.

Almost 90 percent of the 13,000-member Korean Employees Union (KEU) voted a month ago to stage protests in response to a U.S. Forces Korea announcement that it would cut as many as 1,000 jobs because South Korea reduced the amount of money it pays to help base U.S. troops on the peninsula. Officials from the two countries signed a two-year agreement in late April that requires South Korea to pay 680.4 billion won (about $680 million) annually, an 8.9 percent drop from last year’s 746.9 billion won payment.

Let’s see, this protest is more against the Korean government than USFK since they are the one’s that cut the budget and it drew 4,000 protestors which is more people than the 3,000 Hanchongnyun protestors from last week, yet the Hanchongnyun protestors made international headlines. Could it be because the USFK union workers conducted a civilized protests and didn’t resort to bashing policemens heads and destroying property which the news only likes to report? I would be surprised if any newspaper or the news gives you the statistic I just gave you that the base workers drew more people than Hanchongnyun.

I bet the union could of swelled their numbers even more if they put out they were going to beat the riot police and fire bomb Yongsan. All the knucleheads from the universities would of come out even though they probably don’t give a damn if a base worker loses their job or not; they only want to bash in some heads and destroy property to brag about it at the bar that night. These violent protestors have no fear of being arrested so the protests are more for their own entertainment purposes than being a civic endeavor.

Hanchongnyun wouldn’t even have the amount of protestors that got last weekend if asaulting police officers and destroying property was punished with stiff jail sentences. I applaud the union for not resorting to what should be illegal behavior.

A civic group (korean media code word for anti-American group) has been allowed access to the Korean police investigation into the accident that killed the two middle school girls three years ago. I’m sure they will twist the facts of this case for their own purposes to try and build up public outrage before the June 13th anniversary of the accident.

The twisting of the truth in this case is really amazing. I have had KATUSAs tell me they thought before working with US soldiers that the US soldiers ground guided the tracked vehicle back and forth over the girls bodies because a ROK Army tank commander said so on the news. They believed the US soldiers were all laughing about it and they got in a fight with ROK soldiers at the scene over it. This is just a quick sample of the propaganda and lies put out there to smear the US Army. So don’t expect anything truthful to come out of whatever report this “civic group” puts out this week.

Also here is something I heard through the grapevine. We’ll see on the 13th if it is true or not. You will not see the parents of the two girls killed in the accident at any of the protests. They were contacted by the “civic groups” and they told the civic groups that they wanted them to quit taking advantage of this tragedy for their own gain and would not participate. If true I bet the Korean media won’t report it.

Yahoo News is reporting a sharp increase in the number of AIDS cases in Japan.

A rapid spread of AIDS over the past decade has reached a level that has confounded and alarmed the health establishment in Japan, a country that has long felt protected by a first-rate health system and widespread condom use. Infections which had stayed at infinitesimal levels are surging at rates similar to developing countries, and some experts say the real number of Japanese with HIV or AIDS is two to four times the official toll.

The overall reported total of infections isn’t to bad but there is fears that the real number is much higher:

The official toll of 10,070 HIV/AIDS sufferers in a nation of 127 million people pales next to some countries. Even if the actual figure is closer to 40,000, that would mean roughly 1 in 3,000 are infected, compared to about 1 in 100 in Thailand or 1 in 1,500 in China, according to estimates by UNAIDS, the U.N. body waging the global war on AIDS.

But many in Japan are alarmed at the dangerous mixture of chronic underreporting of cases, a sexually freewheeling youth culture that’s less inclined to use condoms or other protection, and the powerful social stigma of a sexually transmitted disease. Satoshi Kimura, head of the AIDS Clinical Center at the Tokyo-based International Medical Center, estimates that between 20,000 and 30,000 people in Japan don’t know they have the virus.

It is the recent increase in cases that is a cause for alarm:

In 2004, a record 1,165 people were reported newly infected, up 14 percent from the previous year — the same percentage growth rate as in AIDS-hit areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, according to UNAIDS figures.

The virus appears to be spreading the fastest among males under 35. Transmission between gay men accounts for the majority of cases, but the health ministry’s 2004 annual AIDS report notes that infections among heterosexual and homosexual men are increasing at roughly the same rate.

That is really amazing that the increase last year in Japan’s HIV infection rate is similar to sub-Saharan African countries that are being ravaged by the virus.

How does Korea stand in regards to AIDS? Here is a Korea Herald report from last year:

On Oct. 20, health authorities reported that 455 people tested positive for HIV in the first nine months of 2004, raising the number of resident Koreans who have been infected with the virus to 2,994. The new cases represent a 14 percent increase over new cases in the same period the previous year. All 305 cases whose route of transmission has been determined were infected sexually: 51 percent heterosexual vs. 49 percent homosexual, according to the Korean Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). Since 1985, when the nation’s AIDS epidemic began, 591 people died of AIDS, leaving the number living with HIV-infection at 2,403.

So Korea had a 14 percent increase equal to that of Japan which means Korea’s HIV infection rate is similar to sub-Saharan Africa also. Soldiers and expats you are not safe either:

In addition, 132 foreign residents were found to be HIV-infected: They are not included in the 455 figure. The number of foreign cases in the first nine months of 2004 was more than double the 59 foreign cases found in all of 2003.

Keep that in mind the next time you go to the club.

The Japan Times is reporting that the Korean fishermen who were caught fishing in Japanese waters and were boarded by the Japanese Coast Guard, are accusing the Japanese Coast Guard of using excessive force.

Tokyo on Friday dismissed accusations that Japan Coast Guardsmen used excessive force when they boarded a South Korean boat suspected of poaching and roughed up one of its crew members.
“I think they acted correctly,” Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said when asked if the coast guardsmen had acted unreasonably.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that a member of the fishing boat crew was hospitalized with injuries after he was beaten by Japanese authorities during the confrontation Wednesday.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said the coast guardsmen smashed the glass window on the door to the boat’s wheelhouse after the crew refused to unlock it and shut off the engine.

The order to cut the engine was a “necessary and minimum measure,” Hosoda said. “When the crew resisted, they got into a scuffle.”

South Korean patrol boats were summoned from off the southern city of Ulsan early Wednesday when Japanese patrol boats entered South Korean waters in pursuit of the fishing boat they said had been operating 8 km inside Japanese territorial waters.

The 77-ton eel boat Singpung-ho had refused JCG orders to stop and sailed off with two Japan Coast Guardsmen still on board. Japanese authorities contacted the South Korean Coast Guard, which helped stop the boat.

The similarities between this case and the 2002 subway incident continue. Make accusations of abuse and have pictures taken of you in the hospital to appeal to Korean nationalism to make it look like the big bad foreigners in this case the Japanese are beating down the Koreans again. A proven formula for getting out of trouble.

I would think that breaking the window of the boat to get the Captain to stop the boat would be reasonable since the boat was escaping with the Japanese Coast Guardsmen still on board. Plus when they did get in the cabin I’m sure the Captain wasn’t to helpful and resisted stopping the boat thus leading to the injuries he received. If he would of stopped the boat like he was directed he could of avoided any alledged injuries. He couldn’t do that though because then he would of been caught in Japanese waters.

So it was better to run with the coast guardsmen on board and get back into Korean waters where he knew nothing would happen to him and he could appeal to Korean nationalism against the Japanese, go to the hospital, claim abuse, and I bet he yelled “Dokto is Korea’s” at some point too for added emphasis of his innocence. I hope they make him pay the illegal fishing fine but that is about as likely as someone being arrested in the 2002 subway abduction.