That didn’t take long, just a week ago the Korean government was saying it was no longer going to use case numbers to make COVID decisions. The Health and Welfare Ministry even said that cases would not matter if they even reached 10,000 a day. Now that case numbers have hit 2,500 they are backtracking:
South Korea may not further ease its coronavirus restrictions, the country’s top public health official warned Thursday, amid a spike in COVID-19 cases.
South Korea began easing virus curbs in November in the first of the three-phase “living with COVID-19” scheme. It had planned to move to the second phase in mid-December after a two-week evaluation period.
Jeong Eun-kyeong, commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said it may be difficult to move to the second phase of the scheme if new cases continue to grow.
The country reported 2,520 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total caseload to 388,351, the KDCA said.
Thursday’s tally marked a slight hike from the previous day’s 2,425, which marked the first time in six days that daily infections exceeded 2,400.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
This guys breaks into a home where he finds his wife cheating on him with another man and pulls out his camera to record it. This causes they guy to be convicted of being a sex offender:
A man was found guilty of a sex crime for filming his wife as she engaged in an extramarital affair. The couple was in the midst of divorce proceedings.
Korea Times
The appellate department of Ulsan District Court sentenced a man in his 50s to a fine of 1 million won ($850) and 40 hours in a sexual violence treatment program for the violation.
The man was indicted for breaking into a studio apartment in Ulsan on an early morning in August of last year, inflicting violence on his wife and the man who was with her, and filming them with his smartphone. He used a ladder to climb up to the window and gain entry to the premises.
He had secretly followed his wife, who had left home after an argument. He then broke into the premises she had entered and was infuriated to find her with the man, both in their underwear.
You can read more at the link, but this is just another example of a bizarre court ruling that comes out of the Korean courts at times.
It looks like President Xi is going to make it official and become the emperor for life he has always wanted:
Only two men in the Communist Party’s history have ever written a so-called historical resolution. China is waiting to see whether President Xi Jinping becomes the third.
The first official declaration on Chinese history in 40 years is set to top the agenda when the ruling party huddles this week in the last major meeting before a twice-a-decade congress next year, where Xi’s expected to break precedent and secure a third term to extend his indefinite rule.
Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s historical resolutions came at critical junctures in the nation’s trajectory and enabled their authors to dominate party politics until their dying breaths. Issuing his own magnum opus would not only put Xi on par with those party titans, but could signal big changes afoot in the world’s second-largest economy.
The meeting from Nov. 8-11, called the sixth plenum, kicks off the closest thing China has to a campaign season. Getting the party to back his take on China’s history — and its future — would be the biggest sign yet that Xi has the power base to potentially rule for life after almost a decade of purging enemies and pushing to foster national pride.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link, but that is the thing about purges, these authoritarians make so many enemies that it is dangerous for them to step down because they then risked being jailed or worse.
Right now U.S. servicemembers still have to quarantine for 10 days upon arrival in Japan, but the government is reviewing a possible drop in this requirement:
The U.S. military population in Japan does not immediately benefit from the shorter coronavirus quarantine period for incoming travelers imposed this week by the Japanese government, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday.
Japan is opening its borders to business travelers, international students and technical interns from countries considered low risk for the coronavirus and lowering its quarantine period for some foreign travelers to three days, with conditions.
Eligible travelers are those from countries that Japan considers low risk. Tourists are still banned.
Travelers from the U.S., except those under the status forces agreement, may still be denied entry to Japan, according to the Foreign Ministry website. SOFA sets the rights, limits and responsibilities for service members, Defense Department employees and others affiliated with the U.S. military in Japan.
The spokesman said the government is still considering a three-day quarantine period for the “specific circumstance” of fully vaccinated U.S. military personnel arriving in Japan.
“The government is still reviewing the matter,” the spokesman said during an hourlong virtual media briefing, “and has not resolved the question yet.”
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
It will be interesting to see if this frigate ends up doing the same maritime DMZ duty as its predecessor:
South Korea on Tuesday held a ceremony launching a new frigate named after a warship torpedoed by North Korea in 2010, the Navy and state arms procurement agency said.
The ceremony for the 2,800-ton frigate, Cheonan, took place at the shipyard of Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. in Ulsan, some 410 kilometers southeast of Seoul, as the Navy still has potent memories of the North’s deadly attack.
The 1,200-ton corvette Cheonan sank near the Northern Limit Line, a de facto western inter-Korean sea border, in March 2010, after a North Korean midget submarine fired a torpedo at it, killing 46 sailors.
The unveiling of the Cheonan carried a symbolic meaning for the survivors of the attack and bereaved families who have wished to see the new warship named after the ill-fated corvette and commissioned to fulfill its unfinished mission of safeguarding the maritime border.
Yonhap
However the prior Captain of the Cheonan did not attend the ceremony for this reason:
Striking a sour note, Choi Won-il, the captain of the corvette at the time of the sinking, said he would not attend the event in protest over the state-run communications standards panel’s recent decision not to take issue with social media video clips raising conspiracy theories behind the cause of the sinking.
Choi does have a point because the Moon administration has been busy throwing conservative journalists in jail for so called “fake news”, but will not take action against fake news in regards to the sinking of the Cheonan. This is likely because they don’t want to upset the Kim regime which is behind a lot of the misinformation put out about the sinking of the Cheonan.
You can read more at the link.
