This is terrible:

An Eighth Army soldier who died with his wife and their 16-month-old child in a car crash in South Korea earlier in the week was identified by his command on Wednesday.

Army Spc. Luis Taveras, 27, of Jamaica Plain, Mass., his wife, Lisbeth, 30, and their son, Luis, were killed when their vehicle collided with a tow truck around 11 p.m. Monday near Camp Humphreys.

Taveras was a quartermaster and chemical equipment repairer with the 19th Expeditionary Sustainment Command. He served four years in the Army and arrived in South Korea in June.

Stars and Stripes

You can read more at the link, but condolences to all SPC Taveras’s friends and family.

Studies have shown that vaccinated people are far less likely to be hospitalized. With Korea’s high vaccination rate it makes sense that case numbers should not be the metric to follow but hospitalizations and deaths instead:

Korea will gradually return to normal as planned even if infections rise to 10,000 a day, an official at the Ministry of Health and Welfare promised Monday. 

The number of daily COVID-19 cases has been rising again to around 2,000 a day since last week as Koreans threw caution to the wind ahead of the phased return to normal that started Monday.

But the government is determined to shift its focus from counting infections to severe cases and deaths because the vaccination rate has increased.

“The ratio of COVID patients between unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people is about 70 to 30. If this trend continues, the medical system will be capable of handling some 5,000 new cases a day,” Son Young-rae of the ministry said.

Chosun Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Another American tech company has pulled out of China:

Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday it has pulled out of China, citing an increasingly challenging operating environment.

The withdrawal was largely symbolic, as many of the company’s services were already blocked by China’s digital censorship. But recent government moves to expand its control over tech companies generally, including its domestic giants, may have tipped the scales for Yahoo.

“In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo’s suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1,” the company said in a statement. It said it “remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

It looks like a lot of people may be seeing jail time for selling drugs at massage parlors across South Korea:

Nearly 50 people, including foreign nationals, have been apprehended in recent police crackdowns on a drug trafficking ring based at massage parlors across the country that hired foreigners, police said Monday.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said it has detained 24 members of the drug trafficking ring for selling methamphetamine and other banned substances at massage parlors with foreign employees nationwide from February to last month and 23 other people who bought the drugs from them.

Of the 47 drug trafficking suspects, 33 people, including foreigners, were put under arrest on charges of violating the Narcotics Control Act, the police agency said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

This is a standard Kim regime playbook item, make unreasonable demands for little to nothing in return:

North Korea is said to have demanded, as preconditions for talks on declaring the end of the Korean War, that South Korea and the United States stop their combined military exercises and that economic sanctions against Pyongyang be lifted.

A lawmaker who attended a parliamentary audit of the National Intelligence Service on Thursday told reporters later that the agency’s chief had made the revelation. 

South Korea and the US have already reduced their combined drills, both to ease inter-Korean tensions and due to the coronavirus pandemic, to the extent that there is great concern about preparedness.

Above all, there is no chance of Pyongyang giving up on its nuclear weapons. It has tested an array of missiles while reportedly reactivating its nuclear facilities. 

Korea Herald via OFK

Yet this is what the Moon administration wants to do. In fact President Moon wants the U.S. to agree to an end of Korean War peace treaty which even the Korean Herald has now picked up on what I have been saying for years is a very bad idea:

The Moon regime argues that an end-of-war declaration would open the way for denuclearization. But with the war over, North Korea would likely demand the dissolution of the United Nations Command and the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea. A formal end to the war would only obscure the mandate of the UN Command — created under US leadership after the Korean War broke out — and ultimately of the US forces stationed in South Korea.

Without a doubt, these are demands that would jeopardize the nation’s security, and yet the Moon administration is pushing almost blindly for an end-of-war declaration — or even for inter-Korean dialogue to that end. The North, which had been unresponsive to the South’s proposals at first, seems to be seeking to take advantage of Moon’s obsession. It has offered preconditions just for discussion of the issue, not for an end-of-war declaration itself. 

Fortunately so far the Biden administration has resisted these calls from the Moon administration and hopefully it stays that way.

So it begins:

South Korea loosened its COVID-19 social distancing measures Monday following “public fatigue” from the prolonged pandemic response and the increased number of vaccinations. The government’s plan, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, is to ease restrictions over three steps, each lasting four weeks, followed by a two-week evaluation period. Each step will introduce new business hours, curfews and limits to public gatherings.

Public businesses in metropolitan areas have been typically open until 10 p.m. during the pandemic. Under the plan announced Monday, restaurants and cafes are allowed open for their normal business hours. Time restrictions and music bans at gyms and bathhouses were also lifted.

The Health and Welfare ministry described its step-by-step plan as “the roadmap for gradual return to normal,” with the goal of becoming “the better Korea.” (………)

U.S. Forces Korea, the military command responsible for roughly 28,500 troops on the peninsula, announced last month that the South Korean government would recognize proof-of-vaccination cards issued for U.S. service members.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.