Note to senior leaders in the ROK military, the days of getting away with sexual harassment and other sex crimes is clearly over:

Military prosecutors indicted an Army general for alleged sexual molestation of a female subordinate, officials said Tuesday.

The brigadier general was accused of attempting physical contact with the female officer at a karaoke bar after a dinner with his subordinates in late June.

Upon a report by the victim, he was immediately relieved of his duties and arrested earlier this month.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Even though the Blue House is saying this summit negotiations are not true, I still believe there is something back channel going on to explain the good behavior of the Kim regime in recent months:

The office of President Moon Jae-in dismissed a news report Wednesday that the two Koreas are in talks to arrange another summit.

Quoting unnamed government sources, Reuters reported that the two sides are seeking to hold summit talks between Moon and the North’s leader Kim Jong-un. One of the sources was quoted as adding that a virtual summit could be an option due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The foreign news report is not true,” Cheong Wa Dae spokesperson Park Kyung-mee said in a brief statement. “There has been no (relevant) discussion.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I can understand the bank’s perspective on this if someone cannot prove they are going to be employed longer than a year. I think even a Korean citizen would have a hard time being approved for a loan under these circumstances:

For Lonnie, a 45-year old Canadian working as a professional English instructor in Seoul, buying his own house in the city has been near the top of his bucket list.

But his plan for a dream house has been let down by local banks rejecting his applications for a credit loan. Despite his status as a full-time instructor at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies for more than eight years, the banks have not been accommodating.

“For the first time in almost 18 years after I came here, I applied for a credit loan offered by Woori Bank last year to raise money to purchase an affordable starter home,” he said. “However, a bank clerk said I don’t qualify for the lending as my contract at HUFS was only for a year, saying foreigners could run away if they only had a one-year contract.“

His contract is renewed on a yearly basis, but he is classified as regular worker subject to the state’s employment insurance coverage. He earns an annual income of around 80 million won ($69,300). 

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

If you have kids you probably know what Roblox is and apparently many Korean investors know as well:

Tesla and Apple have long been the most popular foreign stocks for Korean investors — but not anymore.    
   
Between July 1 and July 23, Korean investors purchased a net $86.54 million worth of shares of Alphabet, which owns Google, making it the most popular foreign stock, according to data from the Korea Securities Depository.   
   
The second most popular was Roblox, a California-based online game developer, of which Koreans purchased a net $75.95 million.  
   
The rise of the metaverse drove its popularity. Roblox allows users to develop their own mini-games, share them with others and change the in-game currency, Robux, into real money. The allowing of users to build their own worlds and make real money has made it a hot metaverse platform.  

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

The Korea Herald has a good in-depth look at what happened with the ROK Navy ship that had most of its crew become infected with the coronavirus:

A seaman first exhibited cold-like symptoms on July 2, a day after the destroyer had made a four-day supply stop at a port. But he was treated with cold medicine and not tested for COVID-19, even though many others began to show similar symptoms. The medical staff had allegedly overlooked COVID-19 symptoms.

What made the outbreak more lethal was the wrong COVID-19 self-test kits Cheonghae packed upon leaving Korea. The unit left with antibody test kits, which take much longer time to detect infection than antigen test kits. It was just plain mistake, the Navy admitted.

“It was days later when we brought in local medical specialists to administer the industry-standard PCR tests,” one Cheonghae officer said, adding his unit began to enforce strict quarantine procedures after the test, which found the first six COVID-19 patients.

That was the first case of infection, which Cheonghae confirmed on July 15, and three days later, the military flew aircraft to airlift the entire crew back home. Many service members who had tested negative for COVID-19 using self-test kits were believed to have been infected.

“We just dropped the ball there,” a military official said.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but there is a clearly a cover up going on within the ship because they are trying to blame contaminated food for infecting the ship. Passing of the coronavirus from surface contact or eating food has been found to be highly unlikely. The vast majority of people are infected by airborne contact with the virus. The crew is claiming they were not in contact with anyone during their 4-day port call in Oman which appears to be unlikely.

“It’s highly unlikely that it came from food. I suspect there may have been people-to-people contact, though the seamen deny there was,” he said, adding the crew should be honest with whom they had come into contact.

The Joong Ang Ilbo has a report about what happened to the Korean climber who went missing in the Karakoram Range:

A Russian who tried to rescue stranded Korean mountaineer Kim Hong-bin said at least 15 climbers passed by Kim without offering any help.  
   
Kim, the first Korean mountaineer with a physical impairment to climb all 14 peaks of the Himalayan and Karakoram mountains more than 8,000 meters (26,250 feet) above sea level, fell down a crevasse while trying to descend the 14th, Broad Peak on the border of Pakistan and China, on July 18.  
   
Russian mountaineer Vitaly Lazo reported on Risk.ru, a website with posts from mountaineers, that he and fellow rescuers received a report that same night that a Russian climber named Anastasia Runova had fallen through a crevasse on Broad Peak and needed help. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but according to the report if someone would have stopped to help the exhausted porter trying to rescue Kim Hong-bin, he may have been saved. Instead his body will probably forever be lost on that mountain.