It looks like small business owners are about to get some relief from the coronavirus restrictions:

South Korea will relax business restrictions on eateries, franchise coffee chains and other facilities in the wider Seoul area, as the country decided Sunday to ease tougher anti-virus curbs in the region for the next two weeks.

The country decided not to extend the so-called Level 2.5 social distancing scheme, set to end at midnight, in the densely populated capital area, as the stricter curbs have been effective in slowing new virus cases, according to health authorities.

Starting Monday, the Seoul metropolitan area will be placed back under the Level 2 rules in the three-tier system, on a par with the nationwide alert level, until Sept. 27.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

This is a pretty amazing narrative of how COVID spread from Seoul to Daejeon:

Citizens in Daejeon, a central city about 150 kilometers south of Seoul, are getting restless as authorities announced Saturday a chain of coronavirus transmissions originating from a health care product business forum has infected 54 people so far.

Daejeon’s latest cluster infection began Aug. 25, when a Seoul resident infected with COVID-19 hosted the forum on health care goods at a building in the In-dong district in the city’s Dong Ward.

A Daejeon woman in her 50s, codenamed Daejeon 293rd Patient, contracted the coronavirus from the Seoul resident and has since spread the virus to 28 other people, including her family members and acquaintances, according to municipal health authorities.

Soon after the business forum, the woman, a resident of Gayang-dong, Dong Ward, met with a number of family members and acquaintances, infecting six of them.

One of her infected acquaintances, identified only as a man in his 60s, visited a restaurant in Gayang-dong later, triggering a chain of coronavirus transmissions in the local community, the authorities explained.

They noted it is regrettable that the man codenamed Daejeon 311th Patient had visited the Gayang-dong restaurant twice, on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, for 20 minutes each time despite showing symptoms, such as phlegm and loss of taste.

The coronavirus then jumped from the 311th patient to as many as 19 people, including the restaurant’s owner and a middle school student.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this just shows how prolonged periods in enclosed spaces is where people are contracting this virus.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

This has to be frustrating for the crews effected to have to travel outside of the country to maintain their qualifications:

The U.S. military has had to send air crews off the peninsula for live-fire training due to local disputes with South Koreans over noise and other complaints, Gen. Robert Abrams said Thursday. (…..)

But he acknowledged that complaints by South Koreans who live near training facilities have caused a setback in live-fire training needed to maintain troop qualifications. 

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

It will be interesting to see if there is any North Korean reaction to this latest news from Woodward’s book:

The headless body of Kim Jong Un’s executed uncle was displayed to senior North Korean officials, US President Donald Trump told the author of an upcoming book on the US president.

Jang Song Thaek, the North Korean leader’s uncle by marriage and a hugely powerful figure within the regime, was purged for treason and corruption in 2013, in what was widely seen as Kim mercilessly asserting his authority.

Kim “tells me everything. Told me everything,” Trump told the Washington Post investigative journalist Bob Woodward, according to his forthcoming book “Rage”.

“He killed his uncle and he put the body right in the steps,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to a building used by senior officials.

“And the head was cut, sitting on the chest,” he added in excerpts from the book seen by AFP.

AFP

You can read more at the link, but with many stories from North Korea who knows how true they really are.

No matter how much more his numbers go down I don’t see President Moon replacing Choo Mi-ae because how well she has squashed every scandal against his administration:

The growing allegations surrounding Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae over her son’s military service are beginning to affect the approval ratings for President Moon Jae-in and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), as support for the President and the party has dropped significantly among men and the younger generation.

In a poll of 1,504 adults conducted by Realmeter from Monday to Wednesday, 45.7 percent of the respondents believed Moon was doing a good job, down 2.4 percentage points from a week before, while 49.5 percent disapproved of his job performance, an increase of 1.4 percentage points.

The decline was large among people in their 20s, whose support for Moon dropped by 5.7 percentage points; among men, by 9 percentage points; and among students, 10.7 percentage points.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but the ruling party is trying to claim that Choo’s attempts for favorable treatment for her KATUSA son were just something any concerned parent would do. How many parents in Korea can call up the Defense Ministry and advocate for extended leaves, assignments in Seoul, and requests to be an interpreter at the Winter Olympics?

Here is what USFK Commander General Abrams had to say lately about North Korea’s coronavirus prevention methods:

North Korean authorities have issued shoot-to-kill orders to prevent the coronavirus entering the country from China, according to the commander of US forces in the South.

The impoverished North ― whose crumbling health system would struggle to cope with a major virus outbreak ― has not confirmed a single case of the disease that has swept the world since first emerging in China, the North’s key ally.

Pyongyang closed its border with China in January to try to prevent contamination, and in July state media said it had raised its state of emergency to the maximum level.

US Forces Korea (USFK) commander Robert Abrams said that the border shutdown had increased demand for smuggled goods, prompting authorities to intervene.

The North introduced a new “buffer zone, one or two kilometers up on the Chinese border,” Abrams told an online conference organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington on Thursday.

“They’ve got North Korean SOF (Special Operations Forces) out there. … Strike forces, they’ve got shoot-to-kill orders in place.”

The border closure had effectively “accelerated the effects” of economic sanctions imposed on the North over its nuclear programs, he added, with imports from China plunging 85 percent.

Korea Times