That is what the Korea Times is asking:
I learned something new today; I did not know that Korea had a quota on the number of students who can be trained to become a doctor:
The Moon Jae-in administration has been at odds with doctors over its healthcare reform bills that will increase the number of medical students admitted to universities and establish a state-funded medical school.
Korea Times
The government said July 23 that it wants to produce more doctors to broaden the reach of public health care services as the necessity for this was confirmed with the onset of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As soon as the plan was made public, however, doctors’ groups were up in arms immediately, vowing to go on strike.
The Korea Medical Association (KMA), the nation’s largest union for doctors, and the Korean Intern Resident Association (KIRA) announced plans to stage an all-out strike Aug. 14 to protest the reform.
You can read more at the link, but what is going on is that the Moon administration is trying to increase the number of doctors so there are more of them in rural areas. However, the KMA is saying the issue is not the number of doctors, but the fact that doctors flock to the Greater Seoul Metropolitan Area because of higher pay and quality of life factors.
The rain continues to fall on South Korea:
South Korea’s annual rainy season has continued for 49 days now, the longest on record, and is poised to set a fresh record as more rains are forecast to pour down until mid-August.
The monsoon season, which has begun on June 24, tied the previous record of 49 days set in 2013, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) said, and will continue until Aug. 16 in the capital Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and western Gangwon Province.
On the southern resort island of Jeju, the rainy season lasted for 49 days from June 10 to July 28, breaking the previous record of 47 days set in 1998.
This year’s rainy season will end the latest on record, surpassing the previous record set on Aug. 10, 1987.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but of course global warming climate change is being blamed for the rain.
Despite the uptick in local infections, South Korea’s numbers are still incredibly low:
COVID-19 infections traced to a church have spread to Namdaemun Market, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Seoul, the health authorities said Monday. This is renewing concerns over mass infections while the number of new cases here has hovered between 20 and 43 a day, since the beginning of the month.
Korea Times
According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), the country added 28 new cases Sunday, bringing the total caseload to 14,626.
Among the 28, 17 were locally transmitted infections, including 11 reported in the densely populated capital, and five in the surrounding Gyeonggi Province.
At least nine were tied to the Namdaemun Market.
You can read more at the link.
The Daily Beast has an article published about how the left-wing operative and convicted criminal, Park Jie-won has taken over Korea’s National Intelligence Service:
The old Korean Central Intelligence Agency, a fearsome tool of terror for bygone South Korean dictators, has now lost the right to spy on politicians and torture foes of the regime. Instead the agency, renamed the National Intelligence Service years ago, is morphing into an instrument for North-South Korean reconciliation.
Nothing shows the changing role of the NIS more sharply than the appointment by South Korea’s liberal President Moon Jae-in of an old-time leftist politico as NIS director. Imprisoned in 2006 for agreeing to send North Korea $500 million to bring about the first North-South Korean summit in June 2000— between then-South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, father of current ruler Kim Jong Un—the 78-year-old Park Jie-won hopes to use the agency to get back in the good graces of the North Koreans.
The NIS may still engage in routine intelligence-gathering, but Park, who was Kim Dae-jung’s closest aide, envisions the agency pursuing “peace, cooperation and unification” of the two Koreas. As for his signature on an old document promising payoffs to North Korea, he called it “fake,” a forgery.
The controversy over the signature revived memories of the scandal in which Park was alleged to have signed an “agreement on economic cooperation” with North Korea before the June 2000 summit. The document states the payoffs came to $3 billion, including another $2.5 billion in long-term aid and investment, all to get Kim Jong Il to agree to host Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang. Several months later, “DJ,” as he was widely known, won the Nobel Peace Prize for which he had been lobbying for years.
Park might say he knew nothing, but he was sentenced in 2006 to three years in prison for arranging payoffs that critics say aided and abetted North Korea’s rise as a nuclear power. Some have claimed the final total sent to North Korea amounted to far more. In any event North Korea conducted its first underground nuclear test in 2006 and has staged five more since then, most recently in September 2017.
Daily Beast
You can read more at the link, but any fair observer can conclude that all the payouts did was accelerate the Kim regime’s nuclear capabilities and made them the even more dangerous threat they are today.
