“The main issue is that there’s just no escaping them.”

Once I was reading mainstream Korean news outlets online at a law firm in the US and someone threatened to tell her superiors I was looking at porn sites. https://t.co/z9NPgGMGUc

— the oranckay (@oranckay) March 20, 2019

It looks like the South Korean media is trying to sensationalize an accidental collision during a figure skating competition into an anti-American incident:

A South Korean sports agency is claiming an American figure skater intentionally injured its client Lim Eun-soo with a skate blade in a collision during the ongoing world championships.
According to All That Sports, Lim sustained a cut to her calf Wednesday when Mariah Bell struck Lim’s leg with her skate during their warmup prior to the ladies’ short program at the International Skating Union (ISU) World Figure Skating Championships in Saitama, Japan.

Lim was immediately treated for her injury. She was 30th among 40 skaters to take the ice and had the cut on her leg taped before performing her program.
In her first senior world championships, Lim, 16, set a personal high with 72.91 points to rank fifth, while Bell, 22, scored 71.26 points to place sixth.
An All That Sports official who witnessed the collision said there was enough ground to believe Bell’s act was premeditated, since Lim was skating close to the walls so as not to interfere with others, and Bell came from behind the South Korean to make contact.

Yonhap

The only problem with the South Korean sports agency’s claim is that it is not true:

he agency that represents Lim, All That Sports, told Agence France-Press that Bell has been “bullying Lim for months,” and once the incident occurred, asked the South Korean federation to lodge a formal complaint with the International Skating Union, the worldwide federation for the sport. As one of Lim’s agents told Yonhap News, Bell was waiting her turn to rehearse her program when she “suddenly kicked and stabbed Lim’s calf with her skate blades.”

Sensational? Yes. True? No.
Bell was the one who was rehearsing her short program, not Lim, which means Bell had the right of way on the ice and it was Lim’s job to get out of her way. Videotape shot from the stands shows Bell skating backwards at a relatively rapid pace near the boards with Lim in her path. At that point, Bell would not have been able to see Lim — but Lim had the responsibility to see Bell and move out of the way.

This is protocol for every skater at every competition, where six skaters share the ice on practice sessions and warmups.
What’s more, because Lim trains with Bell, she certainly should know Bell’s short program after seeing it on training sessions for months. All skaters get to know what their training partners and competitors are doing, including where they are headed and where their jumps, spins and other moves are placed on the ice.

As Bell went by Lim, she started to turn to go forward, and apparently her skate blade slightly cut Lim’s leg. Both skaters were able to compete in the short program later in the day, and both did very well, with Lim finishing fifth with a personal-best score and Bell sixth. 
This is not the first time there has been a collision involving two skaters in a competition. In fact, it would be unusual for an event like the worlds or Olympics to go by without a practice collision. The same day as the Bell-Lim scrap, there was a much more spectacular crash: French pairs skater Vanessa James was skating backwards when she and Italy’s Matteo Guarise slammed into each other at full speed during the warmup before the pairs competition.

As conspiracy theories spread across the internet, the ISU put out a statement saying there was “no evidence” that Bell deliberately kicked Lim, and Arutunian told a Russian news agency the same thing, according to an internet translation.

USA Today

It appears to me that the Korean media may be trying to recreate another Apollo Anton Ohno like controversy that led to him being public enemy #1 and increased anti-Americanism in South Korea. However, this was not the Olympics and no gold medal was on the line thus I expect this will be quickly forgotten.

However, continue to expect every little incident that can remotely be twisted for anti-Americanism to be published hoping something will eventually stick.

Stories like this make me want to do a complete check of a hotel room in Korea for these spy cameras:

Two men who installed miniature spy cameras in 30 motels and live-streamed footage of around 1,600 guests were arrested, police announced Wednesday. 

Since August last year, a 50-year-old man surnamed Park and a 48-year-old man surnamed Kim installed spy cameras in 42 rooms in 30 motels located in 10 cities throughout the country.

The diameter of the camera lenses was smaller than 1 millimeter (0.04 inches), and the two men installed them in parts of TVs, power sockets and even in the hangers for hair dryers that hang on the wall in bathrooms.

Each camera had a wireless function that allowed the men to upload online videos taken on the camera to various websites.

The lives of around 1,600 guests in these motel rooms were streamed live on a pornography website that Kim ran on an overseas server.

Park and Kim made users pay for the videos on the website, and they made some 7 million won in total ($6,197) from 97 members.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but it seems like this is a small payoff considering the expense and work that went into installing the cameras.

Fortunately no one was killed from this accidental firing of a Cheolmae-2 missile which is South Korea’s equivalent of a Patriot missile:

The inadvertent launch of an anti-aircraft missile at a military base in Chuncheon, Gangwon, on Monday was the result of maintenance accident, the South Korean Air Force said on Thursday.

After it was launched from a vehicle during a routine maintenance check, the Cheongung medium-range surface-to-air (SAM) missile exploded mid-air at around 10:38 p.m. on Monday. There were no casualties, nor was there property damage, but the accident spurred an investigation by the Air Force.

Following an on-site inspection and testimonies from witnesses, investigators concluded that the launch was unintentionally triggered by human error during a routine maintenance check. 

“During regular check-ups, mechanics are supposed to disconnect a cable plugged into the missile used in real operations and plug in a testing cable, but the communication between the mechanics was unclear and the check-up was performed without disconnecting the operational cable,” said an Air Force spokesman. “This caused the test launch signal transmitted by the mechanics’ laptop to trigger a launch, and the missile exploded mid-air around 3.5 seconds after launch due to its automatic self-destruction system.”

The missile is equipped with a mechanism that causes it to explode in the event of guidance system failures after launch, according to the Air Force’s briefing on the accident on Monday. 

Also known as the Cheolmae-2, the Cheongung SAM system was developed by the domestic arms producer Agency for Defense Development (ADD) based on the Russian 50R6 Vityaz and S-400 Triumf systems. Each missile costs around 1.5 billion won ($1.3 million) to produce, and a total budget of 1.2 trillion won has been allocated toward the project as a whole. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Now 2 journalists in jail: Byun Hee-jae (2 yrs) & Hwang Ui-won (1 yr) for correctly pointing out JTBC's false reporting of "the tablet PC." The judge wasn't even interested in further discovery. They are in appeals now. Why are they in jail at all for libel? https://t.co/Lsh6E1ZEuU

— Tara O (@DrTaraO) March 20, 2019

Here is the latest article on the North Korean embassy heist in Spain:

The 10 men in dark suits who raided the North Korean embassy in Madrid last month had one goal in mind, it would seem: to overthrow the regime of Kim Jong Un.
Although the scene of the Feb. 22 crime in Spain was many thousands of miles from the DMZ, analysts view the 10 involved as the cutting edge of a North Korean dissident group that’s now named Jayu Joseon, “Free [North] Korea.” It allegedly has the backing of some wealthy Koreans and foreigners as well as ties inside the North—apparently the first organization to have set up an operational challenge to the leadership in Pyongyang.

The immediate purpose of the break-in was to seize computers and cellphones on which intelligence analysts could find top-secret message traffic to the former North Korean ambassador to Spain, Kim Hyok Chol. 
He was expelled by Madrid in September 2017 after the United Nations imposed new sanctions on the North for its nuclear and missile tests. But at the time of the raid last month he had a much more sensitive position: Pyongyang’s envoy to the nuclear talks with Washington and Seoul. (……)

The Madrid 10 are assumed to have transferred the computers and mobile phones to a foreign intelligence agency. An auction to the highest bidder would not be unprecedented in such matters, but most of the suspicion is focused on the CIA, which, if it could access the encrypted material in time, could have found information potentially useful for the Hanoi summit and afterward.

“We can be 99.9 percent sure that Cheollima [Jayu Joseon] carried out the raid,” says Lee Sung-yoon, professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “They had all the incentive.”
As noted, Ambassador Kim Hyok Chol, after his expulsion, emerged as the North’s chief negotiator in the very difficult pre-summit dialogue with the U.S. envoy on North Korea, Stephen Biegun, and some of the message traffic since his departure from Spain was presumed to concern those talks. The messages may have kept on coming for some time through the embassy in Spain even though he would see them elsewhere. Or at least that may have been the assumption of the Madrid 10.

The Daily Beast

You can read much more at the link.

If you have wondered if the masks that many Koreans wear to protect themselves from fine dust work, well this study indicates that they do:

Most face masks tested recently by a consumer group work as advertised, with only one failing.

The Daejeon and South Chungcheong branch of the Voice for Consumers tested 20 masks for their ability to protect wearers against particulate pollutants, and 19 provided the level of protection equal to or better than that claimed on the packaging. 

All 20 products passed purity tests, which checked for chemicals such as formaldehyde.

YJ Corporation’s large-sized YJCM3 product, sold as a Korea Filter (KF) 94 mask, filtered only 87 percent of particulate matter compared to its advertised amount – 94 percent. 

The KF mark indicates the percentage of particulate matter filtered.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has ordered the YJ Corporation mask that failed the test to be recalled and discarded. Production may also be stopped for violating pharmaceutical laws. The organization also checked 50 mask products for the level of information on the packaging, and it found that six did not provide sufficient information. It also reported that some 3M Nexcare mask products, past their expiration period of 36 months, were being sold.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Here is another legacy of the prior Lee Myung-bak administration that the South Korean left has been hoping to tear down:

Experts and environmental groups argued that the weirs of the four-rivers restoration project just had to be opened and the water quality and ecosystems would return to normal.

That, according to a report last month from a special committee of 43 experts, didn’t happen.

Based on government monitoring between June 2017 and Feb. 20, 2019, the chlorophyll a (Chl-a) levels at the Seungchon weir on the Yeongsan River rose from 46 milligrams per cubic meters to 52 milligrams. A high concentration of chlorophyll results in algae bloom.

The chemical oxygen demand (COD), also another water-quality metric, increased from 8.5 parts per million to 10.7 parts per million. The fish assessment index (FAI) at the Seungchon weir fell from 28.8 to 28.2. This means that the ecosystem has worsened.

Readings from the Juksan weir, also on the Yeongsan River, also suggested a deterioration. The Chl-a level there was up from 59 milligram per cubic meters to 84, while the COD level rose from 9.1 parts per million to 9.3 parts per million. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read much more at the link, but one of the reasons the Four Rivers Project was initiated was to improve water quality and this study tends to confirm that it has done that. However, the environmentalists say they are going to go back and find a way to get better data.

It makes me wonder if these scientists would look for more data if the initial data gave them the results they wanted?