Tag: South Korea

This couple will spend three years and six months in jail for what they did to this homeless girl:

A couple in their 20s has been jailed for forcing a homeless teenage girl into prostitution and sadistically punishing her when she refused.

Daegu District Court on Monday sentenced the couple to three years and six months jail on charges of forcing prostitution, intimidation and inflicting critical injuries.

The judges said the crime was “immoral and extremely grievous in its sadism,” causing the victim “indelible trauma.”

The court heard that the man, 25, and the woman, 21, met the girl in January after she ran away from home. They abused the girl for 16 days, forced her into prostitution 50 times and took the money she earned.

When the victim refused to offer sex services, the couple burned her with a cigarette and forced her to eat dog food mixed with their saliva.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Why South Korea Is the Home of Counterfeit Culture | News & Analysis | BoF https://t.co/INgu8zq8sc

— KingSejong (@KingSejong) August 26, 2017

This file photo is of rugby player Andre Jin Coquillard, who recently was approved for naturalization in Korea, according to the Korea Rugby Union on Aug. 26, 2017. Born to a Korean mother and American father, Coquillard, currently a forward with Korea’s military team, had joined the Korean national squad in 2015. He needed the naturalization to play in the Olympics. (Yonhap)

This is definitely the stupid thing I read all day:

A court has fined a man, 73, who spread a false rumor online that Lee Hee-ho, widow of late former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, planned to marry American hip-hop musician Andre Romelle Young, better known as Dr. Dre.

Seoul Western District Court fined the man 5 million won ($4,400) on Friday on charges of cyber defamation and defamation against the deceased.  [Korea Times]

I don’t know what is stupider the fact that someone would actually believe Dr. Dre would marry Kim Dae-jung’s elderly widow or that fact the person who published the blog was fined $4,400 for posting it.

It will be interesting to see if the protesters allow the additional THAAD equipment on to the site considering the blockade they have been maintaining.  Will the Moon administration be willing to send in police to forcibly remove grandmas and grandpas off of the road?  We are about to find out:

South Korea is poised to complete the installment of a US missile shield next week, officials said Friday, despite unabated controversy over the Moon Jae-in government’s flip-flopping on the timing of the deployment.

The stationing of the remaining four launchers of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system comes as the Environment Ministry wraps up a small-scale environmental review. The equipment will join the already operational two launchers, radar and other assets to form a full-fledged battery.

The move will also coincide with a maiden face-to-face meeting between South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo and US Secretary of Defense James Mattis, set for Wednesday in Washington.

“Currently a small-scale environmental impact assessment is under way, and I can’t say it for certain, but the results are likely to come out around Monday,” a Cheong Wa Dae official told reporters on customary condition of anonymity.

The Ministry of National Defense echoed the view, saying the four launchers and related apparatus will be brought to the site in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, as soon as the survey is finished.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

Participants call for the government to stop rice imports during a rally of female farmers from across the nation in front of the National Assembly in Seoul on Aug. 23, 2017. (Yonhap)

From my anecdotal conversations with South Koreans they were more worried about what President Trump starting a war than what Kim Jong-un.  However, as recent events have shown it appears that President Trump like past presidents has come to the conclusion like many South Koreans that war with North Korea would be too deadly for all involved for anyone to start one:

Sirens wailed across Seoul and other South Korean cities on Wednesday, signaling the start of a nationwide civil-defense drill to prepare for a possible threat from the North.

But Lee Buny, a 42-year-old broadcast writer, was more interested in getting to work than finding a bomb shelter. Like many South Koreans, she’s used to threatening rhetoric from the North but doesn’t believe the communist state will ever follow through on threats to conduct an attack on the divided peninsula.

“I’m not worried because it’s the same story I’ve heard since I was born. North Korea keeps saying the same thing over and over again,” she said. “I don’t think North Korea will do anything.”

South Korea regularly holds civil-defense drills to make sure its citizens know what to do in case of an emergency such as a national disaster or an attack from the North, which is believed to have tens of thousands of soldiers and a massive artillery force poised near the heavily fortified border that sits just 35 miles from Seoul.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

South Korean civil defense: in nuclear attack, get down but keep your tummy off the ground (because the shaking will hurt your organs) pic.twitter.com/Ibv938ij1m

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) August 23, 2017

Guards carrying a portrait and the remains of the deceased secret commandos trained to infiltrate North Korea during the Cold War era leave a funeral hall in Goyang, north of Seoul, after their joint funeral on Aug. 23, 2017. Unit 684, better known as the Silmido unit, named after the island off the west coast where it was secretly based, was established in 1968 by the government following North Korea’s failed attempt to attack the presidential office in Seoul earlier that year, but their existence became useless amid the reconciliation between the two Koreas. The existence of the anti-communist unit had been thoroughly denied by the government, and a group of 24 surviving commandos blew themselves up while trying to enter Seoul on a stolen bus. In 2010, the court ordered the state to compensate the bereaved families of the commandos. (Yonhap)

I did not realize that oil theft was such a common crime in South Korea that the police regularly monitor the pipelines:

Police said Wednesday they have arrested two members of a six-man theft ring accused of having dug a 40-meter tunnel in South Korea’s central province of North Chungcheong for more than one month to pilfer oil from an underground pipeline.

The Iksan Police Station in southwestern South Korea also booked an accomplice and the owner of a gas station involved in the alleged distribution of stolen oil without physical detention.

The gang, including its leader surnamed Lee, met at a warehouse in the town of Okcheon in the province in March and began to dig the tunnel with shovels and hoes to access the supply pipeline of the state-run Daehan Oil Pipeline Corp.

After 45 days of digging, the thieves reached an underground oil pipeline and started to steal oil through a rubber hose they linked to the pipeline, according to the police. They loaded 10,000 to 20,000 liters of the stolen oil a day onto a truck remodeled into a tanker.

According to the police, the oil pilferers installed a CCTV near the tunnel to monitor for police crackdowns. In the last three months, they managed to steal 370,000 liters of oil worth 480 million won (about $423,300) from the pipeline.   [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link.