If you are a US government civilian employee working outside of the Seoul area you are about to get a cut in pay. According to the below article those losing their differential pay could lose around $300 a month:
Kim Yong-Sik, then a U.S. Forces Korea employee, checks boiler room machinery at Kunsan Air Base, South Korea, Nov. 8, 2010. The U.S. recently eliminated a hardship differential allowance leading to a loss of income for nearly 3,000 Korea-based civilian employees.
In an unusual move, the U.S. has eliminated the post hardship differential allowance for some 2,800 Korea-based civilian government employees stationed outside the Seoul metropolitan area, according to a memo obtained by Stars and Stripes.
U.S. Forces Korea informed the employees about the pay reduction over the weekend in a letter dated April 15 and signed by chief of staff Lt. Gen. Thomas Vandal. Vandal told the employees he was “very concerned about the effect this will have on you and your families” and promised to address the issue as quickly as possible.
The State Department determines the hardship differential – distributed for extremely difficult or unhealthy conditions or physical hardship – based on a questionnaire that is supposed to be administered by local installations. It has been 5 percent of basic compensation for most locations outside Seoul for the past several years.
“However, as a result of the latest (Department of State) review, the rate was reduced to 0 percent for all U.S. government civilians in Korea” as of April 3, according to the memo, which also said eligible employees will see start seeing the loss in paychecks this week.
Civilian employees in the Seoul metropolitan area were not affected since they did not receive the differential. [Stars & Stripes]
After all the inaccurate reporting by the Associated Press over the No Gun Ri issue in South Korea I keep a healthy bit of skepticism when reading an article like this. There is probably some truth to this especially considering the sexual assaults against deaf students at the Gwangju Inwha School that were uncovered a few years ago. However, how much truth there is to this story I just don’t know. What I do find interesting is how in the Korean media little is being mentioned about this story that is making huge headlines in the US:
In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates at the Brothers Home, guards unload children from a truck in Busan, South Korea.
The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his shoes, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread.
Even now, more than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next.
The policeman yanked down the boy’s pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi’s genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.
Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.
A guard in Choi’s dormitory raped him that night in 1982 – and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labour and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.
Choi was one of thousands – the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled – rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea’s arrival as a modern country.
An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates. [Associated Press]
It looks like New York City has a few less Korean prostitutes today. I wonder how long this will last?:
Joint federal and local Police authorities cracked down on Korean brothels in New York’s Koreatown. According to the police, many of the women who worked at these brothels came from Korea thru a visa waiver program.
The group that operated these businesses attracted customers through elaborate internet website and operated in 11 different premises by disguising to be lawful spa establishments. The arrested group was found to have more than 70,000 customers in a database. [Korea Times]
The Dokdo Foundation on Monday released four maps of Shimane Prefecture produced by Japan after the 1905 treaty that forcibly sealed Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea.
All four maps marked Oki Island, which is located 50 kilometers off the prefecture but not Dokdo.
Japan has claimed that it incorporated the Dokdo Islets into Shimane Prefecture with the prefectural notice of February 22, 1905.
The maps, however, prove that Dokdo was not marked on the maps of the prefecture even after the 1905 notice.
An official at the Dokdo Foundation said that maps showing Dokdo in the jurisdiction of the prefecture have yet to be found, not even in Japan.
Given that the maps were produced by the Japanese government, a leading newspaper and a publisher, the official suspects that the 1905 notice of Shimane Prefecture was never officially issued in Japan and must have been an instrument of propaganda to enhance its claims to Dokdo. [KBS World Radio]
I would hate to think what would happen in South Korea and especially North Korea if the peninsula was ever hit by a major earthquake because of the amount of buildings that appear would not withstand a strong earthquake:
Domestic earthquake experts have warned that the recent quakes in Japan will likely cause a tremor with a magnitude of five to five-point-five on the Korean Peninsula within several years.
Director Chi Heon-Cheol of the Earthquake Research Center under the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources on Monday presented the projection, citing that Kumamoto Prefecture hit by the recent quakes and the Korean Peninsula are located on the same tectonic plate.
Professor Hong Tae-kyung at the Department of Earth System Sciences at Yonsei University also warned that the peninsula could come under additional pressure if strong earthquakes occur around it. He said that South Korea cannot be certain of safety from quakes.
Hong said that when a strong quake occurs, its aftershocks can continue for five to eight years, increasing the number of quakes. [KBS World Radio]
Doesn’t the State Department have bigger priorities other than criticizing South Korea for what textbooks its government wants to use in its schools? What would most Americans think if South Korea released a report criticizing the US for government for its No Child Left Behind and Common Core educational mandates?:
The Park Geun-hye administration’s plan for introducing state-issued history textbooks was singled out as a matter of concern in a US State Department human rights report.Section 2 on “Respect for Civil Liberties” in the department’s “2015 Human Rights Report” published on Apr. 13 included two new references to South Korea’s middle and high school history textbooks in an item on “Freedom of Speech and Press.”“In October the Ministry of Education announced plans to require middle and high schools to use only Korean history books authored by the government-affiliated National Institute of Korean History starting in the 2017 school year,” the report noted in a subsection on “Censorship or Content Restrictions.”
“This would end the right of schools, since 2010, to choose from a range of textbooks approved by the ministry,” the report continued.The textbook issue was mentioned again in another item on “Academic Freedom and Cultural Events” in the section on “Freedom of Speech and Press.”“There were no government restrictions specifically targeting academic freedom or cultural events. However, a government plan to end middle and high schools’ right to choose Korean history textbook [sic] raised concerns about academic freedom,” the report noted. [Hankyoreh]
A farmer plants rice by using a machine in a paddy in Cheorwon, 88 kilometers north of Seoul, on April 15, 2016. The rice planting is the first in the region. (Photo courtesy of Cheorwon county) (Yonhap)
Canadian Ambassador to Seoul Eric Walsh (C) pays tribute at the grave of late Dr. Frank William Scofield at the National Cemetery in Seoul on April 12, 2016. Scofield, a Canadian doctor, served as a medical professor and a Christian missionary in Korea in the latter half of the 1910s and engaged actively in efforts to liberate Korea from Japanese colonial rule. This year marks the 46th anniversary of his passing and the centennial of his arrival in Korea. (Yonhap)
