Tag: South Korea

Over time this makes me wonder if NATO will become more of a factor for security on the Korean peninsula than the United Nations? With Russia and China on the UN Security Council any attempt to assist South Korea to repel North Korean aggression would likely get vetoed. It makes sense that President Yoon would pursue cooperation with an alternate security organization:

President Yoon Suk Yeol and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg hold Individually Tailored Partnership Programs signed by the two sides during a meeting at the Lithuanian Exhibition and Congress Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, Tuesday (local time). Yonhap

South Korea and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) signed a new partnership agreement composed of 11 documents, called Individually Tailored Partnership Programs (ITPPs), which will cover bilateral cooperation in new sectors such as cybersecurity, new technologies, climate change and the defense industry.

The agreement was signed at a meeting between President Yoon Suk Yeol and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Vilnius, Lithuania, Tuesday (local time). Yoon is currently visiting the Baltic country to attend the 2023 NATO summit.

“This year’s participation in the NATO summit is aimed at institutionalizing the framework of cooperation between South Korea and NATO through ITPPs and discuss cooperation in military intelligence and cybersecurity,” Yoon said during the meeting.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest gay rights issue being promoted in South Korea:

Kim Gyu-jin and Kim Se-yeon held their wedding ceremony during the 2023 Seoul Queer Culture Festival earlier this month in central Seoul. Hundreds at the festival congratulated the wife-wife couple on their union — even though it is not legally recognized by South Korean law — as well as on the baby they are expecting.

The Kim couple revealed that their quest to have a child required a trip to a foreign country, Belgium, as accessing a sperm donor had not been possible for them in South Korea.

In addition to same-sex couples, single women also face significant obstacles here when it comes to accessing sperm donations, largely due to a combination of legal restrictions and customary practices within the medical community.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

I wish the Chief of the IAEA would have asked these lawmakers when South Korea is going to stop dumping their own treated radioactive water into the ocean?:

Rafael Mariano Grossi (R), director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), attends a meeting with Woo Won-shik (L), the floor leader of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP), and Wi Seong-gon, a DP member who heads a special committee tasked with opposing Japan’s Fukushima water discharge plan, at the National Assembly on July 9, 2023. (Yonhap)

Senior officials of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) on Sunday met with the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to express concerns and regret over Japan’s plan to discharge water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi met DP officials during his three-day visit to Seoul to explain the U.N. nuclear watchdog’s report that concluded Japan’s Fukushima water discharge plan would meet international standards.

DP floor leader Woo Won-shik expressed regret over the IAEA’s backing of Japan’s water release plan despite lingering public concerns over the potential long-term impact of treated wastewater on people and the environment. 

“(The IAEA’s) verification was biased in favor of Japan from the beginning, losing its neutrality and objectivity,” Woo, who has staged a hunger strike for the 14th day, said during the meeting at the National Assembly.

“It is very regrettable that (the IAEA) made a conclusion without properly investigating (the water release’s) impact on neighboring nations, making it ‘self-verification’ and ‘a Japan-tailored investigation,'” Woo added.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this is all just political theater for the uninformed masses on this topic that do not realize that South Korea and other countries release more becquerels of tritium per year into the ocean than what the Fukushima plant is scheduled to release.

Here is another infant murder case in Korea this time involving a father and grandmother:

 A father was put under emergency detention Thursday on charges of killing a newborn and abandoning the body in collusion with the baby’s maternal grandmother, police said, the latest in a string of child abuse cases involving unregistered babies.

The man in his 40s was first taken into custody in Yongin, south of Seoul, in the wee hours of Thursday on charges of murder and corpse abandonment before the grandmother in her 60s was detained later in the day on the same charges, police said.

The pair allegedly killed the newborn not long after he was born in March 2015 and abandoned his body on a nearby hill. How the baby was killed was not known, but a direct means could have been used as murder charges were brought against them.

They reportedly committed the crime while the baby’s mother was recovering after labor, and the husband allegedly lied to his wife, saying the baby was going to die soon as he was born sick.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

So when are the Korean leftists going to start protesting their own nuclear power plants that are releasing more becquerels of tritium per year than what the Fukushima plant is scheduled to release?:

The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power say the concentration of tritium in the discharged water will be lowered to 1,500 becquerels per liter, using a unit that refers to the amount of ionizing radiation released from a radioactive element. Officials say the annual limit will be 22 trillion becquerels.

That figure is smaller than what many other nuclear facilities around the world routinely release into water or air. Grossi of the IAEA said the release of radionuclides into water “has a proven record.” He said China, South Korea, the U.S. and France were among the countries doing it.

A nuclear-fuel recycling facility in northwestern France discharged 10,000 trillion becquerels of tritium into the English Channel in 2021, according to operator Orano.

Orano’s spokesperson Gwénaël Thomas said in an email that tritium discharges from its facility “have no health impact,” because the radiation is a tiny fraction of natural radioactivity in France and tritium is a naturally occurring radioactive element.

A spokesman for Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, the leading operator of nuclear plants in South Korea, said the country’s discharges into water last year totaled about 214 trillion becquerels of tritium. He said that level was safe for the public.

Wall Street Journal

You can read more at the link, but it is pretty clear that if the Japanese stick to the IAEA approved plan, what they are doing is within international norms. This means much of these protests are more politically driven than any concern about the environment. It reminds me of the THAAD protests in South Korea where the activists were saying the radar was going to poison the agriculture around the area which was scientifically proven to be nonsense. However, these protesters are not going to let science ruin a good narrative.

According to the article Chinese nationals make up 56% of the suspicious property transactions currently being investigated. Americans make up 21%, Taiwanese 8%, and Canadians 6.6% of the additional suspicious real estate cases:

A view of apartment complexes seen in Jamsil in southern Seoul [YONHAP]

The Korean government detected over 400 suspicious land transactions made by foreigners between 2017 and 2022, with more than half of the cases linked with Chinese nationals.    
   
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport reported 437 land acquisitions deemed illegal to related investigation agencies following its large-scale nationwide investigation conducted from February through to June. Out of a total of 14,938 foreign land transactions between 2017 and 2022, the investigation then focused on 920 suspicious cases, in which individuals involved were asked to provide supporting documents for further examination.  (…..)

The investigation identified various violations, with the most common being the manipulation of reported transaction amounts and contract dates, with 419 cases of misreported contracts. Additionally, 61 cases were suspected of tax evasion through expedient gifting, and 35 cases raised suspicions of illegally imported funds from overseas.  

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

The four remaining families say they don’t want to take the compensation unless it comes straight from the Japanese government:

Lawyer Lim Jae-sung, right, who represents some of the forced labor victims who sued Japanese companies for compensations for their forced labor, speaks with the press just outside the Foreign Ministry building in Seoul on Monday to protest the ministry’s decision to make public deposits of third-party compensation money that four out of 15 plaintiffs refused to accept. [YONHAP]

The Foreign Ministry will deposit at local courts compensation money for victims of wartime Japanese forced labor and their relatives who have so far refused to accept the government’s compensation scheme.  
   
Some of the money will also go to parties who have been unable to receive compensation due to personal circumstances.  
   
As of Monday, 11 out of 15 plaintiffs who sued Japanese companies for compensation of their forced labor during the 1910-45 Japanese annexation of Korea have received third-party compensation, mostly from Korean corporate donations.

For the remaining four plaintiffs, two of whom are surviving victims and the rest relatives of victims who had already passed away, the Foreign Ministry announced it was depositing the compensation money so that they could choose to take it from a local court close to where they live “whenever they wish.”  
   
“This decision was reached so that any of the plaintiffs who change their mind and decide to take on the compensation can do so at their leisure,” said a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official in speaking with the press in Seoul on Monday. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

It is about time this happened because telling the age of Koreans can be difficult:

South Korea will scrap its traditional method of counting age and adopt the international standard starting Wednesday, resulting in the reduction of a person’s age by one or two years on official documents, officials said.

Under the revisions to the Civil Act and the General Act on Public Administration, multiple age systems will be unified under the internationally recognized system in which age is based on birth date, according to the Ministry of Government Legislation.

In South Korea, three age systems are currently in use.

Under the most commonly used system of so-called “Korean age,” a person turns 1 on the day they are born and adds a year on the first day of the new year. For instance, a baby born on New Year’s Eve becomes 2 years old as soon as they pass midnight.

The second system is the internationally recognized system, whereby a person’s age is determined according to their birth date, while the third system adds a year to a person’s age on the first day of the new year.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.