Here is the latest “Me-to” like movement happening in South Korea which is going after celebrities who anonymous people claim were bullies in school:
Some celebrities and stars accused of bullying have denied allegations about their past deeds.
Korea Times
Countering an anonymous schoolmate’s claim that she was beaten and abused by a violent girl who later became a star, K-pop girl band (G)I-DLE member Soojin said she was not a violent girl when she was in school.
“It’s true that I was a bit unusual when I was a middle schoolgirl. There were always bad rumors about me which I was quite used to. I wore clothing that was not suitable for a schoolgirl. I once smoked, too, as I was curious about smoking,” she said in a statement she uploaded on her online fan community. “But there’s one thing I’d like to make it clear regarding the allegations. There was no violence involved. I know who the girl is but I never hit her or stole her school uniform or her other belongings as she claimed.” (……..)
K-pop star Hyun-ah is another denier about her past. An anonymous internet user claimed in a post on an online community that the singer was her elementary classmate and she was a violent girl.
You can read more at the link, but attacking celebrities for things that may or may not have happened in elementary school or middle school I think says more about the accusers than the celebrity. How do you let something that happened in elementary school define and impact you your entire life as these accusers are claiming?
The Biden administration is currently helping the Iranians cash in on hostage taking:
The Biden administration is working to free billions of dollars in Iranian assets currently frozen in South Korea, the country’s Yonhap news agency reported on Tuesday.
There is currently about $7 billion in Iranian assets frozen in two banks based in Seoul, blocked by U.S. economic sanctions. Korea’s foreign ministry confirmed on Tuesday that a deal had been reached to free those assets.
“Our government has been in talks with Iran about ways to use the frozen assets, and the Iran side has expressed its consent to the proposals we have made,” the ministry said in a statement. “The actual unfreezing of the assets will be carried out through consultations with related countries, including the United States.”
Tensions rose between the two countries after Iran seized a South Korean oil tanker in early January. South Korea’s foreign ministry has denied the seizure is linked to the frozen assets.
Yahoo News
You can read more at the link.
A new South Korean app called Clubhouse has received a bunch of free publicity when South Korea’s Prime Minister decided to open an account:
After garnering an estimated 8 million downloads since its launch, Clubhouse’s popularity continues across the world and even outside of its original tech-focused seed community.
The latest news comes from East Asia, where Korean media reported this morning that the country’s current prime minister, Chung Sye-kyun, has officially joined the social audio app under the username @gyunvely, making him among the most senior political leaders worldwide to join the burgeoning app.
Tech Crunch
You can read more at the link, but the Clubhouse app is an audio app where you go into rooms and talk with other people. I haven’t used this app before; has any ROK Heads tried out this app?
What I don’t get is why this woman did not report to the bus driver what was happening, especially when the bus arrived at the rest stop?:
The nightmare trip began when she heard the announcement to fasten her seatbelt. As she fastened hers, she saw the man unzipping his pants and taking out his genitalia. She was shocked, but did not show any reaction, fearing that he would harm her.
Korea Times
When the bus reached a rest stop about halfway to Jeonju, she got off the bus and waited, trying to change her seat when she got back on. But she couldn’t because there were no empty seats. She took her seat next to him again, and he continued exposing himself.
She entered a message in her mobile device and handed it to a person behind her while hoping the pervert wouldn’t notice. The person behind her took the phone and saw what she wrote: “the man next to me is flashing and I want to record proof but I am too afraid. Please do it for me.”
The plan worked and she received back the phone with a video record of the man. Then she texted police to report what was happening.
You can read more at the link.
Some good news for Korean small business owners that have bore the brunt of COVID related shutdowns:
The government decided Saturday to lower social distancing levels by one notch each for the greater Seoul area and the other regions next week, but kept tight vigilance to curb COVID-19 by retaining a ban on gatherings of five people or more.
Health authorities said that starting Monday, they plan to lower social distancing guidelines to Level 2 — the third highest in a five-tier system — for the greater Seoul area and Level 1.5 for other regions until Feb. 28.
They will also ease restrictions on restaurants, cafes, gyms and other public facilities in the Seoul metropolitan area to allow them to operate for one more hour until 10 p.m., amid complaints by pandemic-hit small business operators.
Entertainment facilities across the nation will also be allowed to operate until 10 p.m. on condition that they abide by key antivirus rules, such as wearing masks and keeping distance among their clients.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
The Korean left has already been putting journalists they don’t like in jail and now want to expand their legal offense against their conservative critics even further:
The ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) is planning to revise a law within the National Assembly’s February session aimed at requiring media to pay punitive damages for spreading “fake news”. While the DPK said that punishment is needed to prevent the distortion of information and the spread of fake news by not only conventional media, but also portal sites and YouTube, conservative critics raised concerns that the law could be used to tame the media in the name of cracking down on fake news.
Korea Times
The DPK’s askforce team said, Tuesday, that it would revise the law to apply punitive damages to newspapers, TV broadcasters, portal site operators, YouTubers and other one-person media users for spreading false information.
Before the team’s decision, Rep. Yoon Young-chan of the party proposed a revised bill to have YouTubers, other one-person media users and portal site operators to pay up to three times the damages caused by their fake news to the victims. The team also decided that conventional media, such as newspaper and TV, should also be subject to such punishment if they spread fake news.
You can read more at the link.
The comfort women controversy is one of these issues where facts do not matter, how people feel about the topic is what matters:
Korean students at Harvard University have strongly criticized a professor over his controversial claim that Japan’s wartime sexual slavery was actually voluntary prostitution, demanding its immediate withdrawal and his official apology to victims.
Harvard Korean Society made the demand in a statement on its website after Harvard Law School Japanese legal studies professor J. Mark Ramseyer caused controversy with his recently published paper titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.”
“It is a wrong conclusion based on grounds very biased and lacking trustworthiness,” the statement said. “Harvard Korean Society demands Prof. Ramseyer’s official apology and immediate withdrawal of the paper.”
“The issue of comfort women is an international inhumane act, and his academic view which justifies and negates the act is an immoral and shameless view,” it added.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
I have not read Professor Ramseyer’s paper yet because it is behind a pay wall. Maybe it is out of line, but I would not be surprised if it has similar conclusions to what Sejong University Professor Park Yu-ha wrote a few years ago about the comfort women issue:
“Park believes that Japan did not recruit comfort women in Korea, which was part of Japan from Tokyo’s perspective, in quite the same way that it did on the front lines and in occupied areas, such as in the Philippines. In those areas, records show that Japanese soldiers were directly involved in the forcible and violent taking away of comfort women. ‘Many of the Korean comfort women were apparently recruited while being cheated by agents of prostitution, some of whom were Koreans, or being sold by their parents,’ Park said. ‘While some have testified they were forcibly taken away by military personnel, I suppose that such cases, if there were any, were exceptional.’
She was of course arrested for writing such a book. The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes. Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.
What Professor Park writes about is the same historical narrative that Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women“. In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers. The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available. This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet. To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution. I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute. Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty. This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.
It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls that were underage. There is no need to create a false narrative of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.
Some further relief for business owners in South Korea:
The government said Saturday it will allow businesses outside the greater Seoul area to operate until 10 p.m. starting next week, relaxing the distancing rules amid growing discontent over the prolonged virus curbs.
The revised measure will permit businesses like restaurants and fitness clubs to extend their operating hours by one hour under Level 2 distancing currently imposed on the provincial regions, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said in a government response meeting.
“After careful deliberation based on the various opinions from all walks of life, we are adjusting the business hours for publicly used facilities,” he said.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
I wonder if this really is to cool the real estate market or is it just an attempt by the government to make money from the hot real estate market?:
The government is expected to announce a plan this week to provide a total of 850,000 homes to cool down the overheated property market, government and parliamentary officials said Wednesday.
Under the plan, likely to be unveiled Thursday, about 325,000 units will be supplied in Seoul, and the rest in other major cities, including Busan, Daegu and Gwangju, where property prices have soared over the recent months, the officials said.
Public companies like Korea Land & Housing Corp. and Seoul Housing & Communities Corp. will lead the project to offer quality housing at lower prices, they said.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
