It is going to be interesting to see if this law gets passed:
In this Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2014 photo, Cho Hyun-ah, center, former vice president of Korean Air Lines, is escorted by court officials as she leaves for Seoul Western District Prosecutors Office at the Seoul Western District Court Office in Seoul, South Korea. A Seoul court is expected to decide Tuesday whether to issue an arrest warrant for Cho, who resigned as vice president at the airline earlier this month amid mounting public criticism over the incident that she forced a flight to return over a bag of macadamia nuts and a current executive for attempts to cover up the “nut rage” case. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Resentment has mounted so much in South Korea against what has come to be known as “gabjil”, high-handedness by the rich and powerful, that parliamentarians are proposing legislation to punish some of the worst abuses.
A bill to be presented in the national assembly this month is formally called the “Conglomerates Ethical Management Special Law” but has been nick-named the Cho Hyun-ah law.
Cho, also known as Heather Cho, is the daughter of the chairman of Korean Air Lines and was sentenced last week to a year in prison for an outburst on a Korean Air plane while on the ground in New York. It was considered a severe sentence by some legal experts.
The bill proposes to ban members of the powerful business families known as chaebol from working at their companies for at least five years if convicted of a crime. In earlier cases, some high-profile offenders were pardoned, serving little or no jail time, although recently-convicted chaebol executives have found it harder to avoid prison. [Reuters]
You can read more at the link, but I wonder if it is even Constitutional in Korea to make special laws that focus on particular individual families?
What a horrible way to die in what was a preventable accident:
An incident Thursday in which a zookeeper was mauled to death by two lions has led to growing calls for increased safety measures.
The 52-year-old zookeeper surnamed Kim was found fatally bleeding in the wild cats’ enclosure at Seoul Children’s Grand Park in Gwangjin District, northern Seoul.
Both lions, which were supposed to be locked up, were discovered wandering around the body, said another zoo worker surnamed Lee, who first came upon the scene at the enclosure, which measures 374 square meters, about 4,000 square feet.
In CCTV footage examined by the police, Kim appeared on screen alone after taking part in the zoo’s wild animal action development program, which is conducted two or three times a month to help exercise animals’ natural instincts.
During those exercises, workers typically throw raw meat or toys to the animals in their natural enclosures.
Police said Kim was working by himself and remained in the enclosure to clean it without realizing the lion cage was unlocked. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Dozens of American and South Korean veterans attended a special screening Wednesday of a South Korean box-office hit that chronicles the Korean War and other hardships South Korea has gone through to rebuild itself from the war’s ashes.
“Ode to My Father” has become a sensation in South Korea since its opening on Dec. 17, surpassing the 10 million viewer mark in less than a month, as it struck a chord with older generations who have witnessed how South Korea overcame poverty and other hardships to become what it is today.
Organizers of the special screening — the Korean Churches for North Koreans (KCNK) and the human rights group LiNK — said they held the event and invited American war veterans to shed light on the meaning of the Korean War to Korea-U.S. relations.
The movie, which tells the story of an ordinary father who sacrificed himself to support his family, begins with spectacular scenes of a massive evacuation operation that pulled some 105,000 U.S. and South Korean troops and about 98,000 refugees to safety during the Korean War.
The December 1950 operation, known as the “Heungnam evacuation” after the name of the North Korean port, came as the U.S.-backed South Korean forces began retreating from North Korea after China sent massive numbers of troops to fight alongside the communist neighbor.
U.S. veterans attending the screening at the Regal Fairfax Towne Center theater included retired Col. Thomas Fergusson, a grandson of Edward Almond (1892-1979), then commanding general of the U.S. X Corps, who is known for his decision to dump all weapons overboard to get more refugees aboard evacuation ships at the port of Heungnam. [Korea Times]
Part of the Samsung Smarttv EULA: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”
This is part of their speech-recognition tech, which uses third parties (whose privacy policies Samsung doesn’t make any representations about) to turn your words into text. [Boing Boing]
This Rodong Sinmun photo released on Feb. 11, 2015 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visiting the construction site of an orphanage in Wonsan on the east coast. (Yonhap)
To people that haven’t spent a whole lot of time in Korea these slogans may seem humorous, but domestic food security provided by rice farming and fishing are very important to the Korean people on both sides of the DMZ:
North Korea could one day become a land of fairies, where a pungent, fishy aroma permeates the air as stylishly dressed children walk to school.
This is what the reclusive communist nation actually wants its people to aspire to, according to a list of 310 national slogans released by its state media Thursday.
There are five different references to building a socialist, scientific or military-influenced fairyland, according to a translation of the Rodong Sinmun story by the KCNA Watch blog.
Several of the slogans concern food production. One calls for “fragrant smell of fish and other seafoods,” while another declares, “Let the strong wind of fish farming blow across the country!”
Other slogans are less aspirational and more educational, for example: “Fertilizer means rice and socialism.”
The slogans were printed in Korean and haven’t yet been posted in the English versions of the Rodong Sinmun or the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s primary media organs. [Stars & Stripes]
.jpg?resize=450%2C192)
