With everything going on in the world, a badminton scandal is currently the top news story in South Korea:

Responding to critical comments by a badminton gold medalist toward her national team, South Korean Olympic chief Lee Kee-heung said Tuesday he had ordered five coaches to submit reports on the situation.

The action by Lee, president of the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee (KSOC), was in reference to criticism that An Se-young, the women’s singles champion at the Paris Olympics, leveled against the national badminton team moments after she won her gold medal Monday.

An, who had suffered a torn knee ligament in October 2023 while playing in the gold medal match of the Asian Games, claimed that her national team staff didn’t take her injury as seriously as they should have. She also said she found it “difficult” to continue on with the national team, though she later clarified she wasn’t about to retire from international play, and she was only demanding some action from the Badminton Korea Association.

With An and the rest of the badminton team heading back home Tuesday evening, Lee said he didn’t have enough time to look deeper into the situation.

Speaking to reporters at South Korea’s training camp in Fontainebleau, south of Paris, Lee said, “I ordered five coaches to submit reports on how An’s injury had been handled in the months between the Asian Games and the Paris Olympics.”

On top of injury management, An accused the national team of building training programs around doubles players instead of singles players like herself, and of sticking to archaic and inefficient regimens.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this story makes me wonder if anyone would have cared about her complaints if she didn’t win a gold medal?

With another fire, this is making me wonder if Korean building owners will start banning EVs from being parked in parking garages?:

Firefighters work to extinguish a blaze that broke out from an EV car in a parking lot in South Chungcheong. [NEWS1]

Yet another EV-related blaze broke out in Geumsan County, South Chungcheong, following a Mercedes-Benz EV explosion in an underground parking lot in Incheon a week ago. 
  
The police have identified the vehicle involved as a Kia EV6 model. 
  
Residents reported flames in a parking lot to police and fire stations around 5 a.m. on Tuesday. Fire authorities dispatched 35 firefighters and 12 apparatuses, including some fire trucks, to extinguish the blaze. It was brought under control after an hour and 37 minutes, with no reported casualties. 
  
The fire department took measures to prevent the flames from spreading to nearby vehicles and moved the EV out of the parking garage during the firefighting process to minimize additional damage. 
  
“I parked and plugged in the charger around 7 p.m. the previous day,” said the vehicle’s owner, a man in his 50s.

Joong Ang Ilbo via a reader tip

You can read more at the link, but great job by the firefighters for putting out the fire before it spread to other vehicles in the parking garage.

This may be one of the greatest screw over jobs I have seen a Soldier receive due to an administrative error, he went from early promotion of Lieutentant Colonel to retired as a Captain:

When the Army selected Ronald Schow for an early promotion to lieutenant colonel in 2011, service officials realized they made a mistake five years earlier. Schow’s previous promotion to major had never been submitted to the Senate for confirmation, as required by law. His name had been left off the list that the Army sent to Congress in October 2006. Yet, the Army still sent Schow a promotion order that he and his unit believed to be accurate, and he was pinned with a major’s golden oak leaf on the chest of his uniform. Eventually, the Army decided to revoke the rank and return Schow to a captain — the rank at which he retired in 2017 after years of trying to rectify the error.

After exhausting all administrative options to gain a major’s retirement pay, Schow filed a lawsuit last year in Federal Claims Court to get $180,000 in back pay and retirement pay that he would have received if he had retired as a major. However, he said he’s not able to sue for negligence that led to lost earnings from not being promoted to lieutenant colonel because of the limitations service members have in suing the military.

A Supreme Court decision known as the Feres Doctrine blocks troops from suing for anything that occurred to them in the military that is related to their service. “It was terrible. Everyone thought this was an administrative issue, but it turned out to be a legal issue. There’s no precedent for demoting an officer without kicking [him or her] out of the Army,” said Schow, who lives in Indiana and is representing himself in court. “Not only did we lose money during the years where I got demoted, we lost money during the years where I should have been promoted. And to be honest, it’s affected my post-retirement prospects.”

Stars & Stripes

You need to read the whole thing at the link to understand the context of what happened. Basically one guy at Human Resources Command being sick led to the paperwork error that led to for some reason no one in the Army being able to fix. You would think this would be something a Congress person would dig into to rectify.

Since all the commandos are dead this apology is only meaningful to their surviving family members:

South Korean commandos who died as they escaped from Silmido — an uninhabited island where they were being trained to kill then-North Korean leader Kim Il-sung — are due to receive an apology from the country’s defense chief for the first time in 53 years.

In August 1971, the 24 commandos of South Korea’s secret killer squad fled the island in protest of poor treatment, after over three years of training to infiltrate North Korea and capture its leader.

On their way out of Silmido, they killed the island’s guards, hijacked a bus to Seoul after reaching the mainland with a boat. Most of them were shot dead or committed suicide with hand grenades during a clash with the military police. Four survivors were executed.

Along with the apology, the South Korean military said it would recover the remains of the four who were executed for a proper burial, planned to be carried out later this year.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link and Silmido is a pretty good South Korean movie to watch as well that dramatizes this incident.

Korean authorities better get ready to respond to more of these fires as electric vehicles become more numerous:

An electric Mercedes-Benz sedan had been parked in an underground apartment garage for nearly three days before exploding on its own and catching fire, police officials said Monday.

The mysterious fire gutted the parking lot on the first basement level of an apartment building in Incheon, west of Seoul, and ravaged 40 nearby vehicles last Thursday. About 100 other cars also sustained less serious damage.

More than 20 residents were sent to hospitals for smoke inhalation before the fire was fully extinguished more than eight hours after it started. Heavy smoke made it difficult for firefighters to enter the parking lot. 

Security camera footage showed smoke billowing from the vehicle before it suddenly exploded and burst into flames.

According to police findings, the car’s owner in his 40s parked the vehicle on the evening of last Monday, and it remained untouched until it exploded in the early morning of last Thursday. 

After examining security camera footage, police confirmed that no external shock was inflicted on the vehicle while it was parked during the period.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Hopefully no one was too heavily invested in the South Korea stock market because it just lost 8%:

 South Korean stocks tumbled by the most on record to a near nine-month low Monday amid intensifying fears over a U.S. economic slowdown, with big tech coming under heavy selling. The Korean won fell against the U.S. dollar.

The benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) plummeted a record 234.64 points, or 8.77 percent, to close at 2,441.55, after dipping to as low as 2,273.97 at one point, following a 3.65 percent loss the previous session.

It is the lowest closing price since Nov. 14, when the index finished at 2,433.25.

Trade volume was heavy at 749.3 million shares worth 18.4 trillion won (US$13.4 billion), with decliners sharply outnumbering gainers 919 to 10.

Foreign investors dumped a net 1.5 trillion won worth of stocks to spearhead the record-breaking crash. Institutions also sold a net 273.6 billion won, while individuals purchased a net 1.7 trillion won.

The stock market was halted for 20 minutes during midday trading for the first time in four years, due to the sharp decline.

The bourse operator issued a circuit breaker at 2:14 p.m. to halt trading for 20 minutes as the KOSPI fell more than 8 percent for more than one minute at that time.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.