Tag: Korea

This is seriously messed up stuff here:

Prosecutors indicted three teenagers on charges of sexually and physically abusing a 15-year-old high school girl, local media reported Sunday.

Suwon District Prosecutors’ Office found that a 16-year-old girl broke into the victim’s house with her two teen friends and brutally assaulted her on Aug. 8 for speaking ill of her.

The victim and one of the perpetrators were classmates.

The three perpetrators allegedly dragged her out of the house and locked her in the basement of a deserted building for five days.

The victim was stripped of her clothes and forced to engage in “pseudo-sex” while being photographed. Moreover, the perpetrators forced the 15-year-old victim to eat her own excrement, swallow cigarette butts and lick their spit off the floor.  [Korea Observer]

You can read more at the link, but hopefully these teenagers receive very harsh punishment for this horrible crime and not get off light like the teenagers involved in the Miryang gang rape case a few years ago.

This doesn’t seem like too much to ask someone to do to be granted Korean citizenship:

Any foreigner seeking Korean citizenship must be able to sing Korea’s national anthem during a naturalization interview.

The Seoul Administrative Court ruled in favor of the Ministry of Justice, which declined to grant a woman born in China citizenship in 2010, citing she couldn’t sing the national anthem. She also failed two other tests during her interview.

The woman, surnamed Choi, filed a suit with the court, demanding a reversal of the decision.

“We found the interview criteria and the interviewers’ evaluation were fair. Not only did Choi fail to sing the national anthem, she also failed two other tests. Therefore, we find there are no grounds to call the ministry’s decision unfair and illegal,” said a judge.  [Korea Times]

It seems that if she wanted Korean citizenship so badly she would take the time to study and learn the anthem.

Kakao is now in the cross hairs of the Korean government:

KakaoTalk, South Korea’s most-used messenger app, has once again become the center of national attention, stirring up controversy over its announcement that it would not accede to laws allowing authorities to inspect its user data.

The issue over the platform’s privacy policy has split the nation, with some people posting online comments that its new security measures have been long overdue, while others accused it of arrogance and believing that it can operate above the law.

The legal community, however, seemed to be adamant that Daum Kakao’s outright defiance of the law would simply be illegal, and that it would face charges for obstruction of justice.

Although legal sources said that no company executives had been sent to jail for not immediately responding to prosecutors’ warrants, they had faced mounting charges as no prosecutors had shown to walk away that easily from any case or investigation.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link, but Kakao has been losing users to foreign companies because of the fear the government will be accessing user data.  Kakao probably thinks they have to take this tough stand to defy warrants in order to try and keep the users they currently have even if it means violating Korean law.  ROK Heads may remember that this whole issue began because the Park administration has started to crackdown on online rumors.  So to find out who is passing false rumors the government wants to access Kakao data of those passing them around.

Over at Korea Noodles they have old pictures of Dongducheon and the TDC Ville posted for everyone to checkout.

You can view pictures of what the modern day TDC Ville looks like at this link.

I guess one way you can look at this is that there was no talks about not deploy it either:

South Korea and the United States exchanged information on key features of the THAAD missile defense system, but there were no discussions on deploying the system to South Korea, Seoul’s ambassador to Washington said Saturday.

“I am aware that there were consultations on the weapons system itself,” Amb. Ahn Ho-young said in response to questions from lawmakers during a parliamentary audit of the embassy. “But there were no discussions at all about deploying a THAAD battery to the Korean Peninsula.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but the controversy with THAAD has to do with the left wing view that the deployment with antagonize China because the radar can look into China.  Interestingly enough these same leftists don’t seem to mind that the ROK military already has the Super Green Pine as well as the SPY-1 radars on their Aegis ships that can also have the range to look into China.  This is clearly just another example of the usual suspects on the Korean left trying to demagogue what should not be a controversial issue; protecting South Korea from a ballistic missile attack and instead twisting it into an anti-US issue.

New interview with Moon Chung-in, who says deep divisions behind appearance of consensus in China-ROK relations http://t.co/VRjl9IQOYK

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) October 12, 2014

[Industry] Half of major firms’ board members come from SKY, overseas schools http://t.co/3xs99IH0pG #industry pic.twitter.com/KhJUgtcVgv

— 코리아헤럴드 Korea Herald (@TheKoreaHerald) October 10, 2014

Yes the headline is accurate, you can’t make this stuff up:

Japan expressed “deep regret” over the South Korean prosecution’s decision to indict a Japanese journalist for allegedly defaming President Park Geun-hye, underscoring the different stances toward press freedom and signaling that the nations’ already soured bilateral ties might hit another rough patch.

“(The indictment) is deeply regrettable in terms of the freedom of press and relationship between the two countries, as Korea ignored voices of concern repeatedly expressed by our government and by media inside and outside Japan,” Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters.

“It is in stark contrast to the common value of the international community, which is to respect the freedom of speech as much as possible and carry on with law enforcement only in a reserved manner.”

Later in the day, Tokyo’s Foreign Ministry called in diplomat Kim Won-jin from Korea’s embassy in Japan and expressed deep regrets for the indictment while adding that it was “deeply concerned about the situation.

Tatsuya Kato, head of the Seoul bureau of Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper, was indicted Wednesday on defamation charges after he put out a report speculating that Park and an unidentified man might have had a secret meeting on the day of the deadly ferry disaster in April.

Citing an earlier opinion piece by Korean media, the 48-year-old said that Park’s whereabouts were unknown for seven hours, which incited rumors on the supposed secret meeting.  [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link, but I think the Park administration is actually using this reporter as a preemptive strike to stop online rumors like the mad cow lies passed around online by the Korean left that deeply damaged the prior Lee Myung-bak presidency.  Notice that this Japanese reporter simply passed along rumors that the Korean media had already reported.  However, the Park administration knows that it is unlikely that anyone on the Korean left will come out and defend a Japanese journalist which is why they are indicting him and not anyone in the South Korean media.  This then will allow them to move forward with their planned Internet crackdown.

It seems like every few months someone in the Korean media feels the need to make sweeping accusations against foreigners in Korea to drive page view traffic I suppose to their site.  Via the Marmot’s Hole comes this latest example from the Donga Ilbo:

Image via Popular Gusts.

The Dong-A Ilbo warns ladies to be careful of foreigners offering you drinks.

In May, a young man by the name of Kim got a urgent Kakao Talk from a female acquaintance of his who’d gone to a club in Yongsan. She was passing out and worried something might happen to her. He went to the club, found her passed out and surrounded by two foreigners, and rescued her. The next day, she told him that the foreigners gave her something to drink which had apparently been spiked.

She was rescued, but the Dong-A reports that there are women, defenseless against foreigners will ill-intent, who have been sexually assaulted. For instance, on Sept. 10, a 20-year-old woman was sitting at a Gangnam club with two foreign guys and a Korean guy. They gave her a drink which they’d spiked with sleeping pills. They brought her to a nearby motel, where they began filming parts of her anatomy with a cellphone. When she protested, they beat her. After a two week investigation, the cops arrested three guys for sexual assault, including a French guy and some model. [Marmot’s Hole via a reader tip]

You can read the rest at the link, to include a lively discussion on this topic in the comments section.  I just like how the article makes no mention about sexual assault in Korea by Koreans which has been a significant issue that has gained increased attention in recent years. By the way this is not the first time the Donga Ilbo has been spreading lies, I called them out a few years ago when they were spreading lies about GI crime in Korea.

What else I found of interest is how the Donga Ilbo has pretty much did a recycle of the reporting done on the English Spectrum incident. I guess their reporters are even too lazy now to find new xenophobic angle to report on.

I wonder how many of the 10 Koreans killed in the Philippines this year had organized crime connections?:

The Foreign Ministry said Friday that a man whose body was found in the Philippines in July has been positively identified as Korean. The latest discovery raises the number of Koreans killed in the Philippines this year alone to 10.

A ministry official said, “The Philippine police asked the Korean Embassy to identify the body discovered on the outskirts of Manila in late July. After analyzing the fingerprints, the body was determined to be that of a 45-year-old Korean surnamed Lee.”

The body was discovered in a plastic container and bore a gunshot wound to the neck. It appears Lee was murdered and his body was dumped. Philippine police were reportedly tipped off that Lee had connections to narcotics smugglers.  [Chosun Ilbo]