January 2008 Gwangju News.

The January, 2008 issue of the Gwangju News is out, and you can read my articles on the Neil/visa fiasco, the Yeosu Expo, and the Muan International Airport here. You can also view a piece on the Korean presidential election, which reads, in part:

Conservatives openly support the goals of the shareholder class above the needs of the working class. In the United States those for-profit "needs" are now the main reason new laws are made, and must be catered to, by Democrats and Republicans alike, to gain media acceptance, media coverage, and media endorsements. Thus, the U.S. system is entirely corrupted, and few laws are written that are not in direct response to the needs of the wealthy. Multinational corporations, the American Medical Association, and Jewish Political Action Committees have cornered the U.S. government into abandoning 186 different environmental laws, supporting absurd, tragic wars in the Middle East, and enacting trade laws that allow American corporations to seek out and take advantage of the cheapest possible labor, regardless of the harm it does to American workers.

This is a piece on the Korean election, by the way, which was slipped in two weeks after the deadline. How . . . unfortunate.

Korea Times: "About Foreign Teachers"

You know, unless you're a sports writer there's no need to paragraph every goddamn sentence.

I wrote a longer, more whiny entry about Kang Eun-hee's article here.

Local Link Dump

Not much "local" happening, but I'll press on:

* A man in Seoul was found not guilty of inapporpriate conduct after touching his 11-year-old stepdaughter's breasts and backside. These actions were described as a "sign of affection," and were justifiable because (1) the man was drunk, and (2) the girl had not yet reached puberty. (The Korea Times) Over on Waygook.org---yes, I know, but I didn't name it---one guy mentions that perhaps it's more acceptable and affectionate for parents to touch their children in ways unheardof back home.

Oh, and the moral panic over unqualified, unmotivated, AIDS-carrying, pedophilic foreign teachers continues.

* Seoul will introduce Women-Only subway cars in 2008. (The Korea Times) There's a thread about it on Dave's here.

* A few days ago, a Jason Lim wrote a piece for The Korea Times entitled "Why Not Korean Americans?" Apparently he works at Harvard, though I'd like to have a look at his transcripts to see how on earth that was possible. I found it fairly inflammatory, and you can read his piece here. Today the Korea Times printed my short rebuttal, which you can read here.

* Here's an article from February talking about Vietnamese women who become mail-order brides in Korea. (I can't type "bride" without typing "bridge" first, dunno why.) From the International Herald Tribune, but I think it was originally printed in the New York Times.

* 34% of workers at the Ministry of Economy and Finance said "if I receive a phone call from a foreigner, if there no other person that I can ask to answer it, all I can do is hang up.” (Korea Beat)

* Here's an article about foreigners, ghosts, and foreign ghosts in Korea, and the ways their cultural significance. (Ohmynews)