Free Republic

Student Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones dreams of living and working in South Korea once she finishes university, even though she has never visited the country. But while taking language lessons, the 19-year-old found that she couldn't pronounce certain crucial sounds in the Korean alphabet. Her dentist suggested it may be because she was born with a slightly shorter than average tongue, caused by having an unusually thick lingual frenulum - the flap of skin that joins the underside of the tongue to the floor of the mouth. Language barrier: Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones, from Nottingham, had her tongue lengthened by 1cm to help her...

Title only so far.

She had been due to fly to South Korea with her daughter for a special mother's day treat. But it had also been Crystal Kim's last wish to 'die at home' after being diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in February. Instead Ms Kim found herself in a hotel at the weekend after being turned away by Korean Airlines for looking 'too frail' to fly. The dying mother had approval from two doctors and a note clearing her to fly over the weekend from Seattle, but the carrier still thought Ms Kim may not be up for the long haul...

SEOUL, Jan. 21 (Yonhap) -- South Korean naval special forces successfully rescued 21 seamen and their South Korean-operated cargo ship that was hijacked last week by Somali pirates in an operation that left eight Somali pirates dead, Seoul's military officials said Friday. "Our special forces stormed the hijacked Samho Jewelry earlier today and freed all hostages," said Col. Lee Bung-woo, a spokesman at South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Wherever there is a tyrannical government in trouble, you’ll find Jimmy Carter there to defend them. Case in point, his op-ed on behalf of North Korea, published Wednesday in the Post. It begins: No one can completely understand the motivations of the North Koreans, but it is entirely possible that their recent revelation of their uranium enrichment centrifuges and Pyongyang’s shelling of a South Korean island Tuesday are designed to remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future. Every word of this paragraph is false, willfully ignorant or humiliatingly stupid. Take your pick. For...

Deliberate or Accidental, a New Korean War Would be Devastating The soaring modern glass towers of downtown Seoul are magnificent -- and to a North Korean artillery officer squinting through his sights from just 32 miles away, a delicious set of targets. The glistening South Korean capital is a city of glass, almost literally in the shadow of some 500 long-range heavy artillery guns from which North Korea can fire half a million artillery shells an hour, for several hours. A war on the Korean peninsula could explode almost without warning, senior U.S. military officers say. North Korea's immediate, if...

(Reuters) - A U.S. aircraft carrier group set off for Korean waters on Wednesday, a day after North Korea rained artillery shells on a South Korean island, in a move likely to enrage Pyongyang and unsettle its ally, China.....

It’s odd but no so odd at the same time. By now, many people expect to walk into a beauty supply store and see a Korean store owner manning the register. Whether you’re in the suburbs of Houston or on MLK Blvd in Anytown, USA, you know what to expect. And yet, walking down a street in a Black neighborhood with Black residents and Black customers buzzing about the retail shops, that image of the few Koreans in the neighborhood only existing behind the cash register of liquor, beauty supply and other retail shops is still perplexing.

A poster recently smuggled out of North Korea and released by Radio Free Asia appears to boast of the sinking of a South Korean warship that occurred last March. With the caption "We'll take it down with a single blow if it attacks!" the poster depicts a red fist smashing a small warship that resembles the Cheonan – a corvette that broke in two and sank in disputed waters after a mysterious explosion. Forty-six South Korean sailors died in the incident.

WASHINGTON, June 23, 2010 – Sixty years ago this week, North Korean troops stormed across the 38th parallel into South Korea, launching a three-year conflict that culminated in an armistice in 1953, but never officially ended. The North Koreans launched a massive, coordinated air-land invasion in the early-morning hours of June 25, 1950, with more than 230,000 troops, fighter jets, attack bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, tanks and artillery. The ferocity of the offensive caught the South Korean army by surprise. With fewer than 100,000 troops, no tanks and limited aircraft, they were unprepared to halt the invasion force. Seoul, the South...

GENEVA (AFP) – A North Korean diplomat said Thursday that tensions on the Korean peninsula were running so high over the sinking of a South Korean warship that "war may break out at any moment." In a speech to the international Conference on Disarmament, Ri Jang-Gon, deputy permanent representative for North Korea at the United Nations in Geneva, blamed the "grave situation" on South Korea and the United States. "The present situation of the Korean peninsula is so grave that a war may break out at any moment," he said. International investigators on May 20 announced their findings that a...

Foreign students selected kimchi ― fermented cabbage seasoned with red pepper ― as the most representative of Korea, a recent survey showed. ``Hallyu,'' the new wave of Korean pop culture, often proves to be a key factor to pique their interest in Korea. And the longer they stay, the more they become attached to kimchi. The survey was conducted by the Sogang University Language Education Center and asked 101 foreign students about what item they most associate with Korea. Thirty-three of the respondents started studying Korean language because they liked its pop culture, mostly TV dramas. However, when asked what...

Claudia Rosett has a must read description of North Korean logging camps in the Russian wilderness: In 1994 I was working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Moscow when a story turned up in the Russian press, saying that North Korea was running lumber camps in remote areas of Russia. In Moscow, Russian officials confirmed to me that they had two big logging operations manned and policed by North Koreans. Both were in the Russian Far East, in areas once part of Stalin’s old gulag. One was based in a place called Tynda. The other was headquartered...

Firefight Between North and South Korean Navy This Morning: Causualty Unknown Happened on the morning of Nov. 10 at NLL. N. Korean patrol boats went over NLL to the south. Warning shots fired, but ignored. S. Korean navy fired at N. Korean ship. N. Koreans returned fire.

The point of this posting is to continue to systematically attack the notion that it is natural for two Koreas to exist and to continually eat away at all the justifications that South Koreans make in order to some how to ease their collective guilt as they lead their moderately wealthty lives as the other half of the nation continues to suffer (For more on how North Koreans continue to suffer see last week's issue of the New Yorker or what Professor Brad DeLong at UC Berkeley has noted to be last weeks "must read.") I do this under the...

Its Spoken Language Fading, Buton Tries a Script From Seoul That Has Global Ambitions SORAWOLIO, Indonesia -- In an elementary school here on the remote Indonesian island of Buton, a teacher named Abidin recently began to show students how to write their endangered native language -- in the Korean alphabet. Mr. Abidin carefully copied some Korean letters from a textbook onto the blackboard and asked his fourth-grade class what they spelled in their Cia-Cia tongue, a Malayo-Polynesian language related to others spoken across Indonesia. "I eat fish," they replied in unison. The students know little about Korea, 3,500 miles north...

After rare US talks, NKorean diplomats hit VegasSTAFF WRITER 3:47 HRS IST Washington, Aug 22 (AFP) After holding rare talks with a prominent US governor, a diplomatic duo from the reclusive state of North Korea is off to see another side of the United States -- Las Vegas. A senior US official confirmed on condition of anonymity yesterday that the two North Korean diplomats had told US authorities they planned "personal travel" in America's casino capital as well as in Los Angeles. The US official declined further details on the travel of the pair, who are accredited at the United...

Sixty-four years ago, the United States dropped the first nuclear weapon used in war on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A few days later, another was exploded over Nagasaki. More than 200,000 people died in the bombings and many of them were Korean. S. Koreans pray in font of the cenotaph for Korean atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima, Japan, 05 Aug 2009 S. Koreans pray in font of the cenotaph for Korean atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima, Japan, 05 Aug 2009 At a ceremony in Seoul, the Koreans who survived the blasts marked the 64th anniversary of the Hiroshima attack...

It's the worst year in history for the industry: Two Detroit companies went bankrupt, and even the Japanese are losing money. But nothing stops those Koreans. Hyundai and Kia are expanding their lineups, a new Kia plant is to open in Georgia, and they are setting most ambitious goals. Their cars may not be the best, but they are improving--many get on the "recommended" list in Consumers Reports--and they are getting major help from the home country's weak currency. The two are connected under the name Hyundai Kia Automotive Group. Hyundai is larger and owns a 39% controlling stake in...

A Korean Invasion Blindsides the U.S. Army -- but in a Good Way Immigrants From Peninsula Swamp Program Offering Citizenship; Other Groups Squeezed By MIRIAM JORDAN LOS ANGELES -- Suk Joon Lee, a South Korean immigrant, feared his days in the U.S. were numbered. His ice-cream shop wasn't doing well, and if it failed, his investor visa could be revoked. Then Mr. Lee stumbled upon a Korean-language Web site that described a way out: a program that the Army was about to launch that offered a shortcut to getting U.S. citizenship. The site was created by another Korean immigrant, James...