Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party), whose coleader, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, has sparked global outrage for trying to justify Japan’s wartime sex slaves as well as his call that U.S. forces in Okinawa use the local sex industry, will expel a party lawmaker who claims Japan has “swarms” of South Korean prostitutes, officials said Friday.

The party member, Shingo Nishimura, a conservative Lower House lawmaker known for discriminatory remarks against women and foreigners, should also give up his Diet seat, said Nippon Ishin Secretary General Ichiro Matsui, who is also the Osaka governor. (Japan Times)

You can read the rest at the link but he should have just said Japan is swarming with prostitutes period.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

SEOUL — Earlier this year, one of the most prominent North Korean defectors, Yoo Woo-sung, walked out of his apartment building here and found four South Korean government vehicles waiting for him.

Authorities hauled Yoo away and arrested him on charges of espionage. They had learned of his alleged crime, court documents show, thanks to testimony from his sister, who said Yoo had been sent on a mission by North Korea’s secret police to infiltrate the defector community and pass back information about the people he met.

Yoo, 32, is being held at a detention center on the outskirts of Seoul, his case a reminder of how this peninsula’s messy and sometimes covert conflict has left the South on edge, with people here unsure whom they can trust. (Washington Post)

You can read much more at the link.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Surion Korean Utility Helicopters (KUH-1), at left, fly in formation at the ROK Army Aviation School in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, Wednesday.

The Surion, Korea’s first indigenous helicopter, has been deployed after a six-year development phase, the Army said Wednesday.

Ten Korean Utility Helicopters (KUH-1), developed by Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), jointly with European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) Eurocopter, have been deployed to the  Army Aviation School in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province.

President Park Geun-hye, Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin and other guests including lawmakers from the National Defense Committee attended a ceremony to celebrate the deployment.

The completion of the aircraft has made Korea the world’s 11th nation to locally develop a helicopter.

The Korean government launched a six-year, 1.3 trillion won ($1.17 billion) project in June 2006 to produce a twin-engine light utility helicopter to replace the aging fleet of U.S.-made UH-1Hs and 500MD light helicopters that have been in service for decades.

The first prototype of the Surion, which means “agile and flawless” in Korean, was delivered in August 2009 and successfully completed its maiden flight in March 2010 before entering full-scale production in 2012.

According to the Defense Acquisition and Procurement Agency (DAPA), the Surion underwent more than 2,000 test flights over 2,700 hours, without accident.

The aircraft also passed 50 cold-weather tests in Alaska between December and February to test its working in extreme conditions, such as being exposed to 40 degrees below zero Celsius over 12 hours.

The KUH-1, 15 meters long, 4.5 meters high and 2 meters wide, with a maximum takeoff weight of 8.7 tons, is able to carry two pilots, two crew members and nine armed troops or two pilots and some 2,300 kilograms of cargo.

The light utility helicopter has a top speed of 141 knots, or 261 kilometers per hour, and its twin engines enable the chopper to fly for over two hours and thirty minutes fully laden. Its range is some 440 kilometers.

It is also suitable for mountainous terrain, capable of vertical take-off at a speed of 150 meters per minute, hovering at the height of Baekdu Mountain at 2,744 meters.

Thanks to these features, the military expects the Surion to be used in a variety of roles including assault operations, search and rescue, cargo transportation and medical evacuation. It will be offered as a civilian version, as well.

“The Army has mainly used UH-1Hs since the helicopters were introduced in 1968. The deployment of the cutting-edge Surion will enable the ROK Army to innovatively increase its aviation operational capability and reduce difficulties of supplying parts from overseas,” Colonel Song Jae-geun said.

Korea plans to supply a total of 200 utility helicopters to the Army by 2022, while 40 Surion amphibious helicopter variants for the marines will be delivered by 2023 in efforts to enhance the marine’s ability to transport troops and equipment in the littoral environment.

Last month, Korea decided to import 36 Apache Guardians between 2016 and 2018 in order to counter any North Korean infiltration along the South’s coastline and to fly counter-penetration missions along the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas.

President Park said South Korea and the United States will not provide any aid to North Korea as long as it continues to ratchet up tensions with iit provocations.

“When I visited the U.S., President  Obama and I made it clear that we will sternly react to any provocations from the North but leave the door open for dialogue,” Park said during her speech at the ceremony.

“We are going to push for a trust process for coexistence if the North chooses a path to change. I once again strongly call for North Korea’s change.”

1st home-made utility choppers to replace UH-1Hs

Bibimbap. Bulgogi. Tteokbokki. We’re not going to sugarcoat things; Korean cuisine can be just as confusing as attempting to correctly pronounce the name of a dish. Now, that’s no reason to spend every evening dining at Lotteria (Korea’s version of McDonalds, complete with a ramen burger); in fact, all the etiquette and ingredients and ceremony of a hearty Korean meal means diving in head-first and, yes, tasting the kimchi.

For first timers to Seoul or those who need a refresher, we recommend joining an O’ngo Dining Tour. Depending on your tastes (literally), O’ngo will take you out for Korean BBQ, to nibble from street stall to street stall in bustling Myeongdong, or—what we booked—down the alleys and into the local favorites around Anguk after dark. This one tour gave us the confidence (and pronunciation help) to continue devouring only Korean cuisine for the next 7 nights of our stay. Best idea ever, really.

Tours begin at 35,000 KRW ($35) per person, although the 3-hour Night Dining Tour goes for $88. As there were three of us, we ended up shelling out a lot of cash for one night on the town, but soon forgot because that money buys everything you consume in the evening, from specialty tofu dishes and turmeric-tinted rice wine to soju bombs (soju, Coca Cola and beer all chugged down at once).

The guides are Seoulites who these lead tours in their off hours from being university students or working 60 hours a week in an office. Being sleep-deprived but well fed is a South Korean way of life, one that’s all too easy to fall into even on the shortest Seoul stays.

Of O’ngo’s tours, we think you’ll like these two the most:
· Night Dining (88,000 KRW per person). You’ll make 4-5 stops and eat and drink at all, with special attention to Seoul foods (pun intended).
· Korean Fish Market (90,000 KRW per person). Skip Tsukiji in Tokyo and save your fish market first time for Seoul, where having lunch at Noryangjin or Garak Market is as simple as pointing at seafood still swimming and having it turned into ready-to-enjoy sashimi right in front of you.

If You Only Do One Thing in Seoul, Let It Be a Late Night Food Tour

NKorea’s completely avoidable misstep: PRC media starting to lump them in w/ Japan & Philippines as sea foes. mil.huanqiu.com/paper/2013-05/…

— Adam Cathcart (@adamcathcart) May 21, 2013

Psy performs at the “American Idol” finale at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles on Thursday. /AP-Newsis

We first wrote about James Ferris on March 1st when we discovered some medals he was wearing which weren’t in his reocrds. We teamed up with Mark Weiner of the Syracuse Post-Standard when Mark wrote an article about Ferris, from Liverpool, NY, when he went to a ceremony at the White House. Mark was able to send a reporter to ferris house and confront him with his records. Oddly enough, before the reporter went to Ferris’ house, I’d told Mark about how some phonies said they were wearing their fathers’ medals to honor his service. Ferris told the reporter that he was wearing his brother’s medals to honor his service. Funny how the fakers have a discernible pattern. Anyway, Ferris offered to resign as the President of the Korean War Veterans Association and the Board refused to accept his resignation.

Today Mark sends us a link to his latest article on the subject announcing that the membership of the KWVA has sounded off and forced the Board to accept Ferris’ resignation;  [This Ain't Hell]

You can read much more at the link, but the board of the KWVA actually tried to keep him on despite the fact he was a phony.  Only the outrage from the membership got him to resign.  Considering the board was trying to cover for him, it makes me wonder if there are some more phonies in the KWVA leadership?

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Wednesday dispatched a top military official to China as a special envoy, the country’s state media said.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Choe Ryong-hae, the director of the General Political Bureau of the Korean People’s Army, had left Pyongyang for China. It did not elaborate on details of the visit or the itinerary other than saying he was being sent by Kim.

The dispatch comes as bilateral relations have cooled in recent months after the North ignored repeated calls from Beijing not to ratchet up tensions on the Korean Peninsula. (Yonhap)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Here is an article I saw on Facebook that I thought was quite good in regards to how many veterans including those who have been wounded are getting kicked out of the military and often without benefits to shrink the force:

With no clear guidelines, Anderson said, he judges soldiers by their service.

“My job is to look at the pattern,” he said. “We all make mistakes, and soldiers in that population are a high-risk population. We don’t crucify them all for one offense. Two offenses? It depends. There is no set rule. I look at every case independently and say what is medical and what is the pattern of conduct up to that point.”

A review of recent Fort Carson cases shows, though, that soldiers are discharged for one offense.

In October, a sergeant named Dennis Tackett, who had been a handler of bomb-sniffing dogs in three tours in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, came before Anderson. Diagnosed with PTSD, with a history of suicide attempts and in the medical discharge process, the soldier with a clean record had punched a man in the face while drunk.

Anderson had the authority to let the sergeant medically retire but threw him out for misconduct.

“He said my PTSD didn’t make me drink,” Tackett said. “I made that decision.” [The Gazette]

A similar story was published in the Stars and Stripes two years ago, so this one is kind of an update to that one but still worth reading.  Probably the biggest mistake though that The Gazette made with this article is the person they chose to profile.  This is a real issue, but the main person they profiled, Kash Alvaro is likely a phony.  According to members of his unit who have been leaving Facebook comments they say he is both exaggerating and lying about what happened during the deployment.

However, the real issue is whether veterans and especially wounded veterans like the guy mentioned in the above excerpt should be thrown out of the military with no benefits after one incident?

US: NYU researchers took bribes from Chinese groupasiancorrespondent.com/107939/us-nyu-…

— Asian Correspondent (@AsCorrespondent) May 21, 2013