Besides the greening of Seoul in recent years another major change to the city is the restoration of various historical sites in particularly the walls around Seoul which is something I have been a supporter of for many years:

From Gwanghwamun Square to Seoul Station and the new City Hall, the city has been home to many restoration and development projects in recent years at a number not seen since the Park Chung Hee administration.

In the 1970s, the dictator restored historic structures by arguing that they were related to the important issue of national defense.
But in the ensuing decades that brought regime changes and tumultuous democratization movements, preservation efforts simply weren’t a priority for the government or everyday people.

Its efforts are buoyed by increased awareness of cultural properties and the recent Unesco recognition of several Korean heritage sites, including the royal tomb in 2009, as well as by the return of stolen relics, like the case of the Uigwe royal protocol books last year.

Early this month, the government announced that it will continue such initiatives by restoring the Seoul wall by 2015.

“Korea is the only existing castle city in the world,” Mayor Park Won-soon said. “With the restoration, the Seoul wall will be a place of pride and an attraction for foreign tourists.”   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read much more about the restoration of the various historic sites at the link.  I have always felt that the Seoul government should restore the old fortress walls in order to give the city a unique feature unlike any other major city in Northeast Asia to make it stand out.  As it is right now there is no feature of Seoul that pops to mind that international tourists would want to see.  The fortress walls would definitely be a unique attraction especially if it becomes a popular thing to hike the length of the walls while visiting the country.

From the Chosun Ilbo:

Fleur Pellerin, a Korean orphan who was adopted by a French family when she was six months old, has been appointed deputy minister in charge for small business and the digital economy by France’s new President François Hollande. Hollande announced his 34-member Cabinet on Wednesday afternoon.

Born in Seoul in 1973, Pellerin was found on the streets of the capital when she was three or four days old and was sent to an orphanage. She was adopted six months later.

Pellerin passed her baccalaureate — the equivalent to a high school diploma — when she was just 16, two years earlier than most, and graduated from the prestigious ESSEC business school, Institut d’études politiques de Paris and École nationale d’administration.

She joined the Socialist Party as a speechwriter while working for the state audit agency in 2002 and worked as the IT aide to Hollande during his campaign.

French weekly L’Express said Pellerin was appointed not only because of her passionate attitude but also because her background fit with the diversity Hollande wants in his Cabinet. “My background as an adoptee was both my handicap and basis for my success,” Pellerin said in a recent interview with the Chosun Ilbo.  [Chosun Ilbo]

This photo provided by Facebook shows Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan at their wedding ceremony in Palo Alto, Calif., Saturday, May 19, 2011

You can read more from this AP article.

Please leave any links or anything else you want to discuss in the Open Thread.

SBS released last year what was supposed to be one of the biggest action dramas Korea has ever seen with its adaptation of  Tsukasa Hojo’s manga City Hunter.  

The Korean drama version of City Hunter starts out in interesting fashion when the South Korean delegation to Burma in 1983 is hit by a North Korean bomb attack that killed many cabinet members and nearly the ROK President.  This real life incident in Burma is used to start a chain of events that drives the rest of the series.  In response to the bombing five South Korean government officials to include the ROK Defense Minister form a team to lead a covert special operations mission into North Korea to kill selected North Korean generals and military officials.  Two of the people selected for the team were the Presidential bodyguards Lee Jin-pyo and Park Moo-yul who were present at the bombing in Burma.

The team infiltrates into North Korea and completes its mission but when they swim out into the ocean to escape by submarine off the coast of the North Korean city of Nampo the special forces team is gunned down by the submarine crew.  The crew was given orders to kill the commando team by the five South Korean government officials in order to cover up their involvement in the operation.  All 21 men on the commando team are killed except for one, Lee Jin-pyo.  Lee eventually works his way back to South Korea where he kidnaps the son of his friend Park Moo-yul who was killed in the waters off of Nampo.

With Park’s infant son, Lee goes into hiding in the Golden Triangle area of Thailand.  In Thailand Lee forms a drug cartel operation that over the next two decades makes him extremely wealthy.  Lee uses the wealth he has accumulated in order to put into motion his plan for revenge against the five ROK government officials that killed the commando team.  The key part of his plan is Park’s son now named Lee Yoon Sung.  Yoon-sung attends  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and becomes a computer wiz while also being trained in martial arts and conventional weapons by who he believes is his real father Lee Jin-pyo.  Once Yoon-sung gets a job as a computer network security expert within the Blue House in South Korea, Lee Jin-pyo’s plan for revenge moves forward.  As Yoon-sung begins to bring vigilante justice against unsavory characters in Seoul the public begins to call him the City Hunter.

Lee Min-ho as the City Hunter

This all sounds pretty exciting right?  I thought so to at first because this drama had the feel of a big budget Korean action movie especially since it starts out being shot on location in Thailand.  However, after the first few episodes it appears the drama’s director, Jin Hyeok (진혁) decided to try and appeal to the women audience that makes up most of the viewership of Korean dramas and throw in their the typical drama themes of love triangles and other sappy elements like people dying from cancer that seem to be in every Korean drama.  All this does is slow down the pace of the series.  Other typical drama elements of one guy taking on 20 people and beating them all down one by one while the other people all wait there turn to be beaten up gets old.

The lead actor Lee Min-ho 이민호 , who plays Yoon-sung I also found to be unconvincing as a bad-ass tough guy.  He basically has the Korean boy-band looks that I guess the Korean ajummas like in their dramas.  Likewise another main character and Yoon-sung’s love interest Kim Na-na played by Park Min-yeong 박민영 was also unconvincing as a female presidential bodyguard, but she is hot if you like the plastic surgery beauties that frequent Korean television.  However, I did like Kim Sang-joong 김상중 who played the part of Lee Jin-pyo.  He is a convincing bad-ass tough guy that you would expect from a character that went through all he did in the series.

Park Min-yeong as Kim Na-na

I think overall despite its flaws City Hunter is worth checking out yourself to see if Lee Jin-pyo’s plan for revenge succeeds.  I am just a bit disappointed by the drama though because it could have really been much better if it wasn’t weighed down by all the typical Korean drama themes.  I assume the producers of these dramas must think the ajummas won’t watch them without the typical drama themes, but I think that it would be interesting to see if a drama that was straight action throughout could succeed in the Korean market?

Note: City Hunter is available on both Hulu and Netflix.

My wife's grandmother of the Daegu Seo Family, granddaughter of 서상돈. Her name in Korean is 서경숙. After marrying, she immigrated to Canada and changed her name to Josephine Lee.

Via Flickr.

You can read more about the Seo Family in Daegu at this link.

While North Korea as well as South Korea continue to have problems with their own rocket programs, a US private firm is moving forward with their commercial space launch business.  However, unlike the North Koreans when they have a technical problem they stop to check it, that is assuming the North Koreans even have the technology to identify a potential problem:

The California-based company SpaceX on Saturday scrubbed the highly anticipated launch of its Dragon capsule toward theInternational Space Station due to a rocket engine problem.

The last-second abort came when one of the Falcon 9′s engines exceeded a technical limit that forced a shutdown of the launch attempt, which may be rescheduled as early as May 22.

“Launch aborted: slightly high combustion chamber pressure on engine 5. Will adjust limits for countdown in a few days,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk explained on the microblogging site Twitter.

A SpaceX spokesman said engineers would look into the causes, but that the issue was not believed to be something entirely new.

“The computer checks all of the engine elemetry,” said the spokesman on SpaceX’s live broadcast of the event. “We detected something was wrong with one of the limits” on one of the rocket’s nine engines.

The next opportunity for launch is at 3:44 am on Tuesday, May 22, according to NASA. A press briefing to detail the causes of the delay was set for 6:30 am (1030 GMT).

The launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the unmanned Dragon and over half a ton of cargo toward the orbiting lab, will mark the first attempt to send a privately built spacecraft to the research outpost, where it plans to do a fly-under followed by a berthing.

SpaceX is the first of several US competitors to try sending its own cargo-bearing spacecraft to the ISS with the goal of restoring US access to space for human travelers by 2015.

The company made history with its Dragon launch in December 2010, becoming the first commercial outfit to send a spacecraft into orbit and back.

Until now, only the space agencies of Russia, Japan and Europe have been able to send supply ships to the ISS.  [AFP]

You can read more at the link but every American should hope SpaceX succeeds with their launch because this is the nation’s best hope of reviving its access to space after the retirement of NASA’s Space Shuttle last year.  If SpaceX can prove that it can safely and regularly launch its Falcon-9 rocket and dock the Dragon capsule with the ISS, it has a follow on contract with NASA to convert the Dragon capsule for use for manned spaceflight.  Currently the Russians are charging NASA $63 million a seat in the Soyuz capsule while SpaceX says they can get the cost down to $20 million a seat with their Dragon capsule.

If the routine moving of people and supplies is done by a private company at a cheaper cost this means that NASA can use more of its budget for scientific and space exploration purposes.  That is assuming that whatever money is saved through its contract with SpaceX is not just simply cut out of their budget by politicians to pay for their own pet spending projects.

It is amazing to me how little media attention that the release of Ali Moussa Dakdouk, also spelled Ali Musa Daqduq is getting in the US:

(Picture from Daily Mail)

(May. 14, 2012) An Iraqi court has decided to release an activist affiliated with the Lebanese political party Hizbollah who was detained and handed over to the Iraqi government by the American forces upon their withdrawal from Iraq at the end of last year. The detained man, Ali Dakdouk, was accused of involvement in killing U.S. troops in January 2007 in southern Iraq and was arrested in July of that year by the U.S. forces. (An Iraqi Tribunal Releases Hizbollah Activist, Ali Kakdouk [in Arabic], AHRAR NEWS PORTAL (May 7, 2012).)

According to Dakdouk’s attorney, Abd a-Mahdi al-Matiri, the court’s decision was prompted by the lack of evidence implicating his client in the crime of which he was accused. In January 2007, an armed group in Karbala’, Iraq, killed one U.S. soldier and kidnapped four others who were later found dead. The United States had confirmed that Dakdouk traveled to Iraq to train the rebels. (Id.)

Pursuant to article 22(4) of the 2008 Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq, the United States was required to provide to the Government of Iraq available information on all detainees who were being held by them, turn over to Iraqi authorities custody of those detainees wanted by Iraq, and release all remaining detainees in a safe and orderly manner.  [Library of Congress Website]

The incident in question is known as the Karbala Provincial Headquarters Raid where 5 US soldiers ultimately were killed by:

U.S. forces captured a group affiliated to Iran’s Quds force and the Lebanese Hezbollah, the official spokesman for the Multi-National Forces said on Monday.

“We arrested this group in different areas of Iraq and its leaders are Abu Yasser al-Shebani, Abu Mustafa al-Shebani, Abu Zaki, Abu Zahraa, Abu Mousa, Abu Zahar al-Dulaimi, Ali Moussa Dakdouk, Qais al-Kazaali and his brother Leith al-Khazaali,” Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner said during a press conference held on Monday in the fortified green zone in central Baghdad.

“The Lebanese Ali Moussa Dakdouk was captured March 20 in Basra.” Dakdouk served for 24 years with Hezbollah and was “working in Iraq as a surrogate for the Iranian Quds Force,” Bergner said.

“Dakdouk was captured with documents proving his involvement in the attack against the coordination center in Karbala, where five U.S. soldiers were killed,” the spokesman added.

In the assault, up to a dozen gunmen posed as an American security team with U.S. military combat fatigues, allowing them to pass checkpoints into the government compound where they launched the attack. One U.S. soldier was killed in the initial assault and militants abducted four others who were later found shot to death.

Dakdouk told U.S. interrogators that the Karbala attackers “could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Quds force,” Bergner said.

“The Quds force is using elements of Hezbollah to implement military operations against Iraqis and U.S. forces in Iraq,” the U.S. officer noted.  [Iraq Updates]

Needless to say the families of the murdered soldiers are very upset:

The wife of an Army captain killed in Iraq says that she feels only “sadness” and “shock” that the jihadist behind the vicious attack was cleared of charges — and could be freed by an Iraqi court in the coming days.

Charlotte Freeman told FoxNews.com this morning, “It was like a pit (opening) inside of me,” when she learned Wednesday night that Ali Musa Daqduq had been cleared May 7 of masterminding the operation that felled Capt. Brian Freeman in 2007.

“I briefly read it and couldn’t read on. I couldn’t go there,” she said. “It wasn’t like he was dying again. It was more shock that these people get away with what they do. There’s no justice. It’s amazing and shocking to me that someone who did what he did could go free.”  [FOX News]

The British government is not happy either since Daqduq was linked to attacks on British citizens in Iraq as well.

Some members of Congress are very upset about Daqduq’s acquittal because they believe he should have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay long before the US pull out of Iraq:

Several lawmakers, citing Daqduq’s Lebanese ancestry, have since criticized the Obama administration for his release, saying that he should have been held in Guantanamo Bay, and tried by a U.S. military tribunal. Several congressmen from the House Judiciary Committee wrote Obama in protest this week.

Supposedly the Obama administration is trying to work other legal options to hold Daqduq accountable for his crimes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up back in Lebanon with a hero’s welcome by Hezbollah.  Probably the best hope for justice for this guy is a mysterious explosion that tends to happen to Hezbollah leaders from time to time.

As reported a couple of weeks ago the US Army reinstated the controversial CSM Teresa King just to remove her:

The Army decided to formally replace its first female drill sergeant commandant, Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa King, only days after it lifted a six-month suspension placed on her, according to the Associated Press.

The announcement on Wednesday also said there will be a change of command ceremony the next day at the prestigious Army Drill Sergeants School at Fort Jackson, S.C.  [Stars & Stripes]

As I have stated before she probably should have never received the assignment in the first place, but how can she be removed for not deploying and for fake educational degrees when the Army would have known that when they gave her the assignment.  With that all said, King has little sympathy from me for her situation after making this statement:

King said she believes the complaints against her came from those who found her too rigid, when she was following instructions to hold drill sergeants to high standards. And criticism that she had never been deployed in combat is unfounded, she said, because she went where the Army sent her. Once, while posted at Fort Bragg with an airborne unit, she was held back from a combat deployment because she was a woman. Instead, she was sent to jobs in Europe and Washington, D.C.

Seriously does King think soldiers are going to believe her statement?  The 82nd Airborne regularly deploys with women.  She is in a admin MOS and the personnel offices are regularly staffed with females while on deployment for every division in the Army.  What probably happened is that she was made the Rear Detachment NCO for whatever unit she was with to look after all the other soldiers that did not deploy for whatever reason.  This is something that both men and women get assigned to do.  Usually the people left behind are either hurt, have outstanding legal issues, or those assigned to account for property while the unit is away.

It sounds more like King is trying to restore her reputation for a civilian audience that doesn’t know any better.  The bottom line is that she had 30 years to volunteer for a deployment and she did not.