Top Korean soldier held for fraud

Grok Headline matches for Top Korean soldier held for fraud

Report: Others Held With S. Korean in
Iraq (AP)

Report: Others Held With S. Korean in
Iraq (AP) 06/21/2004 02:57 AM
AP - As many as 10 foreigners are being held captive with a South Korean recently abducted by militants in Iraq, a South Korean news report said Monday.

About 10 Others Held with S.Korean in
Iraq-Report (Reuters)

About 10 Others Held with S.Korean in
Iraq-Report (Reuters) 06/21/2004 02:57 AM
Reuters - Militants in Iraq are holding about 10 foreigners as well as the South Korean businessman they have threatened to behead, the businessman's company president told Yonhap news agency on Monday.

Report: U.S. Soldier Held Hostage Killed
(AP)

Report: U.S. Soldier Held Hostage Killed
(AP) 06/29/2004 07:04 AM
AP - Iraqi militants released three Turkish hostages Tuesday, shortly after another group of kidnappers claimed to have executed an American soldier captured nearly three months ago.

South Korean Held in Iraq Pleads for
Life (AP)

South Korean Held in Iraq Pleads for
Life (AP) 06/20/2004 08:55 PM
AP - The Arab satellite TV network Al-Jazeera aired a videotape Sunday purportedly from al-Qaida linked militants showing a South Korean hostage begging for his life and pleading with his government to withdraw troops from Iraq.

South Korean Held in Iraq Is Beheaded
(Los Angeles Times)

South Korean Held in Iraq Is Beheaded
(Los Angeles Times) 06/23/2004 07:46 AM
Los Angeles Times - BAGHDAD — Carrying out a threat issued two days earlier, Iraqi militants beheaded a South Korean hostage Tuesday, dumping the man's body on the side of the road between Baghdad and Fallouja where it was found by U.S. soldiers.

Lib Dem held in vote fraud probe

Lib Dem held in vote fraud probe 06/02/2004 04:33 PM
A local election candidate is arrested over allegations of attempted voting fraud ahead of the 10 June polls.

Man Held in Google Stock Fraud

Man Held in Google Stock Fraud 04/09/2004 04:06 PM
"... was arrested at his home March 5, is accused of fraud as part of the scheme to sell victims shares of "Series B Preferred Stock" in Google, prior to what he described as the company's impending initial public offering, according to authorities."

Dozens held over ID fraud website

Dozens held over ID fraud website 04/09/2005 02:57 AM
News.bbc.co.uk - Fri Apr 8, 09:47 am GMT

U.S. Soldier Dies, Five Held in Iraq
Council Killing (Reuters)

U.S. Soldier Dies, Five Held in Iraq
Council Killing (Reuters) 02/17/2004 04:13 AM
Reuters - A roadside bomb killed a U.S. soldier in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said Tuesday, the third such killing in less than 24 hours.

Hand-held device to nail Internet fraud

Hand-held device to nail Internet fraud 12/25/2004 04:49 PM
Hindustantimes.com - Fri Dec 24, 06:21 pm GMT

An Appeal by 365 Korean Organizations to
the Iraqi Group Holding a Korean
National

An Appeal by 365 Korean Organizations to
the Iraqi Group Holding a Korean
National 06/21/2004 04:29 AM

Following open letter is from an OhmyNews article that encouraged wide distribution.  I don't agree with the content but I think the letter reflects the view of a small yet growing and increasingly vocal part of Korean population so here it is:

An Appeal by 365 Korean Organizations to the Iraqi Group Holding a Korean National

We appeal for the release of the Korean national Kim Seon Il.

Today the Korean people were overcome with shock at the news the Korean Kim Seon Il has been kidnapped in Iraq. His seizure and the threat against the life of this private citizen is already a source of unspeakable sadness for his family and the Korean people. This sadness and shock is the same for the many Koreans who have opposed the United States' unjust invasion and the deployment of Korean troops to Iraq.

The Korean people are well aware of the fact that the US invaded Iraq for domination and oil, and not for the freedom and peace of the Iraqi people. We know also that the US occupation of Iraq has denied the Iraqi people their sovereignty and that there have been widespread human rights abuses by US forces there, leading to Iraqi pain and loss of life. For this reason we have done all that is humanly possible to prevent the deployment of Korean troops, as they will in no way contribute to the peace and security of the Iraqi people.

The kidnapping and threatening a private citizen with death, however, will not contribute to Iraqi peace. The Iraqi people are right to resist the US's unjust invasion, occupation, and carnage. Nevertheless, kidnapping and threatening a private citizen with death cannot be justified. Doing so will only lead to a vicious cycle of blood and revenge.

Again we make an earnest appeal. Please make your claims known through dialogue and release Kim Seon Il to his family as he is of no relation to government policy.

21 June 2004

Seoul, Korea

Korean Network Against Dispatching Troops To Iraq

"?...the praise and placards expressing
admiration are for the first soldier
convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners.
The admonishments are reserved for the
soldier who blew the whistle.?"

"?...the praise and placards expressing
admiration are for the first soldier
convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners.
The admonishments are reserved for the
soldier who blew the whistle.?" 05/26/2004 07:51 PM

Tigers in the Korean DMZ?

Tigers in the Korean DMZ? 09/11/2004 12:49 PM
Xeni Jardin: Snipped from Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design email newsletter, a New York Times story about wild animals reclaiming the heavily-landmined DMZ that divides North and South Korea.

[E]nvironmentalists have recognized this area one of the most enduring symbols of the cold war and one of the most fortified and heavily mined stretches on earth as the Korean peninsula's, and possibly East Asia's, most important wildlife refuge. They have been pressing to preserve it but are feeling a special urgency now because of the growing reconciliation between the North and the South. The environmentalists fear that a South Korea that puts economic development first and a North Korea that has no environmental movement could together lead to the zone's rapid destruction as a refuge. (..)

"The DMZ is the last major vestige of Korea's natural heritage," said Kim Ke Chung, a professor at the Center for BioDiversity Research at Penn State and chairman of the DMZ Forum, an organization based in the United States that is dedicated to preserving the zone. "It's probably the only good thing to come out of the Korean War and cold war. So we have to preserve this as a nature reserve." [Bruce Sterling says: "How did the Cold War become the 'cold war' all of a sudden?]

The DMZ Forum recently held a conference in Seoul to gather support for designating the zone a Unesco World Heritage Site, a classification that would curb all development. William B. Shore, secretary of the forum and a former fellow at the Regional Plan Association of New York, said the zone should become a center for eco-tourism as an alternative to turning it into a weekend getaway for residents of Seoul.

"People are now willing to pay large sums to see wild animals in the proper setting," Mr. Shore said. "Eco-tourism would protect the DMZ from becoming the Hamptons of South Korea." [Bruce Sterling says: "Perhaps it's possible to transform the Hamptons into a DMZ."]

reg-free Link

Korean Slavery

Korean Slavery 05/04/2004 04:47 PM
Korean Slavery - Mark A. Peterson [pdf]

Korean Bloggers

Korean Bloggers 06/05/2005 11:34 PM
Thanks to Jin Ho, Heewon, Goo Dong-Eon, Xenix, Qho, Young Wook, and BK for a very interesting dinner discussion and explaining the Korean blogging scene to me.

Korea is reported by the OECD to have the highest high-speed Internet penetration of any nation. Korea has an extremely vibrant gaming, blogging, mobile phone and youth culture scene and I was eager to find out more about what was going on. I scribbled a bunch of notes over coffee during the day and over dinner. Please excuse any errors since I have not been able to fact check everything. If you could point them out and let me update them, I would appreciate it.

According to articles in the press, there are 5-6 million blogs. These are not to be confused with hompy. Hompy (a derivative of home page) are personal home pages with photo albums, guest books, avatars, background skins, and background music. There are approximately 10 million hompy pages. In a city with a population of 10 million and a country with a population of 45 million, that's quite impressive. Companies seem to be making money selling background music and items for hompy pages. Most of the posts are focused on photos and one line comments on pages of friends. They are generally closed communities and are focused more on real-time presence-like communication rather than diary or dialog.

Cyworld, which sounded like the leader for hompys has a feature they call "scratch scrap". This allows you to copy/paste content from other web pages easily to your hompy. On of the problems that I see with this is that this simple built-in feature does not provide a link back to the original source. It is rumored engineers who designed this left and joined Naver, one of the leading blog companies and created a similar feature for them. Generally speaking, it sounded like people don't link very much. They are still mostly plain html and not css + xhtml. There seemed to be some trackback implementation, but it is not yet as widely used as in the US or Japan. As far as I could tell, none of the blog systems used any of the standard APIs, and some had RSS feeds. Blogs and hompys don't seem to be pinging any pinger sites, which makes them nearly invisible to the outside world. In addition, many sites block search engine bots from crawling hompys and blogs.

It appears that one of the biggest problems is that there are several 800 pound gorilla type portals that remind me of AOL during it's powerful years. They try to create walled gardens of users. With millions of bloggers and hompy users in each community, they are focused more on integrating inside of their portals than open standards or linking across portals. There are some independent blog services and aggregators, but they still seem to be focused on community and somewhat inward facing networks. A not-so-visibile majority of blogs in Japan and the US are also this way, but the public facing citizen journalist or pundit-style blogs seem to be very sparse in Korea.

One of the reasons might be due to the success of OhmyNews. I visited OhmyNews as well, and they are truly an online newspaper powerhouse. You can read about them in detail in Dan Gillmor's We the Media, but they are a edited news website with droves of citizen journalists who submit articles. They have courses in writing for the citizen journalists, tip jars that people can pay them through, editors to help with the important stories, lots of influence and visibility and offline community activities. I can imagine that someone who had something political or pundit-like to say might easily choose to write for OhmyNews than to start a blog. This doesn't describe everything, but I'm sure that OhmyNews has attracted a fair number of the potential media blogger types.

I still have a lot to learn but the incredible difference in the blogging scene and the apparent happiness with what the people had considering the widespread adoption made me wonder if the Korean blogs would ever look like American or Japanese blogs. (Many aspects of the Japanese blogging scene seem to be following in the footsteps of the US blogging scene, albeit with some differences.)

Update:

4- jaz @ June 2, 2005 10:43 AM

hey joi. the function is called "scrap," not "scratch"
what it allows you to do is to display a particular post from someone's mini-hompy (cyworld) - if the permission setting of that post is set to "allow scrap" - not from just any website. there's a watermark-like feature that goes with it, which displays the original author's name and the link back to the origianl mini-hompy.

Sorry about the error. I was told however, that most bloggers and hompyiers didn't cite or link. Someone said that the big portals encouraged because it allowed all of the content to be searched inside the portal, rather than offsite. Does anyone have any more information on this?

Comment - TrackBack

Korean Archery

Korean Archery 08/22/2004 09:18 PM

South Korea's continuing dominance in archery is amazing but, like the effect of monopoly on economy, I think overdominance is starting to hurt international archery competitions.

IMHO, countries overdominating a field of sports should share it's knowhows and training programs with rest of the world, particularly with those countries that never had a chance to win an olympic medal.  For example, South Korean archery association should offer archery scholarships for amateur archers from third-world countries.  I am sure Korean companies like Samsung and LG will be glad to sponsor such scholarship programs.

Imagine the joy everyone will feel when those athletes win their countries' first olympic medal.  I also think such programs are far more rewarding than traditional international aids and foreign relation efforts.

The New Soldier

The New Soldier 08/27/2004 01:51 PM
John Kerry gets caught mocking the famous Iowa Jima flag raising photograph on the cover of his book. Someone decides to put the entire book online. This is probably very bad news for Kerry.

Korean Robots to Help War in Iraq

Korean Robots to Help War in Iraq 05/11/2004 05:14 AM
Hankooki May 11 2004 9:22AM GMT

Gov't considering redenomination of
Korean won

Gov't considering redenomination of
Korean won 09/16/2004 11:32 AM
Maekyung Internet Sep 16 2004 3:15PM GMT

"South Korean Beheaded"

"South Korean Beheaded" 06/24/2004 11:11 AM

Korean General Elections

Korean General Elections 04/15/2004 09:09 PM

As expected, pro-government Uri Party got 152 seats out of 299, which gives them the majority.  Han-nara (Grand National) Party lost its majority position but still managed to eek out a respectable showing, thanks to the daughter of a former dictator who took control of the party just weeks before the election.  It's funny how conservatives prefer the nostalgic certainty of iron-clad rule by dictators over euphoric optimism of liberals.  Min-noh (Democratic Labor) Party emerged in the third place, making the ultra-liberal pro-labor party a political force to be reckoned with.

National Assembly seats after ballot counting[As of 1:00 a.m.]

Party	Before	Now
Uri Party	49	152
Grand National Party	137	121
Millennium Democratic Party	61	9
Democratic Labor Party	0	10
United Liberal Democrats	10	4
Others	14	3

Korean Google Blog

Korean Google Blog 10/03/2002 01:42 PM
Seok Wan Yang is tracking Google in Korean. I don't speak Korean, but it looks helpful....

North Korean nukes

North Korean nukes 04/13/2004 02:02 PM
North Korean Nuclear Devices. "Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology around the world, has told his interrogators that during a trip to North Korea five years ago he was taken to a secret underground nuclear plant and shown what he described as three nuclear devices."

Doubts over N Korean bombs

Doubts over N Korean bombs 01/22/2004 03:10 AM
A top US scientist who visited North Korea says he left "unconvinced" it could develop a nuclear bomb.

Traditional Korean Music

Traditional Korean Music 04/07/2005 03:24 AM

I enjoy all kinds of music but I particularly enjoy traditional korean music.  If you are interested in listening to some, the best album to get started with is the OST album for the Korean movie Sopyonje.  It starts with a bamboo flute instrumental titled Thousand Year-Old Crane.  The instrument is called daekoom, my favorite instrument, which sounds similar to shakuhachi although I think it's deeper and coarser in a satisfying way that sooths the aching inside walls of your heart.  Then it moves on to several pansori songs which to me sounds like a fusion of rap and opera.  I just love pansori!  The only problem is that the CD might be difficult to find outside Korea.

SK Telecom: Korean for Wireless

SK Telecom: Korean for Wireless 06/15/2004 10:00 AM
Business Week Jun 15 2004 2:25PM GMT

eBay ups Korean stake

eBay ups Korean stake 09/01/2004 04:36 AM
In brief Mopping up the minorities

Motorola's Korean Image

Motorola's Korean Image 12/10/2003 06:58 AM
Digital Chosunilbo Dec 10 2003 6:25AM ET

Korean USB Memory Startup

Korean USB Memory Startup 09/24/2004 07:22 AM

A Korean startup with a line of patented USB memory stick products is looking for US partners.  Their product is selling well in Korea but they don't know where the cluetrain stops are in the US so they need help.

I get a lot of requests like this but this is the first time I posted about it.  Why?  Because it's one of those father's friend's son type of thing.  Not as thick as blood but near enough to motivate me to move a few more extra muscles than usual.

Korean Wave (aka Hanlyu)

Korean Wave (aka Hanlyu) 04/17/2005 10:47 AM

Korea has started to emerge as a c ultural powerhouse in asia, in a trend called Ha nlyu ( Korean Wave) which threatens to overshadow even Hollywood and American pop culture.  Korean movies, music, and games are increasingly taking the top spots in popularity charts in china, japan, and south eastern asia countries and it's TV programs are starting to sweep TV primetime slots in those countries.  For example, Jewel in the Palace (google), a Korean drama about an apprentice in the royal kitchen who became the nation's first female royal physician, was watched by more than 40% of the TV audiences in Hong Kong last month.

As a Korean-American, all this is amazing because I still find most Korean movies and dramas not very interesting.  My guess is that Korean cultural goods are popular because they:

• are more familiar to eastern countries than western culture.
• are not burdened by animosity against Japan
• are of relatively high quality
• offer more bang for the buck

While greedy copycat producers are still busy churning out trash in Korea, overall quality seems to be improving at a fast pace still so I think the trend will continue for a while.

Microsoft Gives S. Korean Education
$8.7M

Microsoft Gives S. Korean Education
$8.7M 07/06/2004 11:27 AM
AP via ABCNEWS.com Jul 6 2004 3:39PM GMT

Korean Bipedal Robot Kit

Korean Bipedal Robot Kit 07/09/2004 05:09 PM

Hacker cracks 6 Korean s

Hacker cracks 6 Korean s 06/21/2004 07:05 PM
Techzonez Jun 21 2004 11:23PM GMT

Symmetricom Supports Korean 3G

Symmetricom Supports Korean 3G 08/17/2004 11:06 AM
Unstrung.com Aug 17 2004 3:48PM GMT

Through the lens of a soldier

Through the lens of a soldier 11/14/2003 04:44 AM
lentes de um soldado

pbase.com/sms/iraq
track this site | 4 links

Unknowing Soldier

Unknowing Soldier 03/19/2003 10:27 PM
He doesn't know it yet but an eighteen year old Iraqi conscript called Tariq who will never see his future children and who the world will never get know, will be dead by this Friday lunchtime.

The accidental soldier

The accidental soldier 06/17/2004 08:32 AM
Dr. Sudip Bose joined the Army to help pay his medical school bills. Now he's a surgeon in Iraq, saving the lives of Americans as well as the Iraqis who are trying to kill them.

Homeless Soldier

Homeless Soldier 04/24/2004 08:50 AM
Yesterday, Iraq. Today, homeless in the Bronx. Welcome back, soldier, and god bless America.

Soldier charged

Soldier charged 12/19/2004 03:41 PM
This is what desperate looks like:
Grok Description matches for Top Korean soldier held for fraud
GrokA matches for Top Korean soldier held for fraud

Top Korean soldier held for fraud

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: