Government Announces Development of Korean Operating System

The government has announced a plan to develop a Korean operating system (OS) in conjunction with the country's major IT companies. The Ministry of Knowledge Economy said it would set up a project to develop a web-based mobile OS.

It is envisaged that the operating system, to be called K-OS, will eventually replace all other foreign operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, which according to official figures runs 100.00001% of all Korean web sites.

The government fears that national and economic security is being compromised by the poor security of Windows, an operating system so bad it is said to be easy to create compromised pirate versions which when used by companies and government departments can send confidential data directly to China without the need for prostitutes.

It would be the government's third attempt to become software independent from foreign companies. In the early 1990s, it oversaw the development of the K-DOS project, which sought to create a text-only and inflexible alternative to the recently launched graphically pretty Microsoft Windows 3.0. Launched only one year after the widespread adoption of Windows 3, the Korean companies which had developed K-DOS with government funding refused to use it because it was "untested". The government then launched a plan to test K-DOS in the education sector using the money from change left in public telephones, at which point ordinary Koreans stopped leaving change in public telephones just to avoid spending the next five years playing text-only games on their computers.

The government's second attempt to create an indigenous software industry came with the support for the Hangul Word Processor (HWP) produced by Hancom, who describe themselves as "the home of ambitious dreamers 404 not found". With its pioneering use of quantum programming HWP allows, for example, characters to be both bold and not bold at the same time, which not only provides an outcome for every action and inaction, but also effectively prevents foreign companies producing cheaper compatible products because it is seemingly random outputs make it impossible to reverse engineer. Mandated for use by all government departments, it is widely believed HWP even prevented huge numbers of deaths in 2010 when Seoul sent a declaration of war in HWP format to the Japanese government in Tokyo, which according to sources they have so far been unable to open.

Major Korean IT companies, despite standing to benefit from government investment in connection with the initiative, were privately not enthusiastic about the project. "It's hard to refuse the government's plan, so we will help, but to be honest we don't feel like it" said an official at one company, Seongsan. But if major IT companies eventually develop the system, the government is hoping that K-OS will spread across Korea and eventually sweep the world.

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Home-Made High-Speed Train Forced to Stop Again

A home-made high-speed train stopped abruptly on its way from Seoul to Masan Monday due to unspecified but perfectly safe technical problems, according to its operator, the government-owned Korea Railroad Corporation (Korail).

The home-made train, known as the KTX-Sancheon or 'Thousand Acids', was constructed last year by 58 year-old Kim in the back yard of his house in the Myeong-dong district of Seoul. Kim has now built ten trains and has orders for ten more, which he is aiming to complete as soon as he can collect enough scrap metal from the streets of Seoul to construct them.

The KTX-Sancheon was designed to be the successor to the inferior first generation of Korean high-speed trains, which was based on a design by French company Alstom. These so-called 'KTX-I' bullet-trains were always problematic since parts had to be imported into Korea from France, due to the absurd and unfounded fear that if they were licensed for manufacturing in Korea the design would be stolen by Korean companies. But Kim says he felt Korea's national spirit was being damaged by allowing French trains free passage across Korea, which is why he set out to invent the parts necessary to create an entirely Korean high-speed train, not based on copied French parts at all, which he has never seen.

Korail says it is mystified as to why the trains keep suddenly stopping, not stopping, derailing, smoking, and rocking violently from side-to-side, but while there are now ten different KTX-Sancheon trains in operation which have experienced ten different problems, the single commonality in every accident is the track – based on a British design - which may be experiencing some issues due to the strain put on it by Korea's four seasons. Korail is keen to stress that these entirely domestic issues should not have any bearing on the export sales of the KTX-Sancheon it is currently trying to make.

The KTX-Sancheon can reach speeds of 330 km/h, but Kim overcame the technical issue of how to use brakes from Hyundai Accent sedans to slow the high-speed train down, in what is regarded as a triumph of domestic engineering and an improvement on the earlier inferior French design, which was not copied. While many have hailed Korea's home-made high-speed train as a paradigm-shift, some have criticized Kim's decision to place a steering wheel in the KTX-Sancheon, with suspicions mounting that it may have contributed to at least one of the train's derailments.

In recent months there has been growing disquiet with Korea's domestically designed products, with problems reported with home-made tanks, howitzers, rifles, submarines, and nuclear power plants.

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Mayor Oh Wins Free Meal Battle

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Vote for Nothing
Vote Oh

Oh Se-hoon, the 50 year-old conservative mayor of Seoul - who earlier this year selflessly cast himself as an 'antipopulism warrior' and launched a fierce attack on those who participated in the electoral process which elected him - has won his battle over free school lunches as a sufficient number of voters failed to show up at polling stations.

The mayor had knelt on the floor and wept earlier in the week as he promised to resign if he failed to stop the spread of populism in the democratic process - surprising those who claimed if he was going to lose his composure it should have been after the recent devastating flooding in Seoul which killed 14 people. He is now expected to stay on in his post and end his seven-month boycott of Council meetings while drawing his full salary.

Early Wednesday, the number of voters was reported to be high, and there were fears that the popular vote would reach the 33.3% quoracy required to make it valid, marking a major defeat for the former member of the anti-democratic military government's Army Defense Security Command, which was charged with internal security, the preservation of loyalty to the regime, and the deterrence and investigation of subversion. But the number of populists arriving at polling stations to exercise their dubious democratic rights tailed off in the afternoon, in an apparent endorsement of Mayor Oh's position and his "Vote for Nothing - Vote Oh" campaign. The final turnout was 25.7% and the mayor is now expected to press ahead with further anti-populist measures, including pursuing action against the kind of populists who voted in the referendum.

Mayor Oh has been intending to use his high-profile and caring campaign to deny children food in school as a springboard to bid for the Presidency, and some progressive liberal media outlets, fearing the consequences, have nefariously tried to portray Mayor Oh's victory as a defeat, dubbing him 'Mayor Zero'. But the mayor stayed true to his anti-populist credentials, and the failure to achieve a popular turnout in the referendum he fought hard to hold now clears the way for him to become Korea's next president with support from groups such as the popular National Anti-Populism Union.

The failure to achieve a quorum in the referendum also marks an important victory against populism in Korea, since the votes that were cast will not be counted before being destroyed, and the political status-quo will be maintained. Experts say this clears the way to impose quoracy thresholds in other populist elections at the 66.6% level, with elected officials remaining in their posts unless a sufficient number of voters turn out and defeat them, which will promote political stability.

But while Mayor Oh can be proud of his legacy, it may yet backfire; President Lee Myung-bak has expressed a willingness to stay in his position despite constitutional rules preventing this, and given his huge popularity supporters say it is only fair that the quoracy level for presidential elections is set around the 99.9% level.

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Korean Car Destroyed in Battle for Tripoli

War Crime

A Kia Cerato, probably manufactured in Korea, has been destroyed in the battle for Tripoli. Pictures of the white first-generation Cerato sedan, burning out of control, were broadcast around the world Tuesday. Western reporters filming the footage apparently made no attempt to put out the blaze and save the vehicle. It is not known if pro-Gadhafi forces or rebels were responsible for attacking the car, or whether it was hit accidentally. There is no information on who the owner is, but they are bound to be devastated at the loss of this representative example of Korean technology.

Koreans were shocked by the images that were broadcast without warning. "I hadn't thought about it before now, but this really brings home the brutality and horror of the war in Libya" said 26 year-old Kim, who works for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Seoul. Others expressed concern that if other Korean cars were destroyed, it might leave the people of Libya without enough reliable Korean cars to travel between battles.

In recent years Korean cars have proven popular in Libya as Korean culture and auto-parts have swept the world as part of the Korean Wave. Earlier this month, cars made by Hyundai and Kia were rated as the best low-cost ownership models in Australia, and record sales have been reported in China, where slightly inferior copies of the Kia Cerato are also made. Sales have also surged in France, where ads for the Kia Sportage recently won the prestigious Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Silver and Bronze Lion awards. The ads were criticized for using sexual imagery and small children alongside each other, which while likely to raise sales Korea and France, is apparently less of a commercial positive in other countries. Kia have since denied they commissioned the ad campaign.

The Korean government have asked for a ceasefire so that Korean cars can be safely evacuated from conflict zones, but neither pro-Gadhafi or rebel forces have so far responded.

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Will Daejeon UFOs Raise or Lower Property Prices?

Experts are divided on whether the recent Daejeon UFO sightings will raise or lower local property prices. Some realtors have argued that the potential alien visitation enhances the prestige of local apartment blocks, since after traveling potentially vast distances over interstellar space, extraterrestrials wouldn't just visit any neighborhood. But some UFO experts have said that if the aliens start abducting people, it may cause local properties to be seen as more dangerous, although several construction companies have been quick to say that their apartment blocks are UFO proof, and prospective purchasers and residents should not be alarmed by lights in the sky or strange creaking noises in their homes.

There is actually little evidence that aliens have ever abducted Koreans, as their studies of primitive life have mainly centered around Americans. As Koreans are generally regarded as more advanced life forms, it is widely suspected that the extraterrestrial visitors have little interest in people from this country. This raises the question of why they were flying their spaceships above Daejeon, but one explanation is that they were heading for a nearby U.S. military base.

Earlier this year, a woman from Busan called police when she returned home to discover her husband doing the washing, claiming he must have been replaced by aliens. However, the suspected alien body snatcher was let go when he ate a bowl of kimchi in front of officers. Kimchi is well known for its ability to ward off aliens, although in recent years disturbing evidence has emerged that illegal aliens may be able to tolerate the dish. In his defense, the man said he often did household chores while his wife was out, and while the officers found this explanation unconvincing, they concluded there were no legal grounds on which to detain him.

Any hopes that the UFO sightings may raise property prices in Daejeon seem to be ill-founded. This morning, several hours after the visitation, local real estate agents reported no immediate increase in property interest or asking prices. But Korean Christian groups are said to be flocking to the area, in the belief that being abducted will give them a chance to convert the aliens. If they decide to stay and reside in the area, experts say it may eventually lead to some upward pressure on prices. The government has reminded the groups though that after several incidents in Afghanistan last year, it maintains its policy of not paying for the overseas or interplanetary rescues of abductees.

Local property prices in Daejeon had been subdued since the South Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (SKAERI), which is based in the city, suffered a radiation leak in February this year. After the latest incident, institute officials immediately denied that any experiments or leaks being conducted at the facility would cause atmospheric disturbances or lead to anything resembling an alien abduction.

Unfortunately, the growth in personnel at the SKAERI facility in itself has not been positive for local apartment prices, with most scientists choosing to commute to the atomic energy research facility from Seoul rather than live locally.

Last year, The Korea Times reported that three giant alien spaceships - up to 240 kilometers in diameter - had been spotted in the outer solar system heading for Earth, and The Chosun Ilbo also claimed that researchers had found they intended to attack. It is speculated that the Daejeon UFOs could be advanced scouts for next year's planned invasion.

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East Sea Mistake - It Was Always 'Sea of Korea'

South Korea's long campaign to have the incorrectly named 'Sea of Japan' re-designated by its correct title of 'East Sea' appears to have failed, with a majority of International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) members now in favor of supporting wanton criminality rather than seeing justice be done. It was always perfectly obvious to anyone with eyes that the East Sea lies to the east of Korea, and should therefore be named as such, and the IHO members' blatant disregard for such irrefutable evidence shames not just them, but the whole international community.

The move comes just days after The Korea Times printed the fact that a growing number of countries opposed the designation of the body of water as the 'Sea of Japan'. But the shocking reversal seems to prove that IHO members are liars and do not deserve to sit on such a formerly prestigious organization.

Overwhelming evidence had been discovered over many years by Koreans in their tireless search for historical truth. 58 year-old Kim, a map collector from Seoul is typical of these unsung national heroes. He collected over 4,000 examples of old maps some of which were in good enough condition to be preserved rather than burnt, and they all show that the body of water was called the 'East Sea', not the 'Sea of Japan'. However, the IHO has not been interested in historical truth, with them rejecting the authenticity of some 17th Century maps in the belief that they were laser-printed, even though this is clearly absurd since laser printers did not exist four-hundred years ago.

But the IHO's outrageous rejection of the existence of the East Sea, even though it can clearly be seen from Korea, may have an unexpected benefit. The decision has caused historians and map experts to reexamine the collected documents, and it has now been discovered that what was believed to say 'East Sea' in very small writing, actually said 'Sea of Korea'. This was an understandable mistake given that when Japan ended its occupation of the Korean Peninsula it stole all this country's magnifying glasses, leaving Koreans with little ability to read such small letters. This act of theft was probably deliberately planned by Japan to ensure the IHO decision later this year would go against South Korea.

With this new evidence, South Korea intends to resubmit its objection to the 'Sea of Japan' name, as it should clearly be named 'Sea of Korea'. And more evidence is being found all the time - earlier this week it was discovered that a 1760 issue of "The Universal Gazetteer" named the body of water 'Sea of Corea', and it can clearly be seen next to Corea and under Manchews. The archaic publication has long been considered a trustworthy trove of knowledge in Western society, and every Westerner grows up learning of its importance.

It is believed that some of the latest discoveries also suggest the body of water was variously called the 'Sea of Corea', the 'Gulf of Korea', the 'Ocean of Korea', the 'Corean Sea', the 'Korean Sea', the 'Sea of Joseon', the 'Dokdo Sea', the 'Daemado Sea', the 'Sea of Dangun', the 'Kimchi Sea', and the 'Oriental Sea'. If the IHO reject the 'Sea of Korea', despite the overwhelming evidence presented in "The Universal Gazetteer", evidence can still be presented conclusively proving that the sea should be renamed any of these historically correct alternatives.

The East Sea sits over ocean-floor geographic features known the Japan Basin, the Yamato Basin and the Tsushima Basin, which should be correctly called the Korea Basin, the Korea Basin, and the Ulleung Basin. The IHO has previously rejected applications to change these names as well, despite Korean maps dating back hundreds of years which also show these named by their Korean titles.

While Korea's selfless attempts to establish scientific proof for the good of the world in the matter of the naming of the Sea of Korea appear to have been rejected, it is possible that the decision will not go in Japan's favor either. The increasingly Chinese-influenced IHO is said to be considering renaming the 'Sea of Japan' as the 'Greater China Sea'.

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TechnoMart Building Moves Again, Runs Red Light

Panicked employees have phoned the emergency services after the TechnoMart building in Seoul started shaking again.

Previous movement in the structure had been blamed on its exercise center, and the theory appears to have been confirmed by the latest incident, which initial investigations have suggested were caused by ten people riding exercise bikes in the building's 12th-floor gym. The combined power of the cyclists appears to have led to the TechnoMart building moving down the road, running a red light and alarming motorists, before coming wedged in a narrow alleyway between a branch of Paris Baguette and the building housing Crimson Permanent Assurance's Korean headquarters.

After issuing the building with a citation for the red light, police on the scene are said to be working with construction experts over the question of how to get it back to its original position, possibly using a large sail. Building inspectors said there was no cause for the public to be alarmed over the runaway high rise shopping mall, but some shoppers complained of motion sickness during the incident, while others complained that the building's new position had made it a longer walk back to the subway station.

The building's owners have said that it remains perfectly safe in its new position, and they are celebrating their temporary relocation by distributing free plastic hats to all shoppers. Statistics Korea recently found that people aren't wearing enough hats while shopping.

In the wake of the latest incident, enterprising mobile software developers responsible for the "Mobile Building App" have seen their application race to the top of both the Korean iPhone and Android charts. The 'app', which utilizes motion detection, distinguishes the kind of low-level vibrations typically associated with structural integrity issues from normal movement such as walking, and alerts the owner if it believes the building they are in is moving away from its original location or if it is believed to be about to suffer from what - for legal reasons - the application developers have had to term 'vertical existence failure'.

The application has been widely criticized by the construction and retail industry, who insist that small movements in buildings are perfectly normal, in Korea, especially when they house gyms or lots of shoppers.

But the government says it is considering banning the use of exercise bikes in large buildings, or asking people to cycle on them more slowly while respecting traffic laws.

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Should Bombs Be Dropped on Illegal Aliens?

Immigrants - shoot or bomb?

The first wave of foreign laborers invaded Korea in 1987, but the country accepted them because few Koreans were willing to take on the so-called "3D" jobs - an acronym for dirty, dangerous and difficult. Korea's chaebol were enthusiastic about employing such migrant workers, because it avoided the unnecessary expense of raising safety standards, and nobody asked awkward questions when they died or disappeared into machinery or vats of chemicals. At the time it seemed like a win-win proposition for all concerned.

Predictably given the feral nature of these migrant workers though, it wasn't long before they were killing each other, with the first murder among their ranks occurring in 1992. The risk of one migrant worker killing another and then graduating on to killing a Korean or someone else of significance such as a foreign diplomat meant that these in-community killings had to be investigated by the police, and people began to ask if the benefits of modern-day economic slavery were really worth the costs in police time, machinery cleaning and food product recalls.

Worse, once the floodgates were opened to these alleged people, Koreans quickly learned the nature of their inherent criminality because by the end of 1992 the number of illegal aliens in this country stood at 30,889. And then, through a lack of proper control, a shortage of dog-handlers, and their naturally dubious nature, these foreign laborers began to move beyond cannon-fodder positions into certain manufacturing jobs, which were technically still classed as extreme by the government due to their extremely low pay, but which on other evidence Koreans could clearly have done. By 2002, the number of illegal aliens in Korea had reached epidemic proportions, rising to half of the 629,006 foreigners residing in this country.

While officially the number of illegal aliens in Korea has fallen since then, the media has worked hard to ensure that Koreans are kept properly informed of the growing threat the very fabric of our society faces from these dangerous foreigners. Meanwhile liberal and populist politicians in Seoul have awarded these criminals with amnesties because their failed reproductive policies have led to a low birthrate and subsequent lack of pure-blooded Koreans to fill positions that have instead been seized by these non-country-people.

50 year-old Kim, who is responsible for handling foreign resident policy at the friendly and warmhearted Korea Immigration Service, told reporters in an interview that "A renewed surge in the number of illegal aliens could become a ticking time bomb." And given the cultural nature of many of the countries migrant workers come from, some say these ticking time bombs could become a terrorist threat to Korean society, blowing themselves up randomly on subways and even in your apartment.

So what should be done about these terrorists? The liberal government in Seoul says that even if it feels like we are succumbing to an epidemic, the present number of immigrants is manageable from a law enforcement perspective, and it is sufficient to meet chaebol needs to fill low-paying and dangerous positions which typically carry a 1-in-5 chance of death. But we cannot continue to accept them as guests indefinitely while trying to maintain them under humane conditions. Sometimes the way to deal with dangerous explosives is to blow them up with explosives of your own in a way that minimizes collateral damage to your own people. Everybody knows this.

With the number of illegal immigrants once again believed to be rising faster than their death and disappearance rate in Korean factories, the kindest solution is surely to bomb these migrant workers from the air using Korea's domestically developed KT-1 training jet, which is very competitively priced and can be fitted to carry the necessary ordnance. In any animal population, when numbers exceed their acceptable limit, the humane solution is a cull. Everybody knows this. So today we join with The Chosun Ilbo in urging the government to show there are some necessary limits to Koreans' world-famous warmheartedness towards guests. Let's bomb these immigrants from the air.

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Korean Wave Sparks Tongue-Lengthening Craze!

The Korean Wave - or Hallyu - which is sweeping the world crushing all before it, has had many unexpected results as non-pure-blooded foreigners try desperately to emulate their pure-blooded Korean idols in the worlds of K-pop, K-drama and K-auto parts. But the Korean language, which is the most scientifically logical yet linguistically nuanced and complex in the world, has so far eluded non-pure-blooded speakers, whose tongues and vocal chords are not sufficiently genetically evolved to master it.

But modern surgical techniques may be about to change all this, as news emerges that the world's first Hangeul operation has been conducted on a 19 year-old British girl, who says her tongue wasn't long enough to pronounce the Korean letter 'L', which by common agreement in Korea is always pronounced differently to the way any foreigner sounds it no matter what, providing one of many reasons for Koreans not to understand - or misunderstand - what is being said to them. In scientifically logical Hangeul the 'ㄹ' character, which is sometimes transliterated as 'L' or 'R', is always written but its pronunciation changes depending on the context, and sometimes it is silent, except when it isn't.

Foreigners have often wrongfully accused Koreans of freezing in panic when confronted with a Korean-speaking foreigner, but as 55 year-old Professor Kim at Seoul International University explains "This is actually cleverly disguised practiced disinterest. Foreigners really have little of interest to say." And while Koreans are famous throughout the world for their warmheartedness, the non-pure-blooded frequently misinterpret this surface friendliness as a willingness to seriously listen to their views - or even worse, accept them - when it is clearly the height of arrogance to think that Koreans should accept foreign ideas which are obviously wrong. "Koreans want foreigners to admire them and they want foreigners to accept Korea's cultural superiority, but they don't want foreigners to be just like them, otherwise it dilutes the unique ubiquitousness of the Korean experience." added Professor Kim.

Many agree that the British girl's case raises further serious questions for Korea over where the dividing line between pure-blooded Koreans and foreigners trying to be Korean really lies, and whether they should be prevented from entering Korea in order to protect people here who might otherwise feel uncomfortable by their attempt at close infiltration, given this country's unhappy history with previous infiltrations and invasions.

The debate had already been taking place in the media, after the case last year involving another non-pure-blooded British citizen, who suffered a major road accident with a Korean which was totally his fault, but which nevertheless obligated Korean doctors to give him extensive blood transfusions. The Korean Red Cross has determined that British people have dirty blood, so he could not receive transfusions from his fellow countrymen, and instead had to be given highly-prized Korean blood due to the urgency of the situation, a potentially ill-considered decision which medical experts have said left him completely pure-blooded. The 33 year-old man, who subsequently changed his name to Kim Yong-guk, eventually had to be granted additional legal rights and his company had to issue a memo to all its staff directing them to take him more seriously despite his foreign appearance.

Tongue-lengthening has long been a popular operation in Korea, since studies have shown that students with longer tongues are statistically more likely to achieve higher grades at university level, although there are some gender discrepancies in the research and the reasons for these results are not entirely clear. But the practice has been largely kept quiet for reasons of academic competitiveness, and it is extremely unlikely that any self-respecting cosmetic surgeon would agree to perform such a procedure on a foreigner in Korea. Nevertheless, Korean cultural protection groups are calling on the government to ensure that foreigners are specifically prevented from undergoing such surgery.

Despite some attempts by the Korean government to apply Korean law outside Korea, notably in the field of drug taking, legal experts suggest that foreign governments are unlikely to accommodate Korea's friendly and warmhearted demands for them to prevent more of their citizens from undergoing Hangeul surgery, potentially exposing Korea to an incoming flood of foreigners who can speak Korean well enough to have to be vaguely listened to.

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Man With Orange Car Shunned By Community

A man in Seoul who recently bought an orange-colored car claims he is being shunned by his local community. 34 year-old Kim, who claims to be a Korean citizen, says that the problem began when he saw the new Hyundai Veloster in a dealership and was immediately smitten by its dangerous radical design and stand-out color.

But when he got his new vehicle home, Kim says neighbors who he had always been on friendly terms with began to ignore him. "At first I took it as jealousy, but when they still weren't talking to me two weeks later, I began to think I may have made a mistake." he told reporters.

Hyundai has been criticized for the design of the Veloster, which differs significantly from that of other Korean cars. 54 year-old Professor Kim from Korea International University, an expert in the emerging field of 'difference studies', explained that "Traditionally Korean cars reflected the society that created them - they were functional, a little dull, and if looked at from a certain angle, possibly a little ugly. They came in three colors - silver, black and white - purely as a concession aimed at solving that perennial Korean problem of how you find your Hyundai Avante in a parking garage filled with a hundred other otherwise identical Hyundai Avantes - having three colors reduced the size of that task by two-thirds. But now Hyundai is designing radically different cars and painting them radically different colors, making people nervous."

While it appears that Hyundai is rejecting the safety-in-numbers approach to car design and adopting dangerous foreign ideas, it is not certain this breaches any national security laws, although some have speculated that those buying the vehicles might be.

Kim says he returned to the dealership to ask if they would take the car back, but staff there refused to speak to him.

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"Screw poverty, what about the East Sea?"

Anger erupted today during a meeting between the Korean U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and GNP leaders, after he asked for the South Korean parliament's cooperation to cut global poverty in half by 2015 during a luncheon meeting.

During the expensive lunch, Ban said the U.N. needs the help of parliaments around the world to succeed in the project, known as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. According to the Global Hunger Index, about 195 million children under the age of five go hungry every day, mainly due to rising food prices caused by politicians eating large amounts of food at meetings where they discuss how to help the poor. Figures suggest that 925 million people world wide go hungry every day.

South Korean officials felt that Ban's call on global poverty over lunch meant that he really didn't like the food, but the main reason for their anger was the so-called United Nations' continued insistence on discussing trivia when there are far more important issues affecting the world. "Screw poverty, what about the East Sea?" shouted one of the ruling Grand National Party's committee members as he angrily stood up at the table and made threatening moves towards the U.N. Secretary General.

Other members demanded the UN chief remember his Korean nationality and work to ensure the International Hydrographic Organization adopts the simultaneous use of the correct "East Sea" and incorrect "Sea of Japan" to describe the body of water between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.

The remainder of the expensive luncheon was tense, as UN and GNP staff argued about ownership of the dinner table's water jars.

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Korea May Have Existed 'Before Universe Began' - Scientist

Koreans can trace their history back more than 5,000 years, but new research by a Korean scientist suggests that the Korean civilization may date back much further - in fact to before the Universe began.

The revelation relies on what is called 'Limited Expansion Theory', which postulates that as the Universe expands it gradually slows under its own gravity and begins to contract, eventually ending in the opposite of the 'Big Bang', a so-called 'Big Crunch'. While the principle has been well understood within the scientific community for a number of years, Professor Kim's research suggests that because of the nature of the subsequent infinitely dense singularity, a subsequent second 'Big Bang' is inevitable, which - coupled with the nature of the universe as a closed system with no external variables, would result the second Universe's history unfolding in exactly the same way as the first.

"It's like pi," he explained invoking math - a little understood field in the West - "it starts off with something simple and ends in infinite complexity, but the beginning is the same and so everything which comes after will be the same. Which means that because Korea exists now, it will exist again and in fact, it may have existed before if our current Universe if it isn't the first one. And it would be arrogant to assume ours was the first." said the professor, perhaps again.

It is not known whether the possibility that the Korean civilization may be at least 30 billion years old will alter the international community's continued irrational refusal to accept that Dokdo really is Korean territory.

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Global Financial Crisis Could Damage Dokdo's Main Export of Fear

Dokdo's political leaders are locked in crisis talks today over fears that the second phase of the Global Financial Crisis, or der globalen Finanzkrise as it is called in Germany where it was planned, will severely damage Dokdo's main export of fear.

While Dokdo has manufactured fear for over sixty years, exports began to rise significantly after the ending of the Cold War, as the production of fear declined globally. Increasing consumption of Dokdo fear - particularly on the Korean mainland - has led to a vibrant economy and burgeoning population for the islands. However, the global export market suffered a setback ten years ago with the development of terror, which many described as stronger and more addictive than fear.

In recent months exports of fear from Dokdo have risen sharply again, but now it is feared that as der globalen Finanzkrise sweeps the world, it will inevitably lessen the consumption of Dokdo-produced fear, even within Korea. If Dokdo does manage to maintain some exports of fear, it is likely to be in the context of a much more competitive market, with lower prices.

"Many Koreans are going to stop consuming imports of Dokdo fear when they don't have the money to buy food, which is a more immediate and locally-produced fear." said 48 year-old Professor Kim from Dokdo International University. Mainland Koreans - or 'liberals' as they are known on Dokdo - have been buying gold in large quantities this year, but it is not thought to be edible.

Law School Graduates Face Grim Reality

The first wave of law school graduates to graduate since Korea introduced the U.S.-style law school system here in 2008 will hit the market early next year, prompting warnings from the legal professors who taught them that there will be too many seeking too few jobs.

"This country will have 1,500 new lawyers next year, but they will be driven into cutthroat competition" said 54 year-old Professor Kim from Seoul International University, although other experts have said this is wishful thinking. "The infrastructure is still too weak to accommodate a large number of new lawyers in such a short period of time" he added. Like many things built in Korea in the 1980s and 90s the legal infrastructure may be weak, but the idea that it might collapse taking hundreds of lawyers with it has also been described as wishful thinking, and the more likely outcome is that graduate lawyers will try to create business to earn an income.

The theory appeared to be confirmed over the weekend when one soon-to-graduate law student was discovered digging on a waterlogged mountain overlooking some apartment blocks. He denies he was trying to start a landslide, and has employed five lawyers to defend his case.

There is some evidence that soon lawyers will be spending much of their time suing each other. 23 year-old Kim became the first student to launch a class-action lawsuit against other legal graduates this year, saying they willfully damaged his chances of gaining useful employment. But legal experts say the class-action is likely to fail on both counts, because lawyers have no class and are not useful. In the past, Korean lawyers have argued that they make people's lives better by giving them access to the law, although the definition of "people" in the most popular legal textbook "K-Laws Into Clients (23rd Edition – 2011)" is "pure-blooded individuals... … earning no less than 900,000,000 won per year ($85,000)".

Despite the deluge of legal graduates about to burst through the system, the Ministry of Injustice are reluctant to stop the tsunami of lawyers which are coming through the educational system, because in Korea crime, divorce and natural disasters are treated as economic gains for GDP purposes, mostly through the impact of lawyers' fees. Some say though that this ignores the real socio-economic fallout of these weapons of mass-distraction. In reality they argue, studies have shown that for every additional 1,000 lawyers employed in Korea, GDP actually falls by 0.1%.

Some have urged the Korean government to take the Dokdo issue to the International Court of Justice in The Hague as Japan has repeatedly requested. The government's refusal to do this is mystifying since there is no doubt that Korea would win in the face of Japan's utterly baseless and fabricated claims. Estimates suggest that the legal process of gathering 5,000 years of evidence for Korea's factual case could occupy 500 lawyers for the next several years, reducing the legal surplus. By that time, the Pyeongchang Olympics will occur, and the event is expected to bring with it a large number of construction-related lawsuits, as well as two years of legal wrangling with the Olympic authorities after the Games over Korean athletes who were obviously cheated out of medals.

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Japanese Invasion of Korea Pushed Back at Gimpo

Japanese lawmakers who attempted to visit Ulleung Island yesterday were successfully repelled by Korean border guards at Gimpo International Airport after they attempted to begin a fact-finding tour. The provocation was deliberately designed to be culturally insensitive, as it is well-known that facts are highly offensive to the Korean people.

The lawmakers claimed they wanted to visit the Dokdo Museum on Ulleung Island, to try and 'learn' how the territorial problem is viewed in South Korea. Dokdo is wrongly called Takeshima by the Japanese, and wrongly called the Liancourt Rocks by the so-called 'International Community'. Tokyo has repeatedly said that it wishes to refer the so-called 'dispute' - which is not a dispute at all because Korean sovereignty over Dokdo is a fact in Korea - to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, even though it knows that President Lee Myung-bak can not agree to this because he is busy doing his hair.

One of the Japanese lawmakers even tried to lie his way into Korea, stating "We have no intention whatsoever to claim 'Takeshima is our territory' while hoisting Japan’s national flag on Ulleungdo Island". But border guards - anxious to see off the threat quickly - were unable to find where the lawmaker had concealed the flag he intended to raise.

In May this year, three Korean lawmakers visited the Kuril islands, which were Japanese territory until they were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945. Japan's opposition to the trip provoked the lawmakers to send a letter of complaint to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul stating "Our trip was legitimate parliamentarian activity. A complaint from Japan is an intervention against Korean sovereignty." Japan is evidently unashamed of its blatant double-standard in subsequently trying to send three lawmakers to Ulleung.

While Korea has little intelligence on Japan, it is believed the ultra-rightwingers were hoping to retailiate for the Korean Kuril visit, and change their party's diminished status at home as part of their 'Dokdo Crusade'. The Crusaders' trip to Ulleung was secretly believed to be a cover, and they really intended to try and make their way to Dokdo and push it into disputed territory using their secret robotic implants.

Earlier in the day, a Japanese Professor - who is believed to be part of a think-tank - also tried to gain entry to Korea. The deployment of tanks in the dispute by Japan is seen as a worrying escalation, but even though many Korean weapons don't work, security experts say that one tank is not enough to defeat South Korea.

The latest spat began when Korean Air landed their new Airbus A380 at the recently extended Dokdo International Airport just outside Dokdo City, to prove sovereignty over the rocks. One of the new features of the latest Airbus plane is an 'automatic sovereignty' switch, which can be activated by being simultaneously flicked by the pilot and co-pilot, if they are sober enough. The A380 will not run regular flights from Dokdo however, due to subsidence issues, but the plane incident led the Japanese government to ban government officials from traveling with Korean Air unless they carried a parachute.

Koreans reacted furiously to the Japanese Crusaders' attempt to infiltrate Korea. Student members of the Dokdo Academy, an affiliated college of Dokdo International University, staged a rally at Gimpo International Airport, chanting "The Japanese people are brainwashed and they should think for themselves!" Across the country, emergency Taekwondo classes prepared their students to beat down the invading lawmakers when they arrived at the airport. After bringing a fellow student wearing a Japanese lawmaker mask to the ground, cries of "Finish him off!" and "Kill him!" typically screamed around the buildings. In Seoul, a government minister said "Racial discrimination is an increasing problem in South Korea, and now the world can see how these Japanese dogs are coming here to racially discriminate against us and push their message of hate".

Even 69 year-old Japanese-born President Lee Myung-bak said he could not guarantee the safety of his fellow countrymen, instead apparently choosing to take the Korean side by dispatching one of his top aides, 67 year-old Lee, to stand guard on Dokdo to prevent the Japanese lawmakers from attempting to swim from Ulleung to the islands. Despite his advanced age and increasingly diminutive stature, the 67 year-old aide won the Korea Cage-Fighting Championship three years in a row from 1970-75. Other Korean lawmakers have said they will come to Dokdo to prove to the world, once again, that Dokdo is our territory.

After the Japanese dogs were heroically repelled from Gimpo International Airport, which they will probably now try to claim as their territory as well, Tokyo filed an official protest at the prevention of free movement of its elected representatives, which technically breaches diplomatic and international laws although Korea was never keen on them anyway. But Seoul said the lawmakers were turned back legitimately after testing positive for radiation.

Korean lawmakers say that in response they will step up their regular visits to the occupied Korean island of Daemado - which is wrongly called Tsushima by occupying Japanese forces. The Korean government says that despite Tokyo's outrageous international provocation, it will "continue to pursue a calm and logical approach to the coming war with Japan."

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