Echoes of Hwang Woosuk (in Japan)

I'm not so sure the blogosphere will explode over Haruko Obokata the way it did over Dr Hwang, but there are interesting parallels. 

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/1780/article/p2p-79785427/

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Busy busy busy

Been a busy few weeks, and I'm trying to write something tying Russia's territorial grab in Ukraine (i.e., Crimea) with the threat of Japan's historically revisionist right wing (which, according to Yushukan Museum at the Yasukuni Shrine, believes that Japan's annexation of Korea was legal and legitimate but stripping it away was not).

In the meantime, here's a cute kid named Yebin who is all over the Internets:



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See you in Pyeongchang...

With the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics now gone do svidaniya, the spotlight is slowly making its way to Rio de Janeiro and Pyongchang (p'yŏng•ch'ang, also spelled Pyeongchang).

In that vein, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting video on how the preparation is going for the 2018 Winter Olympics in the rural mountainous P'yŏngch'ang-gun County of South Korea's Kangwon-do Province:



As I noted in my Twitter feed (@kushibo), NBC folks kept pronouncing it pyee-ahng-chang, a result of that extraneous e in the atrocious Pyeongchang spelling:

NBC News correspondent reporting on the closing ceremony pronounced @Pyeongchang2018 as "pee-ahng-chang." Bring back McCune-Reischauer!
— kushibo (@kushibo) February 24, 2014

Yup. Pee-ahng-chang.

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China TV expose on sex workers sparks angry backlash

I thought this was a rather interesting story coming out of China. Very telling in how distrust of the powers that be is growing in the People's Republic. China TV expose on sex workers sparks angry backlash

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Team USA's Sochi uniforms designed by Korean immigrant couple

No, I'm not talking about the folks at Forever 21.

The Sochi uniforms, which some see as a bit of Americana and others see as a reject from Grandpa's closet were designed and manufactured by the Park family of the City of Commerce in Los Angeles County.

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IOC officials' brains: "Maybe we should have gone with Pyongchang in 2014"

I've made it clear in the past that I thought it was a mistake to choose a Russian summer resort for the bikini-clad that is so close to on-going terrorist activity within the same country over P'yŏngch'ang [Pyeongchang] as the host of the 2014 Olympics.

Well, it seems, there are lots of people in Sochi now, including journalists, coming out and pointing out the myriad ways in which Sochi is simply not ready.

Of course, since Pyongchang was eventually given the Winter Olympics for 2018, we may very well be having a similar conversation — no hosting has ever gone 100% smoothly — in four years. But at least there won't be threats of a boycott over rampant homophobia.

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