Oh vows to bring policy, organizational changes to Seoul City
Posted : 2021-04-08 16:14
Updated : 2021-04-08 18:33 Oh Se-hoon, winner of the Seoul mayoral by-election earlier this week, bows to citizens before he enters Seoul City Hall, Thursday, to begin his third term as mayor. Yonhap
New mayor takes office after by-election victory
By Bahk Eun-ji
New Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has been busy from the first day of his term, Thursday, the day after he won the mayoral by-election the previous day.
The former two-term mayor between 2006 and 2011 returned to City Hall after 10 years, and spent the day meeting city officials, learning about pending issues and visiting the Seoul Metropolitan Council and a vaccination center.
New Seoul mayor may seek to reverse predecessor s policies
Posted : 2021-04-07 23:26
Updated : 2021-04-08 05:31 Oh Se-hoon, third from right, the Seoul mayoral candidate of the main opposition People Power Party, bumps fists with a party member at party headquarters on Seoul s Yeouido, Wednesday, before an exit poll was announced. Oh gained 59 percent in the preliminary exit poll jointly released by three broadcasters. Yonhap
By Bahk Eun-ji
Oh Se-hoon of the conservative main opposition People Power Party (PPP), who again became Seoul mayor following Wednesday s by-election, is expected to revive some of the signature policies he pursued previously while serving as mayor of the capital between 2006 and 2011.
Posted : 2021-04-04 16:50
Updated : 2021-04-04 16:52
A voter casts his ballot for the Seoul mayoral by-election at a polling station in Seoul Station, Friday, the first day of the two-day early voting period for the April 7 by-elections. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
By Jung Da-min
Both the ruling and main opposition parties have claimed the high early voting turnout in Wednesday s by-elections would work to their advantages, helping their candidates win the Seoul and Busan mayoral races.
While the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) said the high early voting turnout showed the DPK supporters solidarity and high participation in favor of its candidate Park Young-sun, the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) said people would have voted for its candidate Oh Se-hoon to judge the policy failures of the ruling bloc.
Harvard Law School professor of Japanese Legal Studies J. Mark Ramseyer has faced an outpouring of public criticism from government officials worldwide against his upcoming paper, which claims that sex slaves, known as âcomfort women,â under the Imperial Japanese military were voluntary employed.
Ramseyerâs paper stoked international controversy by disputing the historical consensus that âcomfort womenâ â a euphemism commonly used to refer to women and girls used as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese military before and during World War II â were compelled into sex work against their will.
Unlike many scholastic disputes, which do not stretch far outside academia, Ramseyerâs article has drawn strong responses from high-ranking government officials of several countries, including the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, and even North Korea.
Graffiti encroaching on Seoul
By Richard Pennington
I like to think of myself as a modern guy, open to contemporary ideas and trends. And so I am, in many ways. And yet there are some issues on which I am undeniably old school. That was on display in my Korea Times column of Sept. 9-10, 2020 about tattoos. I stated ― reasonably and coherently, I hope ― that I do not like them.
My response to graffiti is much the same, although the negative vibes generated seem to be even stronger. I will defend people who get tattoos in one sense: They are merely defacing their own bodies. The same cannot be said for graffiti artists who use spray paint and markers to decorate public and private property. Like tattooing, graffiti is not new. Pompeii, buried in volcanic ash in 79 AD and uncovered in the 18th century, had some form of graffiti on its walls.