Word: koreanness
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...South Korea's most famous cold-case files, a sensational murder that drummed up sentiment against U.S. military bases in the country for nearly a decade. On April 3, 1997, a South Korean university student, Cho Chong Pil, 22, was found dead on the bathroom floor of a Burger King restaurant in Itaewon, a nightlife district popular among foreigners in central Seoul. He had been stabbed several times in the neck in what prosecutors later called a random "American gang-style" killing. After several days, they named two suspects who had dined together at the fast-food restaurant that evening...
...been over 10 years since the crime went to trial, and both suspects, after serving some prison time, are free. Now, the Burger King murder is back. Last month, prosecutors reopened the case after the unresolved crime got a wave of attention from a South Korean film and several television series this fall. Critics have long said the trial was bungled, claiming that a 1966 bilateral treaty (SOFA), which outlines the legal rights and responsibilities of U.S. soldiers in South Korea, hinders investigations into crimes committed by American servicemen and their families in South Korea. In 1998, the court dropped...
...murder of Cho remains a mystery, a fact that has infuriated South Korean activists who made the crime a cause célèbre in their fight against the U.S. military presence in their country. After authorities promised to pursue Patterson's case further in 1998, a prosecutor mistakenly failed to renew a travel ban on him. Patterson returned to California in 1999, where he remains today. (Lee, after being acquitted, also returned to the U.S.) In 2006, a Seoul court ordered the government to award $34,000 to the victim's family. The case remained officially closed until...
...Given the North's long-established record of following periods of belligerence with a willingness to talk, Pyongyang's current sound track has been greeted warily in Seoul and Washington. Intense wariness is now deeply ingrained in the diplomats now dealing with the regime. Several senior South Korean officials tell TIME that, at best, they are now, as one put it, "skeptically optimistic, if that makes any sense...
...good news, sources in Seoul say, is that the South Korean government and the Obama Administration are "not only on the same page, but on the same paragraph" when it comes to dealing with the North, as one adviser to President Lee Myung Bak put it recently. One senior diplomat adds that his "gut instinct" is that the North will in fact return relatively soon to the nuclear bargaining table. But even if that happens, Seoul concurs with Bosworth's assessment, on returning from Pyongyang last month, that the sequencing of reciprocal steps by the two sides is likely...