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Japan Today
15-07-2025
- Science
- Japan Today
Rotten insects, viral videos and climate change: S Korea battles 'lovebug' invasion
First reported in Incheon in 2015, South Korea is now annually hit by a weeks-long infestation of 'lovebugs', a type of March fly By Claire LEE K-pop's BTS are grossed out by them. A YouTuber ate them. Hikers plough through them: South Korea is dealing with a "lovebug" invasion that experts say highlights worsening climate change. First identified in South Korea a decade ago, Seoul is now annually hit by a weeks-long infestation of the Plecia nearctica insect, a type of March fly nicknamed "lovebug" for their distinctive mating behavior, which sees them fly around in coupled pairs. Huge clouds of the insects, which are harmless to humans, blanket apartment walls and mountain trails and, after they quickly die, leave behind piles of rotting black remains and a foul stench. Complaints about the bugs, which scientists believe came from southern China and have surged with rising temperatures linked to climate change, have risen sharply, Seoul city data showed. Even K-pop BTS idol RM is seen seemingly cursing upon spotting the insects in a viral video, with fellow bandmember Jin separately seen casually blowing a lovebug out of his way mid-performance. "In general, many insects tend to grow more rapidly in warmer temperatures," Ju Jung-won, a deputy researcher at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, told AFP. "As for the lovebugs, it looks like the temperature and environment found in foreign regions where they are active are now taking hold in South Korea as well, allowing them to survive here." At the peak of Gyeyangsan Mountain in Incheon, west of Seoul, public servants wearing makeshift protective gear struggled to clear piles of dead insects, as vast swarms of the bugs circled in the air, making it hard for people in the area to keep their eyes open. At their worst, the piles of dead lovebugs in parts of the mountain were "stacked more than 10 centimeters high," said Jung Yong-sun, 59, who was tasked with pest-control duties. Walking through them, he added, "felt like stepping on something soft and cushiony." The unpleasant odor took many by surprise. "At first, I thought it was food waste... Turns out, it was the stench of dead bugs," said Ahn So-young, a 29-year-old hiker. "I cried when I came up here. I was so scared." Park Sun-jae, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Biological Resources, told AFP that the bugs were first reported in South Korea in Incheon in 2015. "Since 2022, the population has begun to surge," Park said, adding that they were now "found throughout the greater Seoul metropolitan area". This year, the infestation has been widely documented online, with content creators flocking to the worst-affected areas to cash in on the inundation. One YouTuber collected a massive pile of the bugs and turned them into a "burger patty", mixing them into batter before frying and eating them on camera. "It's not bad. It's really delicious," he said in the video, which has garnered more than 648,000 views. On Gyeyangsan Mountain, content creators Kim Ji-young and Sam Jung intentionally dressed in white — a color known to attract the bugs — and filmed themselves being swarmed. "This is probably something I'll never experience again in my lifetime," Jung said, as his hat and clothes were crawling with the bugs. But for many Seoul residents, the bugs aren't just a viral moment. They are disrupting daily routines. In Daejo Market in Seoul's Eunpyeong district, restaurant owners had to constantly blow the bugs away to protect their ingredients. Dead insects kept piling up on the floor -- putting severe pressure to the cleaners' workload. "I want to be able to eat lunch without worrying about lovebugs landing on my face or getting into my food," business owner Chang Seo-young, 48, told AFP. Lovebugs -— seen by South Korean officials as "beneficial insects" for breaking down plant matter —- typically disappear naturally by early July. But scientists warn that given the unpredictability of the climate crisis, the possibility of insect species -- including ones more harmful than lovebugs -- invading the country cannot be ruled out. "I worry that future generations will have to suffer so much," said Jeon In-hyeop, a 29-year-old visitor to Gyeyangsan Mountain, after surveying parts of the summit covered in bugs. "I feel like our children might end up living in a much more unfortunate world." © 2025 AFP
Japan Today
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
Soft power: BTS fans rally behind Korean international adoptees
By Claire LEE K-pop megaband BTS is back from military service, and their international fandom -- long known for its progressive activism -- is celebrating by rallying behind a cause: adoptees from South Korea. Now Asia's fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, the idols' native South Korea remains one of the biggest exporters of adopted babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999. The country only recently acknowledged, after years of activism by adult adoptees, that the government was responsible for abuse in some such adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent from birth parents. The septet's fandom, dubbed ARMY, is known for backing causes like Black Lives Matter and ARMY4Palestine, and launched the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising project last week to support Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with or learn about their birth families, which can be a painful and legally tricky process. Almost all of BTS members have completed South Korea's mandatory military service, required of all men due to the country's military tensions with North Korea. "We are celebrating both the reunion of BTS and ARMY, and BTS members being able to reunite with their own family and friends," the BTS fan group behind the initiative, One In An ARMY, told AFP. "Helping international adoptees reunite with their birth country, culture, customs and families seemed like the perfect cause to support during this time." The fans are supporting KoRoot, a Seoul-based organization that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families and which played a key role in pushing for the government to recognize adoption-related abuses. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, told AFP it was "very touching" that the BTS fans had taken up the cause, even though "they're not even adoptees themselves". For many adoptees, seeing Korean stars in mainstream media has been a way for them to find "comfort, joy, and a sense of pride" in the roots that they were cut off from, KoRoot's leader Kim Do-hyun added. BTS, who have discussed anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House and spoken candidly about mental health, have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea's soft power reach. For years, Korean adoptees -- many of whom were adopted by white families globally -- have advocated for their rights and spoken out about encountering racism in their host countries. Some adoptees, such as the high-profile case of Adam Crapser, were later deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their U.S. citizenship. Many international adoptees feel their immigration experience has been "fraught", Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, told AFP. Some adoptees have found that, like Crapser, their guardians failed to complete the necessary paperwork to make them legal, she said. This is becoming a particular problem under US President Donald Trump, who is pushing a sweeping crackdown on purported illegal immigrants. Bae said it was possible that "'accidentally illegal' adoptee immigrants may fall further through the cracks, and their deeply unfortunate circumstances left unremedied". Reunions between Korean adoptees and their birth families can be emotionally complex, as Kara Bos -- who grew up in the United States -- experienced firsthand when she met her biological father through a landmark paternity lawsuit. During their encounter in Seoul in 2020, he refused to remove his hat, sunglasses, or mask, declined to look at her childhood photos and offered no information about her mother. He died around six months later. "The journey of birth family searching is very lonely, difficult, and costly. Many adoptees do not even have the means to return to their birth country let alone fund a family search," Bos, 44, told AFP. To have BTS fans rally around adoptees and provide help with this complex process is "a wonderful opportunity", she said. For Malene Vestergaard, a 42-year-old Korean adoptee and BTS fan in Denmark, the group's song "Whalien 52", which references a whale species whose calls go unheard by others, deeply resonated with her. "I personally sometimes feel like that whale. Being amongst my peers, but they will never be able to truly understand what my adoption has done to me," she told AFP. "For me, finding BTS at the same time I started looking for my birth family and the truth about my adoption and my falsified papers, was such a comfort." Vestergaard said the grief woven into her adoption would never go away, but that "BTS and their lyrics have made it easier to reconcile with that truth". © 2025 AFP
Forbes
25-03-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Industrial Only Electricity Deregulation Will Be A Disaster For All Louisianans
The best way to avoid a tariff is to produce steel in the U.S. This picture taken on February 13, ... More 2025 shows the main gate of a factory of South Korea's steelmaker Hyundai Steel in Pohang. (Photo by Jung Yeon-je / AFP) / TO GO WITH AFP STORY Skorea-US-trade-tariffs-steel / REPORTAGE BY Claire LEE (Photo by JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images) Louisiana finds itself at the epicenter of economic development in the Gulf South with two recent mega-projects announced—Meta and Hyundai Steel. At the same time, the LPSC is considering two proposals to 'deregulate' or 'restructure' how power is provided. One proposal is 'full deregulation' that would allow every utility customer in Louisiana to shop around for their electrical supply, and the second is 'partial deregulation' which would only allow the large industrial customers to shop for power supply. Full deregulation has been tried across the nation, and in nearly every fully deregulated state, customers pay higher electricity rates than those living in regulated states. This is because in regulated states, state agencies like the LPSC can ensure rates are fair and stable, and that utilities build enough power generation to meet every contingency. There is less known about this style of proposed partial deregulation, and only a few states, such as Nevada and Michigan, have gone down that road. Now, rumor has it, the casinos in Nevada who pushed for partial deregulation are looking to end that failed experiment because it has not reduced their electricity costs. In Michigan, the public service commission is fighting to restore resource adequacy after partial deregulation resulted in reliability issues and cost shifts to regulated customers when the unregulated energy providers failed to procure regional capacity. What would a partial deregulation in Louisiana mean? Increased prices and reduced reliability for all consumers. And it would create an administrative headache for the LPSC that is larger than they can imagine. The Commissioners just need to look around at how well 'deregulation' has worked for other states. Interestingly, the biggest push for partial deregulation is not being led by the industrial customers like the petrochemical plants operating along the Mississippi River, but rather, by the energy companies that, through partial deregulation, would be allowed to build the power generation that those large industrial customers or data centers would otherwise purchase from regulated utilities. Amplify Louisiana, the lobbying group of those energy companies hoping to build those facilities, says: 'The LPSC should welcome partnerships with private investment to benefit ratepayers. In fact, some of the largest independent power producers in the U.S. are willing to invest in Louisiana and work with the industrials to serve those needs.' The first question to be answered, what does this mean for the average Louisianan? The electricity charged to average consumers will not be based on the cost-savings realized by the industrial users with bespoke power plants. By contrast, the Amplify members developers will do very well. The industrial companies may also think that by bringing generators inside their fences or buying from an independent power producer that they can save money by not paying the usual cost per kilowatt-hour to maintain transmission lines, distribution wires, and the upkeep for the current portfolio of generators. Except these industrial plants want to keep the wires and state's generators as a backup that is subsidized and paid for by all the other consumers. How is that fair? Electricity infrastructure across the country, including in Louisiana, has needed to be renewed, and upgraded for many years—just like our roadways, water, and sewer services. Removing Louisiana's industrial base from the customer base will disproportionately place the financial burden of maintaining grid reliability on residential and small business customers, and an electricity grid is only as strong as its weakest link. There will be a greater likelihood of a broader grid failure. More importantly, deregulation will not be a win-win for the industrial customers. Without adequate onsite backup generation equal to what is necessary to run their plants, they will rely upon a weakened grid during their regular maintenance of onsite power plants. If Louisiana adopts a Texas-like deregulation scheme, the industrials could pay as much as 40-times average electricity rates to buy electricity during peak demand—a price spike that will extend across the state. By weakening the larger public grid for their own corporate benefit, the industrials will needlessly endanger the property and lives of their own families and communities. It is a matter of public safety, and with Louisiana's position in the America's energy supply chain, it is a matter of national security. Finally, since the advent of deregulation, there has been an explosion of 'new products' that seek to give an incentive here or an incentive there with each designed to tweak the regulated market into something resembling what a competitive market provides. That is, the regulators are trying to replicate what a buyer and seller commit to do: a transaction with positive economics and accountability. But deregulation or restructuring has been a disaster across the nation from conservative states to the most liberal like California. In Texas, the agency that manages the electric supply, called ERCOT, has market rules that encompass 2,125 pages and are tweaked almost constantly. To be clear, despite all this bureaucratic oversight, ERCOT has failed miserably killing hundreds during the February 2021 winter freeze and costing the state more than $100 billion in economic losses. Adding insult to injury, the Texas legislature approved billions of dollars in bailouts to the electric utilities that consumers will be paying off over years. In 2023 alone, Texas overcharged consumers $12 billion, and the grid is still not fixed. The LSPC is not equipped to manage such an unwieldy beast and should not consider allowing this money grab to occur. In Louisiana, 'partial deregulation' should be a non-starter.
