South Korea yesterday said it would allow foreign doctors to work in its hospitals after a rigorous vetting process, as a months-long doctors’ strike shows no sign of resolution.
Thousands stopped working on Feb. 20 to protest government plans to train more doctors, causing chaos in hospitals.
The government, which has already offered some concessions in a bid to end the standoff, this week said that doctors with foreign medical licenses would be allowed to practice in the country, in a bid to ease service disruptions.
After the move was announced, Korean Medical Association head Lim Hyun-taek shared a screenshot of a news report on newly graduated Somali doctors with the comment: “Coming Soon.”
The post, which was later removed, prompted widespread online criticism, and was highly inappropriate and “clearly racist,” said Kim Jae-heon, secretary-general of a non-governmental organization advocating free medical care.
The post “exploited Islamophobia and stereotyping against developing countries,” he said.
South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said the government would make sure to “have a thorough safety system to prevent unqualified doctors [with foreign licenses] from treating our people.”
The government is locked in a protracted standoff with the junior doctors, who have refused to return to their hospitals, despite the health ministry offering last month to scale back proposed medical training reforms for next year.
The striking doctors have rejected the offer, demanding instead that the plan to create more doctors be scrapped entirely.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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