Flying Yangban

Korean fishing boat seized by Somali pirates

I would say something silly like "shiver me timbers" but this is serious. A Korean fishing boat has been seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia (Chosun):

A South Korean trawler was hijacked on Tuesday off the coast of Africa. The 160-foot fishing vessel Dongwon 628 was about a hundred kilometers off the Somali coast when its crew put in a radio distress call.

U.S. and Dutch naval ships patrolling international waters in the Persian Gulf region arrived at the scene a few hours later. Yet by then the pirates had reportedly taken control of the Korean vessel and efforts to intervene were abandoned when members of the Korean crew were threatened with guns. According to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain the ship then turned toward Somali territorial waters.

Please note that it was not just ships from the global hegemony that tried to help the Koreans, but also at least one from the Netherlands (I thought they had pulled out of the area).

Yonhap reports that the ships involved in the attempted rescue were the The USS Roosevelt and Dutch ship HNLMS Zeven Provincien.

One wonders why they would linger in an area that has long been known for piracy.

BTW, that last link includes a nice graphic that I stole.  Here it is (BBC):

I would imagine that most of the piracy on in Indonesian waters and on the west coast of Africa is against local boats, but piracy off the Horn of Africa and in the Straits of Malacca is a serious international concern.  I have previously posted on Korean interests and piracy in the straits.  Hopefully, this incident will cause the Korean government to become more involved in combating pirates.

6,691 Iranians on a criminal rampage in Korea? The Chosun says so.

I was checking out a piece in the Chosun on foreign criminals in Korea when the last paragraph jumped out at me:

The biggest group of convicted lawbreakers came from Iran, who made up 6,691 of every 100,000 foreign criminals, followed by 6,304 Russians, 5,672 Hong Kong citizens, 4,958 Americans and 3,190 Germans. Statistically the most law-abiding guests were the Nepalese, who made up only 211 convicted criminals per 100,000 wrongdoers from abroad, followed by 571 Indonesians, 807 Filipinos and 821 Thais.

100,000 foreign criminals?

This is a pretty good example of a poorly chosen method of reporting statistics for the simple reason that there were nowhere near 100,000 foreigners convicted of crimes in 2004 (the year reported on in the article).  The most damnable part is that the apparent precision of the measurement gives more weight to the false impression of rampant criminal activity among foreigners.  Someone who did not read that paragraph carefully might think that there were, for example, 4,958 Americans convicted of crimes in Korea in 2004.  What is wrong with saying 4.96% instead of 4,958 of 100,000?

Luckily, the actual number of crimes was listed in the previous paragraph:

The number of foreign criminals in Korea increased more than five-fold since 1988, from 2,532 to 13,045 in 2004, while the overall number of foreigners only grew 2.6 times, from 2.17 million in 1998 to 5.75 million in 2004, meaning the number of criminals among them rose twice as fast.

With that in mind, let's figure out what the actually numbers really were.  Being an American, I'll use those numbers:

(13,045/100,000) x 4,958 = 646.7711

So, there were about 647 Americans convicted of crimes in Korea in 2004, not exactly a rampage of crime.  That is 4.9697%, which is pretty close to the number reported by the Chosun (math in not an exact science).

So you can rest at night knowing that hordes of foreign criminals will not kill you in your sleep.