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A thousand days after the sinking of the ferry Sewol, the disaster is still a controversy as survivors and victims' families say they continue to suffer as their suspicions remain unanswered. The sinking killed 304 passengers, most of them students of Danwon High School in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, on a school excursion. Nine passengers remain unaccounted for and the Sewol still lies on the seabed off the southern Jin Island...(source: K. Times, 1.09)

Therefore the first candlelight rally of the new year had been held in honor of the Sewol ferry disaster(aka Sewol Massacre). Hankyoreh reported last Friday(1.06): During a press conference(1.05 @KCTU's HQ in Seoul), the organizers of the rally (known as the Emergency Nationwide Campaign for the Resignation of Park Geun-hye) announced that the title of the 11th candlelight rally, which will be held on Jan. 7, is “Down with Park Geun-hye and Up with the Sewol Ferry.”

Last Saturday(1.07) afternoon/evening: Hundred of thousands of South Koreans took to streets across the country, demanding - once again - that scandal-tainted President Park Geun-hye step down. It was the 11th consecutive weekend rally, which first started on Oct. 29 over an influence-peddling scandal centered on Park and her long-time friend Choi Soon-sil... With some 1,500 civic groups involved, the first rally of the new year at Seoul's Gwanghwamun Square centered around the Sewol ferry, whose sinking off the country's southwest coast in April 2014 took the lives of more than 300 people, most of whom were high school students on a field trip... Holding placards critical of Park and lit candles, protesters demanded the immediate resignation of the president and the salvage of the Sewol, which has yet to be retrieved from under the sea. Organizers said about 600,000 gathered for the rally in central Seoul...

Similar anti-Park rallies were also staged in major cities across the country on Saturday, including Ulsan, Busan...

...Gwangju, Daegu...

...and Daejeon, with protesters calling for Park's resignation and the Constitutional Court's approval of her impeachment...(source: Yonhap, 1.08)

The related report by KCTU(in Korean, but incl. a lot of pics) you'll get here.

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