Month: December 2014

China wary over S. Korea-US-Japan pact on N.K. intel http://t.co/7RQ3LdlKj6 via @GlobalPost

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) December 27, 2014

A South Korean man (C) is being repatriated at the truce village of Panmunjeom on Dec. 26, 2014. The 52-year-old, identified only by his surname Ma, illegally entered North Korea in November. (Yonhap)

It seems we can’t go more than a few months without a missing Malaysian linked airplane making headlines:

South Korea’s foreign ministry said Sunday that at least three South Koreans were on board an AirAsia plane that went missing en route from Indonesia to Singapore.

The ministry said that a South Korean man and a woman in their 30s, and an infant were among the 162 passengers and crew members on AirAsia’s flight QZ8501 that lost contact with Jakarta’s air traffic control after takeoff early Sunday.

The foreign ministry said it convened an emergency meeting to address the issue, saying that it will monitor progress in the search operations for the missing plane.

“The Seoul government plans to closely watch related authorities’ search operations and will study various options, including the dispatch of a response team,” Lee Jeong-gwan, ambassador for overseas Koreans and consular affairs, said at the opening of the meeting. [Yonhap]

AirAsia’s majority ownership is from a Malaysian company which the industry considers as having a very good safety record.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

Here are some posting from this week in the ROK Drop Forums:

• 1SG Receives ARCOM for Correcting Social Media Posts
• The Best Time to Invade the US
• Latest Missouri Unrest Against Police
• Andrei Lankov on North Korea’s Sony Cyberattack
• Lee Hyo-ri Vows to Take Off Her Clothes to End Ssangyong Labor Strife
• President Obama’s Approval Rating With US Military Hits A Record Low
• Husband and Wife Become Real Life Christmas Grinches
• Should US Army Deserter Who Joined the French Foreign Legion Be Sent to Jail?

Husband embraced dear wife for the last time and refused to let go http://t.co/s9Di9YH7H9 pic.twitter.com/HIiEC0Fi2M

— DramaFever (@dramafever) December 27, 2014

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un tours a greenhouse at a military farm growing vegetables. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported it on Dec. 26, 2014, without elaborating on the venue or timing of the visit. (Yonhap)

An unfortunate accident has killed three workers at a nuclear power plant in Ulsan that was about to go online:

The labor ministry has ordered two nuclear reactors under construction to be shut down to look into the cause of a toxic gas leak that killed three workers, a local branch said Saturday.

Three workers died Friday apparently after inhaling toxic gas at the construction site of a nuclear reactor in Ulsan, about 410 kilometers southeast of Seoul.

The state-run Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co. earlier said it suspected nitrogen gas leaked from an underground cable caused the deaths.

The ministry said it will cooperate with the occupational safety agency, the emergency management agency and police to conduct a joint probe into the site and summon officials at the state nuclear power company and contractors.

“We will promptly conduct an investigation and hold accountable those who are responsible (in the incident) if any irregularities are discovered,” Yoo Han-bong, who leads the labor ministry’s Ulsan branch, said.

The New Gori No. 3 reactor with a rated capacity of 1,400 megawatts was 99 percent complete for full operation scheduled for next June, and was undergoing a test run since last month to receive approval from the state nuclear watchdog. The New Gori No. 4 reactor was 98 percent complete, with commercial operation slated for 2016.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but it will be interesting to see if the investigation shows any sloppy safety practices led to this tragedy.  Also of interest in the article is that Korea’s nuclear power plants have also been facing cyber attacks and of course the IP address for the attacks was coming out of China.  North Korea is the suspected culprit, but the fact that China continues to allow them use IP addresses in their country shows how they are complicit in letting them conduct these cyberattacks.

This is nothing new and par for the course in regards to provocative bluster from the North Koreans, however it still isn’t right:

On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of “The Interview.” It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

It wasn’t the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top U.S. and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey.”

The defense commission also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, which happened after the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack. The U.S. government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but President Obama actually got off pretty light compared to the ambassador of Botswana of all places that the North Koreans called a “black bastard”.

Kidnapped directors and American defectors: North Korea's six decades of cinema http://t.co/j6ZVBHHjhl via @mashable #NorthKorea #DPRK

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) December 22, 2014

South Korean and U.S. Marines hold a joint firing drill in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, on Dec. 23, 2014. (Photo courtesy of First Marine Division) (Yonhap)