.@realDonaldTrump’s second summit with #Kimjongun just gives #NorthKorea more time to perfect the bomb, says @FletcherSchool professor @SungYoonLee1. https://t.co/FdcZDPATNg
— Tufts Magazine (@TuftsMagazine) February 19, 2019
Via a reader tip comes this news of two former USFK soldiers charged in a murder plot in Michigan:
A woman and her boyfriend were deployed with the U.S. Army in South Korea when they conspired via Snapchat to kill her husband so she could claim the life insurance money, police in Michigan said.
Berrian County Judge Sterling Schrock ruled Wednesday in a preliminary hearing that the murder trial of Kemia Hassel, 22, and Jeremy Cuellar, 24, will begin April 30.
Associated Press
Both have pleaded not guilty in the Dec. 31 killing of U.S. Army Sgt. Tyrone Hassel III. Cuellar was also charged with a felony firearms count.
Authorities say the 23-year-old Hassel was ambushed while visiting his family in St. Joseph Township. He died of multiple gunshot wounds, including one to the head, according to the autopsy report.
All three were soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart in Georgia.
Kemia Hassel told police in a signed statement that she spent months planning how to kill her husband so she could continue her romantic relationship with Cuellar, Township Police Officer Mike Lanier testified Wednesday.
Kemia and Tyrone Hassel married in 2016 and had a 1-year-old son. She told police she was unhappy with her marriage, but didn’t want to go through a divorce because she then wouldn’t be able to receive any life insurance money, Lanier said.
Hassel and Cuellar began plotting while they were deployed in South Korea last year, Lanier said. The pair communicated through Snapchat because they believed the social media app’s temporary messages would make it difficult for police to trace, he said.
You can read more at the link.
I guess this all comes down to what is considered a “meaningful” step to remove sanctions:
U.S. President Donald Trump has urged North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to take “meaningful” steps for denuclearization to earn a lifting of sanctions on his regime, a few days before their second summit in Vietnam.
Korea Times
“The sanctions are on in full,” Trump told reporters at the White House, Wednesday (local time). “I have not taken sanctions off. I would love to be able to, but in order to do that, we have to do something that is meaningful on the other side.”
The U.S. leader implied that denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula will be a long process, saying he hopes to hold more summits with Kim down the road.
“I don’t think this will be the last meeting by any chance,” Trump said.
You can read more at the link.
It looks like Key Resolve is going to happen this spring, just don’t call it Key Resolve:
South Korea and the United States will rename their springtime combined Key Resolve exercise and desist from using the Foal Eagle name for their annual field training, a government source in Seoul said Wednesday.
The move appears to be part of efforts to prevent tensions with North Korea amid ongoing peace efforts with the communist state. Pyongyang has long denounced allied exercises as rehearsals for invasion.
The Key Resolve command post exercise will be renamed the “19-1 Exercise,” and focus on bolstering defensive capabilities, the source said on condition of anonymity. This year’s edition is expected to kick off its two-week schedule on March 4.The name of the Foal Eagle field training exercise, usually scheduled to occur between March and April, will no longer be used. But battalion-level portions of the exercise are expected to proceed as they have been in the past, according to the source.
Yonhap News
You can read more at the link, but USFK definitely found the most boring exercise name ever to replace Key Resolve with. I would love to know if North Korea has stopped or changed the names of any of their exercises?
Anyway does anyone have any better ideas of what to rename Key Resolve as?
NKorean defector and ex-diplomat Thae Yong Ho says Pyongyang never posed real threat of war but “Trump fell into Kim Jong Un’s trap” by seeking peace before denuclearization pic.twitter.com/3LY9UuTeUU
— Kim Gamel (@kimgamel) February 19, 2019
Conservative journalists were thrown in jail for libel even though they reported true information, and a presidential aide is convicted of corruption and is sentenced to jail, and yet is able to walk around a free man:
A court on Thursday handed down a six-year prison term to a former senior secretary to President Moon Jae-in over a corruption case related to a gaming industry body, and one year in jail, suspended for two years, for abuse of power.
Yonhap News
Jun Byung-hun, an ex-presidential aide for political affairs and a former lawmaker, has been suspected of forcing two home shopping channels — Lotte Home Shopping and GS Home Shopping — and telecom company KT to donate 550 million won (US$514,260) between 2014 and 2017 to the Korea e-Sports Association, over which he practically held control. But he was not taken into custody after the ruling.
The Seoul Central Court also slapped him with a fine of 350 million won and an overdraft fee of 25 million won.
The court did not issue a warrant to arrest him as it judged that “it is appropriate for him to appeal to a higher court and solve the dispute (with the prosecution) without detention.”
“His criminal responsibility is grave,” the court said in its verdict, adding that Jun damaged the fairness and integrity of parliament by accepting bribes from companies related to his parliamentary activities.
You can read more at the link.
There is no doubt that China has a long-term strategy to absorb Taiwan at some point, but I think a military attack is too risky due to a possible US military response. I don’t see the security environment changing that much by 2025 to make such an attack less risky:
A former Japanese military officer recently made waves after saying he believes China plans to invade and annex Taiwan by 2025 and Okinawa by 2045.
Stars & Stripes
The comments by retired Lt. Gen. Kunio Orita, a 35-year veteran of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force and a former commander of the 301st Tactical Fighter Squadron and 6th Air Wing, appeared last month in the English-language Taiwan News.
Orita, who retired in 2009 and is now a guest professor at Toyo Gakuen University in Tokyo, recently told Stars and Stripes he expects Beijing will attempt to expand its sphere of influence by first taking control of Taiwan and then militarizing a key disputed islet in the South China Sea.
Once that’s accomplished, he said, China will set its sights on Japan’s southern island prefecture, which hosts about half of the approximately 54,000 U.S. troops serving in Japan.
You can read much more at the link, but Lt. Gen Orita also claims that the anti-US protest movement on Okinawa is sponsored by Beijing. He even says Beijing is providing funding to Okinawa media outlets. That is a very serious accusation if true and I would hope the Japanese government is vigorously working to find out who these Beijing agents are.
Apparently the Japanese government is concerned that President Trump will cut a deal to eliminate North Korea’s ICBMs, but leave them with nuclear weapons. This is significant to Japan because North Korea’s shorter range missiles can easily target Japan with nuclear weapons:
When U.S. President Donald Trump sits down to talk peace with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this month, one of America’s closest allies — Japan — will be looking on with apprehension.
Stars & Stripes
Like the first time Trump met Kim in June, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has found himself on the outside peering in before their second summit set for Feb. 27-28 in Hanoi. The meeting brings both the promise of a less-dangerous North Korea and the potential peril of a weak deal that leaves Japan exposed to Kim’s weapons of mass destruction and does nothing to help ease Tokyo’s own hostility with Pyongyang.
Mitoji Yabunaka, who served as Japan’s envoy to six-party talks with North Korea more than a decade ago, said the country feared “a half-baked, deceptive agreement which leads to the Trump administration taking a soft line on North Korea by removing economic sanctions” without serious progress on disarmament. That would be “the nightmare scenario,” Yabunaka said.
While Japan and the U.S. — which guarantees the country’s security under a 1960 treaty — both want North Korea to give up its weapons, their interests could diverge as talks progress. Kim’s short- to medium-range rockets pose the most immediate danger to Japan, not the intercontinental ballistic missiles that now threaten the American homeland.
You can read more at the link, but if such a deal is reached with the Kim regime I suspect that the Trump administration would make certain security guarantees towards Japan that North Korea would face an overwhelming counterattack if they ever targeted Japan with their missiles.
I guess we will see what deal is struck in about a week.
