Author: GIKorea

How nice of North Korea to launch some fireworks before the start of the Freedom Shield exercise next month:

North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile toward the Yellow Sea on Thursday, Seoul’s military said, in the latest show of force ahead of a major South Korea-U.S. military exercise set to begin next week.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the launch from the North’s western port city of Nampo at 6:20 p.m. It did not elaborate further.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I did not realize it has been this long since an official state visit to the U.S. by a South Korean leader:

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will make a state visit to the United States late next month, and hold a summit with his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the two countries’ alliance and deepen political, economic, security, and people-to-people ties.

The South Korean presidential office said Wednesday that Yoon will travel to the U.S. for a state visit in late April and that a state dinner is slated for April 26. The White House said U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and his South Korean counterpart Kim Sung-han discussed preparations for the upcoming visit by Yoon and his wife, Kim Keon Hee.

It will be the first state visit to the U.S. by a South Korean leader in 12 years. The last South Korean head of state to do that was former President Lee Myung-bak, who was invited by then U.S. President Barack Obama in October 2011. Also, Yoon will be the second state guest invited by Biden since his inauguration in January 2021.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

This is just absolutely horrible to do to any animal. The stench of all these decaying dogs must have been overwhelming:

One of the four surviving dogs. (Screen grab from Care’s YouTube channel)

Over a thousand dead dogs were found on the grounds of a house in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, and police are investigating a man in his 60s on charges of violating animal protection law.

The man said he collected abandoned dogs and starved them to death, but animal rights activists allege that he was paid by dog breeders to get rid of dogs who couldn’t get pregnant anymore or whose commercial value had dipped.

A representative of animal rights group Care told cable news channel MBN that the man was paid 10,000 ($7.60) won per dog to “take care of them,” and he just locked them up and starved them to death from 2020.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

Kim Yo-jong is out making wild threats as usual before next weeks US-ROK Freedom Shield exercise:

Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, warned Tuesday the North is ready to take “overwhelming” actions against military activities by the United States and South Korea, as its rivals are staging joint military drills involving American strategic assets.

Kim also warned the North will regard any U.S. attempt to intercept a missile that it will fire as a “clear declaration of war” against the reclusive nation, according to the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

“As already clarified, we keep our eye on the restless military moves by the U.S. forces and the south Korean puppet military and are always on standby to take appropriate, quick and overwhelming action at any time according to our judgment,” Kim said in an English-language statement carried by the state-run media.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but all the U.S. is only going to intercept a missile if it fired at areas that threaten U.S. or allied territory. The U.S. Aegis ships and THAAD batteries provide terminal missile defense which means it does intercepts while the threat missile is descending from the atmosphere. This means the U.S. would need to know the area where the missile is descending to shoot it down. That is why these assets are located in areas that military commanders want protected such as the THAAD batteries in South Korea and Guam.

The U.S. also has the GMD system with interceptors located in Alaska and California to protect the U.S. homeland. If North Korea fires a missile any where near the U.S. homeland of course it will be intercepted.

Like I predicted, the Korean left is going apocalyptic with the forced labor agreement with Japan:

A group of civic groups on Tuesday condemned the government’s plan to compensate victims of Japan’s wartime forced labor on its own, saying the decision amounts to national humiliation similar to Korea’s 1910 forced annexation by Japan.

The government of President Yoon Suk Yeol announced the plan Monday in an effort to restore strained relations with Tokyo. It calls for establishing a foundation charged with collecting public donations and compensating more than a dozen victims.

Critics, including some victims, civic groups and the main opposition Democratic Party, bristled strongly at the decision, arguing that it makes no sense to compensate victims with public donations, rather than money from Japanese companies that exploited them for hard labor.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but there was never going to be a deal the Korean left would be happy signing with Japan because they need to keep this issue alive. Stoking anti-Japanese sentiment has long been a way to distract the Korean public from other issues. Even the Korean right has done this before in the past as well. Unfortunately this deal will probably not last because as soon as the Korean left takes power again they will likely scrap it.

This seems like this would be something hard to screw up, but some how DOD found a way to do just that. Kudos to Hal and Edward Barker at the Korean War Project for identifying these errors:

The US Congress has urged the US Defense Department to take immediate measures to fix more than 1,000 errors on the Washington memorial wall erected to remember service members and Korean augmentees killed during the Korean War.

Six bipartisan lawmakers, including chair of the House Committee on Armed Services Mike Rogers, on March 2 sent a letter to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

“We find these errors deeply concerning and write to seek accountability on how the Remembrance Wall’s glaring flaws went unnoticed until post-construction,” the letter to Austin read.

The Wall of Remembrance at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington was unveiled to the public on July 27 last year, marking the anniversary of the armistice agreement that brought a cessation to the three-year Korean War.

The Defense Department in January conceded there were inaccuracies on the Wall of Remembrance that features names of more than 36,000 American service members and more than 7,000 Korean augmentees who died in the theater during the 1950-53 Korean War. It pledged to correct the mistakes in coordination with the Interior Department, explaining that the US military had reviewed every name on the Korean War Casualty List before engraving the wall.

The Pentagon apology came after Edward Barker and Hal Barker, who spent decades researching the Korean War and who operate an online repository of information about the war, first pointed out that the wall contained more than 1,000 spelling errors. The names of 245 late service members who were unrelated to the war were included, and around 500 names that should have been featured on the wall were not inscribed.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.