Author: GIKorea

This latest trip abroad for President Yoon has gone way better than his last one where he showed up late to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and was caught using an expletive on a hot mic initially reported to be directed towards President Biden:

 President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee briefly reunited with U.S. President Joe Biden at a gala dinner for world leaders in Phnom Penh the previous day, the presidential office said Sunday.

Yoon and Kim “met with U.S. President Joe Biden who entered the venue shortly after they arrived and happily exchanged greetings,” deputy presidential spokesperson Lee Jae-myoung said in a written briefing. “President Yoon and President Biden caught up with each other and fondly posed for photos.”

The couple also happily exchanged greetings with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his wife, Yuko, Lee said.

The leaders are in Cambodia to attend regional summits involving the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. On Sunday, Yoon, Biden and Kishida are scheduled to hold bilateral and trilateral summits on the event’s sidelines.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

One thing North Korea is accomplishing is strengthening cooperation between South Korea and Japan. Will it lead to anything substantive? I guess we will see, but this is a good start:

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida agreed to strengthen trilateral cooperation to thwart North Korea’s escalating missile and nuclear threats during a trilateral summit in Cambodia, Sunday.

The three leaders held a flurry of summits among them amid North Korea’s escalating provocations in recent weeks.

“North Korea has been staging more hostile and assertive provocations than ever before,” Yoon said during the three-way summit held on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh. 

“North Korea’s provocations, which were staged at a time when South Koreans are deeply saddened (by the Itaewon crowd crush), clearly show that the Kim Jong-un regime is anti-humanitarian and anti-humanity,” Yoon said. “The cooperation among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan is a strong bastion for defending universal values and achieving peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia.”

Biden and Kishida also noted North Korea’s recent provocations threaten the region’s peace and underscored the importance of trilateral cooperation among them.

“North Korea continues its provocative behavior, this partnership is even more important than it has ever been,” Biden said in his opening remarks at the trilateral summit.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

South Korea continues to see progress in their development of the KF-21:

The second prototype of South Korea’s homegrown fighter jet, the KF-21 Boramae, made its successful maiden test flight Thursday, the country’s arms agency said.

It took off from the Air Force’s 3rd Flying Training Wing in Sacheon, about 300 kilometers south of Seoul, at 9:49 a.m. and landed without a hitch at 10:24 a.m., according to the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA).

It flew at an average speed of 407 kph during the 35-minute flight near the headquarters of its developer, the Korean Aerospace Industries (KAI), a source said later.

The first prototype of the 4.5th-generation fighter succeeded in its maiden flight on July 19.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

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

It looks like the Yoon administration has decided to get back at MBC after they reported that President Yoon used an expletive against President Joe Biden. The Yoon administration claimed the expletive was directed towards the Korean National Assembly. The sound quality of the clip was poor and not definitive, but MBC captioned it anyway to say Joe Biden. This led to an entire news cycle of negative headlines for Yoon:

President Yoon Suk-yeol said Thursday that important national interests are at stake during presidential overseas trips, after his office decided to ban local TV station MBC’s reporters from boarding Air Force One to cover his upcoming trip to Southeast Asia.

The presidential office informed MBC of the decision Wednesday, two days before Yoon departs for his tour of Cambodia and Indonesia, citing the broadcaster’s repeated “distorted” coverage.

“The president goes on overseas trips using taxpayer money because important national interests are at stake,” Yoon told reporters as he arrived for work Thursday. “We’ve been providing a service to help with coverage of foreign policy and security issues, and I’d like you to accept it in those terms.”

The presidential office did not specify which reports were distorted, but MBC has been at the center of controversy after it broadcast a video of Yoon walking out of an event in New York in September and telling his aides in vulgar language that it would be embarrassing if the National Assembly did not approve of something unspecified.

MBC subtitled the video to make it appear that Yoon was referring to U.S. President Joe Biden, but the presidential office denied there was any mention of Biden and claimed the word he used was in reference to the National Assembly. Yoon’s remarks caught on a hot mic were difficult to hear because of background noise.

“The boarding of the presidential jet has been a service provided to help with coverage of foreign policy and security issues, and in consideration of MBC’s repeated distorted and biased coverage of foreign policy issues recently, we have decided not to provide the service,” the presidential office said in a notice to the company.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but MBC was taken over by the Korean left years ago with the threat of violence from labor unions and legal attacks. Even further back MBC was well known for the fake news they put out about U.S. beef causing mad cow disease that led to massive anti-US and anti-government riots in South Korea.

This may explain why the political opposition has been recently out pushing anti-Japanese sentiment to get ahead of this announcement:

President Yoon Suk-yeol said, Thursday, he will sit down with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Joe Biden and Fumio Kishida, on the sidelines of multilateral meetings in Southeast Asia later this week amid a series of provocations by North Korea.

“During the multilateral meetings, there will be several important bilateral summits,” Yoon told reporters a day before he leaves for Cambodia and Indonesia to attend meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Group of 20. 

In Phnom Penh, Yoon is scheduled to attend a South Korea-ASEAN summit, an ASEAN Plus Three summit and the East Asia Summit before departing for Bali for the G20 summit on Tuesday.

“A South Korea-U.S.-Japan summit has been fixed and several other bilateral meetings have also been set or are under discussion,” Yoon added. However, he did not elaborate on exactly when the meetings will take place.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.