Author: GIKorea

It was only a matter of time before the major bilateral military exercises got restarted after the Yoon administration won the last election and now we have them:

 South Korea and the United States are resuming large-scale field military exercises suspended for four years when the two nations tried to negotiate North Korea away from its nuclear weapons, according to an official announcement Friday.

Combined exercises by battalions and larger units of the U.S. and South Korean militaries will commence in August and again in early 2023, the South Korean Ministry of Defense said in a news release. The exercises will also be rebranded as Ulchi Freedom Shield in August and Freedom Shield next year.

The exercises will be defensive in nature, according to the ministry.

Another 11 separate field exercises, such as bridge construction, explosive disposal, attack helicopter fire and special warfare are also scheduled with U.S. troops in the coming months, according to the Defense Ministry.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

This is a pretty horrible crime that happened at a university in Incheon:

Police referred a university freshman accused of raping a schoolmate and causing her to fall to her death to the prosecution Friday for potential indictment with an additional charge of filming the rape scene, officials said. 

“I am sincerely sorry,” said the 20-year-old student of Inha University in Incheon, west of Seoul, as he was transferred to the prosecution, without responding to questions from reporters, including on whether and why he did not help her immediately after the fall. 

He was detained by police last Friday hours after the victim was found dead apparently after a fall from a campus building. She was found lying naked on the ground at 3:49 a.m. reportedly with blood on her head, mouth and ears.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The details of why the U.S. government has black listed Chinese owned Huawei telecom equipment has finally leaked out and it worse than I expected it to be:

On paper, it looked like a fantastic deal. In 2017, the Chinese government was offering to spend $100 million to build an ornate Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington DC. Complete with temples, pavilions and a 70-foot white pagoda, the project thrilled local officials, who hoped it would attract thousands of tourists every year.      

But when US counterintelligence officials began digging into the details, they found numerous red flags. The pagoda, they noted, would have been strategically placed on one of the highest points in Washington DC, just two miles from the US Capitol, a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection, multiple sources familiar with the episode told CNN.  

Also alarming was that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, which US Customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said.     

Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction was underway.       

The canceled garden is part of a frenzy of counterintelligence activity by the FBI and other federal agencies focused on what career US security officials say has been a dramatic escalation of Chinese espionage on US soil over the past decade.         

Since at least 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a high-profile regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as clear efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities.    

CNN

You can read more at the link, but the Chinese government is blatantly trying to stop the U.S. military’s ability to respond to a nuclear attack. The obvious conclusion is that the Chinese government must be considering a first strike option with nuclear weapons to put this much effort into preventing a U.S. response. According to the article the Chinese government is playing the race card and blaming all this on xenophobia.

Reading the article had me thinking of the book Ghost Fleet and wondering what other Chinese made technology is out there that could interfere with U.S. military operations during a contingency?

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

The deportation of two North Korean defectors by the Moon administration is getting really interesting. Now it is being alleged that they did not murder 16 people and instead it was an accusation made by North Korea that the Moon administration accepted in order to repatriate them:

The Ministry of Unification has raised doubts over murder accusations brought up against two North Korean fishermen who were deported against their will three years ago based on that claim.

A high-ranking official told reporters Thursday that no one other than the judiciary “has the authority to decide whether they are brutal criminals.” The latest move by the ministry is a de facto retraction of the claims it made over the fishermen during the previous Moon Jae-in administration.

Authorities under the Moon administration accused the fishermen of conspiring with a third man to kill their captain and 15 others on a boat before their escape to the South on Nov. 2, 2019. After a three-day investigation, South Korean authorities sent the fishermen back to the North on Nov. 7, claiming that they confessed to the murders.

The high-ranking official said the truth will be uncovered through the prosecution’s ongoing investigation. But he refused to comment further on questions including whether the ministry can disclose information about the 2019 investigation.

The same day, a government official familiar with the matter also questioned the credibility of the murder allegation, claiming that their confessions were factually inconsistent on simple points such as how many people were on the boat and how they killed them. Munhwa Ilbo, a daily newspaper, reported that they were forced to make those confessions through “cruel treatment.”

Citing intelligence reports, the official said the fishermen were executed within several days after being sent back to North Korea.

Rep. Han Ki-ho, head of the ruling People Power Party’s team investigating misconduct involving North Korea during the Moon administration, claimed Wednesday that the murder allegations were an outright lie.

Citing a source living in North Korea’s northeastern city of Kimchaek, Han said the fishermen were brokers who had tried to help 16 people from five households escape to South Korea.

“The two were set to guide the 16 people to South Korea on a fishing vessel, but fled when they realized they were being arrested,” Han said during a meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul.

Han claimed that the North Korean regime fabricated the story and lied to the Moon administration in an attempt to have the fishermen repatriated. He believes South Korean authorities probably knew what really happened, but went ahead with the deportation.

This is not the first time that North has made false accusations of crime against someone to gain what it wants. Rep. Tae Yong-ho, former deputy ambassador of North Korea to Britain, was also falsely accused as a child rapist by the North after defecting to the South in 2016, said Rep. Kweon Seong-dong, the party’s interim head.

“North Korea’s unilateral claims were accepted as fact without verification,” Kweon said during a speech at the Assembly. “The Park Geun-hye administration did not trust such claims by the North. As a result, we have the lawmaker, Tae Yong-ho, at the National Assembly.”

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but it seems totally foolish to accept the word of the North Koreans on anything relating to defectors. If this allegation is in fact true, I am not sure if anything legally can be done about it, but the people involved in this decision need to be at least publicly brought to light.

It will be interesting to see what the results of this survey are, but expect that it will likely show the majority of the population in South Korea has been infected with COVID:

The results of an on-going large-scale COVID-19 antibody survey, the first of its kind since the outbreak of the pandemic, are expected in early September.

The antibody positivity rate survey, launched last Tuesday, will be conducted on some 10-thousand South Korean citizens over the age of five across 17 cities and provinces nationwide.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, along with the Korean Society of Epidemiology, are currently selecting a demographic group based on age, region and case prevalence that is representative of the nation.

Health authorities hope the survey results will become the stepping stone to a more accurate and scientific COVID-19 policy by finding the scale of “hidden infections” that were excluded from official statistics.

The survey aims to find viral antibodies that were developed through natural infections, not those acquired through vaccinations, which would yield an estimated scale of infections excluded from government statistics.

KBS World News

You can read more at the link.