Author: GIKorea

Good luck with this:

The United States has offered to meet with North Korea “anywhere, anytime without preconditions” and looks forward to a positive response from Pyongyang, the new U.S. special envoy for the North said Monday.

Ambassador Sung Kim made the remarks during trilateral talks with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts, Noh Kyu-duk and Takehiro Funakoshi, in Seoul, where they discussed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s recent remarks that his country should be ready for both dialogue and confrontation.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the Kim regime will meet when they feel like they will get something of value out of it. Kim Jong-un met with former President Trump because Moon Jae-in gave him assurances that Trump was ready for a large deal. Trump was close to signing a deal, but Kim would only give up part of his nuclear weapons program and thus why diplomacy failed.

Moon now has little creditability with Pyongyang and the Biden administration is not offering anything new thus why diplomacy is currently at a stalemate.

It will be interesting to see if local fans includes expats and military that are living in Japan:

The Tokyo Olympics will allow some local fans to attend when the games open in just over a month, organizing committee officials and the IOC said on Monday.

Organizers set a limit of 50% of capacity up to a maximum of 10,000 fans for all Olympic venues.

The decision was announced after so-called Five Party talks online with local organizers, the International Olympic Committee, the International Paralympic Committee, the Japanese government and the government of metropolitan Tokyo.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

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

Doug Bandow writes that it is time for the U.S. to give up its policy of denuclearizing North Korea:

After three decades of insisting that the DPRK can never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, Washington must confront the failure of U.S. policy. American policymakers should consider accepting North Korea as a nuclear state and treating it as a normal country.

It no longer makes sense to talk of preventing the North from developing nuclear weapons. It already has them. There is great uncertainty as to how many nuclear weapons the Kim regime has or could potentially make—around sixty is a common estimate. However, that could be just the start. The Rand Corporation and Asan Institute figure Pyongyang could possess some two hundred by just 2027, a scant six years away. That would give it more nuclear weapons than currently possessed by India, Israel, and Pakistan. (………..)

Most realistic would be a focus on arms control, with the hope of developing a relationship that might lead to denuclearization. Even such a more limited objective would be advanced by developing a broader and more normal relationship. Meaning diplomatic ties—officials contacts are especially important with potentially dangerous adversaries—cultural exchanges, and economic ties.

The National Interest

You can read more at the link, but I agree with Bandow that denuclearization is now a fantasy. What is more realistic is negotiating away North Korea’s ICBM program, capping their number of nuclear weapons, and stopping nuclear proliferation. Without ICBMs their nukes cannot threaten the United States and it is in the US’s interest that North Korea not sell nuclear technology abroad like they have done in the past.

This is pretty unusual to see a brown bear go into a major city and just start attacking people:

Chased by a car after going on a rampage that injured three people, a wild brown bear crossed a busy road, forced its way onto a military camp in northern Japan and attacked a Japanese soldier on guard duty.

Footage on local television showed the bear wandering a street in Sapporo. After a car began to speed after it, the bear crossed a busy road and forced its way into the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Camp Okadama. The bear knocked down a uniformed soldier on duty at the gate.

The soldier suffered cuts to his chest and stomach, but his injuries were not life threatening, according to the Defense Ministry.

The bear, on the the loose all night in a city in northern Japan, also disrupted flights at the airport Friday before being shot and killed by authorities.

Army Times

You can read more at the link.

I like how the parking attendant is supposedly hospitalized after being pushed to the ground. I an sure some settlement money will help him quickly heal which is what this USFK employee should be quickly putting together to resolve this incident:

South Korean authorities are investigating a U.S. Forces Korea civilian employee accused of assaulting a Seoul parking lot attendant over the weekend.

Police were called out to a disturbance at the Hongdae Street lot on Saturday evening and witnessed the altercation, a Mapo District Police Station official told Stars and Stripes by phone on Thursday. He spoke on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation. 

Video footage obtained by South Korea’s MBC News shows a man pushing the uniformed parking attendant while tripping his leg. The attendant was injured and hospitalized, according to police.

The USFK employee, whom South Korean police are not identifying due to privacy laws, was not intoxicated when officers arrived, the police official said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but I also found it interesting that an activist group was protesting at the U.S. embassy over this. Talk about not having a life.