Author: GIKorea

It looks like the Trump administration has not given up on diplomacy with North Korea:

U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun may visit the North Korean side of the Joint Security Area early next week, for a meeting with a high-level North Korean official, sources familiar with the issue told The Korea Times, Wednesday.

“Biegun plans to visit South Korea later this week or early next week, after attending a meeting of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in New York. Talks are underway for Biegun to possibly meet with a high-level North Korean diplomat on the North’s side of the border village of Panmunjeom,” a senior lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) said.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

I am not sure how popular this supposed movement actually is in South Korea, but the declining birth rate is probably little effected by it when compared to other factors like the cost and stress of educating children:

Bonnie Lee doesn’t care about finding a boyfriend or a fairy-tale wedding, and will decide her own happily-ever-after: “I’m a straight woman who is no longer interested in having relationships with men.”

She is not alone.

A growing number of South Korean women are banding together to reject rigid patriarchal norms and vowing never to wed, have children or even date and have sex.

“I’ve always felt that as a woman there are more disadvantages than advantages to being married,” said Lee, a 40-something professional who lives with her dog near Seoul.

Now she has gone even further, embracing the nation’s radical feminist movement called 4B, from the “four nos”: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing.

Japan Times via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

It only makes sense that with a left wing government in power these former convicted spies would seek to have their records purged:

Seven leaders of a now-disbanded left wing party filed for a retrial of a North Korea-affiliated treason case that rattled the nation six years ago, Wednesday, claiming the ruling was rigged by misleading evidence and corrupt ties between the judiciary and the former administration.

Lawyers for former lawmaker Lee Seok-ki and six other former members of the United Progressive Party (UPP) submitted the application for the retrial to the Seoul Central District Court.

The seven were arrested in 2013 on charges of plotting a pro-North Korean rebellion, and were sentenced to jail terms of two to nine years in August 2014 for “inciting” an armed rebellion during two gatherings with dozens of followers in May. Later that year, the Constitutional Court ruled to disband the UPP, saying the small leftist party with five parliamentary seats was a risk to national security due to its “violent” communist motives.

Korea Times via a reader tip

You can read much more at the link.

I always suspected that the claims the NIS made of the spy ring plotting to overthrow the government were exaggerated.  However, this does not explain why Lee Seok-ki was requesting classified documents and then leaking them in an effort to harm the US-ROK alliance.  Why was Lee also trying to get his hands on US-ROK war plans?  As I said before Lee and the UPP are just a political extension of the North Korean stooges in the Korean left that inhabit organization such as the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Korea Teacher’s Union.

These organizations have long been pro-North Korean and anti-US.  That is why I said this whole UPP spy scandal is just a continuation of the Ilshimhoe Spy Scandal and not some new organization trying to overthrow the government.  These groups coordinate with North Korea in order to cause political and social unrest within South Korea.  That is why I said at the time that the UPP should not be banned in South Korea.  By having the UPP all the pro-North Korean politicians all in one party and you know who they are. 

It has been nearly a decade since these bases were closed and they have finally been handed over to the South Korean government:

The United States on Wednesday returned four of its military bases in South Korea in a decision to end a yearslong delay caused by differences on decontamination procedures and to allay worries over the adverse impact of the delay on regional development schemes.

South Korea and the U.S. also initiated the long-awaited return process for the Yongsan Garrison in central Seoul, once home to the headquarters of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), to ensure that a mega project to establish a national park there proceeds as scheduled.

The four returned bases are Camps Eagle and Long in Wonju, 130 kilometers east of Seoul; parcels of Camp Market in Bupyeong, just west of the capital; and the Shea Range parcel at Camp Hovey in Dongducheon, just north of Seoul. They were already closed between 2009 and 2011.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but USFK made no concessions on the environmental clean up concerns that South Korea keeps making. The article speculates that the environmental clean up costs for the U.S. bases may be something they try to tie to the ongoing cost sharing negotiations.

A strategy they could use is that the cleanup of the closed out U.S. bases costs X amount of money to the ROK government and thus should lower the amount of money that the U.S. government is saying Seoul should pay each year.

My guess would be that the Moon administration does not want this environmental assessment to begin in order to keep the perception that the THAAD deployment is “temporary”:

South Korea has yet to conduct a full-scale environmental survey of the site of an advanced U.S. anti-missile battery, sources said Sunday, amid lingering opposition from local residents and complaints from China. 

U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) completed installing a full six-launcher Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery at a base in the southern provincial town of Seongju last year in an effort to cope better with growing missile threats from North Korea.

The installation began under the previous administration in 2017 after a scaled-back environmental impact study. Later that year, the government of current President Moon Jae-in took office and decided to implement a full-scale environmental assessment survey of the 700,000-square-meter plot of land before the “provisional” installation becomes final.

But the survey has yet to take place, sources said.

Yonhap via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

This is something ROK Heads have known for quite some time, but the media is catching up:

For Trump, keeping the status quo would be the best policy at this point because any future deal with North Korea will be criticized within the U.S. as a “bad deal,” according to Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies of Kyungnam University.

“After North Korea gave up Yongbyon, the U.S. still did not give up on sanctions. If the U.S. were to make concessions in any future deal, it will be criticized domestically. Trump considers it best to maintain the current state of tension without any additional agreement. This is the most conducive to keeping up Trump’s case that North Korea has not tested missiles or launched an ICBM,” the professor told The Korea Times, Monday. “If North Korea launches an ICBM, it could affect the U.S. election. But it will not be easy for North Korea to do this, although it has been testing engines and so forth.” 

Another analyst explained that Kim could be aiming to pressure Trump ahead of the U.S. election, but was negative about an ICBM test in the near future. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.