This photo, taken June 28, 2018, shows a rain-swollen stream in Busan as torrential rains pounded the southeastern port overnight in the wake of the annual rain front, in this photo provided by local police. (Yonhap)

Its finally over:

The patent war between the two biggest smartphone rivals has finally ended.

Samsung Electronics and Apple have settled a seven-year legal dispute over each other’s design patents. Neither disclosed the amount of the settlement.

The two giants informed the district court in San Jose, California, “they have agreed to drop and settle their remaining claims and counterclaims in this matter,” according to an order signed by Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California. The settlement means all suits will be dismissed and no further case will be filed on the same claim.

“We can only say that we have settled with Apple and cannot offer any comment,” said a Samsung spokesman.

The dramatic turn of the lengthy legal battle came a month after retrial jurors in the Northern District of California handed Apple $538.6 million in damages for Samsung violating design and utility (technical) patents that included the infamous “rounded corner” patent. Samsung at the time vowed to consider its options including another appeal.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read much more at the link.

It looks like Asian-Americans are beginning to rebel against affirmative action policies which are now targeting them instead of just whites:

That sound you hear is the shattering of a cherished Democratic orthodoxy: race-based preferences in education.

Mr. Adams is an African-American who serves as Brooklyn’s borough president and aspires to run for mayor. On almost any issue, he lands where you would expect a big-city black Democrat to land. But when he cheered Mr. de Blasio’s bid to replace the Specialized High School Admissions Test with criteria meant to sneak in a racial rebalancing, he suddenly had a rebellion on his hands.

Asian-American moms and dads made their displeasure known. So after hastily convening a meeting with angry constituents (and, according to the New York Post, threats from Chinese-American donors), Mr. Adams announced that he wasn’t with the mayor after all.

He’s not alone. Every elected Asian-American in New York City politics has now blasted Mr. de Blasio’s plans. At the City Council, Peter Koo and Margaret Chin are against it; in the state Assembly, Ron Kim and Yuh-Line Niou are opposed; and in Congress, Grace Meng —a graduate of Stuyvesant, one of the affected schools—says she’s “disappointed” by the mayor’s proposal and was particularly “insulted” by the way his schools chancellor framed the issue. What makes this drama so unusual is that every last one of these pols is a Democrat, part of a larger community that overwhelmingly votes Democratic.

Whites have traditionally been the losers from affirmative action. Proponents sometimes justify this as the price to be paid for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Whatever the merits of this argument, the Asian-American experience is hard to squeeze into the box of racial privilege.

In the 19th century, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. law to deny immigration and naturalization based on race. In the 20th century, during World War II, Japanese-American citizens were confined in internment camps. To this list the 21st century adds racial discrimination at our most elite universities, which, as they did with Jews a century ago, limit the number of Asian-Americans they admit.  (……)

As Ms. Chin points out, even if you are an Asian-American with little education, work as a manual laborer, and have no political connections, you understand that an objective exam represents opportunity and upward mobility. You also understand that if merit is replaced by softer (“holistic”) criteria designed to tilt the racial balance (e.g., Harvard has given Asian-American applicants lower “personality” ratings), it will be your children who pay the price. In other words, Democrats are now dealing with an Asian-American community that doesn’t buy the argument that racial justice requires discriminating against a racial minority.  [Wall Street Journal]

You can read more at the link, but yet despite all the discrimination that Asian-Americans have faced in the past and even now by affirmative action policies in colleges, they have still been able to have by far the highest per capita household income of any race, even higher than whites.

If America is so racist how is this possible?

Leave it to General Brooks to dispel media hyperbole about the cancellation of UFG:

The chief of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) on Wednesday dismissed concerns that the recent decision by Seoul and Washington to suspend their combined military exercises would lead to an end of all other allied drills and weaken deterrence capabilities.

Gen. Vincent Brooks defended the decision, noting that the suspension appears intended to help the allies build trust with North Korea and add “greater effectiveness” in ongoing diplomacy on the communist state’s denuclearization.

“I don’t anticipate that this is an end of all exercises and training as we know it, but rather these visible exercises that are right up front that may cause unnecessary irritation at a time when the need for trust building is so important,” he said during an alliance forum in Seoul.

“I will eliminate the doubt and concerns about all military training going away. I don’t have any such instruction coming my way. I don’t feel that is the spirit of our leaders but rather to create a room for them to be able to navigate the way forward … to give them room if this helps set the conditions for them to have greater effectiveness in their dialogue and discussions,” he added.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

형제 들께 고마워요. pic.twitter.com/uQ4vdk53y0

— Sopitas (@sopitas) June 27, 2018

This photo provided by KT Corp. on June 26, 2018, shows the booth of KT SAT, a satellite communications service provider, at CommunicAsia 2018 at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, to promote the Mugunghwa-7 and other communication satellites. (Yonhap)

Here is some more interesting imagery analysis from the folks at 38 North:

Commercial satellite imagery from June 21 indicates that improvements to the infrastructure at North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center are continuing at a rapid pace. Modifications to the 5 MWe plutonium production reactor’s cooling system appear complete, but a less-than-normal cooling water discharge from the outfall pipe makes a determination of the reactor’s operational status difficult. The status of the Radiochemical Laboratory—used to separate plutonium from spent fuel rods—remains uncertain, although the associated Thermal Plant has likely continued operations, and a small non-industrial building of an unknown purpose has been newly erected near the cooling tower. Construction continues on support facilities throughout other operational areas of Yongbyon, especially at the Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR), where the new engineering office building appears externally complete and a small building similar to the one observed at the Radiochemical Laboratory has been erected.

Continued work at the Yongbyon facility should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s pledge to denuclearize. The North’s nuclear cadre can be expected to proceed with business as usual until specific orders are issued from Pyongyang.  [38 North]

You can read much more and see the imagery analysis at the link.

I would not be surprised if the Kim regime is trying to rush completion of these projects and then try and declare that these facilities are for peaceful nuclear energy use.  The North Koreans could argue that South Korea has nuclear power plants, why can’t they?  This would allow the regime to maintain the ability to quickly process material for nuclear weapons again if they were to agree to give up the nuclear weapons they already have.

By the way, ROK Heads may remember that 38 North was part of the US-Korea Institute that the Moon administration tried to get certain employees of the think tank removed from because of their conservative leanings.  Since USKI would not remove the employees the Korean government cut funding and USKI was shutdown.  The shutdown of the USKI was part of a larger effort by the Moon administration to take control of media in South Korea.  Articles like this one showing continued nuclear upgrades by North Korea despite pledges to denuclearize are the types of articles the Moon administration may have wanted to suppress if they still controlled USKI.  It is good to see that 38 North has continued to publish despite the shutdown of the USKI.

This maybe South Korea’s most impressive World Cup win since 2002 even though it was ultimately meaningless since they were eliminated from the knockout stage of 16 teams:

South Korea stunned Germany 2-0 while being eliminated in the group stage at the FIFA World Cup on Wednesday, bringing the defending champions down with them.

South Korea needed to beat Germany by at least two goals and have Mexico defeat Sweden in the other Group F match Wednesday. The Taeguk Warriors took care of their own end at Kazan Arena in Kazan, some 800 kilometers east of Moscow, with Kim Young-gwon and Son Heung-min each scoring in second-half stoppage time. But Sweden made it all moot by beating Mexico 3-0 in Ekaterinburg.

South Korea, which earlier fell to Sweden and Mexico, finished third in Group F with three points, while netting three goals and conceding three. Sweden won the group with six points, beating Mexico, which also had six points, on goal difference.

Germany unceremoniously bowed of the tournament with three points, losing to South Korea in goal difference and becoming the third straight World Cup champions to miss the knockout stage in title defense.  [Yonhap]

These are very capable artillery pieces that Estonia is purchasing from South Korea:

Estonia has agreed to buy South Korean artillery in a $54 million deal that officials say will substantially boost the small Baltic country’s defense capacity.

The Estonian military procurement agency says the contract with Seoul-based weapons producer Hanwha Land Systems is for 12 K9 Thunder howitzers, training, maintenance and spare parts.

Agency director Col. Rauno Sirk said after a signing ceremony on Tuesday that the artillery pieces “will bring Estonia’s defense capacity to a new level and be one of the most considerable steps of building up armored maneuvering capacity.”

The first howitzers are to arrive in Estonia in 2020.  [Stars & Stripes]

ROK Drop favorite Michael Breen writes in the Korea Times that critics of President Trump’s North Korea policy need to show more patience.  Good luck with that ever happening, but he does accurately depict the media environment that is driving much of the negative criticism against Trump:

And yet, a majority of experts have criticized the American president. Why? Failure to secure a more detailed agreement. Talk about impatience.

This criticism is widespread, despite the fact that everyone accepts that, in contrast to many summit meetings where the top leaders sign off on agreements reached between their respective teams, this one was intended to kickstart a process.

So why was the analysis not about a good start?

I believe there are two parts to the answer and they are not easily separated. One is the good faith expert viewpoint and the other is the media environment in which it is expressed.  (…………)

The error in my opinion derives from media obsession with the person of the American president. This both slants reporting and media commentary and influences the way experts deliver their opinions.

If truth be told, media love Donald Trump. He just has to scratch his head and it’s newsworthy. Underlying almost all coverage is a view that he is morally and psychologically unfit to be president. (This is partly because he is a Republican, a party that has almost zero support among news reporters, and partly because, well, he is kind of unorthodox.)

The daily Trump story satisfies on the titillation level ― look what the idiot has done now ― and on the media self-righteousness level ― be warned, this is serious, this man has his finger on the button.

Had Barack Obama held this summit with Kim and achieved the same result, he would probably be up for his second Nobel Peace Prize. But because it’s Trump, I expect that even if the North does de-nuclearize, sign a Korean war peace treaty, and open an embassy in Pyongyang and open the gulag, Trump will still be found wanting.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.