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

Workplace protest, Japanese style:
Bus drivers are striking by continuing to drive but refusing to take fares from passengers. https://t.co/ig11yuqSyj pic.twitter.com/3EYXiENqWY

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) May 3, 2018

Students of Dongseo University’s nursing college in Busan, southeast of Seoul, take the Nightingale Pledge on May 3, 2018. The students usually take the pledge in their third year at school before they go out into the field for on-site training. (Yonhap)

I feel really bad for the parents of Otto Warmbier who have been stuck watching all this adulation given to Kim Jong-un like he is some kind of beacon hope and statesman when the fact of the matter is he is simply a thug ruling a Soprano State.  What was done to Otto Warmbier is just a recent example of this:

Her voice cracking with emotion, the mother of college student Otto Warmbier who was sent home from North Korea in a coma and died soon after said Thursday her family will keep speaking out about the country’s human rights violations to “rub their noses” in what they did and embarrass Kim Jong Un’s government.

Cindy Warmbier told a U.N. symposium on the human rights situation in North Korea: “I can’t let Otto die in vain. … We’re not special, but we’re Americans and we know what freedom’s like, and we have to stand up for this. We have to.”

Her comments came at a sensitive time, as Kim and President Donald Trump are planning a historic meeting, and a day after the U.S. leader hinted at the imminent release of American prisoners being held in North Korea.

A week ago, Cindy and her husband Fred Warmbier filed a wrongful death lawsuit against North Korea, saying its government tortured and killed their son. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeks compensation for the death of their 22-year-old son in June 2017.

Otto Warmbier, who was a student at University of Virginia, was arrested by North Korean authorities in January 2016 for stealing a propaganda poster and sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor.

His plight compounded tense U.S.-North Korean relations. His parents made clear Thursday that while they were silenced by fear of what North Korea might do to Otto after his arrest, they were not going to be quiet any longer.

“We woke up and we realized that North Korea wants us to lock ourselves in a room and do nothing, and we think that’s a bad idea,” Fred Warmbier said.

Fred said he and Cindy are now focusing on the events that occurred “while they had Otto hostage and they were using him as a pawn.”

“We are trying to build a pathway that leads directly to Kim and his regime to force them to be answerable for their actions,” he said.

Cindy Warmbier said Otto was brain dead at four months of captivity, and anyone who had a heart would have said, “Well, we screwed up, let’s get him some medical care.”

But instead, she said, the North Koreans left him in a horrible place with no care to vegetate, and then acted “like we’re doing the world a favor” and released him saying he had botulism — which U.S. doctors never confirmed.

“So we can’t be quiet can we?” Cindy said. “People say why are you doing this? How can I not? How can I not? How can anybody be quiet when this is going on?”

“The only thing we can do is rub their noses in this. It embarrasses them. They don’t like the world to think that they aren’t trying to be a member of the world, and they like to act like a victim, like they’ve been treated poorly,” she said.

Is this the latest example of “fake news” the US President often derides?:

The President’s request of the Defense Department comes ahead of his highly anticipated sit-down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, expected to take place along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas.

North and South Korea recently held their own historic summit, which included an agreement on holding talks over denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and bringing a formal conclusion to the Korean War.

If the peace talks continue among countries, it could decrease the need for a US presence in the region, officials told the newspaper.

National security adviser John Bolton on Friday disputed the Times’ report, calling it “utter nonsense.”

Here is what former nuclear negotiator Robert Gallucci has to say about North Korean denuclearization:

He noted it would not be easy work to achieve complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID), unless North Korea makes a candid declaration of its nuclear stockpile.

Gallucci said the core of the nuclear bomb that devastated Japan’s Nagasaki in 1945 was small enough to be hidden in a small “speaker box,” explaining the difficulty of reaching complete denuclearization.

He said if it was unrealistic for inspectors to find and check all the containers ― small and big, and declared and undeclared ― existing in North Korea, the pursuit of complete denuclearization would be also “nonsense.”

So rather than pursuing CVID, he said, it would be more realistic to focus on reducing the North’s nuclear capability and how to achieve this.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but this is more of the same analysis that seems intended to persuade President Trump that he should not demand complete verifiable denuclearization by North Korea in his upcoming summit.

Here is what a ROK Drop favorite Bruce Klingner had to say about the recent Inter-Korean Summit between President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un:

As much as I enjoy Japan (and diving in Guam), a lot of younger sailors don't want to be so far from home for 4 years. Understand it operationally, but I think detailers are going to be telling more they're going vs. seeing requests. https://t.co/Ag7GYWp02W

— Erik Slavin (@eslavin_stripes) May 2, 2018

Two Siberian tigers — a 13-year-old female named Hancheong and a seven-year-old male named Uri — stroll in a “tiger forest” in the National Baekdu-daegan Arboretum, located on a mountain range in Bonghwa, a town in South Korea’s southeast province of North Gyeongsang, on May 3, 2018. The Korea Forest Service opened the arboretum, which was established on a 27,600-square-meter site, making it one of the largest of its kind in Asia. The establishment of the tiger forest is part of the country’s efforts to preserve the endangered species in the wild. (Yonhap)

That is what this article in the Politico suggests that President Trump is planning to do:

Taking Trump at his word during the campaign—when he decried U.S. allies Japan and South Korea as ungrateful free-riders—it would be reasonable to conclude that Trump is willing to forsake U.S. allies in the region by getting Kim to agree to negotiate away his ICBMs but ultimately leave Kim with a regional nuclear strike capability. Nuclear scholars have worried that a North Korean ICBM capability would “decouple” the United States from South Korea—the question of whether America would trade Seattle for Seoul in a nuclear conflict is a rhetorical one. We know the answer. The irony of a nuclear deal between Kim and Trump may actually be that true decoupling will happen when North Korea retains only the ability to strike U.S. allies but not the United States. Kim can simultaneously give a nod in the direction of denuclearization, remove the imminent threat to the U.S. homeland posed by his ICBMs, and expand a wedge between the United States and its allies.  [Politico]

You can read more at the link, but considering that President Trump has stressed denuclearization repeatedly he would have a hard time agreeing to allowing North Korea to keep nuclear weapons that they can use to strike an ally like Japan and US bases in the region.