This photo capture from the North’s Central TV on April 1, 2018, shows a clip from a movie filmed jointly by North Korea and China, whose title roughly translates to “Promise Made in Pyongyang.” The movie had not been run since it first aired in February 2014, but it was rerun on the day following North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s visit to Beijing the previous week. The movie is about a Chinese dancer building a friendship with North Korean dancers during her travels through the North. (Yonhap)
Good luck trying to get the Kim regime to agree to this:
A complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID) of the Korean Peninsula is what the U.S. government is pushing for, and that approach is “necessary” and “nonnegotiable” when it deals with the North Korea nuclear issue, the acting U.S. ambassador to South Korea said Monday.
Marc Knapper emphasized that the U.S. is “hopeful but realistic” in its expectations for the upcoming summits with North Korea, citing more than two decades of failure in making the North give up its nuclear weapons.
“Let me be clear. There has been no shift in our policy. We are willing to engage with North Korea but our purpose of any meeting first and foremost will be to emphasize the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. It is necessary and nonnegotiable,” Knapper told a forum in Seoul. [Yonhap]
I have no idea whether the accusation that the South Korean K-Pop group Red Velvet is pro-Communism or not, but I just find it ironic that these performers are so eager to perform for a man that puts his own people into labor camps for watching South Korean entertainment. The hypocrisy on display is truly incredible:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, right, talks to Red Velvet members, left, after the Sunday performance at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater. / Yonhap
After the two-hour show at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater starting at 6:30 p.m., Kim met and shook hands with each musician, including four members of Red Velvet. The popular band from SM Entertainment was short of one member ― Joy, also an actress.
SM announced Saturday that she could not travel to the North because she was filming MBC’s TV drama “The Great Seducer,” in which she has a leading role.
Before its Pyongyang visit, the band had stirred controversy, with suggestions by some netizens that the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism had selected the band because it endorsed the North’s communism. Some suggested a parallel between communism’s symbolic color of red, the band’s name and one of its hits, “Red Flavor.”
Kim said after meeting the musicians, “many people had wondered whether I would come to the Sunday performance and watch Red Velvet.” The comment hinted that he knew about the Red Velvet controversy, but he did not elaborate. He said he had planned to watch the North-South joint performance on Tuesday, but had changed his schedule.
The band, the youngest stars among the troupe, performed dance numbers “Red Flavor” and “Bad Boy.”
Joy’s absence had divided fans. Some saw it as unacceptable because despite her busy acting schedule she had joined the band’s Tokyo concert on March 28-29. Fans wondered that if she had performed in Japan why she could not also have found time for Pyongyang.
A South Korean cultural critic said her absence from the North was “an example of the mass-narcissism evident among South Korean celebrities.” [Korea Times]
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un and his wife Ri Sol-ju are surrounded by South Korean musicians after their joint concert at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, Sunday. / Joint Press Corps [Korea Times]
I am always amazed how people keep falling for these scams:
A Malaysian man has been jailed for a year over a fake kidnapping phone scam.
The man, 37, was caught in January after making a phone call to a randomly selected person in Ulsan on Jan. 8. He told the receiver that he had kidnapped his daughter and demanded 27 million won ($25,399) ransom.
The father wired the money but soon realized he had been duped. He reported the incident to police, who caught the suspect days after.
The Malaysian was found to be a member of a domestic voice phishing syndicate. The suspect told police he took 500,000 won from the wired money and shared the rest with his colleagues. Police are looking for other people involved. [Korea Times]
Youngsters are being sent to labor camps in North Korea after being caught secretly watching South Korean entertainment ― including movies and soap operas ― according to sources familiar with Pyongyang.
The sources said the authorities were cracking down on clandestine viewing of South Korean media amid fears that it will harm the Kim Jong-un regime’s “ideological purity.”
The young people still risk being sent to re-education labor camps for using illegal memory cards for entertainment.
“Those who are caught are sent to youth labor-reform centers and kept there for about a year for re-education,” a source said.
In his New Year’s address, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un underscored that “a vigorous struggle should be waged to tighten moral discipline throughout society, establish a socialist way of life and eliminate all kinds of non-socialist practices, so as to ensure that all the people, possessed of ennobling mental and moral traits, lead a revolutionary and cultured life.” [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but does anyone think that President Moon or anyone else in South Korea will speak out against this or just pretend it isn’t happening?
Here is an interesting immigration story involving a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and his adopted Korean daughter:
Retired Army Lt. Col. Patrick Schreiber is hoping his family — adopted daughter Hyebin and wife Soo Jin Schreiber — can stay in the country. Schreiber assumed he and his wife had time to adopt their Korean-immigrant niece, then 15, as their daughter. They didn’t realize that children brought into the country should be adopted before age 16 to be allowed access to U.S. citizenship.
A retired Army lieutenant colonel with six tours of duty, Patrick Schreiber says that his failure to gain an understanding of immigration law is “the greatest regret in my life.”
Because it now could mean having to move his family to South Korea next year so he, his wife and adopted daughter could stay together.
In 2013, just before he deployed to Afghanistan as a chief intelligence officer, Schreiber of Lansing, Mich. assumed he and his wife had time to adopt a Korean-immigrant niece, then 15, as their daughter. Having consulted with an adoption attorney, he thought the cut-off date to legally adopt would be her 18th birthday.
“I assumed wrong,” he says now, having adopted the girl when she was 17.
Too late, according to the government. A federal statute says that children brought into the country should be adopted before age 16 to be allowed access to U.S. citizenship.
As a result, deportation could await daughter Hyebin, a junior studying chemical engineering at the University of Kansas. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but it seems that US immigration laws need to have a process to apply for an exception to policy for unusual circumstances like this. With that said since she is studying chemical engineering I would be surprised if she isn’t able to get a work visa to stay in the US after graduating from college.
Hopefully this gets worked out, but even the worst case scenario of having to go back to South Korea is not that bad. It isn’t like she is going to some third world country and South Korea is where she has spent the vast majority of her life at. I have feeling this will work its self out, but I do find it interesting the difficulty this family is having trying to legally immigrate their adopted daughter to the US while the children of illegal immigrants continue to get special treatment under US immigration laws.
The long awaited joint military exercise has finally begun:
South Korean and U.S. Marines hold a joint landing exercise in this file photo. (Yonhap)
A combined field training of South Korean and U.S. troops got under way Sunday as scheduled, defense officials said amid a nascent peace mood on the divided peninsula.
More than 11,500 service members, including thousands based outside of Korea, plan to participate in the four-week Foal Eagle training, along with around 300,000 South Korean soldiers.
The allies often kick off their largest annual military exercise in late February or early March for a two-month run. This year, however, they waited until the end of the PyeongChang Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games here.
The duration of Foal Eagle has been shortened to a month, with no major U.S. strategic assets such as supercarriers and nuclear subs expected to show up. [Yonhap]
