It seems the drums of a preemptive strike on North Korea are growing louder.  Here is the latest expert to weigh in:

The United States should be prepared to launch preemptive strikes on North Korea, including a nuclear attack if necessary, before the communist nation uses its nuclear bombs that could “kill 90 percent of Americans,” a former CIA chief said Wednesday.

James Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993-95, made the case in an op-ed piece in the Hill newspaper, arguing that the U.S. is erroneously underestimating Pyongyang’s capabilities to deliver nuclear weapons by missile, freighter and even satellite.

“Why do the press and public officials ignore or under-report these facts? Perhaps no administration wants to acknowledge that North Korea is an existential threat on their watch,” Woolsey said in the article, titled “How North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans.”

“Whatever the motives for obfuscating the North Korean nuclear threat, the need to protect the American people is immediate and urgent. The U.S. must be prepared to preempt North Korea by any means necessary, including nuclear weapons,” he said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Once Park Geun-hye was impeached it was only a matter of time before this happened:

Former President Park Geun-hye was arrested on Friday in connection with a corruption scandal that led to her removal from office.

The Seoul Central District Court issued a warrant to detain Park on charges of bribery, abuse of authority, coercion and leaking government secrets, after a marathon hearing the previous day.

“The need for her arrest is acknowledged because there is probable cause to charge her and a concern of evidence being destroyed,” Judge Kang Boo-young said.

Park, ousted in a historic ruling on March 10, became the country’s third former president to be arrested over criminal allegations, following Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan.

Following the decision, Park was transferred to a detention center south of Seoul from the prosecution’s office where she had been waiting for the result after the nearly nine-hour court hearing.

The detention center is where key figures embroiled in the scandal, including Park’s longtime friend Choi Soon-sil and Samsung’s de facto leader Lee Jae-yong, are held in custody.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

If this was just about anyone else people would be claiming Senator McCain is fat shaming.  I guess obese Asian dictators with bad haircuts are not eligible for special victim status:

“What, did they want me to call him a crazy skinny kid?” Sen. John McCain quipped via Twitter on Wednesday in response to a report by the Korean Central News Agencythat the dignity of North Korea’s supreme leadership was hurt by McCain’s recent description of Kim Jong Un as the “crazy fat kid that’s running North Korea.”  [Yahoo]

You can read more at the link, but I think Senator McCain is making a mistake by calling Kim Jong-un crazy.  What he has been doing is actually quite rationale from his perspective.

This does seem pretty stupid for the Japanese government to oppose this statue since it is sitting in a public park and not right in front of a Japanese embassy or consulate like we have seen in Korea.  How would the Japanese public feel if the US launched a lawsuit to take down statues remembering atomic bombing victims?:

The U.S. Supreme Court has dismissed Japanese government efforts to remove from California a “comfort women” statue that symbolizes victims of Japan’s sexual slavery during World War II.

The court on Monday decided not to review the case brought by U.S. plaintiffs who were supported by the Japanese government. It ended Japan’s three-year bid to remove the statue. U.S. politicians involved in the case and civil rights groups applauded the decision.

Glendale’s comfort woman statue is the first erected outside Korea.

U.S. Republican Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Japan Times: “By remembering the past, including the women who suffered immensely, we help ensure these atrocities are never committed again.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

North Korea is super unhappy about American support for defectors. So unhappy they came up with this exceptional paragraph. pic.twitter.com/zE8A1tcV22

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) March 28, 2017

A soldier kisses his son during a send-off ceremony in Incheon, west of Seoul, on March 29, 2017, for the 19th contingent of the 317-member Dongmyeong unit heading to Lebanon next month to replace their comrades serving as United Nations peacekeepers there. The unit has been stationed in Lebanon since 2007 as part of the U.N. interim forces’ efforts to oversee a cease-fire and maintain a buffer zone between Lebanon and Israel. (Yonhap)

Via a reader tip comes this absolutely horrible murder over in Incheon:

A 17-year-old girl has been arrested for the killing and dismembering of an 8-year-old girl in Incheon. The remains were put into two plastic bags and left on the roof of an apartment building where the suspect lives, the Yeonsu Police Precinct reported Thursday.

The teenager, who dropped out of school and suffers from depression, allegedly committed the act Wednesday afternoon after luring the victim to her apartment in Yeonsu District, western Incheon.

According to police, the victim lived in a different building in the same apartment complex.

The suspect, whose identity is being withheld, met the victim at around 1 p.m. at a playground in the Yeonsu neighborhood. The two had not known each other, according to police. The victim’s friend told investigators the victim asked the suspect if she could borrow her mobile phone to call her mother.

CCTV footage showed the two taking an elevator at around 1 p.m. to go to the suspect’s home. Two hours later, the suspect left the home and later returned. At 4:09 p.m., the suspect left again after changing her clothes. It is believed that the murder took place between 1 and 4 p.m. The suspect’s parents were at work at the time.

Inside the suspect’s home were blood stains and tools that might have been used in the killing. Police declined to go into detail out of respect for the victim’s parents.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Even in death Kim Jong-nam could not escape North Korea:

Malaysia put the body of the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on a plane to Pyongyang on Thursday, in a deal that secured the release of its citizens there and ended a drawnout diplomatic spat.

U.S. and South Korean intelligence sources say North Korea masterminded the deadly attack on Kim Jong Nam last month using VX nerve agent, a chemical so toxic that it is on a U.N. list of weapons of mass destruction.

The attack outraged Malaysia and sparked a diplomatic row with North Korea, resulting in travel bans on both sides and a collapse in their long-standing friendly ties.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said the nine Malaysians barred from leaving North Korea had been allowed to board a plane out, adding on Twitter that they were expected to reach Kuala Lumpur at 5 a.m. local time on Friday (2100 GMT Thursday).

The Malaysians left Pyongyang in a Royal Malaysian Air Force business jet, which headed immediately west out of North Korean airspace before turning south toward Malaysia, according to flight tracking website planefinder.net.  [Reuters]

You can read more at the link, but it appears the hostage taking of the Malaysian diplomatic personnel in Pyongyang worked.

I think long time Korea watcher Michael Breen is spot on with this assessment of the impeachment of President Park:

Compared to many countries, South Korea is fiercely democratic. But South Koreans want to be better. After each election, the winner is allowed to act like a short-term monarch and everyone blessed with a connection looks for advantage. By the end of the fourth year, the stench of favor is too much, and approval ratings plunge so low that the outgoing president is considered a liability by his own party’s next candidate. Of the five democratically elected presidents before Park, one was jailed, another committed suicide to avoid a prosecution investigation, and the other three saw their family members go to jail. Now, Park is the first to actually be tossed out.

Although disappointing on the policy front, Park, in all fairness, has been no worse than the others on the moral front. In fact, being unmarried—and, as far as we know, never even having had a boyfriend—as well as being distanced from her siblings, she was assumed to be free of the complications that dogged her predecessors. So, when it turned out she had a best friend who enjoyed unheard of privileges, whose daughter rode a horse in the Olympics, and who received unfair entrance to a university, the country went ape.  [The Atlantic]

You can read the rest at the link, but Michael Breen goes on to explain how the establishment knew Park had to go because of how unpopular she had become and the size of the protests against her and thus impeachment was inevitable.

I wonder if this will still be the direction given to the ROK military after the Korean left likely wins the Presidency in May:

South Korean Defense Minister Han Min-koo on Wednesday instructed troops not to hesitate to take retaliatory actions in the event of a North Korea attack.

Inspecting a coastline guard post of the Army’s 32nd Infantry Division, Han stressed the need for “perfect” combat posture both on the front lines and in the rear.

“There shouldn’t be any disorder even by an inch in the military,” he said. “Any provocation from the North should not be tolerated.”

The minister urged the military to be fully ready for the completion of operations “on-the-spot” at a “decisive” time, citing the grim security conditions on the peninsula.  [Yonhap]

Long time Korea watchers may remember that the last time the Korean left held the presidency, ROK servicemembers who defended the nation against North Korean aggression were treated like criminals.  Hopefully these same policies are not enacted when the Korean left likely takes over this time.