What gets me about the corruption allegations against Ban Ki-moon is that there is no evidence to prove them, but anonymous sources to the media:

Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon put in an all-out effort to refute bribery allegations that he took $230,000 from a local businessman over two occasions in 2005 and 2007 as his approval rating remained in second place despite his return to the country and a promotion tour.

Former Saenuri lawmaker Park Min-sik, who acts as a virtual spokesman for the 72-year-old lifelong diplomat, held a press conference at the National Assembly on Monday, denying charges that Ban had taken the money from Park Yeon-cha, former chairman of the Taekwang Company who was convicted of bribery in a separate case.

In an attempt to prove Ban’s innocence, Park disclosed his diary, in which the former foreign minister harshly criticized the businessman for acting “so rude.”

Park first refuted a report by the Sisa Journal which said Ban and Park had met at Ban’s residence on May 3 in 2005 one hour before a scheduled welcome dinner for the Vietnamese foreign minister who was visiting Seoul at the time. The report said Ban received $200,000 in a shopping bag during that time prior to the dinner gathering.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

China will assume world leadership if needed, Chinese diplomat says https://t.co/v4yborRIjI

— Bonnie Glaser / 葛来仪 (@BonnieGlaser) January 23, 2017

This satellite image, captured from the website 38 North on Jan. 23, 2017, shows a series of improvements at the Kalma missile test site near North Korea’s eastern coastal city of Wonsan that the North has made. Joseph Bermudez, a North Korea military expert, said the satellite imagery raises the possibility of the regime carrying out a threatened test of an intercontinental ballistic missile from there. (Yonhap)

If the testimony is true, you would think the President would have better things to do than spend time ordering her government minister to establish a program to help an equestrian athlete:

President Park Geun-hye made a straightforward and specific order to offer systemic government support for her friend’s daughter’s athletic career, a former vice minister in charge of sports policy revealed Monday.

Kim Chong, former vice minister of culture, sports and tourism, testified in the morning at the Constitutional Court’s eighth hearing to determine whether to remove Park from office.

He said Park cited the need for government support for Chung Yoo-ra, the 20-year-old daughter of her longtime friend, Choi Soon-sil, during their meeting in January 2015. “It was shocking because the president outright mentioned her name,” Kim said.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

Could you imagine how many lawsuits the Trump administration would have against the American media if libel laws in the US were similar to South Korea?:

President Park Geun-hye decided to sue the JoongAng Ilbo and its source from the independent counsel team on charges of defamation over a report that she ordered the government to create a blacklist of artists critical of her administration to control public sentiment in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry’s sinking in 2014.

Hwang Seong-wook, a lawyer of Park in her impeachment trial, said Saturday that she never ordered anyone to make the so-called blacklist of artists and cultural figures.

In his text message to reporters, Hwang also said Park decided to file criminal and civil suits against journalists and other members of the JoongAng Ilbo for defaming her with its report.

The president is also suing a member of the independent counsel who was quoted in the report as a source.

“Those who frequently make false reports under the shadow of anonymity must stop manipulating the press,” Hwang said. “We also urge the press to report only confirmed, objective facts.”

On the front page of Saturday’s edition, the JoongAng Ilbo, an affiliate of the Korea JoongAng Daily, published an exclusive report saying that Park was behind the blacklist scandal.

The report said independent counsel Park Young-soo and his team have so far concluded that the creation of the list started about one month after the tragic ferry accident, which led to the death of 306 people due to the delayed government rescue efforts.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

I have always thought that any deal signed with the North Koreans should first include the return of the USS Pueblo for this very reason:

North Korea boastfully threatened to strongly confront future U.S. hostility Monday, when it marked the 49th anniversary of its seizure of the U.S. intelligence boat Pueblo.

The 906-ton U.S. Navy ship was captured by the North in January 1968. The North claimed the ship violated its territorial waters, while the U.S. argued it was in international waters at the time of the attack. One crew member was killed in the attack, and 80 others and two civilian oceanographers were seized. All of them were freed from an 11-month captivity after the U.S. signed a letter of apology. Since then, Pueblo, named after a city in Colorado, has been on display at the War Victory Hall along the Taedong River in Pyongyang for propaganda purposes.

The U.S. should remember the shameful lesson from the Pueblo case, the North’s propaganda website Uriminjokkiri said.

“Our republic has the mighty military power to counter any kind of war that the U.S. chooses,” it said.

The North has the power to completely eliminate U.S. imperialism from the Earth, which has inflicted immeasurable misfortune and sufferings on the Korean people, it added.

“The U.S. will face a position more miserable than that in the Pueblo case if it forgets that lesson and frantically pursues new ways to provoke war against the North,” the North’s Central TV station said.  [Yonhap]

He sent Kim Yong-nam to mourn the other parts of the body. https://t.co/MxKkxPzytB

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) January 23, 2017

Kim Ki-choon, an ex-presidential chief of staff, appears before the office of the independent counsel in Seoul on Jan. 22, 2017. (Yonhap)

It looks like the state sponsored textbooks is another casualty of the President Park political scandal:

The parliament’s education committee on Friday passed a bill to ban state-authored textbooks amid the boycott from conservative parties.

The National Assembly Education, Culture, Sports & Tourism Committee approved the bill that bans the use of textbooks whose copyrights are held by the government. The bill has been handed over to the Legislation and Judiciary Committee.

The bill targets the Park Geun-hye government’s plan to provide middle and high school students with state-authored history textbooks, which critics say is intended to imbue students with rightist views of the nation’s modern history.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but the significance of this is that these textbooks are hold overs from the Sunshine Policy years where leftist teachers were able to get pro-North Korean textbooks into the schools.  Today the Sunshine Policy and its leftist supporters have been greatly discredited, but the books still remain in the schools which is what the Park administration however incompetently was trying to address.

This is the same thing I have been saying for years that the North Koreans want a peace treaty in order to separate the US from the ROK.  As long as the US-ROK alliance is solid Kim knows he has no chance of reunification with the ROK on his terms:

“What does Kim Jong-un want?” Cha said repeating the question. “I think he wants to … he wants a peace treaty with the United States as a nuclear weapons state. I think that’s what he wants.”

“I would add to that, that the North Koreans clearly would like to loosen, if not fracture, US alliances with Seoul and Tokyo, beginning with Seoul, certainly,” said Ambassador Robert Gallucci, the lead negotiator with North Korea in the 1990s in the Agreed Framework process.

“And they will do a lot to achieve that, and including, perhaps, enter negotiations,” Gallucci noted.  [Business Insider]

You can read more at the link.