“I want, maybe in the next two years, my country free of presence of foreign military troops. I want them out.” — Duterte in Tokyo. pic.twitter.com/aD6nh1b5iK

— Erik Slavin (@eslavin_stripes) October 26, 2016

U.S. Forces Korea Commander Gen. Vincent Brooks (C) offers flower at a memorial ceremony for Australian soldiers who were killed in action during the 1950-53 war during a memorial ceremony at Taepung Observatory in the South Korean border town of Yeoncheon, on Oct. 26, 2016. Australia and 15 other nations fought for South Korea against invading North Korea under the U.N. flag during the war. (Yonhap)

President Park may have her own Hillary Clinton like email scandal on her hands if in fact she was sending secret information over unsecure email to her friend to review to help prepare Presidential speeches.   President Park’s non-profit group just like the Clinton Foundation is also accused of strong arming corporations for money:

The broadcaster said it obtained the computer by searching through things discarded from Choi’s office after she left the country in the wake of a series of corruption and power abuse allegations. Choi is accused of creating nonprofit foundations to benefit President Park after she leaves office, strong-arming conglomerates to make massive donations to them and personally siphoning off money from them.

Choi is a daughter of Park’s former mentor, the late Choi Tae-min. Following JTBC’s Monday report on her editing of the president’s speeches, Park admitted Tuesday that she sought help from her longtime friend to write speeches and public addresses and issued a public apology. Choi, however, seems to have exerted much more power over the president than ever conceived of before – possibly to an unprecedented extent.

According to the JBTC’s Monday report, a file entitled “Blue House meeting” was saved at 4:56 a.m. on Dec. 28, 2012. The eight-page document laid out a scenario for Park, who was then the president-elect, ahead of her meeting to President Lee Myung-bak. The meeting took place 10 hours later.

In a section of the file marked “Foreign affairs and national security issues,” Park was directed to ask Lee a question: “In order to prevent the North’s additional provocations, I believe inter-Korean dialogue is necessary in addition to international cooperation. What contacts have made between the two Koreas?”

Underneath the question, a line read: “The military had three secret contacts with the North’s National Defense Commission recently.”

Talks between Seoul and Pyongyang formally ceased after the North’s sinking of the warship Cheonan in April 2010. It was confidential information that the South Korean military and the North Korean National Defense Commission had secret contacts in 2012. The document suggests that Choi had access to a national security secret.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

I always find it amazing the intelligence collection capabilities the US and the ROK has to do this kind of analysis:

North Korea’s failed Musudan missile launch caused considerable damage to one of its mobile launchers, official sources here said Wednesday, the latest sign of shortcomings in the country’s military capabilities.

Pyongyang launched a ballistic missile, believed to be a Musudan, last Thursday from an airfield in the northwestern city of Kusong. The intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) is known to have exploded soon after liftoff. This launch appeared to have been an attempt by the North to save face from another failed Musudan test conducted less than a week earlier on Oct. 15.

“The exploding missile caused the launcher to catch fire and it was seriously scorched,” a government official told Yonhap News Agency.

South Korean military and intelligence authorities believe that North Korea was testing a Musudan missile with a modified liquid-fuel rocket engine when the missile exploded. They believe the explosion was caused by defects in fuel conduits.

The shape of the missile’s warhead was not disfigured in the blast, which suggests that the recent failure was not caused by warhead overload, a government official said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Further Reading:

https://www.rokdrop.net/2016/10/north-koreas-eighth-test-of-its-musudan-missile-ends-in-failure/

Quartz.com has a long, but interesting read about the growing gender war in South Korea.  Of course the Gangnam murder case is brought up of evidence of growing misogyny against women in South Korea without providing the context that the murder was by a schizophrenic homeless man who was in and out of mental hospitals.  Regardless I think most people would agree there is room for improvement in South Korea in regards to the treatment of women.  However, one group Megalia is accused of being a radical feminist group that is further dividing the sexes in South Korea with its various activities.  The group’s logo in fact makes light of how small male penises are in South Korea.

In response to the growing feminist movement in Korea Korean men are now complaining they are being discriminated against and one guy even jumped off a bridge to promote the idea:

Speaking up for men’s rights isn’t a fringe idea in Korea—it has become mainstream. “What’s striking about the current situation is the extent to which… men seem to be feeling very comfortable in saying that women’s demands for greater rights or greater protection are misguided,” says Koo Se-woong, a former university teacher and managing editor of liberal news site Korea Expose.

In one extreme display of men’s rights, in 2013, the heavily indebted founder of men’s activism group Man of Korea (link in Korean), Song Jae-gi, decided to jump off a bridge to raise money for his group. TV cameras were present as he readied to throw himself into the Han River. Among the goals of Man of Korea was the abolishment of the government’s agency the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and compensation for Korean men who served in the military (all Korean men must serve two years in the army). His body was found a few days later.  [Quartz.com]

Anyway for those that have 15 minutes to spare I recommend reading the whole article.

Talk to them all you want. Just don't pay them. https://t.co/thARC0AVZU

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) October 24, 2016

Members of the North’s General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea present an electric locomotive they made to mark the seventh congress of the organization on Oct. 23, 2016, in Pyongyang. The country’s key media outlet, the Korean Central News Agency, which released this photo said the workers “briskly conducted the do-good-thing movement” to make the locomotive. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

I and many others have been saying this for years that the North Koreans would never denuclearize and it appears the smart people in the US government are starting to realize this:

The U.S. policy of trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons “is probably a lost cause” and the best that could be hoped for is a cap on the country’s nuclear capability, the Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper said on Tuesday.

However, underscoring conflicting views in the Obama administration, the State Department said U.S. policy was unchanged and continued to be to seek the “verifiable denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula.

President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that the United States will never accept North Korean as a nuclear-armed state.

Clapper made clear at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York he did not think that the policy the administration has stuck to, in spite of repeated North Korean nuclear tests, was realistic.

“I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause,” Clapper said at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York. “They are not going to do that – that is their ticket to survival.”  [Reuters]

You can read more at the link.

Here is another drunk woman in trouble story:

A reportedly drunken woman was injured when she fell into a car parking lift in Busan at 1:50 a.m. Saturday.

The woman, surnamed Kim, was apparently in a hurry to use the bathroom.

She ran into the lift to relieve herself where she could not be seen, but she fell two meters through a 60 centimeter gap between the lift and a wall, according to police. She broke her pelvis.

Firefighters rescued her, and she was taken to hospital.

Police are investigating why the parking lift was open and unstaffed, allowing anyone to enter. [Korea Times]

Here is an interesting article that speculates on whether North Korea would have invaded South Korea back in 1983 if the assassination attempt on President Chun Doo-hwan was successful?:

On October 9, 1983, a bomb exploded at the Martyr’s Mausoleum in Rangoon, the capital of Burma. As part of an official visit to the country, then-Republic of Korea President Chun Doo-hwan had been scheduled to visit the mausoleum to pay respects to Aung San, one of the founders of Burma. The results were devastating – 21 dead, 46 injured. Among the dead were prominent members of the South Korean government, including the deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Fortunately, the South Korean president survived.

Chun Doo-hwan was a career Republic of Korea Army officer who came to power under contentious circumstances. His predecessor was Park Chung-hee, another Army officer and father of the current South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Chung-hee was assassinated on October 26, 1979. During an unclear political situation, Chun and military forces loyal to him executed a successful coup on December 12, 1979. Afterwards, Chun established martial law, squashed dissent, and ruled South Korea through 1987 as a military dictatorship, until the democracy movement brought the country its first truly free elections.

In part, President Chun owed his life to his American advisers. Assassination attempts and terrorism on the part of North Korea was a real threat at the time and concern for the president’s safety prompted the Americans to suggest Chun’s flight route be placed further away from the coasts of China and Vietnam. This caused a delay in his schedule, forcing him to arrive later than the rest of his entourage. North Korean agents confused the arrival of the South Korean ambassador with that of the president, resulting in a premature detonation. Had President Chun ignored the advice of his foreign advisers and maintained the original schedule, it is very likely he would have been present at the time of the explosion and would have been killed or maimed.

The possible implications of Chun’s assassination attempt in Rangoon would not be fully known, however, until over a decade later. Kang Myung-do, son-in-law of then-North Korean Premier Kang Song-san, defected to the South in 1994. As he changed allegiances, he brought with him stories. What a story he had to share about the Rangoon bombing.

Kang told the late professor and writer Don Oberdorfer, who was conducting research for a book, that North Korea had been anticipating civil unrest on the scale of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which was pacified through the brute force of the South Korean military. The “massacre,” as it has been described, was a day of infamy for South Korea, and resulted in well over a hundred dead and thousands injured. Kang specifically noted that discharges from the North Korean military had been “slowed or stopped” in preparation for what might occur.

It does not take much knowledge or imagination to reasonably assume that North Korea may very well have intended to invade the South in the event of mass civil unrest. With a nation reeling from its second presidential assassination in four years, the South Korean government in crisis, and the military with its hands full in bringing order to chaos, there would probably be few scenarios better for Pyongyang to exploit in its eternal quest to reunite the peninsula.   [National Interest]

You can read the rest at the link, but I think even if Chun was killed that the North Koreans would not have invaded unless they were given support by China.  The US has the nuclear trump card that can be played to defeat any North Korean invasion.  Without the support of the Chinese nuclear deterrent I don’t see how they could have won a conflict on the peninsula.  It seems the assassination was more for trying to create massive internal unrest within South Korea that could eventually lead to a more Pyongyang friendly government.  Maybe one day when the Kim regime finally falls their national archives will shed light on what their true intentions were.