This looks to me to just be a psychological operation being carried out by North Korea in the wake of the THAAD decision:

North Korea has resumed the broadcasting of encrypted numbers, a method used in the past to send messages to spies operating in South Korea, a government source said Tuesday.

The source said that propaganda radio station Radio Pyongyang aired a 12-minute shortwave segment last week during which a female announcer read out numbers on what seemed to be from a book. The broadcast started in the early hours of Friday morning and marks the first time Seoul picked up on such communication from the North in 16 years.

The North halted all such broadcasting after the first inter-Korean summit in June 2000.

The encrypted number system, a relic of the Cold War espionage age, requires the sender and the receiver to have access to the same book and other types of reference materials so orders can be handed down by mentioning a page and the position of a word on that. This was a favored method employed by the reclusive country to contact and give orders to spies that infiltrated the South.

The coded radio broadcast began at 00:45 a.m. with a female announcer saying, “starting now, I will give review work to No. 27 exploration agents.”

The announcer then said, “on page 459 number 35, on page 913 number 55, on page 135 number 86, on page 257 number 2,” followed by more numbers.

South Korean intelligence authorities are reportedly scrambling to find out why Pyongyang resumed this type of communication, particularly in the digital era when it could have simply given out orders via the internet.

The revelation has put the Seoul government on alert over possible provocations that can be committed by the North’s agents living in the South.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but if North Korea was giving orders to anyone it would probably be the leftist instigators pushing lies about the THAAD radar.

The left wing Hankyoreh newspaper went to the Kyoga-Misaki radar site in Japan to try and dig up dirt to use against the deployment of THAAD to South Korea and found much to do about nothing:

In June of last year, when South Koreans first started talking about THAAD, I came here to report on residents who were concerned about the noise and the health effects of the electromagnetic waves.At the time, there was considerable opposition from residents who were afraid that their health would be damaged by the radar, but over the past year, the residents appear to have come to terms with the radar, like it or not.  [Hankyoreh]

The generators for the radar used to create noise for nearby residents, but they were muffled last year which eliminated the vast majority of the noise and next year the radar is going to be hooked up to the commercial power grid thus turning off the generators.  This will eliminate all the noise.  Also the radar looks out over the ocean thus there are no concerns about electromagnetic waves.

Despite all these facts the Hankyoreh reporter did everything he could to end the article in an ominous tone:

“The negative effect of the radar is invisible,” said Munenori Owan, 75, co-chairman of the Kyoto Group Against the X-Band Radar Base. “Electromagnetic waves are invisible, and the effect of the noise varies with the individual.  If I’m having problems and the person next to me is fine, that makes me the weird one.”“If South Korea teams up with the US against China, South Korea won‘t be able to prosper. Security problems must be resolved through dialogue and not through military conflicts that antagonize the other side. Focusing solely on electromagnetic waves and noise will make you miss the heart of the problem,” Owan said.  Sodeshi Village is weighed down by a sense of despair and discontent that is drowned out by the ominous rumble of the generator. Is this the future that the South Korean government wants for Seongju?

What is really ridiculous about this report is that no mention about the radar at Kyoga-Misaki that is part of the JADGE system that detects and protects Japan from missile attack is made.  Below is a map that shows the various JADGE radars in Japan; the Kyoga-Misaki radar can be seen towards the center of the map:

This radar has been there for years and no one is complaining about electromagnetic waves from that radar.  This is similar to the fact that South Korea operates various radars across the ROK as well and no one is protesting those radars.  This is just another example of how the opposition to the THAAD radar is purely political and has nothing to do with environmental concerns.

I think the Musudan tests had more to do with being able to show the US they can target Guam and build Kim Jong-un profile domestically than any concerns about THAAD:

North Korea’s recent firing of an intermediate-range ballistic missile at a high angle appears to be intended to push South Korea to accept the deployment of an advanced U.S. anti-missile system here and cause a rift in Seoul’s relations with Beijing, a North Korean expert said Tuesday.

Hong Woo-taek, a research fellow at the state-run Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), said, “Pyongyang might have sought to exploit the tension between South Korea and China over the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system issue to strengthen its hitherto weakened ties with Beijing.”

“But China is not foolish enough to alienate itself from South Korea to take sides with North Korea. Pyongyang won’t be able to achieve what it intended by firing the Musudan missile at a high angle last month,” Hong said in his recent report, titled “North Korea’s Intentions and THAAD.”

On June 22, the North fired two Musudan missiles, with one flying some 400 kilometers and reaching an altitude exceeding 1,000 km. Although the Musudan did not fly very far, some experts said the great height it achieved may mean the missile is capable of ranges up to about 3,000 km and could theoretically strike key military bases in the U.S. territory of Guam. The high angle at which the missile flew after takeoff also means it could be used to attack South Korea.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

https://twitter.com/geoffrey_cain/status/755303342377570304

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Jang Jun-gyu speaks during a send-off ceremony for the 11th batch of South Korean troops in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at the Special Warfare Command in southern Seoul on July 19, 2016. Since 2011, the UAE has been home to some 150 troops charged with training UAE special forces and conducting joint military drills. Their unit is known as “Ahk,” an Arabic word meaning “brother.” (Yonhap)

Welcome to Korea Finder.  The way this contest works is that each week a new image is posted and the first reader to accurately describe or locate the image gets a point.  At the end of the year the reader with the highest amount of points will win a Korea related book of their choice.

So who knows where this image is taken at?

2016 Korea Finder Leaders Board

1. Comfortable Chairs – 8
2. Smokes – 4
3. Dd – 2, Setnaffa – 2, MTB Rider -2
4. JoeC – 1, Nullscan -1

It figures that Japan would have someone become a celebrity for simply knowing how tidy a house:

Joy points upward, according to Marie Kondo, whose name is now a verb and whose nickname is being trademarked and whose life has become a philosophy. In April at the Japan Society in New York, she mounted a stage in an ivory dress and silver heels, made namaste hands at the audience and took her place beneath the display of a Power­Point presentation. Now that she has sold nearly six million copies of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 86 weeks and counting, she was taking the next logical step: a formal training program for her KonMari method, certifying her acolytes to bring the joy and weightlessness and upward-pointing trajectory of a clutter-free life to others. The humble hashtag that attended this event was #organizetheworld.

 Upon entering the Japan Society, the 93 Konverts in attendance (and me) were given lanyards that contained our information: our names, where we live and an option of either the proud “Tidying Completed!” or the shameful “Tidying Not Yet Completed!” In order to be considered tidy, you must have completed the method outlined in Kondo’s book. It includes something called a “once-in-a-lifetime tidying marathon,” which means piling five categories of material possessions — clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items and sentimental items, including photos, in that order — one at a time, surveying how much of each you have, seeing that it’s way too much and then holding each item to see if it sparks joy in your body. The ones that spark joy get to stay. The ones that don’t get a heartfelt and generous goodbye, via actual verbal communication, and are then sent on their way to their next life. This is the crux of the KonMari — that soon-to-be-trademarked nickname — and it is detailed in “The Life-Changing Magic” and her more recent book, “Spark Joy,” which, as far as I can tell, is a more specific “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” but with folding diagrams. She is often mistaken for someone who thinks you shouldn’t own anything, but that’s wrong. Rather, she thinks you can own as much or as little as you like, as long as every possession brings you true joy.  [New York Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but her methods are catching on with some people in the US which has caused a feminist backlash for whatever reason.

This is a pretty big bust of street racers in the Seoul area:

Seoul police announced Thursday that they have rounded up 73 people involved in racing their luxury cars on public roads during the wee hours of the night.

From May 2015 to May of this year, police found 73 people who participated in 22-kilometer (13.6-mile) races from the Jangam Station in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi, to the Songchu three-way intersection and back.

The racers were grouped into twos and threes by the horsepower of their cars, and as many as 10 to 15 such groups participated in the midnight race from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m., according to police.

The participants drove at about 60 kilometers-per-hour until they hit the Sapaesan Tunnel, a 4-kilometer-long four-lane tunnel, where they reached speeds of 200 to 324 kilometers per hour. The speed limit in the tunnel is 100 kilometers per hour.

Some motor service center owners helped racers tweak the electronic control unit of their cars in order to allow extreme speeding. Police said some of them received roughly 3 million won ($2,649) per car.

Among the 73 drivers booked by police, only one was a woman.

All 73 face the charge of violating the Road Traffic Act and five have been arrested for being chief organizers of the races. Six men were found to have raced at least 100 times since May of last year.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link

https://twitter.com/pearswick/status/753816737884147712

Soldiers of the 2-8 Cavalry Regiment affiliated with the U.S. Army’s 2nd Infantry Division unfurl the unit’s colors at Camp Humphreys in the city of Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, on July 18, 2016, as they take part in a ceremony to hoist them following the unit’s relocation from Dongducheon, north of Seoul, in this photo released by the division. The relocation is part of a plan to move U.S. bases north of Seoul to Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers southeast of the capital, by the end of 2017. (Yonhap)