Another angle on Kim Jong-un's capacious pants. pic.twitter.com/l9ODfeuN98

— Adam Cathcart (@adamcathcart) June 5, 2016

South Korean President Park Geun-hye and her French counterpart Francois Hollande clink their glasses during a toast at Elysee Palace in Paris on June 4, 2016. (Yonhap)

Is this a sign that sanctions are working that the Kim regime has had to resort to bank robbery?:

Security researchers have tied the recent spate of digital breaches on Asian banks to North Korea, in what they say appears to be the first known case of a nation using digital attacks for financial gain.

In three recent attacks on banks, researchers working for the digital security firm Symantec said, the thieves deployed a rare piece of code that had been seen in only two previous cases: the hacking attack at Sony Pictures in December 2014 and attacks on banks and media companies in South Korea in 2013. Government officials in the United States and South Korea have blamed those attacks on North Korea, though they have not provided independent verification.

On Thursday, the Symantec researchers said they had uncovered evidence linking an attack at a bank in the Philippines last October with attacks on Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam in December and one in February on the central bank of Bangladesh that resulted in the theft of more than $81 million.

“If you believe North Korea was behind those attacks, then the bank attacks were also the work of North Korea,” said Eric Chien, a security researcher at Symantec, who found that identical code was used across all three attacks.

“We’ve never seen an attack where a nation-state has gone in and stolen money,” Mr. Chien added. “This is a first.”  [New York Times]

You can read more at the link, but they actually almost stole $1 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This is just another example of the danger posed by the Kim regime and why all efforts should be made to isolate and strangle the regime economically until it collapses.

It should be interesting to see what comes out of this study from NASA where they are trying to determine how much of the pollution over Seoul is produced domestically compared to what blows in from China:

 The cockpit warning blared insistently as the plane spiraled downward to 500 feet above Seoul: “Too low, too low, terrain. Pull up, pull up, pull up.”

The pilots ignored the automated voice despite a nervous glance from a visiting reporter. Their mission was to take the DC-8 as low or as high as the NASA scientists working in the back required.

The flight was part of a six-week joint Korea-U.S. air-quality field study — known as KORUS-AQ — which officially kicked off on April 29. The timing coincided with the so-called yellow dust season that sees fine particulate matter swept into the air from neighboring China’s Gobi Desert.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the above link as well as more about Korea’s yellow dust problem at this link.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

Foreign tourists wearing military uniforms and berets like those of Special Forces Capt. Yoo Si-jin in the mega-hit South Korean drama “Descendants of the Sun” pose for a photo at the Seoul Global Culture Experience Center in Seoul on June 3, 2016. The photo zone runs from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Yonhap)

I know parking in the D.C. area can be crazy, but this going way overboard:

Bryan Whitman, the senior Pentagon official charged last month with stealing a Capitol Hill nanny’s license plates, has been placed on paid administrative leave and had his top-level security clearance revoked.

It remains unclear whether Whitman, the highest-ranking career civilian in the Defense Department’s public affairs office, had informed his superiors of the alleged crimes — which he was required to do.  (……)

In early April, court records say, Whitman stole two license plates from the car of a nanny who had used a visitor pass to park in his neighborhood, where she cares for a young couple’s 1-year-old son. Two days later, after the plates were replaced, he stole another from the car. Then, in late April, he struck once more — but this time the couple caught him on a video camera they had mounted inside their home’s front window.

After handing over the plates to police and being charged, Whitman agreed to a deal this week that would lead to the case’s dismissal if he pays $1,000 in restitution, performs 32 hours of community service, remains out of trouble for the next 10 months, and stays away both from the nanny and the woman for whom she works.

The source close to him insisted he didn’t know his target was a nanny. Whitman, who has worked at the Defense Department for more than two decades, believed the person using the visitor pass worked on Capitol Hill and was taking advantage of the available parking.

A spokesman for the District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation Department said Wednesday it is legal for nannies to use visitor passes when they are working.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but I would not want to live some place where you have to get a parking pass just park on the side of the street.

ROK unsure of end date for THAAD discussions. Seoul should explore deployment of Aegis ashore system as well. https://t.co/hXUGLxBPQs

— Daniel A. Pinkston (康大植) (@dpinkston) June 2, 2016

Members of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union form a human chain around the building housing the finance ministry in Sejong, south of Seoul, on June 3, 2016, to protest against the introduction of a performance-based pay system. The government is pushing the system as part of economic and labor reforms. (Yonhap)

A ROK Drop favorite Congressman Ed Royce is of course correct that any legislation that a possible Trump presidency proposes has to go through Congress.  The only affect that I see a possible Trump presidency having on South Korea is that they will have to pay more for the upkeep of the US-ROK alliance:

Q. South Koreans have some trepidation over what a Donald Trump presidency may mean for the U.S. alliance with Seoul, such as Washington maintaining U.S. troops on the peninsula and continuing to extend its nuclear umbrella to the region. Should we be concerned?

A. Well, remember the way in which our system works. It is Congress that has passed many of these laws, and whether it is having given Korea NATO-plus-three status, which was a bill that I authored, or whether it’s [the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement] legislation, which I was a co-sponsor of, it is Congress that has passed these bills. And we are deeply committed.

Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan way feel that this is a very important alliance for our members in Congress. For our House members and Senate members, this is a strongly held position. And it is Congress that passes the laws. Every spending bill originates in the House of the Representatives. I’m chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; we have 44 members, and we have set these policies. I’ve been traveling here for over 20 years, and for 10 of those years, I was chairman of the inter-parliamentary exchange working with the [Korean] National Assembly. I would say I’ve never seen the relationship as strong as it is today… and I think it’s going to get stronger.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

By the way Congressman Royce has a lot more in the interview that is worth reading at the link.