[Video Report] Residents of central Pyongyang live on businesses in the market #NorthKorea https://t.co/B2Oh04hIyG pic.twitter.com/ehXwzA5uXP

— RimjingangNK (@RimjingangNK) May 16, 2016

A firefighter battles a fire that engulfed a building inside a U.S. military base, Camp Carroll, in the southeastern city of Chilgok on May 19, 2016, after multiple gas explosions took place at the base. No casualties were reported, although the explosions caused debris to fly and hit other buildings inside the base. Firefighting authorities said the incident was caused by the combustion of nitrogen and oxygen. (Yonhap)

This is a senseless and brutal murder by some homeless guy in Gangnam.  However, the usual suspects are out trying to paint this as a hate crime despite the fact the homeless guy has a history of schizophrenia and has been in and out of mental hospitals:

Mass public mourning of a 23-year-old woman who was fatally stabbed by a stranger in a bathroom near Gangnam Station, southern Seoul, on Tuesday, sparked a rallying call against misogyny across the nation.

Hundreds of people voluntarily left Post-it condolence notes and white chrysanthemums near Exit 10 of Gangnam Station to mourn the victim’s brutal slaying since Wednesday morning.

Politicians visited the impromptu mourning site, which was proposed by a Twitter user that went viral Wednesday, to pay their condolences. Moon Jae-in, the former chairman of the Minjoo Party visited the station Wednesday morning unaccompanied by aides. On Thursday, Cho Eun-hee, head of the Seocho District Office, and Park Won-soon, Seoul mayor, visited the site as well.

“I will preserve the mourning site as well as the memory of the tragic event,” wrote Park on Twitter. “I’ll try to heal the world into a place where there will be no more killings due to anger and hatred.”

After the police announced Tuesday that the 34-year-old suspect, a homeless man surnamed Kim, admitted that he didn’t know the victim but killed her out of vengeance against women in general for looking down on him, misogyny in Korea became a trending topic online and in the Post-its at Gangnam Station.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

This murder case in Hawaii has just gotten a whole lot weirder.  Obviously this NCO has some serious sexual issues if he is having affairs, watching child porn and prostituting himself to other men:

An Army medic charged with conspiring with his lover to kill his wife in Hawaii will be court-martialed for child pornography and prostitution charges that surfaced while investigating the killing.

Sgt. Michael Walker’s general court-martial is set for June 20 and June 21 at Wheeler Army Airfield on Oahu, said Jim Guzior, spokesman for Tripler Army Medical Center, where Walker has been assigned since 2013. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for next week.

Walker has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge in civilian court in the killing of Catherine Walker, who was found stabbed to death in November 2014 in the military housing the couple shared in Honolulu.

Army prosecutors revealed new allegations during a military judicial hearing in March, where they said Michael Walker is accused of possessing and viewing child pornography and receiving money in exchange for sex with men.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

Via a reader tip comes news that Kim Jong-un may have given up smoking.  Considering that this is based off of public pictures this could just be a propaganda campaign by North Korea where pictures of Kim Jong-un smoking are no longer allowed to be published:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is not known for a clean, healthy lifestyle. This is a young man whose ballooning waistline and sudden removal from the public eye almost two years ago was widely (if dubiously) attributed to a powerful addiction to Swiss cheese. Now, however, there is widespread suspicion that the North Korean supreme leader may have finally kicked one of his nastiest habits: smoking.

According to reports in South Korean news outlets like Yonhap and Korea Herald, Kim hasn’t been pictured with a cigarette for at least two months. A quick look at recently released pictures appears to confirm this: The last hint of a cigarette was in mid-May, when Kim was shown sitting next to an ashtray.

There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious about the idea that the North Korean leader may have given up his beloved smokes, however. South Korean media reports on the North are often unreliable. Additionally, Kim’s relationship with cigarettes goes back a long time: He is thought to have begun smoking when he was 15 years old. Over the years, he has frequently been photographed chain-smoking at official functions, much like his father, the late Kim Jong Il, had been before him.  [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link.

The guy that was jumping around kicking people in the City Hunter drama is some how unfit for military service:

Actor Lee Min-ho has been exempted from active military service required of all able-bodied South Korean men because of his medical history, his talent agency said Thursday.

The 28-year-old will instead work in the public service for about two years, MYM Entertainment said, adding it has not been decided when he will start the service.

The decision was made because he has screws in a leg he broke in a car accident in 2009.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link, but I always have a lot of respect for the actors and other celebrities that complete their mandatory military service.

The Queen of Poo Bread now has poo stuffed with sweet, sticky hotteok filling. Yum! #blog … https://t.co/frCKymjxMM pic.twitter.com/G07sYckYrP

— Daniel Lee Gray (@seouleats) May 17, 2016

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un tours a tree nursery in Pyongyang with some officals in this combined image released on May 15, 2016, by the Rodong Sinmun, the organ of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. It marks Kim’s second public outing since the closing of the party’s congress on Monday. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap).

It might help to track this guy down if a picture of what he looked like was available:

A U.S. soldier under military investigation has disappeared from a base near the border with North Korea, a spokesman said Thursday.

The missing soldier is being investigated for a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, said Lt. Col. Richard Hyde, a 2nd Infantry Division spokesman. South Korean police said the soldier had been scheduled to face a court-martial Wednesday, but the military declined to confirm that or provide details about the charges.

The soldier, who is in his 20s, is not wanted for a violent crime, Hyde said.

“We do not believe that he is armed or dangerous,” he said. “He is believed to be in Seoul.”  [Stars & Stripes]

There is a lot to discuss in this article to include the fact that the SHARP training after all these years has been wrong:

How drunk is too drunk to consent to sex?

According to military training aimed at preventing sexual harassment and assault, the answer has been: barely tipsy.

For years, Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention training informed troops that even one drink made a person incapable of giving consent.

In legal terms, that wasn’t true.

The issue has been at the heart of many cases in military courtrooms over the past decade. How many drinks an alleged victim consumed and how much alcohol rendered him or her “incapable of consenting” is frequently disputed at trial.

Now, for the first time, a military court decision has defined the term “incapable of consenting” while overturning a sailor’s conviction for sexually assaulting two subordinates under the influence of “significant amounts of alcohol.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces agreed in a March decision that a person is incapable of consenting when he or she lacks “the cognitive ability to appreciate the sexual conduct in question or the physical or mental ability to make or to communicate a decision about whether they agree to the conduct.” In rendering its decision, the court upheld a 2015 decision by the Navy-Marine appellate court.  [Stars & Stripes]

I read the bold text to mean that if someone is able to communicate that they want to have sex that this is consent regardless of whether they were drinking.  Because of this definition the sailor convicted of sexual assault in the article for having a drunken twosome was released from prison after serving 21 months of a six year sentence.  He left the Navy with an honorable discharge earlier this month.

Here is how the head of a major sexual assault advocacy group has responded to this change:

“There’s that common sense part of it,” he said. “What if you were trying to do a business transaction (with a drunken person)? You’re taking advantage of that guy. He doesn’t understand the intricacies.”

So what if the accused was drinking?  Isn’t the accused decision making ability altered as well?  How is it just the accuser’s ability to make decisions is hampered by alcohol and not the accused?  Anyway I agree with what this lawyer had to say to wrap up the article:

Jack Zimmermann, a Houston military appellate lawyer, said he doubted the case would have a significant effect.

“In reality, it’s going to be very similar to the way it’s been: You look at the words and actions of the people involved,” he said. “The bottom line in these sexual assault cases is that they are going to be won or lost in the courtroom when the complaining witness testifies and the jury believes her or not.”

Even with this new definition I suspect that cases with weak evidence will still get sent to court martial where juries will be left with the difficult job of figuring out the truth of what happened based off of drunken memories.