11 Romantic Places to Take a Walk This Spring in Busan https://t.co/erxUSrgGlK #korea #busan #travel #health pic.twitter.com/ZAaOowhZNn

— Haps Magazine (@hapsmagazine) April 4, 2016

Soldiers line up for consulting at a job fair for soldiers finishing their mandatory military service this year, at KINTEX Convention Center in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, Mar. 30. (Hankyoreh)

The Panama Papers have shown links to secret offshore companies from major Chinese politicians to include President Xi.  This is definitely a huge blow to to Xi who has been pushing anti-corruption reforms within China when his own family is hiding money.  In response to this the Chinese government is claiming this is all lies and have launched a massive campaign to scrub all information on the Panama Papers from the Chinese Internet:

A huge leak of tax documents that revealed the secret offshore accounts of relatives of former and current Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping, could be a part of a “disinformation” campaign by Western forces, a newspaper published by China’s Communist Party said Tuesday.

The revelation came after a year-long investigation by more than 100 media groups worldwide into 11.5 million documents, leaked from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, found offshore financial transactions by influential figures such as aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Dubbed the “Panama Papers,” the leaked documents were obtained by a German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and shared with media organizations worldwide by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

In an editorial titled “Powerful force is behind Panama Papers,” the state-run Global Times newspaper said, “The documents revealed do have basic political targets.”

“In the Internet era, disinformation poses no major risks to Western influential elites or the West,” it said. “In the long run, it will become a new means for the ideology-allied Western nations to strike a blow to non-Western political elites and key organizations.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.  The release of the Panama Papers does make me wonder if western intelligence agencies did have anything to do with  the release of the documents?  This would be a great shot across the bow to China and Russia to do more to stop North Korea’s provocations and nuclear ambitions or face the release of more embarrassing documents.

When I first heard about the leak of the “Panama Papers” I wonder if North Korea was using these off shore companies to launder money like many other politically connected individuals around the world were doing?  Sure enough it has now been confirmed that North Korea has been linked to the Panama Papers:

The Panama legal firm at the heart of a massive data leak kept clients who were subject to international sanctions, documents show.

Mossack Fonseca worked with 33 individuals or companies who have been placed under sanctions by the US Treasury, including companies based in Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.

One had links to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.

The information comes from the leak of 11m of the company’s internal files.

Mossack Fonseca registers companies as offshore entities operated under its own name. This meant the identities of the real owners were hard to trace because they were kept out of public documents.

Some of the businesses were registered before international sanctions were imposed. But in several cases Mossack Fonseca continued to act as a proxy for them after they were blacklisted.

DCB Finance was established in 2006, with its owners and directors based in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang. It was later put under sanctions by the US Treasury for raising funds for the North Korean regime and being linked to a bank helping to fund the regime’s nuclear weapons programme.

The leaked files reveal the owners of DCB Finance were a North Korean official, Kim Chol Sam and Nigel Cowie, a British banker who was also CEO of the sanctioned Daedong Credit Bank.

Mossack Fonseca appears to have overlooked that the owners and directors of the company were based in Pyongyang until it was contacted by the British Virgin Islands (BVI) authorities in 2010, inquiring about another company Mossack Fonseca had set up with directors in North Korea.

Mossack Fonseca resigned as agents for DCB Finance in September 2010.  [BBC]

You can read much more at the link, It will be interesting to see what else comes out about the document leak involving North Korea.

With prices to pay brokers to assist people defecting from North Korea skyrocketing due to the border crackdown during the Kim Jong-un era; it only makes sense that defector families already in South Korea would have to pool their meager resources to get the rest of their family members out:

First came Kim Yong-shil, in 2006. Then her husband, her two grown daughters, her teenaged son. Two years later, out came her mother, then one brother, then in 2012, the other.

One by one over the past decade, the members of this family have escaped from North Korea, the ones who made it out first earning money and meeting brokers so they could bring out the others.

This process — called “chain defection” — is almost the only way to escape from North Korea now, as security along the border has tightened dramatically since Kim Jong Un took control of the state four years ago.

In the past 20 years, some 29,000 North Koreans have fled hunger and repression at home by escaping across the river that forms the country’s border with China. The flow of refugees had been tracking steadily upward until plummeting during Kim’s first year in power. By last year, fewer than 1,300 people had escaped, less than half of the peak recorded in 2009.  [Washington Post]

You can read much more at the link.

According to a court, the threshold for religious accommodation is that the accommodation cannot affect unit cohesion and morale, good order and discipline, healthy and safety:

A decorated army officer is now officially permitted to wear a religious beard and turban in uniform thanks in part to a ruling late Thursday.

Capt. Simratpal Singh — a lifelong practicing Sikh, who was a West Point graduate, Army Ranger and Bronze Star recipient —was previously given a temporary accommodation in December. When it was set to expire in February, Singh sued after he was told by the Army he had to report for days of gas mask and helmet testing, citing religious discrimination.

He eventually won, with a court document saying that the temporary order would only be revoked if his beard and turban affected “unit cohesion and morale, good order and discipline, healthy and safety.”

According to The Sikh Coalition, which is currently representing Singh, he is the first Sikh American to receive a religious accommodation while serving.  [Mashable]

You can read more at the link, but there have been other Sikhs who have had religious accommodations made for them by the military so I am not sure why Singh is being claimed as the first.  In fact there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to sikhs who have served in the US military.

Sure, you could have a helicopter destroyer without an anime-inspired logo, but what would be the point? https://t.co/aIszpsMLXe

— Erik Slavin (@eslavin_stripes) April 4, 2016

I wonder if Donald Trump will mention South Korea’s illegal immigration crackdown on the campaign trail?:

The government said Monday it will clamp down on foreigners staying in South Korea without proper visas and reduce the rate of illegal aliens in the country below 10 percent by 2018.

The government will selectively allow entry to foreigners with low possibility of violating the immigration control law and beef up screening of visa issuance, it said during a planning committee meeting on foreigners policy held in Seoul.

The government’s move is in response to a recent series of airport-related security problems that caused alarm bells to go off.

In January, two Chinese nationals snuck into the country without being noticed by immigration officials or picked up by the airport’s security systems. Later in the same month, a Vietnamese transfer passenger forced his way through the gate of an unmanned automatic immigration checkpoint without being checked.

All the people that entered South Korea illegally were later apprehended.

Last year, 11.3 percent of foreigners in South Korea were believed to be staying here illegally, according to the Ministry of Justice.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I wonder if it is too late to send this guy back to North Korea if he misses oppressing people so much?:

A middle-aged man is walking through a quiet Seoul neighborhood when he suddenly stops. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hands to shield the flame from the winter wind, and takes a deep draw, remembering how things used to be. He’s a former policeman, a broad-shouldered man with a growling voice and a crushing handshake.

Back where he came from, he says, he was someone who mattered.

“In North Korea, people were afraid of me,” he says. He says it wistfully, almost sadly, like a boy talking about a dog he once had. “They knew I could just drag them away.”

That fear meant respect, and bribes, in the North Korean town where he lived, a place where the electricity rarely worked and the Internet was only a rumor. It meant he could buy a TV, and that he had food even as those around him went hungry. It meant that when he grew exhausted by the relentless poverty and oppression around him, and when relatives abroad offered to advance him the money to escape, he had connections to a good smuggler.  [Mashable]

The article features stories about other defectors, but here is the passage that I found of the most interest; just think if unification comes there will a whole country of people thinking just like this that South Korea would have to integrate:

“I knew that South Korea was a capitalist country, that it was very rich. I thought that if I can just get there, I can work less but earn a lot of money,” he says.

He grimaces when he thinks of his naivete.

Few North Koreans have the work ethic and competitiveness needed to succeed in South Korea which is another reason why instant unification would be a disaster for the ROK.

Yoon Chae-young may not have won much on the golf course, but she excels at winning the modeling competition for the Korean LPGA:

Golfer Yoon Chae-young was picked to serve as a face of the Korean Ladies Professional Golf Association for the eighth straight year on Thursday.

Yoon is the only golfer to have served in the role continuously since 2009. Kim Ha-neul, Kim Hye-youn and Kim Char-young each modeled for six years, while Ahn Shin-ae and Yang Soo-jin both did the job for five years.

The association picks models through a voting process from among the top 60 earners on the golfing money list, with KLPGA members, journalists and representatives of tour sponsors casting ballots. This process requires that golfers be both exceptionally talented and popular to be selected. [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.