The North Koreans keeping getting more and more lewd in regards to their comments about South Korean President Park Geun-hye:
North Korea responded to an unusually harsh verbal attack by South Korea’s president against the North’s leader and its recent nuclear test and rocket launch with a characteristically colorful invective of its own Saturday, calling her policy traitorous and adding that Washington’s newly enacted sanctions are “laughable.”
The North’s official reaction — including the insult “senile granny” — was expected, though it took several days for Pyongyang to announce it through its state-run media.
North Korea regularly condemns South Korean President Park Geun-hye through sexist and violent language, saying recently that she lives upon “the groin of her American boss.” [Associated Press]
A family member of a victim of the Daegu subway fire in 2003 weeps at a memorial held on Feb. 18, 2016. A man with a history of mental illness set a subway car on fire in the morning of Feb. 18, 2003. The blaze quickly spread to a train on the opposite track, killing 192 people and injuring 148 others. (Yonhap)
This does make you wonder if for security precautions the North Koreans kept Kim Jong-un indoors somewhere or maybe he was just to lazy to show up for the picture?:
Recent photographs of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared to have been doctored, prompting speculation regarding Kim’s wariness about his personal safety as tensions rise on the peninsula.
The photographs that ran on the seventh page of state newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Friday show Kim surrounded by a large group of party officials, posing before the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reported.
Kumsusan is also the mausoleum of the late Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder.
But something doesn’t look quite right.
On closer inspection, the main flag at the top of the building flutters in one direction, while a group of flags in the background flies in the opposite way, an unlikely phenomenon if wind was blowing at the time the photograph was taken. [Business Insider]
A ROK Drop favorite Park Sang-hak and other North Korean defectors have had security measures improved for them when the ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS) learned of specific information about North Korean terror and assassination attempts within the ROK. In the case of Park Sang-hak the North Koreans have tried to kill him before:
Following the latest intelligence assessment that North Korea is planning terrorist attacks against the South, security measures to protect high-value targets including influential defectors have been beefed up.
The National Police Agency has reinforced the security detail for former North Korean diplomat Ko Young-hwan, vice president of the Institute for National Security Strategy of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). He was put under the highest level of monitoring, as the intelligence community obtained a death threat from the North.
Ko served in the North’s Foreign Ministry from 1978 to 1991. He defected from his post as the first secretary of the North Korean Embassy in the Republic of Congo in 1991.
“I was told by the police that they had obtained specific threats,” Ko told Yonhap News Agency. “I was normally guarded by two agents, but the number has increased to eight.”
The police also improved security measures for Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector currently leading the campaign to send anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border using balloons.
The North has previously assassinated a high-profile defector in the South. Yi Han-yong, nephew of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s mistress Song Hye-rim, defected to the South in 1982 while studying in Switzerland. He was shot in February 1997 by two assailants suspected of being agents from North Korean special forces. He died in a hospital later that month.
The NIS informed the government and the ruling party Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had ordered the country’s intelligence agencies to prepare for terror attacks against the South. In addition to threats on cyberattacks and attacks on public facilities, assassination and kidnapping of high-value targets were also feared. [Joong Ang lbo]
Korean Air Lines planes are visible outside a window at a departure gate of Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, on Feb. 19, 2016. Unionized pilots of South Korea’s No. 1 carrier voted for a strike on the day which, if carried out, would be the first in 11 years. The pilots demanded a 37 percent wage hike, while the management offered a 1.9 percent increase. The union said it is not planning on an immediate walkout, but will gradually raise the strike participation level depending on how talks proceed with the management. (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.
It looks like the ROK and the US are looking to make a strong statement to North Korea on the status of the US-ROK alliance:
The annual Korea-U.S. joint exercises will be the largest ever in terms of both “quality and quantity,” Defense Minister Han Min-goo told Saenuri Party officials at the National Assembly on Thursday.
Twice as many U.S. troops and double the equipment as before, or about 15,000 U.S. troops and hardware like a combat aviation brigade, a Marine mobile brigade, an aircraft carrier fleet, a nuclear-powered submarine fleet, and aerial refueling tankers, will be participating in the drills dubbed “Key Resolve/Foal Eagle.”
On the Korean side, the troop numbers will be greater by half than usual at 290,000 personnel, including special operations forces, Army corps in the front-line areas, and Army divisions in the rear areas.
The exercises are aimed at ensuring that troop reinforcements from the mainland U.S. are integrated smoothly on the Korean Peninsula in an emergency. [Chosun Ilbo]
