It is amazing how these people became millionaires by gaming a stupid program that should have never been put in place to begin with:

WASHINGTON — The Army paid a Texas couple nearly $4 million for supplying it with names of recruits who may have enlisted without their help, part of a bonus program blasted by a leading senator as a “mind-blowing” waste of taxpayer money, according to interviews and documents.
The Army’s Referral Bonus Program — hatched in 2006 during the darkest days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and buried in 2009 — paid as much as $2,000 per recruit. It mirrored a National Guard program so plagued with kickbacks that more than 800 soldiers have fallen under criminal investigations in the last few years, according to Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the financial and contracting oversight subcommittee.
Military investigators branded the scheme “sleazy but legal,” McCaskill wrote in a letter to top Pentagon officials.
Rene Agosto, a former Army sergeant currently working as a civilian in Texas for the Air Force, developed a website called OfficialArmy.com to collect names of potential recruits. The site, designed to look like the government-run Army online portal, attracted potential recruits and encouraged them to fill out a form with personal information. Agosto and his wife Vanessa submitted those names — as many as 12 at a time — to Army recruiters and collected $3,845,000, according to the Army and McCaskill. (Army Times)

You can read more at the link, but even though Senator McCaskill is completely right about this, there is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black in regards to a member of Congress complaining about wasteful spending like this.

Analysing the political and military cooperation between Iran and the DPRK: http://t.co/M3ZPUNCtFO

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) January 19, 2015

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (C) tours a precision machine factory in Pyongyang. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported it on Jan. 16, 2015, without saying when the visit was made. (KCNA-Yonhap)

Shown is a goat on a mountain in Uljin County, North Gyeongsang Province, on Jan. 19, 2015. Local authorities said at least 68 indigenous Korean wild goats have been found in the eastern mountainous region of the country. (Yonhap)

It always did seem a bit sensational that Shin Dong-hyuk was able to escape the way he did from the notorious Camp 14, but now that it has been revealed that he escaped from a far lesser security prison his ability to escape from North Korea seems more plausible:

A prominent North Korean defector who fled a prison camp and became the face of international efforts to hold the country accountable for widespread human rights abuses has changed important parts of his life story.

Author Blaine Harden said in a statement on his website that he has pressed Shin Dong-Hyuk to “explain why he had misled me” during interviews for Harden’s book on Shin, “Escape from Camp 14.”

North Korea tried to discredit Shin late last year as it fought a U.N. General Assembly resolution that backed the findings of a groundbreaking U.N. commission of inquiry into Pyongyang’s human rights abuses.

Human rights groups say the U.N. inquiry was based on interviews with scores of North Korean defectors. “Its findings are still valid,” said Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch. The organization last year gave Shin an award for extraordinary activism and said he is “regarded as the single strongest voice on atrocities taking place in North Korea.”

Shin was traveling and could not be reached for comment. He was expected to arrive in Seoul from the U.S. on Monday afternoon, said Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

“Every one of us have stories, or things we’d like to hide,” Shin said in an apology for the inaccuracies in recounting his past in his latest Facebook post, giving few details. He said he may or may not be able to continue his work of trying to eliminate North Korea’s political prison camps but urged others to keep fighting. “These will be my final words and this will likely be my final post.”

Shin’s story originally drew widespread attention because he said he had lived in a high-security political prison camp in North Korea from his birth until his escape through an electrified fence. He describes himself on Facebook as “The only known person born in a North Korean prison camp that escaped and survived to tell the tale.”

Harden’s statement said he passed along Shin’s new information to The Washington Post, his former employer. Its report over the weekend said Shin now says he was transferred around the age of 6 to a lighter-security prison camp with his mother and brother. It was there, not the harsher camp, where he informed authorities about an escape attempt by his mother and brother. For that, they were executed. He now says he was later transferred back to the harsher camp.

“The fundamental building blocks of his story have remained the same, although I am fully aware of the differences between (the two camps),” Scarlatoiu said Sunday. “Still, born and raised in a camp, he was subjected to forced labor, induced malnutrition and torture. He informed on his mother and brother, who were executed. He escaped from the camp, and lived to tell his story. None of that has changed.”  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link, but I think One Free Korea does a good job of summing up why his new claims are more believable.  See also North Korea Economy Watch on how even the North Koreans have unintentionally confirmed Shin’s new story.  What he has also done is shed doubt on any current or future defector testimony critical of the Kim regime that only plays into the hands of the human rights violators in North Korea.

Here is an interesting article from Bloomberg that explains why the Korean media does not actively investigate chaebol and when major incidents do happen they are quick to forget about them:

It’s the rare scandal that links air rage, corruption and the fate of the world’s 14th biggest economy. The Cho Hyun-ah kerfuffle dominating South Korean news media offers all this and perhaps more: a chance to right a political system that’s veered off course.

The news media pounced on the delicious tale of Cho’s freakout, on a Dec. 5 New York-to-Seoul flight, over the manner in which she was served her macadamia nuts. Cho figured her status as daughter of Korean Air’s chairman entitled her to demand that Flight 86 return to the gate to toss off a crew member who didn’t pay her sufficient homage. The 40-year-old has since been indicted for obstructing aviation safety (she’s also being investigated for colluding with transportation officials).

News commentators are now slamming the sense of privilege felt by families running Korea’s corporate giants, or chaebol. Indeed, Cho’s tantrum demonstrated, in a nutshell, how nepotism and clubby ties between government and industry hold back the economy.

But why did it take Cho’s nut-rage to get reporters on the case? Something similar happened last April with the sinking of the Sewol, in which more than 300 people (most of them school kids) died. The ferry was operated by chaebol Chonghaejin Marine, a fact that was harnessed to explore how cronyism and the revolving-door between regulators, bureaucrats and the private sector put lives at risk. This fit a disturbing pattern. When a spectacular incident makes global headlines, journalists feel compelled to investigate Korea’s chaebol problem. When the dust settles, they move on. Rather than respond only to periodic public outrage, journalists should keep a steady watch on the issue.

Two years ago, Park Geun-hye rode a wave of discontent into South Korea’s presidential Blue House. Many blame the widening gap between rich and poor on the dominance of the chaebol, with their unseemly penchant for tax-evasion, sibling battles over assets and extreme concentration of national wealth. Just five companies generate roughly two-thirds of South Korea’s gross domestic product. This outsized influence stifles small-and- medium-size companies. It kills any chance a startup might have to introduce game-changing products and create new jobs. Park’s plan to rein in the chaebol is off to a slow start, and media elites share in the blame.

The chaebol are major advertisers with deep pockets and, like Japan’s vast power industry or America’s military- industrial complex, they are adept at using their brawn to muzzle criticism. In his explosive 2010 book “Think Samsung,” that company’s former in-house counsel Kim Yong-chul detailed how family-owned conglomerates allegedly used bribes and intimidation to “lord over” the government and the media. Kim says that when he first approached local news outlets with the story, he found no takers. [Bloomberg]

You can read the rest at the link, but I think with the rise of alternative media it is getting harder for the chaebol to cover up their transgressions.  With that said I would be surprised to see anything change anytime soon.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is shown in the left circle while taking a photo at a precision machine factory in Pyongyang. Kim’s younger sister, Yo-jong, is seen in the right circle. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported it on Jan. 16, 2015, without saying when the visit was made. (KCNA-Yonhap)

This sounds like another populist antic, by the Dongducheon Mayor because the city could have the land tomorrow if the Korean government agreed to accept it:

Dongducheon residents and members of the Dongucheon City Council protest the possible long-term presence of U.S. soldiers in their city Monday, Dec. 2, 2013, in front of the Ministry of National Defense headquarters in Seoul.
Lim Sang-O/Special to Stars and Stripes

Angered by the U.S. military’s continuing possession of a long-vacated base, a city near the North Korean border is taking steps to “show its will,” from canceling friendship activities to forcing troops to go to municipal hall to register their cars.

Dongducheon, home to the 2nd Infantry’s Camps Casey and Hovey, notified the military Jan. 9 that it would withdraw its staffer handling private vehicle registrations for troops from Casey on Monday, forcing them to travel to city offices about a mile away.

“It was the quickest and easiest measure we could take under the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) and Korean domestic law,” the chief of a city office handling U.S. Forces Korea affairs said.

Dongducheon also plans to halt tours of the city for incoming 2ID soldiers and will no longer invite U.S. troops to take part in its annual Lunar New Year’s Day ceremony next month, he said. The city is also considering halting other friendship events with 2ID.

At issue is when U.S. Forces Korea will return Camp Castle, which it said closed in 2010, to South Korean control. The city says negotiations on the return that have been going on for several years have been postponed.

USFK said in a statement it is ready now to turn over 38 acres about 1.8 miles from city hall.

“Camp Castle will be returned as soon as the (South Korean) government agrees to accept the return,” the statement said. The command would not elaborate on why the handover has apparently stalled and referred questions to South Korea.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said the two countries are currently discussing the handover of the base through Status of Forces Agreement channels including an environmental subcommittee, but the timing of the return has not been decided. The ministry did not provide further details.

Dongducheon had hoped to turn the vacant base into a university campus that city officials believe would bolster the local economy.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but with just about every USFK camp closeout and handover environmental clean up has been a big negotiating point.  This is because the Korean government tries to get USFK to pay as much for the clean up as possible even though by the letter of the SOFA the camps can be turned over as is.

This has always been a strange murder suicide case and the speculation from this reporter a court has decided is not slander:

A Seoul appellate court acquitted a reporter on Friday of falsely claiming that the younger brother of President Park Geun-hye may have been behind the murder of his nephew.

In 2013, a lower court had cleared Joo Jin-woo, a reporter of the monthly news magazine Sisa IN, of charges that he spread false information about Park Ji-man in an article published in December 2012.

At the height of President Park’s presidential campaign, Joo’s article revisited a 2011 case in which the body of Park’s nephew was found on a hiking trail near Mount Bukhan in northern Seoul. Just three kilometers from the scene, another one of her nephews was found hanging from a tree.

Police concluded that one of the nephews had murdered the other after getting into a financial dispute, and then hung himself.

But Joo alleged that Park Ji-man may have ordered the murder, citing a legal dispute between Ji-man and his brother-in-law, who is the father of the two nephews.

Joo also faced charges that he slandered the president’s late father, former President Park Chung-hee, during a book event in 2010.

Upholding a lower court ruling, the Seoul High Court said Joo was not guilty of spreading false information since he’d tried his best to uncover the truth behind the murder.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

North Korea calls U.S.-South Korea exercises "open challenge" http://t.co/ULXoq9oCpx via @reuters #NorthKorea #SouthKorea #USA

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) January 15, 2015