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

Here are some posting from this week in the ROK Drop Forums:

• 1SG Receives ARCOM for Correcting Social Media Posts
• The Best Time to Invade the US
• Latest Missouri Unrest Against Police
• Andrei Lankov on North Korea’s Sony Cyberattack
• Lee Hyo-ri Vows to Take Off Her Clothes to End Ssangyong Labor Strife
• President Obama’s Approval Rating With US Military Hits A Record Low
• Husband and Wife Become Real Life Christmas Grinches
• Should US Army Deserter Who Joined the French Foreign Legion Be Sent to Jail?

Husband embraced dear wife for the last time and refused to let go http://t.co/s9Di9YH7H9 pic.twitter.com/HIiEC0Fi2M

— DramaFever (@dramafever) December 27, 2014

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un tours a greenhouse at a military farm growing vegetables. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported it on Dec. 26, 2014, without elaborating on the venue or timing of the visit. (Yonhap)

An unfortunate accident has killed three workers at a nuclear power plant in Ulsan that was about to go online:

The labor ministry has ordered two nuclear reactors under construction to be shut down to look into the cause of a toxic gas leak that killed three workers, a local branch said Saturday.

Three workers died Friday apparently after inhaling toxic gas at the construction site of a nuclear reactor in Ulsan, about 410 kilometers southeast of Seoul.

The state-run Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co. earlier said it suspected nitrogen gas leaked from an underground cable caused the deaths.

The ministry said it will cooperate with the occupational safety agency, the emergency management agency and police to conduct a joint probe into the site and summon officials at the state nuclear power company and contractors.

“We will promptly conduct an investigation and hold accountable those who are responsible (in the incident) if any irregularities are discovered,” Yoo Han-bong, who leads the labor ministry’s Ulsan branch, said.

The New Gori No. 3 reactor with a rated capacity of 1,400 megawatts was 99 percent complete for full operation scheduled for next June, and was undergoing a test run since last month to receive approval from the state nuclear watchdog. The New Gori No. 4 reactor was 98 percent complete, with commercial operation slated for 2016.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but it will be interesting to see if the investigation shows any sloppy safety practices led to this tragedy.  Also of interest in the article is that Korea’s nuclear power plants have also been facing cyber attacks and of course the IP address for the attacks was coming out of China.  North Korea is the suspected culprit, but the fact that China continues to allow them use IP addresses in their country shows how they are complicit in letting them conduct these cyberattacks.

This is nothing new and par for the course in regards to provocative bluster from the North Koreans, however it still isn’t right:

On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of “The Interview.” It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

It wasn’t the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top U.S. and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey.”

The defense commission also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, which happened after the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack. The U.S. government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but President Obama actually got off pretty light compared to the ambassador of Botswana of all places that the North Koreans called a “black bastard”.

Kidnapped directors and American defectors: North Korea's six decades of cinema http://t.co/j6ZVBHHjhl via @mashable #NorthKorea #DPRK

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) December 22, 2014

South Korean and U.S. Marines hold a joint firing drill in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, on Dec. 23, 2014. (Photo courtesy of First Marine Division) (Yonhap)

This is a start at least to these two countries learning to play nice with each other:

South Korea, the U.S. and Japan will sign a trilateral information-sharing arrangement on Monday to better handle the evolving nuclear and missile threats from North Korea, Seoul’s Defense Ministry said Friday.

The arrangement is expected to strengthen the three-way security cooperation that has been lackluster due to historical and territorial feuds between Seoul and Tokyo, and Seoul’s push for a deepened strategic partnership with Beijing.

South Korea’s Vice Defense Minister Baek Seung-joo, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work and Japan’s Vice Defense Minister Masanori Nishi will sign the arrangement separately in their respective countries on Monday.

Under the deal, South Korea and Japan will not directly share their military information, but they will share it via the U.S. upon their consent, Seoul officials explained. Such an indirect method has been devised apparently in consideration of the public sentiment in the South against any military collaboration with its onetime colonizer.

“If South Korea offers information to the U.S., the U.S. would provide it to Japan upon South Korea’s consent. On the other hand, if Japan offers information to the U.S., the U.S. would give it to the South upon Japan’s consent,” a senior official at the Defense Ministry told reporters, declining to be named.

“The sharing will be limited to information about North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats. The country that has produced a particular piece of information will determine to what extent it will share its information.”  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link, but an example of how this would work is if the Japanese received intelligence of an imminent nuclear test they would give that intelligence to the US to give to South Korea instead of directly.  The whole setup seems juvenile, but President Park remembers what happened to President Lee Myung-bak when he tried to pass this deal a few years ago and it caused a public outcry and he had to cancel the deal.  It was so bad he had to fly to Dokdo to prove he was not a Japanese traitor.  Park is being smarter about this intelligence sharing deal with this indirect approach and noticed when she is having the deal signed; right in the middle of the holidays when few people are paying attention.

The highly controversial movie “The Interview” was released yesterday despite threats from North Korean sponsored hackers and that means more reviews of the movie are in.  Like some of the initial screening reviews I read these reviews are not good either:

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy calls it “an intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In the relatively sparse annals of irreverent major studio comedies that pissed off foreign nations, for big laughs this one doesn’t rate anywhere near Borat or Team America: World Police. … As political satire goes, The Interview has the comic batting average of a mediocre-to-average Saturday Night Live sketch, with a few potent laughs erupting from an overall mash of sex, drugs and TV broadcasting jokes that feel rooted in a sense of humor primarily characterized by a frat-boy/altered state/prolonged adolescence mind-set.”

Additionally, “if you set up as provocative a premise as do the makers of The Interview, you ultimately have to deal with all its implications; let’s just say that what concludes the film is rote action, simplistic wish-fulfillment stuff that feels cheap and naive and more concerned with looking coolly kick-ass than with any real-world consequences. Even if one part of the film is sincere in wanting to highlight North Korea’s negatives (famine, ideological orthodoxy, cult of personality, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, et al.), the larger part is devoted to very Western-style sexual grossness, deterministic outrageousness, self-satisfied obliviousness and contended immaturity.” Alongside Franco and Rogen, “Park brings great energy and enthusiasm to his tricky job of portraying the world’s least known big-deal ruler — there are even scenes of him getting the famous Kim haircut and selecting a suit from a closet full of identical ones.”  [The Hollywood Reporter]

You can read more reviews at the link, but this movie appears to be pretty horrible.  I think I will pass on watching it even if it is supposed to be my patriotic duty now to do so.  Has any ROK Heads seen this film and can verify how bad it is?

It looks like the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who has made international headlines about her defection from the country has been exaggerating some of the tales she has been telling:

You’d have to have been inhuman not to be moved. But – and you’re going to hear a lot of “buts” – was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t. Whether this matters is up to the reader to decide, but my concern is if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed. We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee.

“Celebrity Defector”

I met Yeonmi Park a few months ago when I spent two weeks filming a story about her and her family for Australia’s SBS Dateline. We called the story, “Celebrity Defector.”

Back in South Korea where she now lives, Park is one of the stars of a television program featuring a cast of North Korean women. It’s called “Now On My Way To Meet You” and it daringly satirizes the Kim Dynasty. The women tell personal anecdotes about their lives in North Korea and their journey to the south. A number of the women were introduced to us as having been homeless and starving – the reason they fled.

Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience.  [The Diplomat]

You can read the rest at the link, but it is a very convincing case that Park has exaggerated circumstances of her defection to possibly help raise awareness and funding for the North Korean human rights organizations she has been working with.

Here is Yeonmi Park’s response to this article:

I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.

But one very important thing to correct:  I do not have a foundation.  The website was a dummy site built by a friend, and it was not supposed to be live. There was no way it could accept money, and I haven’t taken any.  I am so sorry for the confusion. The site has been taken down.

Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything. I am also writing a book about my life in North Korea, my escape through China and and my work to promote human rights.  It is where I will be able to tell my full story.

In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience and kindness to me.

I think most of the inconsistencies are pretty minor that could be explained by poor memory and English language skills other than the story of her mother being raped.  If that is not true then that is a flat out lie.  The organizations that promote defector testimony like this need to be very careful to not have defectors exaggerate or lie because this just plays into the hands of the Kim regime and its apologists.  The truth about North Korea is bad enough, there is no need to lie about it.