North Korean leader Kim Jong Un poses for pictures with female pilots as he provides field guidance to the flight drill of female pilots of pursuit planes of the KPA Air and Anti-Air Force in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang November 28, 2014. REUTERS/KCNA
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un tours the Korean April 26 Cartoon Film Studio in Pyongyang. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported it on Nov. 27, 2014, without saying when the visit was made. Circled is Kim Yo-jong, the North Korean leader’s younger sister who serves as a deputy director level official at the North’s ruling Workers’ Party. (KCNA-Yonhap)
In her slim-fitting trouser suits and black-heeled shoes, Kim Yo Jong cuts a contrasting figure to her pudgy older brother, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
On Thursday, state media said the younger Kim, 27, had taken a senior position in the ruling Workers’ Party, confirming speculation she had moved closer to the center of power in the secretive state.
It named her as a vice director alongside the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department, which handles ideological messaging through the media, arts and culture.
Kim Yo Jong’s title supports earlier reports from a North Korean defector group which said she may have taken a high-level role when Kim Jong Un recently disappeared from public view for more than a month, prompting speculation about his grip on power.
South Korea’s intelligence agency later said Kim, 31, was likely to have had surgery on his left ankle. Kim has since reappeared, walking with a limp.
Kim Yo Jong’s power has been likened to that of a prime minister, an unnamed South Korean intelligence source told the Seoul-based JoongAng Ilbo newspaper in April, even before her brother’s injury.
“All roads lead to Comrade Yo Jong,” the source said. [Reuters]
Here is the latest military budget fight happening in Congress:
A dispute between House and Senate armed services committees over whether to slow growth in military housing allowances and raise off-base pharmacy co-payments has put at risk passage of a defense authorization bill.
“This is as bad as I’ve ever seen it,” said one armed service committee staffer, describing the impasse between House-Senate negotiators striving to reach a defense policy bill compromise two months into the new fiscal year. (Stars and Stripes)
This passage here just confirms what I have always believed that Congress rather have equipment built with no one to man it than protect personnel from cuts:
Buyer cautioned that he wasn’t speaking for the commission. But as a former lawmaker with years of experience on armed services, as a career reserve officer and as someone who has studied compensation issues for the past 18 months, Buyer said he believes the “baseline argument” that current pays and benefits are unsustainable “is false.”
“I learned immediately as a freshman congressman on the House Armed Services Committee [in 1993] about the power of the defense industrial base in Washington D.C.” Its “appetite on programmatic” defense spending “is so strong” that personnel budgets feel “tremendous pressure” and those backing other programs “will do everything they can to either cut personnel numbers or benefits to gain access to money to pay for programs.”
I have always found this amazing how this Japanese journalist is tried for reporting in the Japanese media what the Korean media was reporting themselves about President Park:
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A trial has begun for a Japanese journalist charged with defaming South Korea’s president by reporting rumors that she was absent for seven hours during a ferry disaster in April because she was with a man.
A spokesman from the Seoul Central District Court said Thursday that Tatsuya Kato of Japan’s Sankei Shimbun was present in court as his lawyers and prosecutors introduced evidence.
The indictment has raised questions about South Korea’s press freedom. Critics accuse South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s conservative government of clamping down on journalists in an attempt to control her image.
Prosecutors indicted Kato in October over his Aug. 3 article about Park’s whereabouts on the day the Sewol ferry sank and killed more than 300 passengers, mostly teenagers on a school trip.
The article repeated rumors in South Korean media and the financial industry about a relationship between Park and a former aide who was said to be married at the time. (Associated Press)
Chey Min-jung (R), the daughter of SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, salutes to her mother at the Korea Naval Academy in Changwon City, South Gyeongsang Province, on Nov. 26, 2014. The 23-year-old was commissioned as second lieutenant after an 11-week training. She became the first woman from a chaebol family to enlist in the military in a country where all able-bodied South Korean men are subject to compulsory military service for about two years. The mother of the younger Chey is the daughter of a general-turned-president Roh Tae-woo who served from 1988 to 1993. (Yonhap)
I am not at all familiar with St. Louis so I was wondering if Korean-Americans had opened businesses in the black neighborhoods there like they have in other major cities. It appears they have which of course has made them targets of the rioters:
The violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over a grand jury decision not to indict a white police officer who fatally shot a black teen destroyed two Korean stores.
Among the roughly 20 stores that are run by Korean nationals in Ferguson, two were burned down and another five or six were looted or had their windows broken as of Wednesday, according to the Korean American Association of St. Louis.
The cost of damages has exceeded $2 million.
The stores, most of which sell cell phones and beauty products, were attacked because they are on a road leading to the Ferguson Police Department.
Local police are reportedly blocking that road now, although business owners were recommended to suspend their businesses as people continue to protest the decision over Officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in August. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
