This would probably be an interesting meeting to be a fly on the wall and listen in to:

The military is planning to hold a rare meeting between major South Korean and U.S. Forces Korea special operations officials later this month to discuss ways to improve special warfare capabilities amid North Korea’s threats, Seoul’s defense ministry said Tuesday.

South Korea operates special forces units separately under the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps, and regularly stages combined drills with U.S. Special Operations Command Korea troops, but holding a meeting between all of their commanders would mark a rare occasion.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

This story has been all over social media and now being covered by the Stars and Stripes:

An Army master sergeant who says he lost a leadership role due partly to his beard and haircut has ignited online debate over both the impact of shaving waivers on careers and the extent to which service members can express themselves on social media. Master Sgt. Darhem Parker, who has more than 24,000 followers and 550,000 likes associated with his TikTok account, celebrated his elevation to first sergeant as part of the Hawaii-based Alpha Company, 29th Brigade Engineer Battalion in an April 30 video post.

“Somebody in real life is going to see that picture on their wall and be pissed (expletive) off,” Parker says as he shows off his command picture while pointing out his haircut and his beard. Parker wasn’t wrong about that. He was counseled by his battalion sergeant major on May 2 for inappropriate online conduct, he said during a video interview Tuesday. Parker said he mostly agreed with the counseling regarding his video.

“When I look back on it, I cringe when I say I agree, but I ain’t always right,” Parker said Tuesday. “I could have toned down the passion or the ‘I told you so’ attitude.” What Parker didn’t expect was the mention of his appearance in the counseling statement, along with the instructions to retake his command photo after correcting his haircut.

Stars & Stripes

You can read much more at the link, but what he ended up being relieved for was not the beard, but for taunting on social media. If he would not have posted anything on social media this whole thing would have never had been an issue. Just another example of how social media has caused another career to crash and burn.

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

Due to outside pressure the Yoon administration is now having to provide public updates on what they had previously been handling quiety with the Naver issue and Japan:

The presidential office said Tuesday a report set to be filed with the Japanese government by LY Corp. will not include plans for stake sales by the South Korean portal giant Naver Corp.

Naver has been under pressure from the Japanese government to “review its capital relationship” in LY Corp., the operator of Line controlled by a joint venture between Naver and SoftBank of Japan, over a massive data leak of user information. 

“We have been communicating with Naver, and LY’s report set to be submitted to the Japanese government will not include plans for Naver selling stakes,” a high-ranking presidential official said over the phone.

“The Japanese government should not disadvantage Naver because the report did not include a stake sales plan,” the official added.

It marked the first time for the presidential office to directly address the possibility that Naver would not sell its stakes to SoftBank.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but to sum this whole issue up, the Japanese government was unhappy with the massive data leak Naver’s Line app had. The Japanese government then pressured Naver to improve cyber security or consider selling Line to someone who will. The Korean left predictably decided to turn this into a anti-Japan issue, which now has caused the Yoon administration to make public statements instead of trying to handle this issue quietly with the Japanese government.

By the way the Japanese government never even issued any formal guidance to sell Line:

Sung noted the Japanese government has stated several times there was no mention of a stake sale in the administrative guidance it issued to LY, Line’s operator, earlier this year, nor any reference to control of the company.

Once again this is a cyber security issue. Naver needs to fix the cyber security for their Line app and then the Japanese government will leave them alone. Did I miss anything?

If you are accused of a crime I can understand having protections to your identity. Sometimes people get falsely accused of things and spreading their information online causes them irreparable harm. However, once convicted of a crime there shouldn’t be issues with posting information about the criminal:

Concerns surrounding the disclosure of the personal information of convicted criminals and those suspected of having committed crimes have been mounting in South Korea, sparked by the recent revival of a name-and-shame website known as “Digital Prison,” around four years after it was shut down by South Korean authorities.

The debate was triggered by the unauthorized release of the personal details of a 25-year-old man surnamed Choi, who is accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death on top of a building in the densely populated Gangnam district of Seoul on May 6 at around 5 p.m. Local reports suggested that Choi has admitted to planning the crime.

Choi’s personal information, including his full name, photos, university entrance exam scores, the medical school he was accepted into and social media accounts, rapidly spread across the internet, with Digital Prison pinpointed as the originating platform.

Following the release of Choi’s personal information on Wednesday, Digital Prison published more posts containing the information of several other criminals and those suspected of having committed crimes. These include the personal information of a YouTuber in his 50s who allegedly stabbed a fellow YouTuber near the Busan District Court on Thursday morning on live stream.

Korea Herald

An end of an era for the ROK Air Force:

A group of South Korean Cold War-era fighter aircraft staged one of their final flights last week ahead of retirement next month, bidding farewell after more than five decades of service.

The four F-4 Phantom IIs took off from their home base in Suwon, just south of Seoul, for the commemorative flight boarded by reporters on Thursday, retracing the supersonic fighter-bomber’s 55-year history in South Korea’s airspace.

The first batch of the U.S.-made jets arrived in South Korea in 1969, in a major boost to the Air Force that sought to beef up its aircraft fleet against threats posed by North Korea’s Soviet-made jets amid fierce rivalry between the two Koreas.

More than a half-century later, the Phantoms will be fully retired from service on June 7, handing over operations to defend the skies to a new generation of aircraft.

Yonhap via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.