It looks like the Yoon administration has decided to get back at MBC after they reported that President Yoon used an expletive against President Joe Biden. The Yoon administration claimed the expletive was directed towards the Korean National Assembly. The sound quality of the clip was poor and not definitive, but MBC captioned it anyway to say Joe Biden. This led to an entire news cycle of negative headlines for Yoon:
President Yoon Suk-yeol said Thursday that important national interests are at stake during presidential overseas trips, after his office decided to ban local TV station MBC’s reporters from boarding Air Force One to cover his upcoming trip to Southeast Asia.
The presidential office informed MBC of the decision Wednesday, two days before Yoon departs for his tour of Cambodia and Indonesia, citing the broadcaster’s repeated “distorted” coverage.
“The president goes on overseas trips using taxpayer money because important national interests are at stake,” Yoon told reporters as he arrived for work Thursday. “We’ve been providing a service to help with coverage of foreign policy and security issues, and I’d like you to accept it in those terms.”
The presidential office did not specify which reports were distorted, but MBC has been at the center of controversy after it broadcast a video of Yoon walking out of an event in New York in September and telling his aides in vulgar language that it would be embarrassing if the National Assembly did not approve of something unspecified.
MBC subtitled the video to make it appear that Yoon was referring to U.S. President Joe Biden, but the presidential office denied there was any mention of Biden and claimed the word he used was in reference to the National Assembly. Yoon’s remarks caught on a hot mic were difficult to hear because of background noise.
“The boarding of the presidential jet has been a service provided to help with coverage of foreign policy and security issues, and in consideration of MBC’s repeated distorted and biased coverage of foreign policy issues recently, we have decided not to provide the service,” the presidential office said in a notice to the company.
Korea Times
You can read more at the link, but MBC was taken over by the Korean left years ago with the threat of violence from labor unions and legal attacks. Even further back MBC was well known for the fake news they put out about U.S. beef causing mad cow disease that led to massive anti-US and anti-government riots in South Korea.
This may explain why the political opposition has been recently out pushing anti-Japanese sentiment to get ahead of this announcement:
President Yoon Suk-yeol said, Thursday, he will sit down with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Joe Biden and Fumio Kishida, on the sidelines of multilateral meetings in Southeast Asia later this week amid a series of provocations by North Korea.
Korea Times
“During the multilateral meetings, there will be several important bilateral summits,” Yoon told reporters a day before he leaves for Cambodia and Indonesia to attend meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Group of 20.
In Phnom Penh, Yoon is scheduled to attend a South Korea-ASEAN summit, an ASEAN Plus Three summit and the East Asia Summit before departing for Bali for the G20 summit on Tuesday.
“A South Korea-U.S.-Japan summit has been fixed and several other bilateral meetings have also been set or are under discussion,” Yoon added. However, he did not elaborate on exactly when the meetings will take place.
You can read more at the link.
The Korean left is definitely coordinating to promote anti-Japanese sentiment against the Yoon administration as its tries to improve ties with Japan:
A salute South Korean sailors rendered to the “rising sun” flag of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force at a fleet review touched off an exchange Monday in Seoul between the nation’s defense minister and an opposition lawmaker.
South Korea’s navy attended the Japan International Fleet Review on Sunday in Sagami Bay near Tokyo for the first time since 2015. Eleven other countries, including the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and India, also sent warships to the ceremony.
Saluting the rising sun flag is equivalent to paying respects to a war criminal, said Jeon Yonngi, a Democratic Party member, during a National Assembly hearing.
The flag for some recalls Japan’s colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945 and its military aggression during World War II, when the Japanese Imperial Navy flew the flag. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force has flown the same banner for more than 50 years, according to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
South Korea in 2019 asked the International Olympic Committee to ban the flag at the Tokyo Olympics, suggesting that it recalls for Asians the “scars and pain” of World War II as the swastika does for Europeans, according to a July 23, 2021, report in the Mainchi newspaper.
Jeon at the hearing broadcast by the assembly asked National Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup whether South Korean sailors should have saluted the flag as it passed on a Japanese vessel during the fleet review.
The sailors were saluting the host country warship, “in accordance with international practices,” Lee replied. “Thus, I would like to say it is not that the [South Korean navy] made a salute toward the rising sun flag.”
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
The real story here is why would a major underwear company want to work with the Kim regime to smuggle money into North Korea? What did they get in return? Was anyone in the Gyeongi-do government in on this? Are other so called NGOs doing the same thing to circumvent sanctions? That’s what I want to know:
Prosecution took into custody a man suspected of colluding with Ssangbangwool Group to smuggle huge sums of foreign currency into North Korea about three years ago, according to judicial sources.
The Suwon District Prosecutors Office apprehended the chief of the Asia Pacific Exchange Association, a Seoul-based nongovernmental organization, at an unidentified place in Seoul where he was hiding out, on charges of violating the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act.
Prosecutors have been investigating allegations that Ssangbangwool, South Korea’s leading underwear company, secretly sent millions of US dollars to China in 2019 and that the money was sent to North Korea.
They allege that dozens of Ssangbangwool executives and employees took part in the alleged currency smuggling by hiding dollars inside books on their trips to China to deliver them to North Korea.
Prosecutors suspect the man, only identified by his surname An, played a role in the crime.
Ssangbangwool and the NGO are suspected of handing $1.5 million and US$500,000, respectively, to the North.
Prosecutors are also looking into possibility that support funds the NGO received from Gyeonggi Province were part of the money sent to the North.
The province surrounding Seoul provided about 2 billion won ($1.46 million) to the NGO on two occasions between 2018-19 for an event where North Korean officials attended, and delivered flour and saplings to the North.
Korea Herald
You can read more at the link.
It is pretty clear that the political opposition wants to form this committee so they can come up with findings to blame the Yoon administration for the crowd crush tragedy in Itaewon:
The main opposition Democratic Party (DP) and two minor progressive parties submitted a joint request Wednesday for a parliamentary investigation into the Itaewon crowd crush despite opposition from the ruling party.
The DP, the Justice Party (JP) and the Basic Income Party submitted the request to the National Assembly’s Bills Division on Wednesday afternoon, with an aim to have the request reported at a parliamentary plenary session scheduled for Thursday.
“We should clearly determine where the responsibility lies and come up with measures to prevent a recurrence by looking thoroughly into the accident, including its cause and measures taken before or after the tragedy,” the parties said in the request sponsored by 181 lawmakers.
The parties called for forming an 18-member special committee to oversee the probe and look into whether measures by government agencies were appropriate and whether there were attempts to minimize or cover up the tragedy.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but prosecutors already have an investigation going on that has led to a number of arrests and firings already.
If the North Koreans really wanted to send the U.S. a message on a election day they could have launched an ICBM. The fact they launched a lone short range missile is a pretty small reaction to the U.S. election:
North Korea launched one short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) toward the East Sea on Wednesday, South Korea’s military said.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the launch from an area in or around Sukchon, South Pyongan Province, at around 3:31 p.m.
The North’s latest provocation came as ballots are being counted in the U.S. mid-term elections. The South’s military has been staging computer-simulated Taegeuk drills since Monday.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
The political opposition in South Korea is demanding that the ruling government stop combined exercises with USFK:
Military exercises involving U.S. and South Korean forces are a necessary consequence of the constant security threat from North Korea, the South’s national defense minister told lawmakers Monday.
Suspending exercises with the U.S. military “is impossible” in light of threats from North Korea, Minister of National Defense Lee Jong-sup told lawmakers at a parliamentary hearing Monday.
Rep. Cho Sujin,a conservative lawmaker and member of the ruling People Power Party, during the hearing described relations with North Korea as a “fraught situation” that requires people to be “highly attentive.”
Cho called on Lee to answer opposition critics who question whether the increased tempo of exercises is the correct response to North Korea’s record-breaking spate of ballistic missile tests this year. Several progressive South Korean non-governmental organizations and independent party lawmakers have been critical of the joint exercises and allege they fuel the division between Seoul and Pyongyang.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link, but the political opposition is playing right into the hands of the Kim regime of sowing division in South Korea while they quickly advance their missile and nuclear programs.
