While the ROK was cutting military drills with the U.S., the Kim regime was actually increasing theirs:

Most of North Korea’s naval drills involving submarines in the past seven years took place in 2018, even as the two Koreas held talks three times to defuse tensions, Rep. Han Ki-ho of the opposition People Power Party said Tuesday, citing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The military found that the North deployed its submarines to rehearse attacks on the South about 150 times in 2018, the highest number since 2014, when such drills took place about 120 times. Excluding 2018 from 2015 to 2019, Pyongyang held the drill 87 times a year on average. 

No drills took place in 2020 because of the pandemic, according to the military.

But the 2018 drills were not made public at the time, and since 2018, South Korea has cut back on its own naval drills with the US to counter North Korean submarines.

The Navy held submarine drills with the US only eight times, spending two weeks in total running them in 2018, while in 2016, the allies spent a little over a month holding them.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

The ruling party has been attacking the opposition party’s presidential hopeful with corruption allegations so now they are fighting back with corruption allegations themselves against the ruling party’s candidate:

Clashes between rival political parties intensified Tuesday in connection with a sprawling regional development corruption scandal, causing disruptions of a series of parliamentary audit sessions of the government amid opposition calls for an independent counsel investigation.

At the start of at least three audit sessions, lawmakers of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) hung banners on their desks calling for a special prosecutor probe and other slogans attacking the ruling Democratic Party and its presidential hopeful Gyeonggi Province Gov. Lee Jae-myung. 

In response, DP lawmakers boycotted the sessions, accusing the PPP of trying to take political advantage of the audit. Some DP members even put up their own banners claiming that the opposition party is to blame for the scandal.

The scandal escalated over the weekend with the arrest of Yoo Dong-gyu, widely considered a close aide to Gov. Lee, on charges that he played key roles in helping a private asset management firm collect astronomical profits from a land development project in Seongnam, south of Seoul.

Lee was mayor of Seongnam at the time.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but if Gov. Lee Jae-myung is found to be some how involved in this scandal this is far more serious than the allegations being thrown at his rival former Prosecutor General, Yoon Seok-youl.

It took a while to get going, but once the infrastructure was in place South Korea has made quick gains getting their population the COVID vaccine:

Nine out of 10 South Korean adults have received at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine, helping the country to get closer to a goal of creating herd immunity, the health authority said Tuesday.

A total of 39.7 million people have received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine, accounting for 77.4 percent of the country’s 51.3 million population or 90 percent of those aged over 18, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA). 

The number of fully vaccinated people stood at 27.2 million, or 53 percent of the total or 61.6 percent of the adult population, the KDCA said. 

Health authorities expressed optimism that the country will be able to fully inoculate over 70 percent of the population by the end of October thanks to people’s willingness to get vaccinations and smooth vaccine supplies

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It looks quite a storm system hit Pyeongtaek:

 Several Army helicopters were damaged in a storm that battered this U.S. base 40 miles south of Seoul on Friday evening, according to the 2nd Infantry Division.

The division declined to provide specifics on the damage, citing operational security policies, but the command was “conducting maintenance checks across the fleet,” according to a statement to Stars and Stripes on Monday.

The helicopters were not in the air during the storm and no injuries were reported, Lt. Col. Ryan Donald, the division’s public affairs director, said Saturday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

The Kim regime continues their strategy of wooing the Moon administration to pressure the Biden administration into a deal:

 South and North Korea restored their direct communication lines Monday, raising hopes for the resumption of stalled inter-Korean dialogue amid a drawn-out deadlock in denuclearization talks.

The two sides had contact through a military hotline and a separate joint liaison office channel, according to South Korean officials.

Hours earlier, North Korea’s state media announced that the lines would be back to normal operation as of 9 a.m. on the day.

Last year, North Korea blew up a liaison office in its border town of Kaesong and unilaterally cut off all inter-Korean communication lines in anger over anti-Pyongyang leaflets sent from South Korea.

The hotlines were briefly back in operation in late July before being suspended by North Korea in protest of an annual combined military exercise of South Korea and the United States. The North has long denounced the allies’ annual military exercise as a rehearsal for invasion.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

If you are wondering why your Facebook account is down, here is what is currently going on:

Facebook Inc. services experienced widespread outages Monday morning, adding to the social network’s miserable day.

Facebook FB, -4.88% shares dropped as much as 6% to an intraday low of $323, which would be their worst single day decline since a 6.3% fall logged on Oct. 30, 2020. The stock outpaced a 1.5% loss on the S&P 500 index SPX, -1.30%and a 2.3% loss on the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index. COMP, -2.14%

The decline followed a national broadcast of a whistleblower’s allegations that the social media network placed profits before safety. Late Sunday, ViacomCBS Inc.’s VIAC, -1.97% news program “60 Minutes” interviewed former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen, who alleges that the social-media giant has been deceiving investors about how it has been dealing with hate speech and misinformation on its platform.

Haugen provided thousands of pages of documents to The Wall Street Journal, which formed the basis of the publication’s The Facebook Files series. Haugen is scheduled to testify before Congress on Tuesday morning and is also seeking whistleblower protection in complaints filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Adding to all of that was a widespread outage of Facebook services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, that started just before noon Eastern time. Even the status dashboard Facebook uses to communicate its availability to developers was not working Monday.

Market Watch

You can read more at the link, but I also read reports that Facebook employees were having a hard time getting into their offices because the security system used to scan cards for access was down as well.