This bad idea keeps coming up:
President Moon Jae-in’s speech early Wednesday morning at the 75th United Nations General Assembly contained some proposals on engaging North Korea.
Korea Times
Political watchers, however, generally view the proposals, including declaring an end to the 1950-53 Korean War, as unrealistic in the current deadlock in inter-Korean and denuclearization talks.
Moon called for the support of the international community in declaring an official end to the war, which was halted by an armistice, not a peace treaty. He also proposed the establishment of a new network of countries in Northeast Asia, including the two Koreas, China, Japan and Mongolia, to promote cooperation in infectious disease control and the promotion of public health.
You can read more at the link but a Korean War peace treaty is something that North Korea has long sought as a way to end the presence of US troops in South Korea. If there is peace why is USFK needed?
President Moon has been saying all the right things that USFK will remain after any peace treaty is signed, to include claiming Kim Jong-un understands this as well. However, this is likely just rhetoric to prevent energizing South Korean conservatives against a peace treaty.
Remember Moon is a very skilled politician that needs to keep the Korean right at bay and public anxiety down. If he openly advocated for a USFK withdrawal, that would give the South Korean right an issue to strongly attack him with and cause much public anxiety after decades of security guarantees provided by US forces.
That is why I think the Moon administration will publicly say they support USFK staying, but will then have surrogates do things to make life difficult for USFK if a peace treaty is agreed to. Every USFK traffic accident, parking ticket, drunken fight, etc. will become a national headline complete with anti-US activists protesting to increase anti-US sentiment. It will be the 2002-2004 timeframe all over again and this time the Korean left will hope that the US president decides to pull out USFK on his own accord.
Heck even our friends in Canada understand this.
So now a USFK servicemember can still test positive for the coronavirus and be released from isolation:
The U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) said Tuesday it will release coronavirus patients showing no symptoms after 20 days of quarantine even if they continue to test positive for the virus, citing medical research that individuals are no longer contagious after 20 days.
USFK said it came up with the change in the discharge policy after thorough coordination with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).
“USFK … will begin to release individuals from isolation once they have reached 21 days in isolation, regardless if they continue to test positive for COVID-19,” USFK said in a statement.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but apparently the after a length of time the virus is dead within the body but its remnants can still trigger a positive test. Because of this the Korean standard is 10 days of no symptoms to be released from isolation. USFK has doubled the Korean standard with 20 days of no symptoms. This means the anti-U.S. leftists will not be able to claim that USFK is releasing COVID-19 positive personnel to infect Koreans.
I wonder if this guy had an accident and fell overboard?:
A South Korean fisheries control official went missing while on duty aboard an inspection boat off the western border island of Yeonpyeong earlier this week, and authorities are looking into intelligence that he could be alive in North Korea, officials said.
The 47-year-old official affiliated with the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries disappeared from the 500-ton boat before noon Monday when it was patrolling around 10 kilometers south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto inter-Korean maritime border.
Colleagues only found his shoes on the vessel and reported his disappearance to the Coast Guard, prompting an intensive search operation involving about 20 vessels and aircraft.
“According to our military intelligence, he was found in North Korean waters late Tuesday, and we are looking into details,” the ministry said in a statement. “We will take necessary steps, including investigating how he went missing and checking related facts with North Korea.”
It was not immediately known if he was found alive or not, but military sources said there is a chance he is alive.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
Historian Robert Neff has an interesting article in the Korea Times about the World War I’s impact on the foreigner community in Korea:
The foreign community as a whole struggled during the war; many of the Western religious organizations and businesses in Korea had to curtail or suspend operations due to manpower shortages. At Unsan, the U.S. gold mining concession in northern Korea, the American miners were exempt from the draft ― the mines were considered essential to the war effort ― but lack of supplies hampered operations.
Korea Times
Although Korea did not actively participate, it did contribute to the war efforts. In 1915, Korean Leather Company in Seoul agreed to provide the Russian government with 150,000 pairs of boots, 520,000 cartridge cases and 280,000 leather belts ― the contract was worth over $1 million.
You can read the whole article at the link.
It makes me curious what the Chinese were trying to learn from the NYPD?:
A New York City police officer has been arrested on charges he was secretly working as an agent of the Chinese government.
Baimadajie Angwang, a community affairs liaison at the 111th Precinct in Queens and a member of the US Marine Corps Reserve, had for years been reporting back to “handlers” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), according to a criminal complaint filed at a New York federal court.
Mr Angwang, 33, an ethnic Tibetan native of China and a naturalised American citizen, had allegedly been reporting back on the activities of fellow Tibetans in the US since 2014.
According to the charging documents filed on Monday, Mr Angwang also assessed potential Tibetan intelligence sources, and used his position in the New York Police Department (NYPD) to pass along information about its internal workings to the Chinese.
“The investigation has revealed that Angwang had used his official position in the NYPD to provide consulate officials access to senior (police) officials through invitations to official NYPD events,” the complaint said.
Since June 2018, the FBI said Mr Angwang has been “in frequent communication” with an unidentified Chinese consular official he referred to as “Boss.”
That same year, he was awarded “Officer of the Month” by the NYPD for his initiative and public service.
The Telegraph
You can read more at the link, but apparently Angwang claimed he was being tortured back in China for being a Tibetan to get asylum in the U.S. However, Angwang’s father is retired from the People’s Liberation Army and his mother is a retired Chinese government official and member of the Communist Party. With family ties like that it makes me wonder why he was allowed to work in any sensitive position in the U.S. much less be allowed citizenship.
This is just another example of the broken asylum system in the U.S. which is now being used by adversaries to infiltrate spies.
