It will be interesting to see how this is handled:

The United States recently pressed South Korea to pay at least $100 million, or 117 billion won, for the temporary dispatch of U.S. strategic assets around the Korean Peninsula, the JoongAng Ilbo exclusively reported Wednesday.

Citing multiple sources with knowledge of the talks, the paper said U.S. officials raised the issue late last month and again last week when both countries met for their first and second rounds of discussions on renewing the bilateral Special Measures Agreement (SMA), a cost-sharing deal that defines how much each country pays for the stationing of 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea.

Both countries launched discussions late last month to renew the deal, which is set to expire at the end of this year. The first round of talks was held on Sept. 24 and 25, and the second round was held on Oct. 23 and 24.

In both meetings, multiple sources who spoke with the JoongAng Ilbo said the United States asked South Korea to pay for the deployment of their strategic assets flying near the Korean Peninsula, saying their flights were defending the South.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

North Korea is continuing to put pressure on the Trump administration to drop sanctions. Expect these shorter range tests to continue up to the New Year. After the New Year they will probably have some kind of longer range test planned to demonstrate their displeasure to the Trump administration:

North Korea fired two short-range projectiles from a western region toward the East Sea on Thursday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said, amid a lack of progress in denuclearization talks with the United States and chilled inter-Korean ties.

The projectiles were fired at 4:35 p.m. and 4:38 p.m. from areas in the city of Sunchon, South Pyongan Province, toward the East Sea, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.

Both flew around 370 km across the peninsula, reaching a maximum altitude of around 90 km, the JCS said, adding that South Korean and U.S. intelligence authorities are analyzing their exact type.

“Our military is monitoring the situation in case of additional launches and maintaining a readiness posture,” the JCS said, calling on the North to “immediately stop such an act that does not help efforts to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

We all know that President Trump wants South Korea to pay more for the US-ROK alliance upkeep. This is nothing new, however this guy needs to sell a book which of course means coming up with a quote that make Trump look crazy. When are people going to learn not to take President Trump’s outbursts literally as he wanting $60 billion a year from South Korea. From the quote, I read it as he wants South Korea to pay much more for US-ROK alliance upkeep fees and just threw out a big number to make his point:

 U.S. President Donald Trump called South Korea a “major abuser” and claimed the U.S. ally should pay US$60 billion a year for the stationing of American troops in the country, according to a memoir published Tuesday.

Guy Snodgrass, former chief speechwriter and communications director to former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, made the revelation in his new book, “Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis,” as he recounted two meetings between Trump and his national security team at the Pentagon in July 2017 and January 2018.

According to Snodgrass, Trump repeatedly questioned the value of stationing U.S. troops overseas and asked top officials, including then-Defense Secretary Mattis and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whether the troops could be withdrawn from countries such as South Korea, Japan and Germany.

“It’s a losing deal!” Trump was quoted as saying in January 2018. “If (South Korea) paid us $60 billion a year to keep our troops overseas, then it’s an okay deal.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here is an odd story involving a Korean student attending Boston College:

Alexander Urtula was all set to graduate from Boston College at 10 a.m. on May 20. The 22-year-old was an exemplary student, a biology major and a member of the school’s Philippine Society, and his parents were in town from New Jersey to watch him receive his diploma. But just hours before the ceremony, Urtula leapt to his death from the top floor of a parking garage in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. 

According to a press release from the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, his girlfriend of 18 months, 21-year-old Inyoung You, has been indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter over his suicide. She was “physically, verbally and psychologically abusive” towards Urtula, according to the DA’s office, and repeatedly told him to “go kill himself” and to “go die.” The abuse, which has allegedly been documented in their more than 75,000 text messages, became “more frequent, more powerful and more demeaning” in the hours leading up to his death. You, a fellow Boston College student from South Korea, had tracked Urtula’s location on her phone, and was there when he jumped.

According to the DA’s press release, an investigation revealed that You knew about her boyfriend’s “spiraling depression and suicidal thoughts” brought on by the texts—still, she wrote him and encouraged him to die.

Elle

You can read more at the link, You left school in August and returned back to South Korea. U.S. authorities say they will try and extradite her if she does not voluntarily return for trial.

The Korean taxi lobby is trying to take out another ride sharing company:

A taxi industry body urged Tada, a ride-hailing service, to terminate its business on Tuesday, a day after prosecutors indicted the company’s heads on charges of running a transportation business without a license and declared the app-based business illegal. 

In a joint press conference with independent lawmaker Kim Kyung-jin, Kook Chul-hee, chief of the Seoul Private Taxi Association, said “the prosecution’s indictment brought the illegality of these taxi operators to light.”

Kim and Kook also asked the government to suspend Tada’s operation, which it claims has made a mockery of law and order, saying it would be dereliction of the government’s duty if it did not do so.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I seriously doubt the Moon administration will cut any deal with the Japanese on the forced labor issue because what will the Korean left campaign on in the Parliamentary elections next year? They need this issue as a distractor from the economic woes facing the country and the Cho Kuk corruption mess:

 From creating a fund to compensate victims of Japan’s wartime forced labor to entrusting a civilian panel with addressing the thorny issue, a flurry of proposals are raising cautious hope for a thaw in frosty ties between Seoul and Tokyo.

Diplomatic circles, scholars and media in both countries have put forward the ideas while Seoul and Tokyo have been exploring a diplomatic off-ramp — or at least a path for de-escalation — through a series of high-level or working-level talks in recent months.

“These proposals illustrate the resilience of the Seoul-Tokyo relationship at work, when both countries apparently feel fatigued about their ties having long been on a collision course,” Nam Chang-hee, a professor of international politics at Inha University, said.

This week, Japan’s Kyodo News reported that Seoul and Tokyo are weighing the idea that the government and companies in South Korea, with the participation of Japanese firms, set up a fund under the name of “economic cooperation,” not as compensation for forced labor.

Seoul’s foreign ministry rejected the report as “untrue,” while reiterating its “openness” to searching for a solution “acceptable to the victims and people of both countries.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but what I think is going on is that each side trying to create the appearance that they are the ones that are being reasonable by trying to work towards a solution knowing full well one will not be agreed upon.

I absolutely called this one that the next time we see Cho Kuk’s younger brother he would be in a wheelchair. He had earlier tried to avoid arrest by claiming he had a bad back, now he is wheelchair bound and even added a neck brace for added dramatic effect:

The prosecution again sought an arrest warrant for a younger brother of former Justice Minister Cho Kuk on Tuesday over a hiring scandal and an alleged fake lawsuit surrounding a private school foundation run by his family.

State prosecutors asked a Seoul court to issue a warrant to formally detain the 52-year-old man over charges, including breach of duty, bribery, obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting destruction of evidence.

The brother, who worked at the Woongdong school foundation, is alleged to have leaked test questions and answers to two people who applied to teaching posts at a middle school run by the foundation and received 210 million won (US$180,102)

He is also suspected of incurring financial losses to the school foundation by filing a fraudulent lawsuit against it over construction costs.

The prosecution claimed the younger Cho should be arrested, given that two brokers who gave the money to him were already taken into custody. A court review of the request will be held probably on Thursday.

The prosecution earlier sought an arrest warrant for him, but a local court rejected to issue it on Oct. 9, saying the charges are disputable.

If the warrant is issued, he would be the third member of the former minister’s family to be arrested.

Chung Kyung-sim, Cho’s wife, was arrested last week on a total of 11 counts of charges including an alleged forgery of a school award for her daughter and a dubious investment in a private equity fund. A son of Cho’s cousin involved in the fund was also arrested in mid-September.

Yonhap

As you can see the Korean media continues to blur the faces of those involved with the Cho Kuk scandal. For this brother they don’t even give his name instead call him the younger Cho. This very much unlike what they did with everyone involved with the President Park Geun-hye impeachment who the media did everything possible to personally destroy.

This is all an attempt by the North Koreans to separate the ROK from the U.S. by trying to get them to not enforce sanctions:

South Korea offered Monday to hold working-level talks with North Korea about a long-suspended tour program at the North’s Mount Kumgang, after Pyongyang demanded Seoul remove all of its resort facilities from the mountain in a threat to end the joint business.

The North made the demand Friday, following up on leader Kim Jong-un’s directive that all South Korean-built facilities should be removed from the mountain resort and the North should build an international tourist zone of its own there.

The order was seen as an ultimatum designed to test Seoul’s willingness to restart the project before he seeks development on his own as the South is unlikely to resume the program anytime soon due to international sanctions on Pyongyang.

Yonhap

North Korea even sent out their useful idiots in South Korea to help them in this effort:

Meanwhile, a coalition of pro-unification civic groups in Seoul urged the government to promptly resume talks with the North to restart not only the Mount Kumgang tour program but also the now-shuttered inter-Korean industrial park in the North’s border city of Kaesong, regardless of sanctions on Pyongyang.

“For the past year, the government said it would push the projects through close consultations with the United States, citing sanctions on North Korea. But it only ended up confirming the United States’ undisguised opposition” to the projects, the coalition said in a statement.

“We must swiftly put in all efforts to turn the crisis we face into a last opportunity,” it said. “We should not miss this significant opportunity for progress in inter-Korean relations.”

You can read more at the link.