Cho Kuk was a mber of Sanomaeng (Socialist Workers League of Korea). Its goal was to overthrow #SouthKorean system for workers' socialist revolution by armed uprising. Cho said he's not ashamed of it. Moon designated Cho to be the Justice Minister.https://t.co/uA6GW88ejv
— Tara O (@DrTaraO) August 22, 2019
Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.
It appears that the North Koreans have yet more features of their new missile systems to test:
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff says that North Korea fired two unidentified projectiles believed to be short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea Saturday morning from the eastern town of Sondok in South Hamgyong Province.
The JCS said the missiles were fired at 6:45 and 7:02 a.m. and both flew about 380 kilometers at a maximum altitude of 97 kilometers and a top speed of over Mach six-point-five.
The JCS also said it will share information on the latest launches with Japan following Tokyo’s request as the bilateral intelligence-sharing pact of the General Security of Military Information Agreement, or GSOMIA, is still in effect.
The South Korean military is monitoring the situation in case of additional launches.
According to Japan’s Kyodo news agency, the Tokyo government also announced North Korea appears to have fired a ballistic missile but the projectiles did not reach Japanese waters or its exclusive economic zone.
Saturday’s launch comes eight days after the regime’s last firing on August 16th but it’s the first since a South Korea-U.S. joint military exercise ended this past Tuesday.
KBS World Radio
You can read more at the link, but you have to love the irony of South Korea pushing for a boycott of Japan over a trade dispute while wanting to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Park despite North Korea regularly firing missiles designed to destroy the ROK.
If true this would help explain why North Korea so easily blew off a food aid offer from South Korea this summer:
North Korea is accepting 800,000 tons of rice from China to help feed its people after turning down a smaller aid package from South Korea last month, according to a Japanese news report on Tuesday.
Citing a South Korean official and a trader on the border between China and North Korea, a report from the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun said China was preparing to ship 800,000 tons of rice to North Korea through maritime channels, probably in addition to other foodstuffs like corn that would make the total size of the aid around one million tons.
Beijing’s decision to provide food assistance to the North was made after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Pyongyang in June, the report said, although no formal announcement has been made about it.
Joong Ang Ilbo
You can read more at the link.
Which have been greater: the anti-Abe or anti-Moon protests? I have heard there were massive anti-Moon demonstrations that the administration controlled broadcast media did not report. https://t.co/118yQUvhtZ
— David Maxwell (@DavidMaxwell161) August 22, 2019
It is pretty clear that the Blue House is going to take the Kang Kyung-hwa approach to getting President Moon’s Justice Minister nominee approved:
Cho Kuk promised Friday to donate all his family’s scandal-plagued wealth to society in an attempt to keep his justice minister nomination from being derailed.
Cho, however, remained silent about suspected academic fraud and other scandals surrounding his daughter, which have become the focus of public disquiet over his controversial nomination.
“My family and I have been loved by society, but I failed to have the humility to look back on myself,” Cho said in a press conference broadcast live Friday afternoon. He promised to quickly donate his family’s investments in a private equity fund and its ownership of a private school foundation to society at large.
Joong Ang Ilbo
You can read more at the link, but the current ROK Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-hwa had similar ethical issues as Cho and made face saving public statements like Cho is now making to get approved.
However, Cho’s ethical lapses are even worse than Kang’s:
He made clear, however, that he wouldn’t abandon his nomination to head the Ministry of Justice. “Please trust my sincerity and watch me till the end,” he said. “I will work with a humble attitude.”
Despite media reporting on suspicious wealth management, Cho insisted the family never used illegal means. While promising to donate the controversial family money and school foundation, Cho gave no explanation about any specific allegation.
After reading the brief statement about his family’s wealth, Cho ended the press conference without taking any questions. Conspicuously missing in his statement was any mention about the most volatile elements of the scandal surrounding his family, which involve his daughter.
Cho’s 28-year-old daughter, who currently attends Pusan National University’s Graduate School of Medicine, is suspected of having been wrongly cited as the first author of an English-language paper published in the Korean Journal of Pathology in 2008 and using that accomplishment to gain admission to Korea University in 2010.
The professor in charge of the controversial paper admitted Thursday that he had given special treatment to Cho’s daughter.
“She was responsible for experiments and editing of the paper,” Chang Young-pyo, a professor in the Department of Medical Science at Dankook University, told the JoongAng Ilbo on Thursday. “I was responsible for data analysis and writing the first draft of the paper. I cannot deny that a favor was given to her by crediting her as the first author.”
You can read more at the link, but ROK Heads may remember that one of the reasons former ROK President Park Geun-hye was impeached was because the daughter of her friend Choi Soon-sil, received special treatment to get admitted to college as well.
That is what Oh Young-jin writing for the Korea Times says people in South Korea are speculating about:
A look at the participants in the National Security Office meeting presided over by Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s top security aide, does not reveal these elements in play before the GSOMIA decision. But the movers and shakers that led the move were hidden in plain sight, as it was more the action of working-level presidential aides and others outside Cheong Wa Dae that have inherited Roh’s zeitgeist.
Some argue openly ― and more wonder ― whether the GSOMIA decision is aimed at diverting public attention from the scandal involving the justice minister-to-be regarding a mushrooming body of allegations of unethical, if not illegal, activities involving his daughter, himself and other family members. The revelations are shocking, dumb-founding and despicable to the point that his nomination deserves an immediate withdrawal.
But speculation appears quite plausible that Moon ditched the military pact to save his apostle, whom he depends on solely to achieve one of his key presidential agenda items ― reforming the prosecutors, an influential group notorious for colluding with power at a given time and thereby hindering the development of the nation’s democracy.
Korea Times
You can read more at the link, but the Justice Minister Nominee Cho Kuk is one of President Moon’s closest friends that he wants put in charge of the powerful Justice Ministry. It is ironic that President Moon came to power due to candlelight protests against the supposed corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration and Moon has done the same thing of appointing people with shady backgrounds to important positions in the government. The negative media is worth it because he trusts these people to forcibly advance his agenda.
Giving the media another bright shiny object to follow could have definitely been part of the timing of the GSOMIA calculus, but I feel they were going to withdraw regardless for a variety of reasons.
The Moon administration has decided that domestic politics is more important than national security:
South Korea consulted with the United States often and adequately on the fate of a bilateral pact with Japan on sharing military intelligence, Cheong Wa Dae said Friday, as Washington has voiced “strong concern” and “disappointment” over Seoul’s decision to discard the key tool for strengthening trilateral security cooperation in Northeast Asia.
“It’s true that the U.S. hoped for the extension of the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA),” South Korea’s Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Hyun-chong said in a press briefing.
Thus, he added, it was “natural” for Washington to be disappointed with Seoul’s move, which represents its toughest countermeasure yet against Tokyo’s export curbs.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but what allows the Moon administration to make this decision more easily than it should of, is that they know the U.S. will share with them any pertinent information the Japanese have on North Korea anyway.
This decision allows the Moon administration to show they are “doing something” in response to the trade dispute with Japan, burnish their anti-Japan street cred with the South Korean left, without really giving anything up in return.
