There have been so many false reports about the North Korean regime I find this report to be just another likely click bait headline:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly executed a general accused of plotting a coup by throwing him into a piranha-filled fish tank. The unnamed general was said to be the latest victim of the dictatorial leader, who has executed numerous aides, including his envoy to the US in May. The general was allegedly killed inside a giant piranha tank built inside Kim’s Ryongsong Residence, in Pyongyang, after being accused of plotting a coup, the Daily Star reported.
It is claimed the general had his arms and torso cut open with knives before being thrown into the tank, which was filled with hundreds of piranhas imported from Brazil, it is reported.
This is a good idea that hopefully will lead to more ship seizures:
The U.S. State Department has pledged up to five million dollars for informants on North Korea’s violations of sanctions, including its illegal transshipment of coal and oil.
According to Radio Free Asia on Tuesday, the State Department announced to offer rewards for information that leads to the disruption of financial mechanisms of persons engaged in certain activities that support North Korea, including money laundering, sanctions evasion, cyber-crime, and WMD proliferation on the Rewards for Justice (RFJ) website run by the department.
The State Department has run the RFJ program since 1984 to obtain information about international terrorists. The newly announced reward prioritizes information about maritime illicit transshipment by North Korea for its export of coal and import of crude oil. In particular, a wanted poster with a caption to urge people, especially Chinese maritime workers, to stop North Korea’s illegal maritime activities was produced in both English and Chinese. The detection of maritime illicit transshipment is a challenging task as it requires a large scale oversight and North Korea has adopted ever more elaborate schemes to avoid sanctions.
Those who provide a critical piece of information to identify hackers who have stolen data or spread malicious codes under the orders of North Korea will be rewarded as well.
Kim Won Bong, 2nd person behind Kim Il Sung, reached ministerial level in Korea Workers' Party in #NorthKorea. He fought against #SouthKorea during the #Korean War. Yet #MoonJaein said KWB is "the root of SK military" & "the foundation of the SK-US alliance." Unbelievable! pic.twitter.com/lBRXj3AnK0
Forest fire victims rally A group of residents and merchants from the northeastern cities of Sokcho and Goseong, victimized by a devastating forest fire in April, rally near the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul on June 7, 2019, to demand the government compensate them for their damages from the fire and come up with policies to support them. (Yonhap)
The Moon administration is not going to like this news:
Eight out of ten South Koreans think economic issues are more important than unification with North Korea, according to a new government survey.
The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs released on Friday the results of their survey of three-thousand-873 South Korean adults, which indicates that 77-point-one percent of respondents would choose the economy over unification if only one of the two problems could be solved.
In the survey, 55-point-nine percent agreed with the proposition that South Korea and North Korea don’t necessarily have to form a unified country.
A full 53-point-two percent answered negatively when asked if they were willing to partially give up their quality of life for unification with North Korea.
I am not a fan of the raid on the North Korean embassy in Spain, but one of the perpetrators who was caught definitely should be worried about his life being in danger:
A Korean American man arrested in the U.S. on charges of raiding the North Korean embassy in Spain claims that he faces possibly fatal retaliation from the North should he be extradited to Spain.
According to the LA Times, attorneys for the 38-year-old former U.S. Marine Christopher Philip Ahn are making the case before a federal judge in Los Angeles that he is a devoted family man who is not a danger or a flight risk.
In court papers filed Thursday requesting his release on bail, the attorneys cited the fact that Ahn was previously involved in the extraction of Kim Han-sol after his father Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of the North Korean leader, was assassinated in Malaysia in 2017.
They said Ahn’s life could be in jeopardy in Spain and that North Korea has every incentive to either capture and torture him to extract information regarding Kim Han-sol’s whereabouts or to simply murder him as retribution for embarrassing the regime.
I wonder what the U.S. government’s definition of a “certain limit” is compared to the Moon administration’s?:
This photo shows South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha speaking to reporters at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, ahead of her departure for Slovakia on June 6, 2019. (Yonhap)
South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said her country and the United States determined that North Korea’s short-range missile launches in May did not “deserve” suspending talks with the regime. Speaking Friday at a security forum in Bratislava, Slovakia, Kang said South Korea and the U.S. analyzed the launches in early May and “decided to take a cool headed approach about this.” “We said this doesn’t deserve breaking the momentum for dialogue,” she told the forum in English, according to an AP transcript. “But if it reaches, the provocation reaches a certain limit and that cannot be tolerated, clearly it goes back to more pressure.”
Korean name for outgoing UNC deputy commander Lt. Gen. Wayne D. Eyre, outgoing deputy commander of the United Nations Command (UNC), poses after receiving a frame with his Korean name written on it at a ceremony in Seoul, in this photo captured from the UNC website on June 7, 2019. The South Korea-U.S. Alliance Friendship Association presented the Canadian officer with the frame. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
Below is a well made Youtube video that goes into the history of Samsung.
I did not realize that Samsung was founded as a truck company in Daegu by Lee Byung-chul who was chummy with the Imperial Japanese. He eventually moved his business down to Masan which was the main port the Japanese were using to export out of Korea.
Lee Byung-chul
After the colonial occupation Lee would go on to become friends with President Rhee Syngman and business continued to grow. Then during the Korean War business continued to thrive as he had contracts to move U.S. supplies and equipment with his trucks. After the war is when Samsung grew dramatically as it expanded into building construction and other industries to where today it is Korea’s flagship global business conglomerate.
