Tag: South Korea

Considering the history between South Korea and Japan, this cooperation in regards to missile defense is pretty significant and hopefully will open the door to more future military engagement that is in the best interests of both countries:

South Korea, Japan and the United States will hold their first joint missile defense drill in Hawaii next month, the Ministry of National Defense said on Monday.

The trilateral antimissile defense drill is expected to kick off on June 28 and will take place on the sidelines of Rimpac, or the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise. This multinational naval maneuver, which takes place every two years, will last between June 30 and Aug. 4.

Moon Sang-gyun, spokesman for the Defense Ministry, said that Seoul is partaking in the trilateral drill designed to detect missile launches from North Korea and track their trajectories, “for more effective defense” against Pyongyang’s threats and in line with the three countries’ intelligence-sharing pact.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

A Korean researcher with a think tank has published an opinion article on why the South Korean government should take advantage of Trump’s offer to allow the ROK to develop nuclear weapons if he is elected President.  To break the status quo on the Korean peninsula it would take a policy that has the potential to really shake up the current security paradigm which the ROK developing nuclear weapons would definitely do:

Rather than criticizing Trump, Korea may announcethat it would not develop at this time, but prepare for development of nuclear and anti-nuclear weapons. While seriouslyand feverishly working on these weapons, Korea may ask China, as well as the U.S., to strongly intervene in North Korean affairs to abandon their nuclear programs as a condition for Korea to abandon its own nuclear programs.

In view of North Korea’s progress made in developing short-range missiles that can carry nuclear weapons, Trump’s view may well providea timely diplomatic cover for Korea to really improve its defensive posture and to put heavy pressure for North Korea to negotiate.

When the opponent is as vicious and sneaky as leaders of North Korea, who made complete fools out of Bill Clinton and Kim Dae-jung as well as all of Kim Dae-jung’s successors before Park Geunjye, Korea has to negotiate from the position of strength without which North Korea will clearly not give in. [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link.

iPhone snap of terraced rice paddies at sunrise, Myodo, Yeosu. Photo by Robert Koehler of SEOUL. https://t.co/8KwvZTA0Tb

— Seoul Selection (@SeoulSelection) May 14, 2016

We have all probably made online posts we regret and would later delete.  What if the service you left the posting on would not delete it?  In Korea it may become law that postings that people wanted removed have to be deleted.  Even if this does become a law it just seems like it would be extremely difficult to enforce if the content is kept on servers outside of Korea:

But it was not until 2014 that the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), a media regulation agency, took further steps to discuss the concept, following the European Court of Justice’s landmark ruling for a right to be forgotten.

The result of years of consultations came in the form of a guideline last month, which will go into effect next month. But the guideline, though much anticipated, faces controversy for its blurry standards and lack of specific directions for implementation. Still, proponents support the notion of a right to be forgotten for purposes of privacy and personal dignity.

Unlike the decision by the European Union’s top court, the KCC’s guidelines primarily concern online users’ own posts rather than articles posted by a third party, since Korean law already grants people the right to request the deletion of information by a third party if it is deemed damaging to one’s reputation. And yet the guidelines seek to expand on the right to be forgotten, since it orders Internet companies to accept removal requests in some “exceptional cases” that formerly blocked or limited the original writer’s autonomy over their content.

“People sometimes face trouble accessing and deleting their own posts for different reasons,” said Choi Yoon-jeong, director of the privacy protection and ethics division at the KCC. “For instance, when a platform bans the deletion of a post by a user who has lost his or her ID or password. The guidelines are designed to ensure users’ rights under precisely these kinds of circumstances.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Basically this advisor is stating in the interview that Trump has to say one thing on the campaign trail, but once elected President he will be more flexible on the policies he is campaigning on:

A President Donald Trump will neither abandon South Korea nor let the Asian ally defend itself against threats from North Korea, a top foreign policy adviser to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said.

Walid Phares, an international relations scholar who serves as Trump’s foreign policy brain, made the remark in an interview with Yonhap News Agency and Yonhap News Television, stressing that Trump’s remarks, such as his call for Seoul to shoulder all costs for U.S. troop presence, should be taken only as an expression of “principles.”  (………..)

“At this point in time he is a candidate. He’s a Republican candidate, practically speaking. So, he will talk about principles, and those principles mean burden-sharing. He wants the South Korean government to share more,” Phares said. “There is a principle … that America alone cannot be defending the world. It does not mean that America wants to withdraw from the world.”

Trump will see “what the South Koreans can offer, or what the Japanese would offer, what our friends in the Middle East could offer. Then he would negotiate. He is good at negotiations,” Phares said of the call for defense burden-sharing.

Such negotiations do not mean Trump will abandon South Korea, Phares said.

“If South Korea is threatened by either North Korea, or other players, a Trump administration would be standing by the South Koreans. There is no idea that we’re going to let South Korea or Japan defend themselves against a threat,” he said.

Referring to Trump’s call for South Korea to shoulder all costs for American troop presence, Phares said that the real estate tycoon “wants to show the maximum” as a negotiator before settling for reality. And such maximum positions could evolve over time, he said.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest of the interview at the link, but the bottom line is that if Trump is elected the ROK government best be ready to pay more USFK cost sharing than the 50% they are paying now.  Considering Japan is currently paying 75% I would not be surprised if that is the number that Trump may want to settle on.

Over at The DMZ War there is a very interesting document posted that is a transcript of a 1976 phone conversation between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger and Scowcroft talk about a lot of interesting things in regards to the US response to the killing of two US Army officers during the DMZ Axe Murder Incident. For example Kissinger believed that the North Korean barracks inside of the Joint Security Area (JSA) should have been bombed.  Something else I did not know was that the two officers killed in the attack had their bodies shipped home in coffins made from the wood of the tree that was chopped down:

You can read the rest of the transcript at this link.

I understand that having a nuclear weapon used against you is a horrible experience, but the two atomic bombs were a key factor in ending World War II which ultimately brought independence to the entire Korean peninsula:

A group of South Korean victims of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Thursday demanded an apology and compensation from both the United States and Japan.

“Nuclear bombs were dropped and Koreans in Japan at the time were victims,” a shelter for bombing victims in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province, said in a press release.

The demand comes as U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima later this month, making him the first sitting American president to do so.

The victims pointed out that “Japan has thoroughly hid its own war crimes while only emphasizing the fact that it was victimized by the bombing.”  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link, but I recommend readers check out this link to see why I think the US has nothing to apologize for in regards to using nuclear weapons to end World War II.

This has to horrible news to the residents of this apartment who have been using the tap water contaminated with a decomposed corpse:

A body was found in a water tank on the roof of an apartment block in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province, local daily Kyunghyang Shinmun reported Tuesday.

Management staff at the apartments in Gongdan-dong found the body of a 38-year-old Chinese at 1:30 p.m. Monday after a resident complained that the tap water had a bad smell.

“The body had no particular injuries,” police said. “The Chinese is presumed to have been dead for two weeks.”

Police are investigating and an autopsy will be held Wednesday.

Gumi City has provided bottles of mineral water to apartment residents as an emergency measure. [Korea Times]

Wanted: Korean actors for upcoming projects https://t.co/btKT7lqUD8 pic.twitter.com/QSBUejA2CE

— London Korean Links (@lklinks) May 12, 2016

Chinese vessels are seen fishing illegally in South Korean waters near an island close to the inter-Korean maritime border in the West Sea on May 10, 2010, in this photo provided by the Onjin county office that administers the island. Officials say more than 180 Chinese boats were fishing illegally in the area on the same day. (Yonhap)