These are some really bad poll numbers for President Lee which may influence his decision on whether to deploy troops to the Middle East which would likely be unpopular in South Korea:

President Lee Jae Myung’s approval rating fell to the lowest level since he took office, marking the ninth consecutive week of decline, a poll showed Monday.

In the poll conducted on 2,515 adults from Monday to Friday by Realmeter and commissioned by the EKN newspaper, 33.8 percent positively assessed Lee’s handling of state affairs, down 3.6 percentage points from the previous week.

His disapproval rating rose 3.8 percentage points to 63.3 percent.

Realmeter attributed the decline in Lee’s approval rating to negative public sentiment over controversies surrounding his recent Cabinet reshuffle, the possible deployment of military assets to the Strait of Hormuz and uncertainty over real estate policies.

The pollster also cited a sharp drop in support among liberal voters and those in their 20s, with support from those aged 18 to 29 falling 10.2 percentage points.

Yonhap

Even more interesting is that the opposition party is now more popular than the rulling party:

n a separate poll conducted by the same pollster, support for the ruling Democratic Party fell 5.7 percentage points from a week earlier to 36.1 percent, while support for the main opposition People Power Party rose 4.5 percentage points to 42.1 percent.

Times have changed really fast in Korean politics.

It doesn’t appear to be anything nefarious going on with the North Korean border incursions, but the US and ROK senior leaders decided to check it out for themselves anyway:

Top U.S. and South Korean commanders inspected frontline positions within the Demilitarized Zone this week amid increased North Korean construction and repeated crossings of the heavily fortified border. Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, and Gen. Jin Yong-sung, chairman of the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited the eastern border Wednesday and examined North Korean construction near the Military Demarcation Line, according to a Joint Staff press release. The line divides the two Koreas within the DMZ, a buffer zone established after the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice instead of a peace treaty.

The agreement has maintained stability on the Korean Peninsula for the past 70 years, but firm readiness is necessary to preserve it, Brunson said in the release. The visit follows several recent demarcation-line crossings by North Korean troops. South Korean forces fired warning shots last month after North Korean soldiers crossed the border in the DMZ’s eastern sector, according to the South’s Ministry of National Defense. The incident marked the first warning shots fired in response to a crossing since an incursion last year, the Yonhap News Agency reported Aug. 16. North Korean troops crossed the line 17 times last year, the report said.

Stars and Stripes

You can read more at the link.

It is right now very hard for a person in their 20’s to secure a job in South Korea:

Job information pamphlets are displayed at a university career support center in Seoul on Sept. 9, 2026. (Yonhap)

The number of employed people in their 20s fell at the fastest pace this year since the 1998 Asian financial crisis, data showed Sunday, amid a trend toward entering the labor market at a later age.

The number of employed people in their 20s averaged 3.38 million in the January-August period, down 193,000 from the same period a year earlier, according to data compiled by the Korean Statistical Information Service (KOSIS).

The decline was the steepest since 1998, when the figure plunged by 550,000 in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the article doesn’t say what the reasons are. However, it makes me wonder if AI is having an impact on entry level jobs in Korea?

The lack of state media amplification of these missile launches is believed to be a signal that the Kim regime is being respectful towards the Trump administration:

North Korean state media on Sunday made no mention of the ballistic missiles fired a day earlier, continuing a pattern of silence over its missile launches since early August.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and the Rodong Sinmun, the most widely read newspaper in the country, had made no mention of the launches as of 9 a.m.

On Saturday, North Korea fired multiple short-range ballistic missiles from the Wonsan area toward the East Sea, just a day after South Korea, the United States and Japan wrapped up their trilateral military exercise.

Pyongyang fired a short-range ballistic missile toward the East Sea on Aug. 6 and another on Aug. 12, followed by a barrage of the same type of ballistic missiles on Aug. 20, as South Korea and the United States staged their annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise. North Korean state media remained silent on all three launches.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The problem with the calls to slow down AI development is will the Chinese do the same?

The CEO of Anthropic said Saturday the artificial-intelligence industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without such a slowdown, Dario Amodei warned that within six to 12 months, AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet.

The warning comes as worries about AI grow inside and outside the industry and reports continue to emerge about increasingly powerful systems that solve problems beyond human capacity but could also go rogue and carry out other, more harmful tasks. The worries have grown so loud that the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said in an interview with Fortune that his company would wait until next year to start selling its stock to investors on Wall Street as it focuses on safety.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but AI development is basically this generation’s Manhattan Project. Who ever achieves AI dominance first will have a massive strategic advantage like the U.S. had after World War II.

The world was lucky that the U.S. was very magnanimous after World War II because it could have easily used nuclear weapons to crush all communist threats and stop any rivals from building their own nukes.

If China gets advanced AI first because the U.S. slows down development, can they be trusted to be as magnanimous as the U.S.? Or will they use their AI advantage to power drones, aircraft, robots, and other military equipment to conquer their perceived enemies while they have the advantage?

I rather US develops this technology first so we don’t have to find out.

This is a big loss for China who has long supported the outgoing governor Denny Tamaki and a huge win for Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi:

Genta Koja, the candidate backed by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s ruling coalition, is set to win Sunday’s Okinawa gubernatorial election, defeating incumbent Denny Tamaki, Kyodo News projections showed.

A win for Koja would provide a tailwind for Takaichi’s government as it pushes for the contentious relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan to the coastal Henoko area in Nago within the southern island prefecture.

Koja, 42, a former deputy Naha mayor and central government bureaucrat, will be the first Okinawa governor in 12 years to accept the relocation plan.

He is set to be the first Okinawa governor born after 1972, the year when the island was returned to Japan, having been under U.S. control since Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945.

Mainichi

You can read more at the link, but Koja’s election win shows how popular Takaichi is in Japan that even Okinawa now strongly backs her. This is significant because China has been trying to foment popular dissent against the relocation of U.S. Marines on Okinawa. With the Tamaki gone the base relocation plan will now face no political opposition on Okinawa.

What else will not face political opposition is the deployment of Japanese Self Defense Forces to the islands southwest of Okinawa that the Governor is also responsible for. These forces were deployed to the islands in response to increasing Chinese and even Russian naval, air, and missile activities around the islands.

Once again, Chinese threats against Japan are being answered by its voters choosing stronger security over appeasement. You would think China would have learned by now that the more belligerent it is toward Japan, the more it will choose leaders who are strong on security. However, President Emperor Xi and his underlings just cannot help themselves because anti-Japanese sentiment is a core value of the CCP since it is an effective way to distract their internal population from domestic issues when needed.