Category: Korea-General Topics

How did someone like this ever become a priest in the first place?:

A priest of the Anglican Church of Korea has been disqualified for openly wishing for President Yoon Suk-yeol’s plane to crash during his ongoing trip to Southeast Asia.

The Daejeon Diocese of the Anglican Church of Korea announced the disqualification of Father Kim Gyu-dong as a priest Monday after he called for a nationwide prayer for the crash of the presidential plane in his social media post.

President Yoon Suk-yeol accompanied by first lady Kim Keon-hee began a trip to Southeast Asia on Friday to attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Group of 20 summits, and they are scheduled to return home Wednesday.

Kim recently uploaded a social media post about Yoon’s Southeast Asia trip, saying he wants the presidential plane to crash and wishes the entire nation would pray for the accident. Kim deleted the post later after his church was flooded with protests, explaining that the post was intended as a personal memo but was disclosed by mistake.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

After what happened at Itaewon I can understand why Gordon Ramsay’s team would be concerned about a crowd crush happening in a subway car with him in it:

Celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsey’s demeanor during his three-day visit in Seoul from Nov. 9 to 11 for the opening of his signature restaurant created a stir that continued even after he left the country. 

This time, he was at the center of controversy for his request to add security to his subway commute on Thursday. 

It was an unprecedented security request made by a celebrity regarding public transport, which came following the Itaewon disaster that claimed 157 lives in a deadly crowd crush on Oct. 29. 

News reports on the request triggered public outrage over the use of public resources to protect a foreign celebrity.

Gordon Ramsay Korea filed a request with police for one hour of “safety cooperation” during the British chef’s planned subway trip from 11 a.m. Thursday.

The company’s request did not mention stationing officers, but expressed concerns that the appearance of a foreign celebrity could lead to large crowds gathering in public spaces, officials from Seoul Metro, Korea Railroad Corp. (KORAIL) and Seoul Subway Police told The Korea Times, Sunday.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

One thing North Korea is accomplishing is strengthening cooperation between South Korea and Japan. Will it lead to anything substantive? I guess we will see, but this is a good start:

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida agreed to strengthen trilateral cooperation to thwart North Korea’s escalating missile and nuclear threats during a trilateral summit in Cambodia, Sunday.

The three leaders held a flurry of summits among them amid North Korea’s escalating provocations in recent weeks.

“North Korea has been staging more hostile and assertive provocations than ever before,” Yoon said during the three-way summit held on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh. 

“North Korea’s provocations, which were staged at a time when South Koreans are deeply saddened (by the Itaewon crowd crush), clearly show that the Kim Jong-un regime is anti-humanitarian and anti-humanity,” Yoon said. “The cooperation among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan is a strong bastion for defending universal values and achieving peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia.”

Biden and Kishida also noted North Korea’s recent provocations threaten the region’s peace and underscored the importance of trilateral cooperation among them.

“North Korea continues its provocative behavior, this partnership is even more important than it has ever been,” Biden said in his opening remarks at the trilateral summit.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

This may explain why the political opposition has been recently out pushing anti-Japanese sentiment to get ahead of this announcement:

President Yoon Suk-yeol said, Thursday, he will sit down with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Joe Biden and Fumio Kishida, on the sidelines of multilateral meetings in Southeast Asia later this week amid a series of provocations by North Korea.

“During the multilateral meetings, there will be several important bilateral summits,” Yoon told reporters a day before he leaves for Cambodia and Indonesia to attend meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Group of 20. 

In Phnom Penh, Yoon is scheduled to attend a South Korea-ASEAN summit, an ASEAN Plus Three summit and the East Asia Summit before departing for Bali for the G20 summit on Tuesday.

“A South Korea-U.S.-Japan summit has been fixed and several other bilateral meetings have also been set or are under discussion,” Yoon added. However, he did not elaborate on exactly when the meetings will take place.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

If anyone deserved a Soldier’s Medal it is these three U.S. troops from Camp Casey. I like the comment from one of the survivors that the one large Soldier was pulling people out of the alley like he was picking radishes from a field:

 A trio of foreign heroes praised for saving more than 30 lives from last Saturday’s tragic crowd crush in Seoul turned out to be American soldiers stationed in South Korea, some survivors said Thursday.

One of the survivors, known only as a twentysomething man living in Cheongju, central South Korea, told Yonhap News Agency he believes the three foreign heroes are U.S. soldiers serving in Camp Casey in Dongducheon, about 50 km north of Seoul.

The man told local media earlier he was pulled out of the chaos in a narrow alleyway in Itaewon before fainting and being carried to safety.

He said he is convinced the heroic Americans are Jarmil Taylor, 40, Jerome Augusta, 34, and Dane Beathard, 32, after belatedly learning of their interviews with French news agency AFP published Sunday.

He said he went to Itaewon on Saturday to enjoy the Halloween festivities with his friends but fell down in the crowd in the narrow alleyway before being crushed for about 15 minutes.

The Cheongju man, who is 182 cm tall and weighs 96 kg, said a strong black man rescued him from the crowd as if pulling radishes from a field.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

North Korea’s war on fish continued this weekend:

North Korea fired four short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) toward the Yellow Sea Saturday, the South Korean military said.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the launches from Tongrim County in North Pyongyan Province between around 11:32 a.m. and 11:59 a.m.

The missiles flew about 130 kilometers at an apogee of 20 km with a top speed of Mach 5, it added. 

The North’s latest provocation came on the last day of the extended large-scale combined air drills of the South and the United States.

On Saturday two B-1B strategic bombers joined the Vigilant Storm exercise alongside four South Korean F-35A stealth fighter jets and 4 U.S. F-16 fighters, the JCS said.

It marked the first time the B-1B Lancer has been deployed to the Korean Peninsula since 2017, in a demonstration of Washington’s firm commitment to extended deterrence for South Korea and the allies’ combined defense posture, JCS added.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The Kim regime continues to look for excuses to justify their long expected nuclear test to the international community, but I doubt anyone other than the usual suspects are going to buy it:

North Korea threatened to unleash a powerful action if the U.S. does not halt joint military drills with partners including South Korea, in what might be an effort by Kim Jong Un to lay the groundwork for his first nuclear test in five years.

“If the U.S. continuously persists in the grave military provocations, the DPRK will take into account more powerful follow-up measures,” the state’s foreign ministry said in a statement released on official media Tuesday. Such ministry statements are often used by the country, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to make clear the warning is coming from Kim’s regime.

The U.S. and South Korea this week started joint air drills known as Vigilant Storm that will run through Friday and involve about 240 aircraft in about 1,600 sorties to “hone their wartime capabilities,” the U.S. 7th Air Force said in a statement. The drills have added to a series of joint exercises on land, sea and air in recent weeks, some of which have also included Japan, that have led to complaints and provocations from Pyongyang.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.