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The Marines are coming!  The Marines are coming!:

South Korea and the United States plan to stage a joint landing drill here late this month, with three U.S. amphibious ships participating, officers said Wednesday.

Starting at the end of this month, the Marine Corps and the navies of the two nations are scheduled to hold the annual landing drill of Ssangyong in South Korea’s southern port city of Pohang “to boost capabilities of conducting the full spectrum of a combined arms, amphibious landing operation,” a military officer said.

Though the exact scale of the planned exercise is not known, officers say some 1,000 U.S. Marines and 3,000 South Koreans are to take part in the drill, which is expected to last less than a week, together with the three U.S. amphibious vessels.

“The U.S. plans to send the 25,000-ton USS Green Bay transport dock, the 41,000-ton USS Bonhomme Richard assault ship and the 15,000-ton USS Ashland dock landing ship for the exercise,” another officer said.

The Green Bay, which takes on the design for stealth capabilities, is able to deliver a fully equipped battalion of 800 Marines. It is the first time that the San Antonio-class ship has taken part in the joint drill.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but I would like to see the anti-US leftists try and stab these guys like they did the US ambassador.

With the repeal of the adultery law in South Korea, this has opened the door to the reopening of the Ashley Madison website that is used by people looking to have an affair:

A Canada-based website facilitating extra-marital affairs among its clientele is back in business in South Korea, authorities said Tuesday, in what seems to be a quick move after the country’s top court abolished a decades-old anti-adultery law late last month.

Ashley Madison, an online dating site which hooks up married individuals as well as singles, has resumed service for local customers under a new domain, www.ashleymadison.co.kr, the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), the local watchdog for online materials said.

The controversial website, operating in more than 20 countries worldwide, first began its service here last year, luring customers with aggressive marketing until the KCSC banned the site in April, citing the demoralizing nature of the business.

The KCSC, however, lifted the ban on Ashley Madison on Tuesday, following the decision by the Constitutional Court to repeal the anti-adultery law on Feb. 26. [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

Defense Minister Han Min-koo (R) tours the headquarters of the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint military exercises by South Korea and the United States at an air force base in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, on March 6, 2015. (Yonhap)

For those who have an interest in South Korea’s modern history, I highly recommend taking the time to read this interview in the Joong Ang Ilbo with former Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil.  Just about every event in Korea’s modern history he played a significant role in to include the military coup that brought Park Chung-hee into power and the deal with Japan to normalize relations in return for economic aid:

There was once a time not so long ago when Korean politicians played by rules largely dictated by The Three Kims: Kim Dae-jung, Kim Young-sam and Kim Jong-pil. The Three Kims wielded considerable influence on the Korean political landscape – sometimes as rivals or enemies, sometimes as allies – and two of the Kims went on to become president: Kim Young-sam in 1993 and Kim Dae-jung 1998.

Kim Jong-pil helped each of them clinch those presidential victories.

Though Kim Jong-pil never made it to the Blue House, he was named prime minister twice, by Park Chung Hee in 1971 and Kim Dae-jung in 1998. And few doubt the size of the boots in which he strode the political stage.

Kim retired from active politics a decade ago. At 89, he has offered his view of a tumultuous half century history of Korean politics in a series of interviews with the JoongAng Ilbo.

Beginning last October, the former political titan shared vivid glimpses of events that he either witnessed or made happen himself, many of which changed the flow of Korean history.

Kim was born in 1926 in what is now Buyeo County, South Chungcheong, to a wealthy farmer.

“Because I was born to a rich family, I did not suffer economic hardship when I was young,” Kim recalled. “But after my father’s death, things started getting difficult and I had to change my path.”

Kim dropped out of Seoul National University’s school of education and enrolled in the Korean Military Academy. He graduated a second-lieutenant and worked at the military’s intelligence bureau, where he first met Park Chung Hee.

“Park worked at the intelligence bureau as a government employee after he was discharged from the military,” Kim said. “He had to leave the army after prosecutors sought a death sentence for him on charges of being a socialist in 1949 [when he was 32].” Park was eventually convicted of following leftist ideas and sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was commuted to a 10-year suspended prison term. Park was discharged shortly after.

Kim recalled it was Park’s meticulousness that appealed to him.

“The most important thing in your life is what kind of people you meet,” he said.

Kim was the architect of the May 16 military coup led by Park. It overthrew a civilian government set up a year earlier after the student-led April 19 Revolution that toppled the government of Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president. Park carried out the coup in the name of bringing an end to its ineffectiveness and corruption and getting rid of Communist elements in a country still reeling from the 1950-53 Korean War.

Kim wrote a declaration of promises to the nation after the coup in the name of the new leaders. The first promise he made to the people was to make anti-Communism the state’s No.1 priority.

“It was done to create a new set of rules by discarding old, ineffective rules of the past,” said Kim about the coup, which critics consider a grab for power by ambitious men in uniforms in brazen disregard of the Constitution or any ideals of democratic freedoms.

Supporters of Park Chung Hee, the father of current President Park Geun-hye, say he cut through the rapidly diminishing hopes at the time, changed the way the country was governed, and through intelligence, determination and an iron fist enabled it to grow into an economic powerhouse at a speed no one had foreseen.

When asked about the ongoing debate over how to define the coup on May 16, 1961, Kim brushed the question off as an irrelevance.

“It doesn’t matter at all whether it is defined as a revolution or a coup,” he said. “What’s important is that it brought about profound changes in every sector encompassing politics, economics and the society. And it produced tangible outcomes. And that is the revolution.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest of this interesting interview at the link that has other interesting tidbits such as how he tried to stop Park Chung-hee from changing the Constitution to seek a third presidential term, but Park went ahead with the “Yushin Constitution” changes anyway that gave him dictatorial powers.  I wonder how differently Park Chung-hee would have been viewed by history if he would have taken Kim Yong-pil’s advice at the time?

After our previous post, many of you asked where you can buy cream beer in South Korea. While there are a couple small pubs that serve this new classic drink, one bar you can visit is Chir Beer 369, which is located in Sangsu, Seoul. Chir Beer is also renowned for its fried chicken, so it’s a good idea to munch on some Cajun chicken wings to balance out the sweet cream beer.  [You can see more unusual beers in Seoul at KoreAm Journal]

Models pose with Korean melons at a Lotte Mart store in downtown Seoul on Feb. 2, 2015. (Yonhap)

The Park Administration is still pushing forward with this plan to connect road and rails to North Korea:

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said Tuesday it will push forward a project this year to restore severed sections of inter-Korean railroads and highways.

The project was announced as part of the ministry’s 2015 agenda. It is also part of the Park Geun-hye administration’s ambitious proposal to operate trains from Seoul to cities in the North this summer in celebration of the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan’s colonial rule – but only if Pyongyang goes along.

Earlier this month, the Ministry of Unification unveiled a plan to restore the two Koreas’ western and eastern railways to operate trains this summer from Seoul to the North Korean cities of Rajin and Sinuiju. Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae has said the goal is to link the railways and have trains operating in time for the Aug. 15 Liberation Day.

While the Park government is optimistic that Pyongyang will accept the offer, North Korea has yet to even respond to the proposals. Despite the North’s silence, the Transport Ministry announced Tuesday it will push forward the project by restoring missing sections of railways and highways in the South to the inter-Korean border.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but I see this ending two ways, either North Korea getting free roads and rails for little to nothing in return or a whole bunch of potential hostages whenever the North needs to manufacture a reason to keep some.

Via One Free Korea comes this Yonhap article that explains how missile defense is one area the US can use to pressure China to reign in North Korean provocations:

The deployment of ballistic missile defense systems around North Korea by the United States and its allies could be an effective way to change China’s strategic thinking about Pyongyang, a U.S. congressional report said.

The Congressional Research Service made the point in a recent report, “North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation,” saying Beijing would find it not in its national interest if provocative actions by the North lead to increased military deployments in the region.

When North Korea fired a long-range rocket in April 2012, a key focus of Chinese media coverage of the case was Patriot missile deployments that were made by the U.S. and its allies in response to the North’s launch, the report noted.

A subtext of those reports was that the North’s actions are feeding military developments that are not in China’s interests, it said.

“As part of the efforts by the United States and its allies to change China’s strategic thinking about North Korea, the BMD (ballistic missile defense) deployments may have an impact,” the report said. “Many observers, particularly in the United States and Japan, argue that continued North Korean ballistic missile development increases the need to bolster regional BMD capabilities and cooperation.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link as well as over at One Free Korea who also believes that South Korea and Japan should also move towards developing their own nuclear arsenals to further pressure China.

This is nothing new and par for the course in regards to provocative bluster from the North Koreans, however it still isn’t right:

On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of “The Interview.” It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

It wasn’t the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top U.S. and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey.”

The defense commission also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, which happened after the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack. The U.S. government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but President Obama actually got off pretty light compared to the ambassador of Botswana of all places that the North Koreans called a “black bastard”.

Actress Clara attends an event in Seoul on Dec. 16, 2014, to promote LG Household & Care’s cosmetics brand “VOV Span Mascara G.” (Yonhap)