It appears that the horrible wildfires in South Korea are finally contained:

 A massive wildfire that began in Sancheong County and swept through nearby regions in South Gyeongsang Province has been fully contained, authorities said Sunday.

The main fires were under control as of 1 p.m. Sunday, nearly 10 days after they first broke out March 21, according to forestry officials.

The wildfire has scorched an estimated 1,858 hectares of woodland, equivalent to around 2,600 football fields.

At least 30 people have died from the recent wave of nationwide wildfires, including 26 reported in North Gyeongsang Province.

Yonhap

Here is what started the fire Gyeongsangbuk-do:

Meanwhile, police authorities said they have booked a man suspected of starting the massive wildfires in North Gyeongsang Province.

The 56-year-old man is accused of causing the fire at around 11:25 a.m. on March 22 while performing an ancestral rite at a family grave on a hill in Uiseong County, North Gyeongsang Province.

The fire then spread rapidly to nearby Andong, Cheongsong, Yeongyang and Yeongdeok for days due to gusty winds amid dry conditions.

You can read more at the link, but investigators are still trying to determine who started the other wildfires.

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Having driven this stretch of I-40 in Arizona many times before I know from first hand experience how treacherous the hill west of Williams can be in snowy weather. Unfortunately this time the accident that occurred was extremely deadly:

Arizona officials are working to determine whether additional human remains discovered in the debris of a fatal pileup crash on Interstate 40 on March 13 are those of the South Korean family who went missing in the area at the time of the crash.

Jiyeon Lee, Taehee Kim and Junghee Kim have been missing for nearly two weeks after driving through a winter storm on their road trip between the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.

Investigators have confirmed that one of the vehicles in the collision, which involved multiple passenger vehicles that “were rear-ended, pushing them into, and in some cases, underneath crashed tractor-trailers,” was a BMW SUV, an update from the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office said on Monday. The family had been traveling in a BMW rental vehicle, the sheriff’s office said.

CNN

You can read more at the link.

The horrible wildfires in South Korea continue to burn and have become even more deadly:

This photo shows fires in parts of a village in Uiseong County, some 180 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on March 25, 2025. (Yonhap)

The death toll from a wave of wildfires that tore through southeastern region has risen to 18, with one person missing, forest service officials said Wednesday, as firefighters still battled to contain the rapidly spreading blazes.

The fires that began in Sancheong County in South Gyeongsang Province last Friday have spread to nearby Uiseong, and were advancing to neighboring Andong, Cheongsong, Yeongyang and Yeongdeok, fueled by strong and dry winds.

Of the victims, two were found in Andong, three were in Cheongsong, six were in Yeongyang and seven in Yeongdeok, officials said. The remaining one person was missing in Cheongsong.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It is a good day for Lee Jae-myung who many consider the front runner to be the next president of Korea:

An appeals court on Wednesday acquitted opposition leader Lee Jae-myung of lying as a presidential candidate during the 2022 election, overturning a lower court’s sentence of a suspended prison term.

The decision by the Seoul High Court removed a major legal hurdle for Lee, as a suspended prison term, if finalized, would have stripped him of his parliamentary seat and barred him from running in the next presidential election.

The appellate ruling can still be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Yonhap

First of all the law to prosecute politicians for lying seems like one that can be easily weaponized by the political opposition. With that said here is what Lee was accused of lying about:

During the initial trial, the opposition leader was found guilty of lying during a media interview in December 2021 that he did not play golf with the late Kim Moon-ki, a former executive of Seongnam Development Corp., which was behind a corruption-ridden development project in Seongnam, south of Seoul, when Lee was the city’s mayor.

Lee was also found guilty of lying during a parliamentary audit of the Gyeonggi provincial government in October 2021 that he was under pressure from the land ministry to rezone the former site of the Korea Food Research Institute in Seongnam.

The site was later developed into apartment complexes by a private developer, and allegations were raised that Lee rezoned the land to give preferential treatment to the company.

In November, the lower court sentenced Lee to one year in prison, suspended for two years, for making false statements in violation of the Public Official Election Act.

In reversing that decision, however, the Seoul High Court said none of the four remarks Lee made during the campaign about allegedly not knowing Kim qualified as false statements. That included the remark about golf.

“He cannot be considered to have lied that they did not play golf, and it is difficult to recognize the remark as false,” the appeals court said.

On the alleged pressure from the land ministry, the court acknowledged that Lee “came under pressure from various angles.”

“His remark that he was threatened with charges of dereliction of duty could be an exaggerated expression of the considerable pressure he felt at the time, but it is difficult to recognize as false,” the court said.

From this article to me it is unclear whether he played golf with Kim Moon-ki and instead of lying about the pressure from the land ministry the appeals court believes he was just exaggerating. That is the area of this law that can be easily weaponized. Politicians exaggerate and bend the truth all the time. Should they be prosecuted everytime they do this?

It would be foolish of the North Koreans to not test the effectiveness of their weapon systems in Ukraine so this should not be a surprise to anyone:

North Korea is using its support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to test weapons it could deploy against the South in a future conflict, Ukraine’s ambassador to Seoul said in a news report Sunday. Ukraine and South Korea share a common adversary, Ukrainian Ambassador to South Korea Dmytro Ponomarenko said in written remarks published by Yonhap News. South Korea “should not forget that Pyongyang also uses Ukrainian soil as a testing ground for its weaponry, which could be used in future possible standoff,” Ponomarenko said. Seoul “has no reason to hesitate in the development of full-scale military-technical cooperation” with Kyiv, he said. “It’s a matter of interest for both Kyiv and Seoul,” he added.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.