I am sure Ms. Stephens feels like she is doing something positive, but in my opinion she is just enabling the Kim regime to receive tourism dollars that ultimately goes to funding their nuclear and missile programs that threatens regional peace:

When British traveler Zoe Stephens, 30, decided to tour North Korea for the first time in 2017, she didn’t think she would be doing it for a living.

“I went to North Korea as a tourist first, pretty much the same way as everyone else. I realized it’s nothing like what the media says,” she told The Korea Herald. She said “the real North Korea” took her by surprise and charmed her.

“So I decided that I wanted to start doing tours to show everyone what the media wasn’t showing — the human side to North Korea.”

Since then she has visited North Korea more than two dozen times, staying as long as a month at a time until the pandemic shut down the borders. She eventually began working as a tour guide for a Beijing-based company Koryo Tours, which mainly offers travel programs to North Korea.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but Ms. Stephens claims she has free access to go around the country and take pictures. However, I doubt they are taking her to the labor camps and firing squads. Keep that in mind every time someone tells you how great North Korea is to visit.

Another sign that Korea’s drug problem continues to spread:

Members of a college social club comprising hundreds of members from South Korea’s 13 colleges, including the nation’s most prestigious schools like Seoul National University and Korea University, administer drugs at an amusement park. (Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office)

A 30-something graduate student at KAIST, South Korea’s top science-specialized university, was recently arrested by the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office for distributing and using drugs within a social fraternity he created in 2021 which included members from 13 other elite universities.

Three other university students were also apprehended, and two others were indicted without physical detention for breaching the Narcotics Control Act. Eight other students who took drugs but were not suspected of other offenses were granted deferred prosecution on condition they participated in a rehabilitation program.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

You might as well have a policy platform that supports trying to find the Loch Ness Monster and the Sasquach if you believe at this point North Korean denuclearization is achieveable:

The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula would remain a U.S. policy objective should Vice President Kamala Harris win the White House race in November, a former Pentagon official said Tuesday, dispelling concerns about the exclusion of the goal in the Democratic Party’s new policy platform.

Colin Kahl, former undersecretary of defense for policy, made the remarks, saying that people appear to be “overreading” the platform. He is known to have participated in a process to write the platform expected to help set the tone for Harris’ policy stances.

During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday, party delegates officially adopted the platform that did not have any mention of the goal in contrast with the 2020 document that stated a pledge to advance the “longer-term goal of denuclearization.”

“Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula remains an objective of this (Biden) administration and, I would have to imagine, a Harris-Walz administration,” Kahl told a press briefing.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The only thing surprising about this news is that it took prosecutors four-months to figure out this was a political hit job and charges should have never been sought in the first place:

A prosecution investigation team has decided to acquit first lady Kim Keon Hee of charges related to her acceptance of a Dior handbag from a Korean American pastor in 2022, legal officials said Wednesday.

The team from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office (SCDPO), which is in charge of the first lady’s case, has recently reported the decision to Lee Chang-soo, the head of the SCDPO, and Lee plans to report it to Prosecutor General Lee One-seok soon, the officials said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I have to assume alcohol must have been involved in something this tragic happening:

A woman reported missing by her family was found dead in the back of a police vehicle in Hadong, South Gyeongsang Province, Saturday.

In an unexpected turn of events, local police revealed Sunday that she appeared to have entered the empty, parked car for unknown reasons and was unable to get out for 36 hours amid blistering heat, leading to her death.

The backseat doors of police vehicles cannot be opened from the inside, a feature designed to prevent suspects from escaping. The front seats are also separated from the back by a partition, the Hadong Police Station explained.

Surveillance footage shows the victim entering the unlocked vehicle in the police station’s parking lot through a back door at around 2 a.m. Friday. The car had remained unused until the time of her discovery, at around 2 p.m. Saturday, by a police officer.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

This is interesting because it is very rare for a North Korean Soldiers to defect across the DMZ like this. It causing officials to wonder if Seoul’s newly started propaganda broadcasts might be having an effect:

A North Korean soldier crossed the border into South Korea early Tuesday in the latest defection amid Seoul’s propaganda campaign in response to Pyongyang’s s repeated launches of trash-carrying balloons.

The South Korean military detected the soldier from north of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas in the eastern section of the border and conducted an operation to help him arrive in the South.

The North Korean, wearing a military uniform, is believed to have walked southward through a path located near the Donghae road along the east coast — one of the two rare roads connecting the two Koreas where the North has installed mines and removed street lights. (….)

The defection came just 12 days after a North Korean resident defected to the South by crossing the neutral zone of the Han River estuary located west of the inter-Korean land border.

It also came as South Korea has been conducting full-scale anti-Pyongyang broadcasts, including news and K-pop music, daily through its border loudspeakers since mid-July in response to the North’s repeated launches of trash-carrying balloons.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here we go again with the Korean leftists trying to raise anti-Japanese sentiment for political purposes:

Seoul’s presidential office is facing mounting pressure as controversial remarks regarding Japan by President Yoon Suk Yeol’s foreign policy aide have prompted criticism from the opposition for bringing humiliation to South Korea.

Labeling the aide’s remarks as carrying the intention of a “pro-Japanese traitor” — or “chinil” in Korean, describing those overly favorable to Japan to the extent of betraying national interests — the liberal main opposition Democratic Party of Korea pledged Tuesday to propose a bill to prohibit people who had previously praised or justified Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from becoming public officials. The main opposition party also pledged to introduce the bill as closely aligned with its core party policy, meaning that party members would all vote for it to counter Yoon’s conciliatory approach to Japan.

The latest controversy hails from a media interview with Kim Tae-hyo, the first deputy director of the presidential National Security Office. Kim said in an interview with public broadcaster KBS on Friday evening that Yoon’s omission of Japan’s wartime wrongdoing from his Liberation Day speech comes from Seoul’s forward-looking approach to its bilateral ties with Tokyo.

“If Japan turns a blind eye to its history and fails to say what it should say, we should harshly complain about it and try to change that,” Kim said.

“But what matters is Japan’s feelings (about apologizing),” Kim added. “When we pressure someone who does not feel inclined to do so to apologize, does that truly help Korea-Japan relations and cooperation? The level of trust between Kishida and Yoon seems very high.”

This answer was in response to the interviewer’s question about criticism over Seoul’s failure to speak up boldly about bilateral issues with Tokyo.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but why doesn’t the Korean Democractic Party instead of passing a bill to ban people who make pro-Japanese statements from holding office pass a bill saying that if you make pro-North Korean statement you cannot hold public office? Japan for many decades has not been a threat to South Korea and has strong economic and cultural ties. North Korea on the otherhand continues to be a threat on all fronts to South Korea.

The reason the Democractic Party doesn’t want to pass a bill banning people with pro-North Korea views from holding office is because many of them would have to leave government then. The Korean left is filled with those sympathetic to North Korea and even spies.

If the government wants to pass a bill, pass one against those holding pro-China views. China is the nation that most recently attacked and devestated South Korea during the Korean War five years after the Imperial Japanese were defeated. China continues to be the nation that enables North Korea to be the threat to South Korea that it is today not Japan.