Eastern Asia

From 16-28 August 2020, the armed forces of the United States and South Korea will hold scheduled joint exercises inside South Korea. Those, in turn, will be preceded by joint exercises held by the two countries to work through emergency response actions; these will take place from 11-14 August.

The term “decoupling” has started to appear more and more often in reports dedicated to the current state of US-China relations after, on April 17, The Wall Street Journal published results of a survey of 25 large US companies operating in the PRC, conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in China and AmCham in Shanghai.

We continue to track a series of scandals related to the fact that a number of NGOs that were involved in the protection of “comfort women”, as it turned out, spent the money on promoting themselves and their leaders, and not on the needs of the victim grandmothers they were commissioned to help.

Although it has already been 75 years since World War II ended, when the territorial divisions that now demarcate various parts of the world were drawn through a series of international treaties and laws, politicians in a number of countries continue to exploit territorial issues in order to maintain military tensions, to justify increases in military spending, and as an argument to support nationalist views that only serve to deepen the divide in relations between a number of countries.

The author has reported, on more than one occasion, that over the course of the history-related dispute between Japan and South Korea, the issue of comfort women is being gradually replaced with that of forced labor. In fact, its victims are trying to receive as much compensation from Japan as possible via legal action. And decisions made by South Korean courts on the issue have led to what is referred to in Seoul as a trade war between the ROK and Japan.

On the night of July 10, 2020, the body of the 64-year-old mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, who had taken his own life, was found in the woods of Mount Bugak in northern Seoul.  The liberal politician and human rights activist, Park Won-soon, was a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea. He first became mayor of the capital in 2011 and was subsequently re-elected to the post 2 more times in a row. The 64-year-old was viewed as a potential candidate for the 2022 presidential election.

It is time to stop irresponsible finger-pointing.
All over the world, as this essay is being written, well over 17 million COVID-19 cases have been reported, and 676,000 people died. And instead of concentrating on serious research, trying to save human lives and attempting to stop the global calamity, ‘residents’ of the White House are spending all the energy on their own political survival, as well as on the survival of the regime.