#President Yoon Suk Yeol

[victorysp]

King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima host the state banquet in honour of President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Mrs. Kim Keon Hee at the royal palace in Amsterdam during the first day of the state visit to Netherlands. December 12, 2023.

📷 vorsten

[brothergabefl]

Uncharted Territory to go outside and enjoy the day after dozens of tattoos, top team squad, mob boss. I want greasy fingers down on the dragon Sissy trouser, Hoosier Trump.

the Lord, as many as I love, I rebuke and chase him. Why don’t you show us enough? Christian love, because it’s the judgment. 20 verses 10, I hear the whispering receive because the mini Prevail against em but it goes on the Lord is with me like a dread Champion. These are my persecutors and will stumble and will prevail Brother Thompson. Now, Are you ready for die? For Christ Revelations? 2…

[newscast1]

South Korea to pardon former leader Lee for corruption crimes

South Korea to pardon former leader Lee for corruption crimes

President Yoon Suk Yeol-led South Korean government has decided to grant a special pardon to jailed ex-President Lee Myung-bak. Seoul,UPDATED: Dec 27, 2022 11:47 IST South Korea ex-President Lee Myung-bak. (Photo: AP) By Associated Press: The South Korean government of President Yoon Suk Yeol said Tuesday it will grant a special pardon to ex-President Lee Myung-bak, who was sentenced to a…

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The State Visit of the President of the Republic of Korea — Day 1

King Charles III, Queen Camilla, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, First Lady Kim Keon Hee, South Korean girl band Blackpink (Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa), Prince William, and Catherine, Princess of Wales, attend the State Banquet at Buckingham Palace on 21 November 2023 in London, England.

King Charles III is hosting South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and his wife Kim Keon Hee on a state visit from November 21-23.

It is the second incoming state visit hosted by the King during his reign.

📸: Yui Mok-WPA Pool / Getty Images

[head-post]

South Korea’s President practising golf to mend relations with Trump

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has brushed the dust off his golf clubs in an effort to build a relationship with President-elect Donald Trump, an avid golf enthusiast, ABC News reports.

The presidential office said on Tuesday that Yoon began practicing the game for the first time in eight years in preparation for a possible golf game with Trump.

Since his election, Trump’s “America First” approach has raised concerns that it could negatively impact the US defence commitment to South Korea and hurt the Northeast Asian country’s trade interests in various ways, including raising tariffs.

Some experts believe it is important to establish a close personal friendship with Trump during the transition period before he officially takes office in January. Duyeon Kim, a senior analyst at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, said:

Much could depend on whether Yoon is able to strike up positive chemistry with Trump immediately during the transition and foster a close personal friendship to convince him to want to support and advance Seoul’s interests.

Yoon and Trump discussed strengthening bilateral cooperation and agreed to hold a face-to-face meeting soon during a phone call on Thursday. The South Korean president later told reporters that while the situation may not remain the same as it was under the Biden administration, “we have been preparing for a long time to hedge those risks.”

And apparently a game of golf may be what’s needed.

Local media reported that Yoon travelled to a Seoul golf course on Saturday, but the presidential office said it could not confirm the reports.

A senior presidential official, speaking on condition of anonymity at a briefing, said that while he did not know how hard Yoon was practicing golf, the training was necessary because “our president also needs to hit the ball correctly to have conversations with Trump, who has outstanding golfing skills.”

Yoon is not the first world leader to try to use golf to develop a relationship with Trump.

Japan’s assassinated Prime Minister Shinzo Abe struck up a personal friendship with then-President Trump on the courses of golf clubs in both Japan and the US when he was president. In 2017, Abe said a round of golf with Trump was a good chance to relax and discuss difficult issues.

Read more HERE

[trendynewsnow]

North Korea's Foreign Minister Visits Russia to Discuss Military Cooperation Amid Rising Tensions

North Korea’s Foreign Minister Visits Russia Amid Growing Military Cooperation Choe Son-hui, the Foreign Minister of North Korea, has recently arrived in Russia and is scheduled to visit Moscow on Wednesday, as reported by Russian state-run media outlets. This visit comes on the heels of NATO’s confirmation that North Korean troops have been deployed in the Kursk region to assist Russian forces,…

[dailyworldecho]

[michaelgabrill]

VP Harris, South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol to Visit NASA Goddard

Vice President Kamala Harris and Republic of Korea (ROK) President Yoon Suk Yeol will visit NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Tuesday, April 25, to see firsthand the agency’s climate change work. NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy and Goddard Center Director Makenzie Lystrup will join them on tour. from NASA https://ift.tt/KAMICVn

[dmifyouknowagoodpsychiatrist]

as u can tell by my profile, this is my favorite show of all time

your blood on top of all the sins i already have to pay for? must you be so cruel?

[zvaigzdelasas]

[The Economist is Private UK Media]

Making someone do porridge (or “eat rice and beans”, to use the Korean expression) for expressing their political views is [...] not generally associated with [South Korea]. Yet Lee Yoon-seop, a South Korean poet, is currently languishing in prison for just this. The 68-year-old was sentenced to 14 months in November for threatening South Korea’s “existence and security”. His crime? Writing a poem in praise of the North.

The law used to prosecute Mr Lee, the National Security Act (nsa), is designed to protect South Korea from spies and traitors. But it also bans South Koreans from visiting or making contact with the North, reading or watching North Korean media or saying anything good about Kim Jong Un’s [...] regime. Though South Korea replaced its former military dictatorship with a democracy in 1987, such restrictions on free speech show that some of the generals’ autocratic tendencies endure.[...]

The NSA was modelled on a law designed to quash pro-independence activities during Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Since 2003 there have on average been more than 60 NSA prosecutions a year, often for pretty clear espionage cases. A businessman and an army officer were arrested for allegedly selling military secrets to North Korea. Soldiers in the South have been prosecuted under the act for endangering morale by distributing pro-North propaganda.

But the NSA is too often used to prosecute satirists and raid the homes and offices of leftists. Some cases have been ridiculous. Kim Myeong-soo, a PhD student, received six months in prison and a two-year suspended sentence for selling books on North Korea that were widely available in public libraries. A South Korean woman was given a two-year sentence, suspended for four years, for owning recordings of 14 North Korean songs.

This is not Mr Lee’s first offence. But the claim that the sexagenarian posed a threat to South Korea is absurd. His ode was published on a North Korean website. Access to such sites is banned by the NSA and forbidden from a South Korean IP address. [...] It consists of a list of South Korean problems that Mr Kim, in the poet’s view, would instantly solve given the chance.

Mr Lee’s real offence appears to have been believing his own nonsense. By contrast, police decided not to investigate a man under the draconian law for selling shirts with a smiling Mr Kim and the slogan “Walk a flowery path, comrade”. That was OK, officials said, because he was selling them to make a buck.

Worse, the issue points to a broader authoritarian tendency in the South. Its president, Yoon Suk-yeol, often demonises his political opponents by calling them “anti-state forces”, a phrase lifted directly from the NSA. Unfavourable press coverage is routinely labelled “fake news” and the offices of offending outlets have been raided. The administration and its allies have sued more press outfits for defamation—which in South Korea can be a crime even when the offending words are manifestly true—in Mr Yoon’s first 18 months in office than any of its three predecessors did in total.

Yet even a more liberal government would be unlikely to remove the NSA’s illiberal clauses. No administration has made a serious attempt to address it in 20 years. There is no significant political support for scrapping the law [...]. The current administration at least flirted with allowing South Koreans access to North Korean media, but recently abandoned the idea. [...]

Mr Yoon talks often about South Korea’s democratic values. They are at the heart of his pitch for the country to be a strategic link between East and West, developed and developing countries. For that reason alone he should take them more seriously. South Korea is undoubtedly a democracy, but not a terribly liberal one so long as it locks up old men for their dotty opinions. Reforming the NSA would be a better rebuttal to the sentiment Mr Lee expressed than banning it.

22 Jan 24

[victorysp]

Queen Máxima and King Willem-Alexander with the President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Kim Keon Hee during the welcome ceremony at the Dam square in Amsterdam on the 1st day of the 2 day state visit to the Netherlands. December 12, 2023.

📷 Patrick van Katwijk

[world-of-wales]

The Princess of Wales arrives at Horse Guards Parade on day one of the President of South Korea Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the UK || 21 NOVEMBER 2023

[catherinetheprincessofwales]

The Princess of Wales at Horse Guards Parade for day one of the President of South Korea Yoon Suk Yeol's state visit to the UK. 🇬🇧 🇰🇷

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alaina Demopoulos at The Guardian:

McKenna, who is 24 and lives in a rural, conservative state, recently got back on dating apps after a year of finding herself. She had two first dates planned for this weekend, but after Donald Trump won the election, she cancelled both. “It’s heartbreaking to know that in this country you only matter if you’re a straight white man,” she said. “It’s just devastating that we’re at this point. So I will not let another man touch me until I have my rights back.” McKenna, who did not want her last name published for privacy reasons, first heard about 4B a few months ago, via a TikTok video referring to the South Korean social movement. The basic idea: women swear off heterosexual marriage, dating, sex and childbirth in protest against institutionalized misogyny and abuse. (It is called 4B in reference to these four specific no-nos.) The mostly online movement began around 2018 protests against revenge porn and grew into South Korea’s #MeToo-esque feminist wave.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, 4B is once again on McKenna’s mind – and she’s not the only one. Trump’s embrace of manosphere figures such as Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys and Adin Ross means he has strong support among their evangelists – mainly, young men. But for young women, the former president’s long history of misogyny means a vote for Trump is a vote against feminism, especially with reproductive rights as a key issue in 2024. Ahead of the US election, pundits predicted a history-making gender gap, and early exit polls support that prediction: women aged 18-29 went overwhelmingly left, while Trump picked up ground with their male counterparts compared with 2020. With the race called, TikToks viewed hundreds of thousands of times offered one way for women to go for the jugular: 4B, specifically cutting off contact with men. “Girls it’s time to boycott all men! You lost your rights, and they lost the right to hit raw! 4b movement starts now!” one creator wrote on TiKTok in a video viewed 3.4m times. In another video, a woman exercises on a stair climber machine. “Building my dream body that no man will touch for the next 4 years,” reads the caption. The top comment on her post: “In the club, we all celibate.” On Wednesday, Google searches for “4B” spiked by 450%, with the most interest coming from Washington DC, Colorado, Vermont and Minnesota. In South Korea, 4B began as an offshoot of national protests against the spycam epidemic, in which perpetrators filmed targets – most of whom were women – during sex or while urinating in public bathrooms without their knowledge or consent.

[...]

As with #MeToo in the US, men have called 4B an overreach, and discriminatory. South Korea’s conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, ran on a platform of abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which protects against gender-based violence and discrimination, saying feminists were to blame for the country’s economic woes.

Haein Shim, a South Korean activist and current undergraduate researcher at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, said in an email that women who participated in 4B protests faced cyberbullying, harassment, stalking and threats of violence. “Many of us wore masks, sunglasses, and hats to cover our faces, and it was common practice to dress differently before and after a protest to minimize being stalked.” There were more nuanced critiques, too. “Some debated if it was a sustainable way to participate in feminism, because it was a total disconnect with men, and some people believe there have to be productive conversations among people with different world views in order for society to move forward,” Lee said. Feminists expressed concern over whether 4B “disregarded heterosexual women’s desires, in order to punish men who may or may not have participated in misogyny”.

Shim, the activist, says that 4B goes beyond just boycotting men, and encourages women to find solidarity with each other. “It’s a new lifestyle focused on building safe communities, both online and in-person, and valuing our existence in this crazy world,” she said. “What we want is not to be labeled simply as some man’s wife or girlfriend, but to have the independence to be free from the societal expectations that often limit women’s potential to be fully acknowledged as human beings.” Second wave feminist groups of the 1960s and 70s such as Cell 16, which advocated celibacy and separation from men, and political lesbians, who opted out of heterosexuality, were historically deemed as extreme – or simply trendy. 4B, a more contemporary movement that mostly lives online, may seem more accessible to gen Z women. On TikTok, 4B posts play as communal and therapeutic, a way to take back control during a time when basic rights are at stake.

Donald Trump's election, combined with the erosion of abortion access post-Roe, has fueled an angry backlash among feminist-inclined women by importing the South Korean 4B Movement to the States.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The State Visit of the President of the Republic of Korea — Day 1

Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, attend a ceremonial welcome for The President and the First Lady of the Republic of Korea at Horse Guards Parade on 21 November 2023 in London, England.

King Charles III is hosting Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and his wife Kim Keon Hee on a state visit from November 21-23.

It is the second incoming state visit hosted by the King during his reign.

🎥: Mark Case / Getty Images