Day: February 17, 2017

    Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, arrives to be questioned as a suspect in a corruption scandal that led to the impeachment of South Korea's President Park Geun-Hye, at the office of the independent counsel in Seoul on 13 February, 2017. Prosecutors on Friday arrested the de facto head of South Korea’s largest conglomerate, Samsung, on bribery and other charges related to a political corruption scandal that triggered the impeachment of President Park Geun-Hye. In a fresh blow to the electronics giant’s corporate image, a district court cited new evidence in approving the arrest warrant against vice-chairman Lee Jae-Yong, who oversees the family-run electronics giant in the absence of his ailing father. Among other allegations, Lee is accused of paying nea...

    This year, as usual, wreaths were laid Thursday at statues of Kim Jong Il and his father, North Korea’s Eternal President, Kim Il Sung. There were parades and figure skating and synchronized swimming and displays of the flowers known to the rest of us as begonias but to North Koreans as Kimjongilia. The North’s third-generation leader, Kim Jong Un, cut a solemn figure as he bowed at his father’s tomb and presided over a meeting of Communist Party apparatchiks. But was that look of gravity a mark of respect for his deceased father? A sign of shock at the sudden death this week of his estranged older half brother? Or the steely face of a man who will stop at nothing to hold on to power? For South Korea’s often-unreliable intelligence service and some analysts in China, Kim J...