Free Republic

The Communist Chinese government rebuked a U.S. Army general for using the words “dagger” and “shield” to respectively describe regional allies South Korea and Japan. Four-star Gen. Xavier Brunson, the commander of the United States Forces Korea (USFK) and United Nations Command, made the analogy during a May 22 podcast interview conducted by the United States Army War College, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) first reported. Nearly a week later, the Chinese embassy in South Korea responded by issuing what it called a “solemn warn[ing]” to the general, claiming his use of figurative language to characterize the U.S.’s East...

A couple sisters who defected from North Korea visit a gun range in the U.S.

Polish state defence firm Bumar-Łabędy has signed an agreement with South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem setting out the terms of production in Poland of dozens of South Korean K2 tanks. It will be the first time in almost two decades that Poland will manufacture tanks domestically. The agreement, signed on Monday, formally defines the division of work and payments under a wider 2025 contract in which Poland ordered 180 K2 tanks and 81 support vehicles, some of which were to be produced domestically. Under the plan, Bumar-Łabędy will assemble 61 Polish-configured K2PL tanks and 72 support vehicles. The first K2PL tank...

A genetic study of the remains of four 2,000-year-old dogs recovered from two archaeological sites on the Korean Peninsula suggests that the canines belonged to a lineage separate from other dog populations in East Asia, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. It had been previously thought that dog populations in East Asian shared a single lineage. Hyeongcheol Kim of the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Suyeon Kim and A-reum Yu of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, and their colleagues determined that ancient Korean dogs resembled the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog. Korean dogs...

Muslim street takeovers in the name of ‘prayers’ have become a global problem from New York to London to Moscow, they’re creating conflict in India, and, less expectedly, in South Korea. On a Friday afternoon, dozens of men stream out of a five-story building in Ansan’s Danwon-gu, some dressed in long white garments and caps, quietly walking away or chatting in small groups along the street. The building they emerge from looks like an ordinary commercial property, but it is the Ansan Islamic Center, one of 21 mosques operated nationwide by the Korea Muslim Federation. The crowd, made up mostly...

How could the country that is now the foremost persecutor of Christians in the world have emerged from the work of a dedicated Christian missionary? Jonathan Cheng’s history of North Korea, "Korean Messiah," sets out to explain... Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary who arrived in ‘the Hermit Kingdom’ of Korea in 1890, built a vast mission compound in Pyongyang. His ministry helped spark the great Christian revival of 1907, which led to Pyongyang being called the ‘Jerusalem of the East’ with great churches and crowded Wednesday prayer meetings. Moffett ran a world-class seminary, and his theology carried a message of...

The incredible story of Yang Kyoungjong is all the more phenomenal because, while there's very little proof that he ever existed, our need to believe that he did has been so urgent that facts seem to matter very little. But that hasn't stopped at least three reputable historians from telling Yang Kyoungjong's story with confidence, and the premise of his life even became the basis for My Way, a multimillion-dollar South Korean action movie, albeit one embroidered with its own fictions. Yang Kyoungjong's story begins just after D-Day when, in an interview made for historian Stephen Ambrose years later, an...

North Korea’s constitution now calls for an immediate retaliatory nuclear missile strike if leader Kim Jong Un is killed by a foreign power. The change, believed to have been adopted earlier this year, was made soon after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was wiped out in the US-Israeli strikes, the Telegraph reported. “If the command-and-control system over the state’s nuclear forces is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks … a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately,” the revised Article 3 of North Korea’s nuclear-policy law now reads. The revision, likely agreed on by the Supreme People’s...

North Korea has formally amended its constitution to mandate an automatic nuclear strike if leader Kim Jong Un is killed or the regime’s command structure comes under attack. This chilling “dead hand” policy, enacted in the shadow of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s assassination by U.S.-Israeli strikes, reveals the regime’s paranoia and the inescapable logic of deterrence in a world of tyrants.

Madangbawi, a landmark rock on Seoul's Gwanaksan Mountain that has recently gained fame among young people as a place to "absorb good energy," has been defaced with graffiti. The Gwanak District Office completed restoration and referred the case to police. Critics say the sudden surge in popularity has led to unexpected side effects. Madangbawi is a signature landmark located along the No. 1 hiking trail on Gwanaksan. It is widely known as a rest stop where hikers take certification photos. However, a hiker recently defaced the rock by spraying yellow lacquer paint on it. The message left at the scene...

A team of researchers led by Kyungcheol Choy of Hanyang University found evidence of chicken-keeping some 2,000 years ago with the Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) technique, according to a statement released by Hanyang University. This technique allows scientists to analyze collagen peptides and amino acid sequences obtained from small samples of bone, thus allowing the identification of even highly fragmented remains. The chicken bones in this study were unearthed at the Gungok-ri site in southwestern Korea. "We confirmed not only the presence of chickens but also their management during the Proto-Three Kingdoms period," Choy said. Plus, elevated levels of...

In the summer of 1905, two men held a private conversation in Tokyo that the world wouldn't find out about for nearly two decades. No treaty was signed. No announcement was made. But in that room, the United States quietly handed an entire nation over to colonial rule — and set in motion a chain of events that would end at Pearl Harbor forty years later. This is the story of the Taft-Katsura Agreement, the secret deal that validated Japanese imperial ambition at the exact moment it needed validation most. We cover the Meiji Restoration and Japan's transformation from feudal...

According to a report in The Korea Herald, Jeong Choong-won of Seoul National University and an international team of researchers conducted a genetic study of 78 individuals buried in 44 tombs in South Korea's Imdang-Joyeong burial complex, which was in use during the Three Kingdoms period between the fourth and sixth centuries A.D. The scientists detected evidence of close-kin marriages and family-based sacrificial burials among the occupants of the burials. Most of the tombs in the complex consist of a main burial chamber and a secondary chamber. In at least 20 of the main chambers, the researchers found evidence of...

The year was 1490. The location, Qingyang, China. It was a spring evening in this central Chinese city when something strange began to occur in the sky above. For one, there was a recently discovered comet that was coming into view: Comet C-1490 Y1. But this comet pales in comparison to the really strange event that was about to occur. The Meteor Shower That Killed 10,000 People | 19:18 Swegle Studios | 459K subscribers | 709,238 views | July 8, 2025

Retired Navy Capt. E. Royce Williams has been keeping a secret for more than 50 years. To his friends, family, and others he served with, Williams was known as a decorated fighter pilot, who led a successful career in the Navy, where he served for more than 30 years and flew more than 220 missions in Korea and Vietnam. However, even his wife wasn’t aware of what he’d done on Nov. 18, 1952. That morning, Williams was continuing what had become a daily routine for him as a young Navy pilot stationed onboard the USS Oriskany off the coast of...

A heroic battle, the longest dogfight in the history of US Naval aviation, was forgotten, buried among the closest held secrets of the cold war, for over sixty years.

The world of totalitarian dictators is getting a bit of a shake-up this week, as something that has been intensely speculated upon in the South Korean government and media has come to pass at least on some level: North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has reportedly designated his teenage daughter as his official heir, indicating that she would be groomed to continue his family line and dictatorship. That said, it’s difficult to say how much media manipulation and spycraft is involved here–there are many in the South Korean government, media and public who believe that one of Kim Jong Un’s...

North Korea is executing schoolchildren for watching South Korean TV shows and listening to K-Pop, including Netflix’s hit series “Squid Game,” according to Amnesty International. Escapees told the human rights group that teenagers and even middle school students have been publicly executed, sent to labor camps or subjected to brutal public humiliations for consuming foreign media banned by the regime. The accounts are based on 25 in-depth interviews conducted in 2025 with North Koreans who fled the country between 2012 and 2020, the organization said. Most were between ages 15 and 25 when they escaped. One interviewee said people, including...

Korean War hero Royce Williams is being awarded the Medal of Honor, and his actions are something not even Hollywood could have dreamed up. Congressman Darrell Issa announced on Wednesday that President Donald Trump officially informed Williams of his MoH. The Medal of Honor is the nation's highest military award. It is only awarded for actions so heroic that oftentimes, the person earning it is killed. Williams is still with us in 2026, and his once-secret actions are now out in the public. Buckle up for one of the most insane war stories you'll ever hear.

The host city for World Youth Day 2027 will be Seoul, South Korea. The fact that an American Pope will be presiding and that Korean culture generally is pretty popular in the US means that interest in attending should be pretty high among Americans. I suspect that some of my own kids may find their way over there for the event. This being the case, what better time for American Catholics to find out about the vibrant past and hopeful future of the Church in Korea? Seoul is a particularly appropriate site for WYD 2027 considering that Catholicism had its...