A prominent K-pop music video director was yesterday charged as part of a corruption scandal rocking South Korea and engulfing South Korean President Park Geun-hye.
Cha Eun-taek, who has worked with Gangnam Style star Psy and boy band megastars Big Bang, used his ties to a secret confidante of Park to win lucrative projects from state agencies and private firms, prosecutors said.
That confidante — Choi Soon-sil — has been labeled Park’s eminence grise, a shadowy figure who is believed to have leveraged her close relationship with the president to extract more than US$60 million from top firms, including Samsung.
Prosecutors said Park ordered her former economic adviser to help Cha pressure officials and private firms so that he would win contracts.
Cha, 46, has been charged with abuse of power, coercion and embezzlement and becomes the latest public figure to be embroiled in the snowballing scandal.
Choi, 60, is accused of meddling in a wide range of state affairs including the country’s preparations for the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Prosecutors last week formally charged her with abuse of power and coercion, saying Park was a “co-culprit” who had colluded with Choi to strongarm top firms into giving cash to nonprofit foundations Choi controlled.
Park — the first South Korean president to become a criminal suspect while in office — has rejected a series of requests from prosecutors to answer their questions.
As a sitting president, Park cannot be charged with a criminal offense except insurrection or treason, but she can be investigated and potentially charged once her term is over.
Park is faced with growing public calls to resign and a push by lawmakers to impeach her, with her job approval ratings diving to record lows of 4 percent.
Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in recent weeks to call for her ouster, with organizers claiming the latest rally on Saturday in Seoul drew 1.5 million people.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
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