Moon Jae-In

On today’s show: Myung-Sook Cha, at 19, joined the May 1980 GwangJu Democratization Movement in South Korea. She was imprisoned for two years afterward. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Wednesday that states can set their own carbon emissions standards for coal-fired power plants.

South Korea is often cited as the only democratic nation of the two on the Korean peninsula. But the distinction wasn’t always as easy to make; following the Korean War, the South was governed by a series of military-backed dictators until the country finally adopted the current version of its constitution in 1987. The realization of free and fair elections and civil liberties was the product of decades of organizing, which was often cracked down on brutally. One such struggle took place in the southern city of Gwangju, where in May of 1980, a student-led movement according for democratic reforms was met with military force, resulting in a massacre and an armed insurrection known as the Gwangju Uprising. Myung-Sook Cha, at age 19, was one of the young people who joined the May 1980 GwangJu Democratization Movement in South Korea. She was eventually captured by the military police, charged of being a North Korean spy, tortured and imprisoned for two years. She was subsequently exonerated and, after years of silence, decided to tell her story at events in Korea and among Korean diaspora communities to raise awareness about what happened at Gwangju and its role in the broader struggle for democracy in South Korea. She joined Jerome to talk about her role in the Gwangju movement, with executive director of the HANA Center Inhe Choi translating.

On today’s show: Benjamin Netanyahu negotiated a merger between far-right party Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) ahead of the April polls. A Facebook post by Ahmed Abu Artema inspired the March of Return, a months-long campaign by Gazan residents along the Israel-Gaza border in 2018. The second summit between President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un collapsed abruptly without an agreement today in Hanoi.

“Sometimes you have to walk,” President Donald Trump said on Thursday at an afternoon press conference in Hanoi after his second summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un collapsed abruptly without an agreement. Trump explained publicly that Kim offered to dismantle his country’s most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted sanctions against the nation. According to Trump, Kim would not commit to dismantling other elements of North Korea’s weapons program, causing negotiations to collapse. “Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that,” Trump said. Joining us for analysis of where U.S.-North Korean relations stand is Bruce Cumings, a professor of history at the University of Chicago and author of the books Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century,The Korean War: A History and North Korea: Another Country.