SOUTH KOREA – South Korea’s liberal opposition parties scored a landslide victory in a parliamentary election held last Wednesday, dealing a resounding blow to President Yoon Suk Yeol and his conservative party but likely falling just short of a super majority.
The Democratic Party (DP) was projected to take more than 170 of the 300 seats in the new legislature, data by the National Election Commission and network broadcasters showed with more than 99% of the votes counted as of 5:55 a.m. yesterday (5.55 p.m. ET last Wednesday).
A splinter liberal party considered allied with the DP was expected to take at least 10 seats, projections showed.
“When voters chose me, it was your judgment against the Yoon Suk Yeol administration and you are giving the Democratic Party the duty to take responsibility for the livelihood of the people and create a better society,” DP leader Lee Jae-myung said.
Lee won a seat in the city of Incheon to the west of the capital, Seoul, against a conservative heavyweight candidate considered a major ally of the president.
The bitterly fought race was seen by some analysts as a referendum on Yoon, whose popularity has suffered amid a cost-of-living crisis and a spate of political scandals.
“Judgment” was the common theme running through comments by opposition victors, many of whom had campaigned heavily focused on what they said was Yoon’s mismanagement of the economy and his refusal to acknowledge his wife acted improperly when she accepted a Dior bag as gift.
First lady Kim Keon Hee has not been seen in public since Dec. 15 and was absent when Yoon voted, reflecting the view by some analysts and opposition party members that she had become a serious political liability for the president and his People Power Party (PPP).
His PPP was projected to win just over 100 seats, meaning Yoon would avoid the super-majority of a two-third opposition control that could break presidential vetoes and pass constitutional amendments.
But nearing the end of the first two years of his five-year single term allowed by the constitution, Yoon was likely to slip into a lame duck status, some analysts said.
The National Election Commission (NEC) was expected to announce the official results yesterday. Nearly 29.7 million people, or 67% of eligible voters, cast their ballots, according to the NEC.
It marked the highest ever turnout for a parliamentary election, though the numbers were down from the 2022 presidential vote that narrowly brought Yoon to power.
Yoon, who took office in May 2022, was not up for election this time but his ability to pass legislation is likely to be badly damaged by the poor showing by his PPP.
He has suffered low ratings for months, hamstrung in implementing his pledges to cut taxes, ease business regulations and expand family support in the world’s fastest aging society.
Mason Richey, a professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said Yoon might focus more on his overseas agenda now, though those plans could also be at risk if the opposition seeks to cut budgets with its majority.
“Given his likely lame duck status, the temptation for Yoon will be to focus on foreign policy where he will still have statutory power,” Richey said. (CNN)…[+]

VATICAN CITY – A representative of Brazil’s Yanomami people said he met Pope Francis to ask him to support Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s efforts to save his indigenous people.
The Yanomami, estimated to number around 28,000, live in Brazil’s largest Indigenous reservation, in the northern states of Roraima and Amazonas. Invasion of their lands by illegal miners has caused malnutrition and deaths.
“I’ve asked the pope to support the Lula administration, because Lula needs friends. He won’t be able to do it alone. There are a lot of people around him, politicians who don’t want him to solve it,” Davi Kopenawa told reporters.
“The pope said he’s going to talk to him.”
Kopenawa, a shaman who co-founded and chairs the Hutukara Yanomami Association, which campaigns for indigenous rights and the preservation of the Amazon rainforest, met Francis at the Vatican.
He mentioned water poisoning from mercury – used by wildcat miners in the hunt for gold – as one of the biggest threats to his community, along with deforestation for cattle ranching and soya farming.
The Yanomami territory, an area about the size of Portugal, has been invaded by gold miners for decades, but the destructive incursions multiplied in recent years when former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro dismantled environmental protections.
Lula, a leftist three-time president who returned to office in 2023, has led a push to evict illegal miners from Yanomami territory. In January, his administration announced 1.2 billion reais ($239.58 million) in aid for the indigenous community.
Francis, who hails from Brazil’s neighbour Argentina, has made defense of the environment one of the cornerstones of his papacy, and has repeatedly condemned the plundering of natural resources in the Amazon and elsewhere. (Reuters)…[+]

VIETNAM – It was the most spectacular trial ever held in Vietnam, befitting one of the greatest bank frauds the world has ever seen.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death yesterday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44billion (£35billion) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five defendants were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges.
“There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era,” says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. “There has certainly been nothing on this scale.”
The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the “Blazing Furnaces” anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.
A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.
The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country’s richest women has joined their ranks.
Truong My Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It has long been the commercial engine of the Vietnamese economy, dating well back to its days as the anti-communist capital of South Vietnam, with a large, ethnic Chinese community.
She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as Doi Moi, in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants.
Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.
All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending. (BBC)…[+]

UKRAINE – Ukraine needs military aid and air defense systems in the face of Russia’s intensifying attacks, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, as he criticised his country’s allies for engaging in “lengthy discussions” and “turning a blind eye”.
The Russian military launched attacks on five regions across Ukraine, killing at least seven people and damaging infrastructure including substations and power generation facilities, Ukrainian officials said yesterday.
Zelenskyy said Russia fired more than 40 missiles and about 40 attack drones overnight, many targeting energy infrastructure. The attacks show how “critical” air defence has become for Ukraine, he posted on X, adding that the Russian missiles and Iranian-designed one-way drones must not be allowed to hit Ukraine.
In southern Odesa, Governor Oleh Kiper said on his Telegram channel last Wednesday night that Russian missile strikes killed four people, including a 10-year-old girl, and left several others in critical condition.
The region’s air defences shot down seven Iranian-designed attack drones of the Russian military near energy infrastructure, which was not damaged, Kiper said yesterday morning.
In northeastern Kharkiv, two women and a 14-year-old girl were killed after a missile strike last Wednesday afternoon, Governor Oleg Sinegubov said on Telegram, also posting photos of rescuers clearing up rubble.
He reported multiple other attacks across Kharkiv through yesterday morning, including a drone attack that injured one person, and a missile fired from a Russian S-300 system that targeted “energy infrastructure”.
Kharkiv was targeted with more than 10 missiles, leaving more than 200,000 subscribers without power.
Kharkiv, the capital of the region of the same name, lies just 30km (19 miles) from the border with Russia and has come under frequent bombardment since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022.
Attacks in the capital Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia and Lviv also targeted infrastructure, but left no casualties, according to local authorities.
Zelenskyy said that “if Russian missiles and ‘Shahed’ drones continue to strike not only Ukraine but also the resolve of our allies, this will amount to a global license for terror”.
The president travelled to Lithuania to participate in a regional security summit yesterday, saying that “Russian evil is a threat not only to Ukraine, but to every nation bordering Russia and to everyone who values international law”.
Ukraine signed a 10-year bilateral security deal with Latvia at the meeting. “It envisages Latvia’s annual military support for Ukraine at 0.25% of GDP,” Zelenskyy posted on X.
On Wednesday, United States President Joe Biden urged the US House of Representatives to vote immediately on a $60billion Ukraine aid bill, which has been stuck in the House after clearing the Senate.
“There’s overwhelming support for Ukraine among the majority of Democrats and Republicans. There should be a vote now,” Biden told reporters.
Ukraine’s parliament passed a bill yesterday to overhaul its army mobilisation rules as it tries to generate fresh manpower to rotate its troops.
The measure, which must be signed by Zelenskyy before it becomes law, would oblige men between 18 and 60 years to update their personal data with the military authorities, allowing draft offices to see more easily who can be called up in any region.
The bill also does not set any time limit for wartime military service, meaning that soldiers who have been fighting since the beginning of the invasion will have no dembilisation date and a chance to return home. The final, amended text of the contentious measures was still to be published on the parliament’s website.
Ukraine’s General Yuriy Sodol told parliament that Russian forces outnumber Ukrainian troops seven to 10 times in eastern regions.
“We lack manpower,” said Sodol, who is commanding soldiers in the regions of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.
The top general for US forces in Europe, General Christopher Cavoli, told Congress last Wednesday that Ukraine will be outgunned 10 to one by Russia within a matter of weeks if Washington does not send more ammunition and weapons soon. (Al Jazeera)…[+]