South Korea’s constitutional court has unanimously voted to uphold the impeachment of president Yoon Suk Yeol.

Accordingly, Yeol, whose declaration of martial law in December involved special forces storming the National Assembly and National Election Commission, was officially removed from office Friday.

The court’s verdict, by a vote of 8 to 0, means South Korea will hold an election to choose a new president within 60 days. Separately, Yoon, 64, will also be tried on criminal insurrection charges.

Yoon, who was halfway into a single five-year term, is the second South Korean president to be impeached. Park Geun-hye, another conservative, was removed from office in 2017 after a corruption scandal.

The court’s decision marks the end of what has been a turbulent presidency.

Yoon was elected in 2022, beating his liberal opponent, Lee Jae-myung, by just 0.73 of a percentage point, or 247,077 votes, beginning his term on what many viewed as a weak public mandate.

Although Yoon was welcomed by the Biden administration for bringing South Korea into a three-way military pact with Japan, aligning it with the United States’ broader push to constrain China’s ambitions in the region, his track record of scandals, diplomatic gaffes and flashes of authoritarian governance made him deeply unpopular at home.

During his tenure, Yoon and his allies were criticized for trying to muzzle adversarial media outlets and journalists as well as a government-funded cartoon competition that awarded its top prize to a work lampooning Yoon.

As part of his martial law order, Yoon banned all political activity and placed the media under military control.

His wife, Kim Keon-hee, was trailed by myriad controversies of her own, including revelations that she plagiarized her master’s thesis.

Yoon remained defiant at his impeachment trial, claiming that he was being framed for insurrection by his political enemies — and that his declaration of martial law was intended as a plea for public attention.

Since December, he has attempted to justify his declaration of martial law with accusations that members of the liberal opposition party — which holds 192 of the legislature’s 300 seats — were North Korea sympathizers who used their “legislative tyranny” to paralyze his government. It was an echo of the anti-communist rhetoric that past military dictators and subsequent conservative leaders have frequently invoked against South Korean liberals, who have long been defined by their support for reconciliation with Pyongyang.

In defending his decision to deploy troops to the election commission, Yoon has cited a widely debunked conspiracy theory that last year’s general elections, which resulted in his conservative People Power Party suffering a crushing defeat by the liberals, were compromised by voter fraud.

“The declaration of emergency martial law on Dec. 3 was intended to announce that the country is currently facing an existential crisis, and to desperately appeal to the public so that they would become aware of this situation and give their support in overcoming it,” Yoon told the Constitutional Court in early March.

But in their testimonies to the court and prosecutors, many of the military and government officials once under Yoon’s command contradicted his version of events, recalling orders to arrest Yoon’s political opponents — and to prevent the National Assembly from exercising its constitutionally guaranteed right to lift martial law with a vote, as it did hours after the president’s declaration.

Source: Agency Reports

Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing will travel to Thailand for a regional summit as his country reels from an earthquake that killed thousands and left cities in ruins.

The earthquake in central Myanmar last Friday killed 3,085 people and injured 4,715, the junta has said. Hundreds more are missing and the toll is expected to rise.

A spokesman for the Myanmar army said Min Aung Hlaing is scheduled to fly to Bangkok on Thursday, on the eve of a summit that will gather leaders of the seven countries that border the Bay of Bengal.

His attendance will be unusual as sanctioned leaders are typically barred from these events.

Host Thailand, where the earthquake was felt and killed 21 people, has proposed that the leaders issue a joint statement on the disaster. Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka are also part of the summit.

Countries around the world have sent aid and rescue teams to Myanmar since the quake, but poor infrastructure and an ongoing civil war has complicated relief efforts.

The junta announced a temporary ceasefire late on Wednesday to expedite these efforts, after earlier rejecting proposals from armed ethnic rebel groups.

Before this, the military had continued its airstrikes in rebel-held areas, including those badly hit by the earthquake.

On Tuesday night, troops opened fire at a Chinese Red Cross convoy carrying relief supplies. The junta said the troops fired after the convoy refused to stop despite being signalled to do so.

Myanmar has been gripped by a bloody civil war since the military seized power in 2021, which led to the rise of an armed resistance that has been fighting alongside armed ethnic groups, some of which have been fighting the military for decades.

Years of violence have crippled the economy, supercharged inflation, and plunged the country into a humanitarian crisis.

Now, the earthquake has worsened the crisis. Humanitarian groups have urged the junta to lift any remaining obstructions to aid.

The UN has also urged the global community to ramp up aid before the monsoon season hits in about a month.

(BBC News)

The Slovak cabinet has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest in Central Slovakia.

Prime Minister Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government announced after a cabinet meeting that 350 out of an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears would be culled, citing the danger to humans after a spate of attacks.

“We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods,” the prime minister told reporters afterwards.

A special state of emergency allowing bears to be shot has now been widened to 55 of Slovakia’s 79 districts, an area that now covers most of the country.

The government in Bratislava has already loosened legal protections allowing bears to be killed if they stray too close to human habitation. Some 93 had been shot by the end of 2024.

The plans to shoot even more were condemned by conservationists, who said the decision was in violation of international obligations and could be illegal.

“It’s absurd,” said Michal Wiezek, an ecologist and MEP for opposition party Progressive Slovakia.

“The Environment Ministry failed desperately to limit the number of bear attacks by the unprecedented culling of this protected species,” he told the BBC.

“To cover up their failure, the government has decided to cull even more bears,” he continued.

Wiezek argued that thousands of encounters a year passed without incident, and he hoped the European Commission would intervene.

Slovak police confirmed on Wednesday that a man found dead in forest near the town of Detva in Central Slovakia on Sunday night was killed by a bear. His wounds were consistent with an attack.

The 59-year-old man had been reported missing on Saturday after failing to return from a walk in the woods.

He was found with what authorities described as “devastating injuries to the head”. Evidence of a bear’s den was found nearby, a local NGO told Slovak newspaper Novy Cas.

Bears have become a political issue in Slovakia after a rising number of encounters, including fatal attacks.

In March 2024, a 31-year-old Belarusian woman fell into a ravine and died while being chased by a bear in northern Slovakia.

Several weeks later a large brown bear was captured on video running through the centre of the nearby town of Liptovsky Mikolas in broad daylight, bounding past cars and lunging at people on the pavement.

The authorities later claimed to have hunted down and killed the animal, although conservationists said later there was clear evidence they had shot a different bear.

Environment Minister Tomas Taraba said on Wednesday there were more than 1,300 bears in Slovakia, and that 800 was a “sufficient number”, as the population was growing.

However, experts say the population remains more or less stable at around 1,270 animals.

Bears are common across the Carpathian mountain range, which stretches in an arc from Romania through western Ukraine and on to Slovakia and Poland.

(BBC News)