Seoul, Korea
CNN
–

At 14 years old, he was a poor factory worker. On Wednesday, he became the leader of one of Asia’s most powerful economies: the US allies and cultural juggernauts.

But Lee Jae Myung faces a tough job as he heads towards a decisive victory over conservative rival Kim Moon So on Tuesday. South Korea remains deeply divided, with Lee’s predecessor gaining short-lived power in December and declared martial law, causing many voters to worry about their democratic state.

Six months of political turmoil settled the existing rifts and was protested in protest against both former President Yok Yeol and his people’s power parties.

The choppy international situation exacerbates domestic uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s global tariffs have hit South Korea’s trade-dependent economy violently.

Wang Jo Hee, a law professor at Honggik University in Seoul, said Lee’s election may ultimately provide much needed stability after the revolving door of interim leaders over the past six months.

“We can’t even engage with Trump in the tariff war and it’s a serious problem because of an export-driven economy,” Cho said. She added that the election, which saw the highest voter turnout since 1997, represents a stinging public responsibilities to people’s power parties.

“For a lot of people, I think this election was about putting the country in charge of chaos,” she said.

One voter Kim Yong-gu-gun told CNN he was very pleased with Lee’s victory, which made him feel like he was flying. He drove from his home to the capital for two hours on the night of martial law. Before becoming a democracy, Korea has a bloody oppression share in its authoritarian past.

“So I told my wife to call me and tell my kids that I was going to (Parliament) for my grandchildren,” he said. “To create a better world for their generation, we need to stop martial law. I can’t ignore it and sleep.”

However, it remains to be seen whether Lee (60) can heal political divisions. In particular, he has been caught up in a variety of legal challenges, in the face of allegations of corruption and abuse of power.

It is not clear what will happen in his ongoing criminal trial. The sitting president is usually immune from the prosecutor, but there is disagreement as to whether this applies to cases that begin before taking office.

However, at his inauguration ceremony on Wednesday, Lee tried to cast herself as unity and a new start for over 50 million people.

“Now is the time to replace hatred and conflict with coexistence, reconciliation and solidarity. Open an age of happiness, dreams and hope for the nation,” he said in his speech. “I answer the serious call to build a completely new country.”

Lee’s epic rise is well documented.

Born in the mid-1960s, he was the fifth of seven children in a poor family from Andong, a riverside city southeast of Seoul. His father, according to a biography that includes excerpts from his office and Lee’s diary, shows that his mother was a public bathroom rate collector, while his father worked as a market cleaner.

In the early suffering of rapid industrialization that significantly transformed Korea, Korea transformed into a major power, Lee began working in the factory as a teenager, from gem plants to refrigerator assembly lines. While working in a factory that made baseball gloves, he permanently injured his left arm.

In his diary, Lee will write about the vy wish of a student who saw him wearing a school uniform and a student who saw enough students to eat.

Despite his humble beginnings, he eventually passed his school exams and won a full scholarship to study law at Cheonggan University, one of Seoul’s top private universities.

From there, Lee became a human rights lawyer and joined politics in 2010 as mayor of Seoon Nam, just outside Seoul, and as mayor of Song Nam, representing the liberal Democratic Party. It led to another, more important stint from 2018 as governor of Kyoto, the most populous country surrounding the capital.

By then, he had his eyes on the presidency – and left the runner-up governor in the 2022 election, losing to Yoon by less than a percentage point.

Lee then became a lawmaker and survived an attempted assassination in January 2024, when a man stabbed him in the neck during a public event that his party denounced as an “act of political horror.”

Later that year, Yoon’s unfortunate power glove came. Lee rushed back to Congress and made another headline as one of the lawmakers who pushed past soldiers to drive away past soldiers and lift martial law. He jumped the fence to enter the building and streamed live on a viral video that was viewed tens of millions of times.

Despite his growing popularity, Lee is being watched with suspicion by many enemies due to the criminal trial.

Separately, he was convicted of violating the election law by intentionally making a false statement during discussions during the 2022 presidential election. The case was sent to the Court of Appeal.

Lee denies all charges against him. Speaking to CNN in December, he allegedly had been charged with various charges “without evidence or basis,” claiming the allegations were politically motivated.

Yoon’s martial law was driven partly by frustration that spanned a month-long political stalemate, with Lee’s Democrats preventing the president from moving forward with many of his campaign promises and policies.

Today, Democrats control both Congress and the presidency. This allowed us to see a “return to normal politics.”

“It might be easier to push through policies than it was under President Yun, the Berlin-Each,” she added.

And Lee has a lot to do right away. This includes dealing with slowing the economy and participating in US-Korea trade talks.

“I will soon be revitalizing the Emergency Economic Response Task Force Team to restore people’s livelihoods and revitalizing the economy,” he said in his inauguration speech on Wednesday. He added that it will turn the global economic and security crisis into an opportunity to maximize our national interests and strengthen trilateral cooperation between the US and Japan.

Arlington added that Lee clearly sees the US South Korean alliance as the “backbone” of the country’s national security, but that must be balanced with relations with China. The US rival is also South Korea’s largest trading partner.

Yoon took the famous hardline in North Korea and relations plummeted. In contrast, Lee comes from a political party that has historically adopted a more reconciliatory approach to South Korea’s authoritarian neighbours.

Lee reiterated his long-standing peace goals on the Korean Peninsula, vowing to “keep communication channels open while responding firmly to North Korea’s nuclear threat.”

But most of all, Lee emphasized the importance of rebuilding public trust by being so severely damaged by the martial law crisis and punishing those responsible.

“I will rebuild everything that has been destroyed by the riots and create a society that continues to grow and develop,” he said Wednesday. “Please don’t wake up again to use the power of the military to seize the sovereignty of the people.”

Brisbane, Australia
CNN
–

Erin Patterson, a woman accused of killing three guests in a meal of death cap mushrooms, told her trial Wednesday that she may have inadvertently added foraging mushrooms to lunch because her Dusel tasted “small pale”;

On the third day of evidence on Wednesday, Patterson was filmed throughout the July 2023 event. She was accused of intentionally adding fatal death cap mushrooms to a wellington meal of beef cooked for four guests, including her in-laws, at a small town home in Leongatha in rural Victoria.

Patterson denied the three murders of her step-laws, Don Patterson and Gale Patterson, and Gale’s sister, Heather Wilkinson. She also denied trying to kill her local pastor, Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson, to kill a guest for the fourth time.

Back at Patterson before lunch, defense attorney Colin Mandy SC asked where he bought the ingredients. Patterson said all the ingredients came from Woolworths, Australia’s leading supermarket.

Patterson said he found the recipe in a cookbook. For example, she said she couldn’t find a beef tenderloin log, so she bought a twin pack of individual steaks. The recipe called for mustard, but she didn’t use it and she said Don didn’t use prosciutto because he “don’t eat pork.”

On a Saturday morning for lunch, she said she fried garlic and shallots and chopped store-bought mushrooms in a food processor. She cooked the sauteed mixture, probably known as daxel, for 45 minutes, so it was dry and didn’t let the pastries get soaked, she said.

Patterson told the court that she had tasted the mixture, and because she was “a little bland” she added dried mushrooms that she had previously stored in a plastic container in the pantry.

Mandy asked what she believed was in a plastic container in the pantry: “I believed it was just a mushroom I bought in Melbourne,” Patterson said. “And now, what do you think was in that tub?” Mandy asked.

“I think now I could have had something forged there too,” she said, her voice is broken.

Patterson told the court that Ian and Heather Wilkinson had all their meals. Don finished what Gale hadn’t eaten. Patterson only ate about a quarter or a third of the beef Wellington.

After lunch they cleaned and sat down to eat the orange cake Gale had brought.

“I had a cake, then another cake, then another cake,” Patterson said. “How many cakes did you have?” Mandy asked. “Everything,” replied Patterson. She said it reached about two-thirds of the original cake.

“I was full so I went to the bathroom and got it back again,” she said. Patterson previously told the court that she had been battling bulimia for most of her life and was self-conscious about her weight.

Patterson said he felt nauseous after lunch and took diarrhea medication later that night. The next day she skipped Sunday Mass due to the same symptoms, but still had diarrhea later that day.

That night, she said, she removed pastries and mushrooms from the remaining beef Wellington and put the meat in the microwave for the kids to eat for dinner.

The next day, Monday, she thought she needed liquids so she went to the hospital. There, the doctor told her that she could have been exposed to the death cap mushroom. Patterson said she was “shocked and confused.” “I didn’t know how the mushrooms were during my meal,” she said.

Earlier on Wednesday, Patterson told the court he had never seen a website claiming to show the location of the death hat near her home.

She said she knew Death Cap Mushrooms and searched online to see if they had grown in the area. She said she realized they weren’t.

Patterson also told her trial Wednesday that she may have forged mushrooms at the Kolumbula Botanical Garden in May 2023 and chose mushrooms near the oak tree. The court previously heard that death hat trees grow near oak trees.

Patterson said he would dehydrate the mushrooms he didn’t want to use right away and store them in plastic containers in his pantry. She said at the time she also bought dried mushrooms from an Asian grocery store in Melbourne. They smelled irritating and she said she put it in a plastic container in the pantry.

Mandy asked: “Do you remember putting wild mushrooms that were dehydrated in May or June 2023 in containers already containing other dried mushrooms?”

Patterson replied: “Yes, I did that.”

Later in the proceedings, Patterson recalls a conversation with her husband, Simon, as their parents were seriously ill in the hospital. She said she said she had dehydrator-dried mushrooms. “He told me.

She told her that his comments “we’re thinking a lot about a lot.”

“It made me think about all the time I used the (dehydrator) and I was beginning to think about how I dried mushrooms a few weeks ago.

Patterson also told the court he was responsible for three factory resets on the phone. Her son did the first. She said she knows there are images of mushrooms and dehydrators in Google photos. “I just panicked and didn’t want them to see them,” she said. Asked who she was talking about, she said: “Detective.”

Patterson’s evidence continues.

CNN
–

How will Moscow respond to stunning Ukrainian drones in a strategic aircraft fleet?

So far, the Kremlin remains tightly trapped, only saying it is awaiting the results of a formal investigation into the attack that hit air bases thousands of miles from the Ukrainian border.

But Fury is openly vented throughout the Russian media, with Prokremlin experts and bloggers pursuing retaliation, seeking nuclear retaliation.

“This is not just an excuse, it’s the reason to launch a nuclear attack in Ukraine,” the well-known “two major” blogger told a popular telegram channel with over a million subscribers.

“After the mushroom cloud, you can think about who lied, made a mistake, etc.” they added, referring to the search for the Kremlin’s fiasco scapegoat.

At least one prominent Russian political analyst, Sergei Markov, warned in a social media post that using nuclear weapons would “reduce real political isolation.”

However, popular blogger Alexander Cott demanded that Russia “attack all our powers, regardless of the outcome.”

Of course, Russian hardliners are routinely clammer-sized figures for the removal of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, yet are still shrouded in thin veils, but ultimately publishing Armageddon’s sky threats targeting Western allies. It is hardly surprising that they are doing so again after such a painful series of attacks.

But it would be wrong to be too satisfied to dismiss all Russian nuclear saber rat rings as mere propaganda.

In fact, this time there are several reasons to worry about taking the slim possibility of a catastrophic Russian reaction.

First, several Russian critics have commented on how the destruction of a considerable number of Russian strategic nuclear bombers in Ukraine is interpreted as violating Moscow’s legal nuclear threshold.

The Kremlin’s recently updated nuclear doctrine sets the conditions for launches — says attacks on military infrastructure “which “disturbs nuclear reactivity behavior” and “critically important” could cause nuclear retaliation.

The Ukrainian operation was “the basis for a nuclear attack,” says Vladmir Soloviviv, a TV firefighter host in the Russian province, calling for a strike in Kiev’s Ukrainian presidential office.

Whatever its legality, the barriers to the Russian nuclear reaction remain benevolent and high, and such strikes could be dismissed by the Kremlin world as a practical over-view.

The first will poison ties with major Russian trading partners such as China and India, causing potential military action against the Russian army.

The inevitable mass casualties will bring about universal caveats and ensure further isolation of Russia at the international stage.

But here is the problem. The Kremlin may feel overwhelming pressure to restore deterrence.

It was not only recent Ukrainian drone attacks deep in Russia that humiliated Moscow. Shortly afterwards, Ukraine launched yet another bold assault on the strategic Karch Bridge, linking Russia with Crimea.

Last year, another powerful blow was hit by the capture by Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, and the Kremlin struggled to free its land. Meanwhile, if not weekly, drone attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure and airports continue to cause widespread disruption, far from the frontline.

At the same time, Ukrainian allies are gradually lifting restrictions on the use of Western-supported weapons against Russia, further challenging what was once believed to be Moscow’s red line.

Few people doubt that the Kremlin is itching to react decisively, but how?

A former Russian minister told CNN that the most likely response by Moscow was the “wild” traditional missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities where Ukrainians have already suffered for many years.

“Russia has no ability to launch a massive military attack, so there is no other way. They don’t have enough personnel,” said Vladimir Mirov, a former deputy energy minister who currently lives outside of Russia.

“People talk about the possibility of nuclear weapons and more. I don’t think this is on the table. But President Putin has shown many times that he relies on wildness and revenge.”

In other words, although very unlikely, nuclear options cannot be completely discounted. This Ukrainian conflict has already won multiple unexpected turns, particularly the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 itself.

And while Ukraine and its supporters enjoy the surprising success of recent military operations, thrusts at a humiliated, wounded Russian bear can have dangerous and horrifying consequences.

CNN
–

A dark chapter in Chilean history.

During the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990, thousands of babies were stolen from biological mothers and sold to adoption by foreign couples, mainly in the US and Europe. In Chile, they are known as “Children of Silence.”

And now, for the first time in the country’s history, a Chilean judge has announced that he is indicting an individual who claims he has stolen a baby that was stolen in the country.

“In the 1980s there was a network of judges who detected and stole babies from Catholic priests, lawyers, social workers, and even poor mothers, who mainly adopted them and sold them to adoption,” said Alejandro Aguilar Brevis, a judge at the Santiago Court of Appeals, who was responsible for the investigation.

According to a judicial statement, the investigation focused on the city of San Fernando in central Chile involves two babies who were stolen and handed over to a foreign couple.

According to a Chilean judicial statement, the ring is said to have focused on “adding or stealing babies for financial gain” with the aim of “emerging from the country to various destinations in Europe and the United States.”

The judge charged and issued arrest warrants against five people. He said “they should remain in pre-trial detention for crime associations, child abduction and intentional misconduct,” the release said.

The Chilean government has requested extradition to Israel against a former Chilean Family Court judge who is currently living there and allegedly involved, the release added.

CNN contacted the judiciary to determine whether the parties involved have legal representation and how they would respond to the claim, but so far there has been no response.

The judge held that the restriction law does not apply in this case because “these are crimes committed under military junta and must be punished in accordance with the American Treaty on Human Rights and the jurisdiction of the American Court of Human Rights.”

The investigation was released Monday, a day after Chilean President Gabriel Borik said the final report was issued by the task force, which he prepared to investigate a case of a baby stolen last year.

Following that recommendation, Borik said the Chilean government would “provide additional means of searching for origins and create a genetic fingerprint bank that will allow for the unification of many baby families that have been stolen for a long time and given to foreign families.”

Constanza DelRío, Founder and Director We are looking for ourselves (We’re looking for each other), the Santiago NGO, dedicated to reunifying the family of stolen babies, said she was cautiously optimistic because countries like Chile find the truth about stolen babies “are very slow and denying the victim.”

Del Rio was a victim of an illegal adoption and filed a lawsuit in 2017, demanding an investigation by the Chilean government. Authorities were appointed as special prosecutors, but the investigation was not anywhere, she said. According to Del Rio, another prosecutor filed a lawsuit last year solely to declare that he “didn’t establish that the crime was committed.”

President Borick said creating a task force proves his government is serious about the issue, speaks publicly about it, and recognizes the systematic theft of the baby at the time as fact.

There could be tens of thousands of cases. Theft of thousands of babies in Chile has been documented by non-governmental organizations for over a decade. Since 2014, CNN has reported on multiple cases in which stolen people have been stolen as the baby is reunited with a biological mother after DNA testing has proven to be indeed relevant.

River Constance We are looking for ourselves On its own, it built a database containing around 9,000 cases, which helped reunite over 600 parents with stolen children.

Ten years ago, Marcela Labraña (Sename, by its Spanish acronym), the then superintendent of the country’s Child Protection Agency, said her agency is investigating hundreds of cases but suspects there are thousands more.

“This is no longer a myth. We know this happened today, and it was true. It’s not the story that a few people were saying,” Labranya said.

CNN
–

Mexico’s ruling party Morena gains control of the Supreme Court after the country’s first judicial election.

Preliminary results from Sunday’s race were shown by a linked candidate with Morena, who won most of the judicial seats. The victory will bring the party to a firm grip on every department of the government. This is a change that democratic supporters weaken the country’s checks and balance.

Critics also warned that elections themselves pose a risk to democracy, and argued that by electing judges through popular votes, the independent authority of the court can be compromised, thereby having the ability to support the law and to curb crime and corruption that rampify other authority.

About 100 million citizens were eligible to participate in the Sunday event, but only about 13% appeared on the ballot. Experts say the figures reflect the confusion between many positions and voters overwhelmed by candidates.

Víctor Manuel Alarcón Olguín, a research professor at UAM-Iztapalapa University, focusing on political parties and elections, has also lost the way to design the process. He said lawmakers “didn’t provide an adequately well-defined way to electoral authorities, and election officials had to resolve many of these technical issues in turn, at least in order to make the system work.”

Among the nine predicted winners in the Supreme Court race are three seated judges, with former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the founder of Morena. Others include former legal counsel for Lopez Obrador, the current human rights prosecutor for the Attorney General’s Office, and Indigenous lawyers who are expected to become the next president of the court.

“At best, many of these people do not indicate affiliation or such obvious participation in the ruling party, but they have a very diverse range of interests, connections, or at least ideological or manifestation affinity.

All nine candidates appeared in the pamphlet, and Morena members were accused of distributing them to voters to suggest candidates to vote. Election rules prohibit political parties from promoting or supporting judicial candidates.

Morena’s leader, Mexican President Claudia Sinbaum, distanced himself from the pamphlet, condemned its use and sought to ask for an investigation into the matter.

Sunday’s race was the first time any country had held elections at any level of justice. Almost 900 federal posts appeared, including all nine Supreme Court seats and around 1,800 local positions in 19 states. Votes are still counting nationwide, with results expected to be gradually announced next week. In 2027, there will be a second vote for hundreds of other judicial positions.

Sheinbaum labelled the election on Sunday as a successful election.

“In Mexico, voting is voluntary. It’s not mandatory. It’s not mandatory, but it’s not here. Here it is free, direct, universal, and secret. That’s why 13 million people have decided to vote in judicial exercises. That’s a very good thing,” she said.

Lopez Obrador and his party approved the judicial election in September, claiming that popularity votes would help corruption and immunity within the courts.

But critics say Morena was robbing her popularity in order to select like-minded judges with the goal of passing reforms blocked by the earlier, more balanced courts. They also fear that votes could be affected by political actors and criminal groups.

The eight Supreme Court Justice, which had 11 seats at the time, announced her resignation in October and refused to take part in Sunday’s election. Most resignations come into effect on August 31, 2025, the day before the new court begins.