South Korea lawmakers introduce impeachment motion News
South Korea lawmakers introduce impeachment motion

The South Korean Parliament on Thursday introduced a motion to begin impeachment proceedings against President Park Geun-hye. The opposition-led parliament will need at least three-fourths of the parliament’s votes [Parliament Guidelines] for the motion to proceed. The motion is only valid for 48 hours and the motion must come to a vote by this Friday, or else it will become stale. If the vote is held and the motion is sustained, Park will be suspended from exercising her power and once the impeachment is finalized, she will not be exempt from criminal or civil liability.

The investigation into the president is the latest controversy affecting South Korean government officials. Earlier this month, South Korea’s three opposition parties introduced a joint impeachment motion [JURIST report] against embattled president Park. In October Park proposed [JURIST report] to amend the country’s constitutional provision that limits presidents to one term in office. Currently, South Korean presidents can only have a single five-year term, and Park finishes her term in office in February 2018. In Kyung-joon, a senior prosecutor in South Korea was indicted [JURIST report] in July on charges of bribery by accepting more than USD $11 million from an executive at the online-game company Nexon during collusive stock transactions over a nine-year period.

THIS DAY @ LAW

White supremacists overthrow government in Wilmington, North Carolina

A group of white supremacists overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898, killing at least dozens of Black people in the process. The city's Republican government resigned after the 500-2,000 strong white mob burned the offices of a Black-owned newspaper and terrorized black neighborhoods. The new state Democratic government passed laws in 1899 disenfranchising Black voters across North Carolina. Learn more about the 1898 Wilmington Coup.

Supreme Court limited free speech in wartime

On November 10, 1919, the US Supreme Court ruled in Abrams v. United States that the federal government could criminalize speech if it was of a type tending to bring about harmful results, in this case, resistance to the United States war effort. In a powerful dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes countered that even during wartime, free speech could only be curtailed when there was clear and "present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about."

Leonid Brezhnev dies

On November 10, 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died of a heart attack. He had served as leader of the USSR from October 1964 until his death. Following his death, the Soviet Union cycled through three more leaders during the 1980s until Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the country to dissolve in 1991. Read an obituary of Leonid Brezhnev from the New York Times.