‘Unimaginable situation’: South Korea endures fallout from president’s martial law effort
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(SEOUL, South Korea) — As South Korea navigates a path forward after President Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law order last week, the nation’s political parties are still wrangling over whether to impeach him for the shocking move even as the president maintains it was a “highly political decision.”
Yoon could face a second impeachment vote on Saturday after a first impeachment vote over the weekend ended with lawmakers from the ruling People Power Party walking out before the vote.
The public reaction has been complex and varied, reflecting the deep political, social, and generational divides in South Korea. But overall there is a mass consensus that putting the country under martial law was an inexcusable action, no matter what motivated the president to do so.
“It was an unthinkable, unimaginable situation,” Seo Jungkun, a professor at Kyunghee University in Seoul, told ABC News.
“President Yoon attempted to suspend the functions of the national assembly. He ordered the removal of lawmakers, therefore he could be charged with treason,” Seo explained, referring to a testimony by Lt. Gen. Kwak Jong-geun, who oversaw the special forces dispatched to the National Assembly on the night of the martial law declaration.
Under South Korea’s constitution, if a sitting president is accused of insurrection, the police have the authority to arrest him while he is still in office.
Yoon vowed to “fight until the last moment” in an unexpected speech on Thursday and said that he had never intended to disrupt the “constitutional order” when he ordered hundreds of troops into the National Assembly on Dec. 3.
“My purpose was to inform the public about the colossal group of opposition parties’ heinous anti-state behavior,” Yoon said.
Yoon listed numerous grievances against opposition lawmakers in an effort to justify his actions. He claimed they had slashed funding for initiatives to revitalize the much-needed South Korean nuclear power sector and to combat drug traffickers, criminals, and foreign spies, including North Korea-led provocations.
The opposition Democratic Party stripped the National Intelligence Service of its decades long anti-espionage investigative power early this year, handing over that authority to the police which many agree are not capable of investigating North Korean provocations.
Yoon’s government has been at a deadlock since assuming power in 2022 due to the opposition’s continuous impeachment attempts targeting key members of his administration.
The Democratic Party has also impeached numerous prosecutors and judges involved in legal cases in which their party leader, Lee Jae-myung, had been personally accused while he served as mayor and governor. Lee is currently undergoing five trials for criminal charges such as corruption and bribery, subornation, and the illegal transfer of funds to North Korea.
“Yes, the opposition put pressure on the government in an unprecedented manner. But it was within the bounds of law and authority,” Professor Kang Won-taek of Seoul National University said, saying the measures were simply politics.
Many analysts in Seoul agree that Lee’s time had been ticking because if he were to be sentenced with any of these charges, he would be losing eligibility to run for presidency, which is why the opposition is pressing hard at full speed now. Once elected president, Lee would be immune from criminal prosecution by law.
The majority Democratic Party introduced a second motion to impeach the president on Thursday, following up on their warning that they will push for impeachment every week until it passes. Lawmaker Kim Min-seok of the Democratic Party referred to President Yoon’s speech as a “declaration of war against the nation,” saying he is delusional.
Yoon faces a deeply divided faction even within his own ruling party. The leader of the People Power Party, Han Dong-Hoon, is now in favor of impeachment.
“There is no other way,” Han said as other ruling party lawmakers shouted angrily that impeachment is only a personal opinion of Han’s and that “it is too early to define it as insurrection.” All except three ruling party lawmakers shunned the impeachment vote last Saturday by refusing to vote, but the upcoming vote is expected to be a close call.
If Yoon is impeached on Saturday he will be immediately suspended, but the Constitutional Court could take up to six months to decide whether to reinstate or remove the president.
Impeachment requires the presence of at least seven judges to hear the case and the agreement of two-thirds of the Constitutional Court judges. Currently, the Constitutional Court has only six members.
“Realistically I believe the case will be dismissed if the Constitutional Court remains as is with six judges,” Dr. Lee Junhan of Incheon National University told ABC News. Based on past cases, the judges are likely to rule that there were problematic actions but not precisely unconstitutional, which will lead to no impeachment, he said. “And this is what the president is aiming for.”
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(LONDON) — How warm was 2024? By March, just three months into the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had already estimated a 55% chance that 2024 would be the warmest year on record for the planet. By July, they gave it a 77% chance.
It was nearly certain by November.
Turns out, breaking the record was never really in doubt. Last year easily beat out the previous record holder, 2023, for the warmest year on record globally, according to data collected and analyzed by Copernicus Climate Change Service, part of the European Union’s climate research program and confirmed by NASA and NOAA scientists.
Copernicus said the global temperature for all of 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level. NASA’s estimate came in slightly lower, with their scientists finding that the earth was 1.47 degrees Celsius warmer than in the mid-19th century. NOAA reported 1.46 degrees Celsius. There is a slight variation in the numbers because each scientific organization conducts its own analysis using different tools. However, the fact that the findings of three independent scientific agencies are so close demonstrates the strength of the data.
It was also a record year for the contiguous United States, according to NOAA. In 2024, the average temperature of the contiguous U.S. was 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average and the warmest in its 130-year record.
The year 2024 was the first complete year the planet was warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the pre-industrial average from 1850 to 1900. If that number sounds familiar, it’s because the historic Paris Agreement established a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
Global temperature was above the Paris Agreement threshold for 11 of 12 months, according to Copernicus. We’ve now had back-to-back record-breaking years for the warmest global temperature and each of the past 10 years has been one of the 10 warmest years on record.
While this is the first calendar year on record to top the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold, it’s not the first time the planet has passed that mark, including the 12-month global average temperature between February 2023 and January 2024 and the monthly global average temperature in February 2016.
Exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold over several months or even for a few years isn’t considered a failure to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal. The agreement looks at the global temperature average over multiple decades before making a final determination.
However, climate experts say short-term threshold breaches like we saw in 2024 are an important warning that record-breaking temperatures are likely to continue in upcoming decades if the world doesn’t reduce its emissions.
“All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850. Humanity is in charge of its own destiny but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence. The future is in our hands — swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, in a press statement.
What’s causing the warming?
Since last summer, the recent short-term spike in global temperatures has been fueled primarily by the El Niño event in the equatorial eastern Pacific. Record highs for global average temperature tend to occur during El Niño years.
But an El Niño alone isn’t causing the record-breaking warming, according to climate scientists. What happened in 2024 is that a short-term El Niño spike occurred on top of the gradual, long-term global warming trend primarily driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, we’ve seen global warming accelerate during both El Niño and non-El Niño seasons.
“The defining factor in the evolution of many key climate indicators in 2024 has been the increasing global temperature, which is largely associated with the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, a consequence of human activities,” said Copernicus.
Copernicus data shows that in 2024, the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached the highest annual levels ever recorded.
“Our data points clearly to a steady global increase of greenhouse gas emissions and these remain the main agent of climate change,” added Laurence Rouil, director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
While human-produced greenhouse gas emissions and El Niño were key contributors to the 2024 record, some scientists believe there is something else at play as well.
One possibility is that the planet is a victim of its own success in curbing air pollution. In recent decades, regulations, including one in 2020 that drastically cut the amount of sulfur dioxide being released by ships, have significantly reduced the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere.
Aerosols are tiny particles that can reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures. But their concentrations are now greatly diminished. According to the EPA, U.S. sulfur dioxide emissions have dropped 94% since 1980. The burning of fossil fuels by power plants and other industrial facilities is the largest source of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.
While this means cleaner air, fewer atmospheric aerosols also results in a greater amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface creating a heating effect. Some research suggests that this may have contributed to recent warm Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures.
Some climate experts believe the January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Volcano may be playing a role in our warming trend. This eruption released an unprecedented amount of water vapor into Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA.
Typically, volcanic eruptions cool the Earth’s surface by emitting sulfur dioxide, which transforms into sunlight-reflecting aerosols. However, the 2022 eruption was different, as it released a substantial amount of water vapor—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
A study published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, found that this event could have a significant impact on surface temperatures around the world, triggering warming of over 1.5°C in some regions, while cooling others by around 1°C. However, other studies investigating the eruption have come to very different conclusions.
In July 2024, research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere concluded that most of the volcano’s effects dissipated by the end of 2023. Experts say that the atmospheric aerosol data used in the calculations could be behind the contradicting conclusions.
Copernicus said the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere hit a record high in 2024.
Climate scientists say one thing is certain. As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels in large amounts, we will continue to see temperatures increasing globally.
To make that point, Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M shared on social media an email template he reuses each year when reporters ask him about the global temperatures.
His auto reply reads, “No, this is not surprising — it is exactly in line with predictions. Here is a comment you can use for your story: Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest in the record.”
So certain of the trends, Dessler concludes by saying that this year “will end up being among the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
High hopes with the Paris Agreement
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the historic Paris Agreement was signed in 2016, then-President Barack Obama said, “Today, the world meets the moment. And if we follow through on the commitments that this agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet.”
But in large part, the world hasn’t met the moment nor followed through on its commitments.
In October, the United Nations Environment Programme published a report aptly titled, “No more hot air … please!” which found the world has made little progress in reversing the use of fossil fuels and faces twice as much warming as agreed to during the Paris Climate Agreement.
The World Meteorological Organization said carbon dioxide concentrations have increased by more than 11% in just two decades, making 2023 a record for the amount of this greenhouse gas currently in our atmosphere.
So, it was little surprise when researchers at Climate Action Tracker, an independent project tracking government action on climate change, declared that efforts to curb climate change have “flatlined” since 2021.
As leaders fail to take decisive action, the consequences of record-break warming take their toll on lives and property.
These extreme weather events, which ranged from severe storms to hurricanes to wildfires, killed at least 418 people and impacted large swaths of the country.
Human-amplified climate change has led to the significant warming of the oceans, which provides the energy hurricanes need to intensify. Hurricanes Beryl and Milton rapidly intensified over unusually warm ocean water, made several hundred times more likely due to human-amplified climate change.
A recent study from Climate Central found that every Atlantic hurricane in 2024 saw an increased maximum wind speed, ranging from 9 to 28 mph, because human-amplified climate change resulted in elevated ocean temperatures. The researchers said it’s unlikely Beryl and Milton would have reached Category 5 status without the impact of climate change.
While the severe impact of hurricanes and wildfires is evident in the images of mass destruction, extreme heat is actually the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States.
Research has discovered that children and adults over 65 are among the most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses and death and the Journal of the American Medical Association found that heat deaths in the United States have nearly doubled since 1999 and represent a 63% increase in death rates caused by heat between 1999-2023.
Extreme heat also affects a child’s health, development, behavior, and learning ability. A 2020 study found that a 1°F hotter school year is associated with a 1% reduction in learning that year, based on test scores.
Because our oceans absorb the majority of the planet’s heat, global sea temperatures reached record highs for the first half of 2024 and remained well above average for the rest of the year. According to NOAA, this has fueled the largest ocean coral bleaching event on record impacting nearly 77% of coral reef areas.
Uncontrolled climate change is also putting nearly one-third of the world’s species at risk for extinction, according to a recent analysis by University of Connecticut researcher and biologist Mark Urban. He found that 160,000 species are already at risk because of changes in our climate.
Reasons to be hopeful
ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee said, “1.5 degrees is bad, but it’s better than 1.6, which is better than 1.7.”
She added, “Each point one degree of warming creates more severe consequences for us, especially the most vulnerable. There’s still time to slow or even stop the warming curve if we stop burning fossil fuels and reduce our consumption.”
While we haven’t reached peak fossil fuel use yet, renewable energy, like wind and solar, is growing exponentially. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the “world added 50% more renewable capacity in 2023 than in 2022.” The IEA forecasts that the next five years will see the fastest growth yet for clean energy.
Although it was less than many countries wanted, world leaders attending the COP29 UN climate conference agreed to increase contributions to developing nations dealing with the effects of climate change to $300 billion annually by 2035, triple the previous goal of $100 billion.
Companies across the globe are working on ways to collect and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keep it from being released during electricity generation and manufacturing. While these carbon capture and storage technologies are in their infancy and have yet to significantly contribute to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, billions of dollars are being spent on these efforts.
There are also tens of thousands of green tech companies around the globe working on everything from clean fusion energy to harnessing the power of waves for electricity to making more efficient electric vehicle batteries.
(WASHINGTON) — The Assad regime in Syria came toppling down in lightning speed after rebel forces led a days-long offensive across the country and captured the capital, Damascus, on Sunday, with President Bashar Assad ultimately fleeing to Russia.
How did it happen so quickly?
Some Syrian analysts, as well as the Biden administration, have pointed to Assad’s chief backers — Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — as having been “weakened and distracted” in recent months. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September said the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was a “historic turning point.”
Other close watchers of Syria have also pointed to another key factor: a tiny white pill with a pair of interlocking half-moons on one side.
The pill is the synthetic stimulant fenethylline or fenetylline, known by the brand name Captagon, that overtook the Middle East as a popular drug. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report last year, “the main departing area for ‘captagon’ shipments” continues to be Syria and Lebanon, and, “[a]ssuming that all amphetamine seizures reported in the subregion are of ‘captagon,’ seizures doubled from 2020, reaching a record high of 86 tons in 2021.”
Caroline Rose, who studies the Captagon trade at the Washington-based think tank New Lines Institute, told ABC News the drug has a “licit” history and is incorrectly perceived as not being dangerous, and therefore doesn’t garner the stigma of party drugs like cocaine or ecstasy. It’s also popular in Muslim countries where alcohol is banned by the Quran, she said.
“It makes you feel invincible,” Rose said. “It staves [off] hunger and helps keep you up late at night, and you have taxi drivers, university students, poor people in bread lines, wealthy people who want to lose weight — you have fighters who are using it because it keeps you up late, it gives you energy and you can survive on one MRE [meals ready to eat] a day.”
The world’s leader in Captagon trade has been Syria, generating an estimated $10 billion for the country — and an estimated $2.4 billion a year directly for the Assad regime, according to a 2023 study conducted by the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks, a nonprofit that conducts research on organized crime and corruption in Syria.
One person who has had a very close eye on the Captagon trade from Syria in recent years is Rep. French Hill, one of dozens of lawmakers who co-sponsored the bipartisan Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, which proposed to place heavy sanctions on Assad and his closest allies. The bill ultimately passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020.
Hill subsequently introduced the Captagon Act in 2021, which he told the publication The New Arab in 2022 was designed to “disrupt and dismantle the Assad regime’s production and trafficking of the lethal narcotic.”
“In my view, the Assad regime turning to narcotics production for its main source of revenue was a sign that the world treating Assad like a pariah was working,” Hill told ABC News. “It is clear after last week’s events that the rot in Assad’s military and finances ran deep.”
According to Rose, the booming Captagon trade was a “zombie economy” born out of the stiff sanctions imposed on Syria by the United States and Europe — and it was also lining the pockets of the Assad regime.
“If there ever was a perfect case for a narco-state, I think it was Syria, because you had the state security and political apparatus defending Captagon production and putting out a public narrative that there wasn’t Captagon but then using the president’s brother, all its security apparatus and the Fourth Armored Division all involved in carrying out the trade,” Rose said.
Meanwhile, Turkey and Saudi Arabia grew frustrated with their efforts to normalize relations with Assad, and their borders were being flooded with the drug, according to a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment.
According to Rose, in recent negotiation efforts for normalization, Assad was trying to use the power he wielded over the trade of Captagon as leverage over them, and it backfired.
“In many of my discussions with high-level officials in Gulf countries, they said the Assad regime used it [the Captagon trade] as a leverage tool for normalizations, and that the regime often explicitly acknowledged their connection to the Captagon trade,” Rose said. “This was a strategy to garner a transactional deal between Gulf states and Damascus, to incentivize them to pay the regime in return for lessened Captagon flows. And that frustrated Gulf states because it really was not the way they wanted to start normalization discussions.”
“They believed that after isolating the regime, sanctions and severed diplomatic relations, the regime should be the actor accepting their demands, not the other way around,” she added.
Matthew Zweig, a sanctions expert at the lobbying arm of the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pointed to another question related to Captagon that may have also ultimately contributed to Assad’s downfall.
“The question is whether Assad could even control the trade,” Zweig told ABC News. “Or did the trade control him? And the same question can be applied to the transitional government. Can they control the trade or will the trade control them? There is a lot of money.”
On Sunday, just hours after the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, captured Damascus and took power, its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani stood up in front of a crowd of supporters inside the capital’s historic Umayyad Mosque and declared: “Syria has become the biggest producer of Captagon on Earth, and today, Syria is going to be purified by the grace of God.”
The future remains uncertain when it comes to the powerful forces of a cartel economy driven by billions of dollars, high demand and a fragile transitional government.
The experts, as well as Hill, conveyed hope to ABC News that Syria would be able to pivot toward a better future with a normalized economy.
Yauhen Yerchak/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(LONDON and BELGRADE) — A team of Lithuanian investigators recovered the black boxes from Monday’s deadly cargo plane crash, as they began their probe into what caused the aircraft to go down and worked to clear the crash site.
Investigators from the U.S. were dispatched to aid in the investigation, officials said. German aviation experts had arrived to help, while Spanish investigators were expected to arrive later Tuesday.
The jet crashed on Monday morning less than a mile from the runway at Vilnius International Airport, officials said. One of the four people onboard was killed in the crash, local officials said.
Lithuanian police and prosecutors have opened a “pre-trial” investigation into the crash, according to Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, whose office held a meeting late Monday on the government response.
The government has ordered an investigation under the country’s criminal code, which calls for probes into “‘Improper maintenance or repair of vehicles or roads, or of equipment thereon,’ which provides for liability in the event of loss of life, serious injury to persons or very serious damage to property,” the prime minister’s office said.
“I urge everyone to have confidence in the investigating authorities’ ability to conduct a thorough and professional investigation within an optimal timeframe,” Šimonytė said in a statement. “Only these investigations will uncover the true causes of the incident—speculation and guesswork will not help establish the truth.”
The investigation will be led by the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Lithuania Transport Accident and Incident Investigation Division, with aid from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the board said on Monday.
The results of that investigation are expected to be made public, the NTSB said.
Lithuanian officials said on Tuesday that they expected the inspection of the crashed plane to be mostly completed within three days, at which point the destroyed plane will be removed from the site. Officials told reporters that they were searching for a hanger where they can begin to place aircraft parts.
The DHL cargo plane — a Boeing 737-476 operated by Swiftair — had flown into Lithuania from Germany. It crashed in a residential area in Liepkalnis, on the outskirts of the capital, Vilnius, the Lithuanian airport authority said in a statement posted on social media on Monday.
One of the pilots, who was from Spain, was pronounced dead at the scene and the other was transferred to a local hospital in critical condition, Bozena Jerenkovic, a medical doctor who was part of the emergency team on site, told ABC News on Monday. It appeared that the cockpit had been separated from the plane’s fuselage, she added.
The Lithuanian National Crisis Management Center confirmed to ABC News that the pilot is in critical condition. The other two people who were injured in the crash are doing OK, the center said.
ABC News has reached out to Bonn, Germany-based DHL for comment.
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti and Melissa Gaffney contributed to this report.
