¹ The Four Great Rivers Project is a major civil engineering project being pursued by the Lee Myung-bak administration with the proclaimed aim of preventing flooding, solving water shortage problems, and improving the quality of drinking water of the four major rivers in South Korea. Despite broad public opposition including expressions of concern from local governments, opposition parties, academia, environmental groups and the four major religious orders that the project would wreak havoc with the nation's natural environment while doing little to actually bring about the promised benefits, the government has pushed forward with unusual speed and showing little regard for procedural regulations. The “Water-Friendly Region Law” gives the Korea Water Resources Corporation extraordinary powers to develop leisure and tourist facilities in the vicinity of the four rivers. The opposition claims that this law is meant to compensate the Corporation for the huge debt incurred by undertaking the Four Rivers Project as the government's proxy, a legally questionable move serving to exempt much of the Project funds from legislative scrutiny. (All notes provided by translator Beckhee Cho)

² Lee Myung-bak's campain slogan and subsequent policy “Denuclearization. Opening. 3000” promises to help North Korea reach a per capita GDP level of US$3,000 within ten years in return for giving up its nuclear program and opening its society to the outside world.

³ The South Korean navy corvette Cheonan split in two and sank on March 26, 2010 near Baeknyeong Island in the West Sea, killing 46 seamen. The Lee Myung-bak administration organized a joint military-civilian investigation group (JIG) to look into the cause of the sinking. The JIG announced in its ‘interim report’ on May 20 that the Cheonan had sunk as a result of a North Korean torpedo attack, a charge that Pyongyang denied. The Lee government took the case to the UN Security Council, calling for a UN resolution condemning North Korea. However, with China and Russia opposing it and independent scientists raising doubts about the JIG findings, the Council only agreed on an ambiguous presidential statement condemning the incident without specifying North Korea as the culprit.

⁴ The term signifies the influence on election results by negative developments in North-South relations. The governing party suffered a serious setback in the wake of the anti-North campaign waged by the government on the issue of the alleged torpedo attack.

⁵ The struggles of summarily discharged workers at Giryung Electronics for reinstatement and of the female train attendants of the high speed trains (Korea Train Express, or KTX) at KORAIL to gain regular employee status have ended in victory for those who had persisted through close to five years of strikes, demonstrations and legal battles.