Kim Jong-pil
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Kim Jong-pil, the founder of South Korea’s spy agency whose political skills helped him also serve twice as prime minister, first under his dictator boss and later under a man his agency kidnapped, has died. He was 92.
Kim was declared dead on arrival at Seoul’s Soonchunhyang University Hospital from his home on Saturday, said hospital official Lee Mi-jong. He described the cause of death as age-related complications.
South Korea’s presidential office released a statement saying Kim’s “fingerprints and footprints that marked South Korea’s modern political history will not be easily erased.”
A retired lieutenant colonel, Kim was a key member of a 1961 coup that put army Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee in power until his 1979 assassination. Park was the father of Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female president, who was ousted from office last year over an explosive corruption scandal and is now serving a 24-year term in prison.
After the senior Park seized power, Kim created and headed the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, a predecessor of the current National Intelligence Service, before serving as his prime minister, the country’s No. 2 post, from 1971 to 1975.
Park Chung-hee used the spy agency as a tool to suppress his political rivals at home, including then-opposition leader Kim Dae-jung, who became South Korea’s president in the late 1990s.
GAINESVILLE — With Gary Ramey’s fledgling gun-making business taking off in retail stores, he decided to start offering one of his handguns for sale on his website.
That didn’t sit well with the company he used to process payments, and they informed him they were dropping his account. Another credit card processing firm told him the same thing: They wouldn’t do business with him.
The reason? His business of making firearms violates their policies.
In the wake of high-profile mass shootings, corporate America has been taking a stand against the firearms industry amid a lack of action by lawmakers on gun control. Payment processing firms are limiting transactions, Bank of America stopped providing financing to companies that make AR-style guns, and retailers like Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods imposed age restrictions on gun purchases.
The moves are lauded by gun-safety advocates but criticized by the gun industry that views them as a backhanded way of undermining the Second Amendment. Gun industry leaders see the backlash as a real threat to their industry and are coming to the conclusion that they need additional protections in Congress to prevent financial retaliation from banks.
“If a few banks say ‘No, we’re not going to give loans to gun dealers or gun manufacturers’, all of a sudden the industry is threatened and the Second Amendment doesn’t mean much if there are no guns around,” said Michael Hammond, legal counsel for Gun Owners of America. “If you can’t make
Honor Defense is a small operation with a handful of employees that include Ramey’s son and his wife who work out of a non-descript building in a Georgia office park north of Atlanta. In 2016, its first year, it sold 7,500 firearms. Its products — handcrafted 9mm handguns that come in a variety of colors — can now be found in more than 1,000 stores.
When Ramey noticed that neither Stripe nor Intuit would process payments through his site, he submitted a complaint with