Air Busan plane catches fire at South Korean airport, all 176 evacuated safely

The unprecedented charges mean the South Korean president faces decades in prison if convicted.

A South Korean president has no immunity in insurrection charges, which is punishable by life imprisonment or death.

South Korean investigators call to formally charge President Yoon

The crash of the Jeju Air flight killed 179 people, making it the deadliest air accident on Korean soil.

Donald Trump never misses a good brand opportunity. You can buy collectible Trump trading cards, limited-edition autographed Trump guitars, $499 “Trump Won” low-top sneakers, and Trump-endorsed Bibles. Long before he got into politics, Trump peddled liquor (Trump Vodka), education (Trump University), and meat (Trump Steaks). But Trump’s latest enterprise—a new cryptocurrency token named $TRUMP—might be his most brazen yet.

After his team launched the token on Friday evening, the price per coin shot from $6 to more than $70 within about a day. Because two of Trump’s affiliate companies own 80 percent of the total supply of the coin, Trump essentially manifested more than $10 billion in a single weekend. At one point this weekend, Axios estimated that $TRUMP momentarily accounted for about 89 percent of Trump’s net worth, making him one of the richest people in the world. And last night, Melania Trump announced her own coin, $MELANIA.

Throughout Trump’s long history of cashing in on his personal brand, there has never been such a dramatic injection of artificial value. Both $TRUMP and $MELANIA are so-called memecoins. There are no business fundamentals under the hood, no practical use cases to speak of. Memecoins are typically spun up in a matter of minutes, whisked to massively overinflated valuations on social media, and promptly dumped on the suckers who bought in a few moments too late. It’s an incredibly efficient, incredibly predictable, and incredibly predatory playbook.

The arc of a memecoin’s market cycle almost always bends toward zero: A coin inspired by the “Hawk Tuah” girl was worth $500 million just after it launched late last year and swiftly lost 99 percent of its value. Other silly tokens, such as the inauspiciously named $BODEN (an unofficial, unsanctioned riff on President Joe Biden’s lame-duck era) have experienced similar collapses. It’s the same story in each case: Insiders and early adopters turn a quick profit at the expense of latecomers. And although it’s definitely possible that Trump’s position of global influence gives $TRUMP more staying power than the typical memecoin, it’s arguably even more volatile than cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, that are not exactly stable in their own right. The value of $TRUMP has already dipped by more than half and is now worth less than $8 billion.

In a sense, the $TRUMP token represents a natural move for the president. He has made an enormous effort to position himself as a powerful ally of the crypto industry: Trump has said he plans to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and promoted another crypto business with his three sons just weeks before the election. Trump announced the coin on Truth Social on Friday night at the same time as the pre-inauguration “Crypto Ball,” a ritzy celebration emceed by David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur and podcast host whom Trump has tapped as his crypto czar. It was meant as a kind of debutante ceremony: After four years of what the industry has interpreted as targeted sanctions and harassment from SEC Chair Gary Gensler and other steely regulators, crypto is finally free to become the fullest version of itself.

Whether memecoins are even legal is a matter of dispute. Biden’s SEC regularly went after crypto companies for issuing coins that appeared to violate existing securities laws. But Trump himself is picking the next SEC chair. There’s also the question of what Trump’s new tens of billions of dollars on paper end up amounting to in the real world, because most of the total token supply hasn’t actually been issued, and because any attempt to start cashing out would no doubt tank the price. Still, even after Trump has promised a new golden age for crypto during his second administration, his new hypothetical billions practically cement his interest in a more hands-off approach to the industry. Keep in mind: Trump called bitcoin a “scam” just a few years ago, when crypto didn’t seem to suit his interests. Trump is far less likely to level those kinds of judgments in the future.

Another potential issue is that because memecoins are so lightly regulated, anyone can buy them, whether they are 12-year-olds with a parent’s credit card or North Korean hackers looking for leverage over the global economy. Some of the available supply of Trump’s official cryptocurrency might already be controlled by foreign interests. There’s also the chance that Trump’s memecoin gambit could inspire other world political and cultural leaders to release similar coins. (Lorenzo Sewell, the pastor who administered today’s inaugural prayer, has already announced a $LORENZO coin.) If foreign actors get their hands on Trump’s supposedly America-first economic initiatives, the administration’s promise to turn the country into a “bitcoin superpower” starts to feel a little hollower.

Although much of the crypto world has been eagerly awaiting Trump’s return to the White House, a new sense of unease has settled over some of the industry’s biggest defenders, who recognize that memecoins don’t exactly reflect well on crypto. Memecoins are “zero-sum,” the investor Balaji Srinivasan, typically aligned with Trump, reminded his followers on X over the weekend. “There is no wealth creation … And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.” Nic Carter, a prominent crypto investor and Trump supporter, reasons that the unease is indicative of a broader panic, a slow-growing sense that Trump can’t be controlled in the way the industry might want. $TRUMP “exposed the worst parts of the crypto industry to the public eye in a way that really didn’t need to happen, right when we were on the cusp of legitimacy,” he told me today.

A Trump Steak might not be the juiciest cut you’ve ever eaten, but at least it’s a piece of real meat—something you can see and touch. $TRUMP enthusiasts won’t even get that much.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In today’s reading list, Atlantic journalists offer an intricate examination of those who swindle or hurt others, and those who must live with the fallout. The stories below follow a con man turned true-crime writer, a prison break facilitated by a dog crate, the spectacle of murder fandoms, and more.

The Con Man Who Became a True-Crime Writer

In his old life, Matthew Cox told stories to scam his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s trying to sell tales that are true.

By Rachel Monroe

The True Story of the Married Woman Who Smuggled Her Boyfriend Out of Prison in a Dog Crate

She wanted to escape her marriage. He wanted to escape his life sentence.

By Michael J. Mooney

They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.

The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history

By Ariel Sabar

The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t

For years, he used fake identities to charm women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then his victims banded together to take him down.

By Rachel Monroe

The Gross Spectacle of Murder Fandom

After four University of Idaho students were killed, TikTok and Reddit sleuths swarmed the campus. The community is still struggling with the wreckage they left behind.

By McKay Coppins

The Mobster Who Bought His Son a Hockey Team

A tale of goons, no-show jobs, and a legendary minor-league franchise that helped land its owner in prison

By Rich Cohen

The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side

Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit

By Ariel Sabar

The Rise and Fall of an All-Star Crew of Jewel Thieves

They were highly sophisticated. The local police seemed helpless. Then a retired septuagenarian detective stepped in.

By Geoff Manaugh

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Night Agent, an action series about an FBI agent who is drawn into the mysterious world of the Night Action organization (streaming on Netflix on Thursday) We Do Not Part, a book by Han Kang that follows the friendship between two Korean women and the massacre on Jeju Island (out Tuesday) Presence, a horror film told from the perspective of a spirit bound to a family’s suburban home (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

America Just Kinda, Sorta Banned Cigarettes

By Nicholas Florko

No drug is quite like nicotine. When it hits your bloodstream, you’re sent on a ride of double euphoria: an immediate jolt of adrenaline, like a strong cup of coffee injected directly into your brain, along with the calming effect of a beer. Nicotine is what gets people hooked on cigarettes, despite their health risks and putrid smell. It is, in essence, what cigarette companies are selling, and what they’ve always been selling. Without nicotine, a cigarette is just smoldering leaves wrapped in some fancy paper.

But if the Biden administration gets its way, that’s essentially all cigarettes will be.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The hipster grifter peaked too soon. A singing chimp isn’t the wildest part of Better Man. Where Han Kang’s nightmares come from A Palestinian story unlike any other A Holocaust novel confronts fiction’s limits.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

How Trump made Biden’s Gaza peace plan happen David Frum on Justin Trudeau’s performative self-regard The one Trump pick Democrats actually like

Photo Album

A young child runs across a rectangle of light in a dreamlike image. (Mitja Kobal / Kolari Vision)

Take a look at the top images in this year’s “Life in Another Light” biannual infrared-photography competition.

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Investigators have been granted 20 days to bring Yoon to trial over his short-lived martial law decree.

When Donald Trump completes his once-unthinkable return to the White House, he’ll face a world far more violent and unsettled than when he unwillingly gave up power four years ago.

And his very presence behind the Resolute desk feels destined to destabilize it further.

Trump has offered mysterious plans to bring quick ends to the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East. He has antagonized allies and mused about a return to an age of American imperialism, when the United States could simply seize the territory it wanted. He and his advisers have threatened trade wars and allied themselves with movements that have eroded democracies and supported rising authoritarians.

And Trump is again poised to push an “America First” foreign policy—inward-looking and transactional—at a moment when a lack of superpower leadership could embolden China to move on Taiwan or lead to renewed conflict in the Middle East, just as the region seems on the doorstep of its biggest transformation in generations.

“Trump is less of a surprise this time but will be a test. The international system has baked in that Trump is not an instinctive supporter of alliances, that he will be inconsistent,” James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, told me. “Allies and adversaries alike are going to know that nothing is free; everything is a negotiation.”

[Read: How ‘America first’ became America alone]

Trump, Biden officials ruefully note in private, will inherit a strong hand. He will take the helm of a healthy economy and will become the first U.S. president in decades to assume office without a large-scale military deployment in an overseas war zone. And the grueling conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza—which Trump has demanded end immediately—both appear to be at inflection points, with war-weary sides showing a willingness to talk.

The president-elect has said there will be “hell to pay in the Middle East” if Hamas hasn’t released the hostages seized on October 7, 2023, by the time he is inaugurated. After months of negotiations by President Joe Biden’s team, a breakthrough appears at hand to pause fighting and release some hostages.

The moment has come during the incumbent’s final days in office, yet Trump has been quick to take credit—the deal was made with input from his Middle East envoy—even as a permanent resolution to the conflict remains uncertain. And his intervention does seem to have played a key role in achieving a breakthrough. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared eager to start Trump’s second term on the incoming president-elect’s good side while Hamas may have been spooked by his bombast. But as the cease-fire slowly unfurls in the weeks ahead, Trump’s tempestuousness could just as easily endanger the fragile deal.

During his reelection campaign, Trump repeatedly proclaimed that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine “within 24 hours,” a claim he has since softened. Indeed, nowhere will his swearing-in be more nervously watched than in Kyiv. Trump, of course, has long derided NATO, the alliance that has propped up Ukraine. Moscow has made some halting advances, despite a last-ditch surge of aid to Ukraine from the Biden administration. And the president-elect’s desire for a quick, negotiated end to the conflict seems likely to ratify some of Russia’s territorial gains.

Trump’s White House and the MAGA-ified House of Representatives have shown no appetite to send substantial aid or military equipment to the front, and although Europe will gamely try to pick up the slack, Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself will suffer without American support. Russia’s advantage in manpower—bolstered by the North Korean troops it is using as cannon fodder—will only expand, and Russian President Vladimir Putin may grow more confident that he can simply win a war of attrition.

[Read: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

One senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the incoming administration, identified Trump’s long-standing deference to Putin as a grave concern, particularly if Russia’s aggression sets off NATO’s mutual-defense pact. “If Trump gives in to Putin an inch, he’ll take a mile,” the official told me. “If he turns his back completely and encourages him to move beyond Ukraine, think how much more costly it will be if Article 5 gets triggered. Then we have American skin in the game.”

Divisions are already emerging in Trump’s orbit as to the best approach to Ukraine and beyond. Steve Bannon, the right-wing provocateur and first-term Trump aide, has argued against globalism. Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has become Trump’s most influential informal adviser, has used his fortune and social-media reach to prop up right-wingers in the U.K. and Germany who are eager to walk away from Kyiv. That echoes the approach of the incoming vice president, J. D. Vance.

But not all of Trump’s team is in lockstep. The secretary-of-state nominee, Marco Rubio, has been a NATO defender, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has argued forcefully in favor of tougher sanctions on Moscow’s energy sector to strangle Putin’s government economically.

Those divisions feel familiar. Trump’s first-term diplomatic and national-security teams—initially stocked with Republican stalwarts whose views were far closer to GOP orthodoxy than those embraced by MAGA—often found themselves feuding among themselves. Both camps were frequently frustrated by a president who had few consistent desires other than a need for flattery.

The result was a haphazard foreign policy. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un started out on the receiving end of “fire and fury,” only to later receive what Trump called “beautiful letters.” China went from foe to friend and then back again. And even as his administration levied tough sanctions against Russia, Trump continually cozied up to Putin, siding with the dictator over his own U.S. intelligence agencies in Helsinki.

[Read: No more Mr. Tough Guy on China]

That unpredictability, although it brought chaos before, could work to Trump’s advantage on the world stage this time around, his new crop of advisers believes. Would any foreign adversary dare test Trump if they can’t anticipate his response? Trump himself leaned into the idea in October, when he told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent Beijing from blockading Taiwan, because Chinese President Xi Jinping “respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

It’s far less calculated than Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory of the case—far more born of Trump’s own whims and ego—but the end result, his advisers argue, could be the same.

And that, to put it mildly, was on full display during the transition.

Maps showing the familiar view of the Western Hemisphere, but with the U.S. borders cartoonishly expanded, have become popular right-wing memes. Suddenly, Greenland is part of the United States. Upon closer examination, so is the Panama Canal. And Canada—our friendly, polite neighbor to the north—is now the 51st state.

There are debates even in Trump World as to how serious any of these efforts at territorial expansion might be, and all agree that a healthy dose of trolling was involved in Trump dispatching Donald Trump Jr. to Greenland or calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor.” But foreign capitals have long learned to take the elder Trump both literally and seriously.

Trump’s desire for Greenland—based on its strategic location and abundant resources—has rattled not only Denmark, which governs the island, but also other NATO members, which are aghast at the incoming American president’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the island. Similarly, Trump’s threats toward Panama and his bullying of Canada—including warnings of sweeping tariffs—have again sent a clear message to the world: Under its 47th president, the United States cannot be counted on to enforce the rules-based order that has defined the postwar era.

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

A Trump-transition spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the Middle East, Israel’s response to October 7 created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza but also decimated the Iranian proxies that have served as buffers for Tehran for decades, leaving the regime newly vulnerable.

“Iran is now at the weakest point since 1979,” Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said on Monday. “There is a cease-fire in Lebanon and the possibility of a new political future with a new president. Russia and Iran’s lackey in Syria, [Bashar al-Assad], is gone.”

In his first term, Trump withdrew the United States from a nuclear deal with Iran, implemented a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and brokered the Abraham Accords, which further isolated Tehran. He authorized the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the general who directed Iran’s militias and proxy forces around the Middle East. He’s now filled his Cabinet with Iran hawks, including Waltz—which could put him at odds with Gulf allies who seem more inclined to try for a détente with Tehran.

The only certainty is more uncertainty. And the president-elect was quick to embrace the chaos when asked by a reporter at a news conference last month about his plans for Iran.

“How could I tell you a thing like that now? It’s just … you don’t talk about that before something may or may not happen,” Trump said. “I don’t want to insult you. I just think it’s just not something that I would ever answer having to do with there or any other place in the world.”

In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online, confessing that it probably should have done a cursory search before hiring someone with “less-than-desirable traits, like, say, five outstanding warrants for fraud.” Oopsie! Read it now and you might find the post unrepentantly confessional in a prescient kind of way, anticipating a future in which any sin or failure can be transfigurated as long as it makes for good-enough content.

Which is to say: The fact that only now is Ferrell profiting from her own story illustrates how innocent—easily shocked, even—we once were, and what brazen shamelessness we’ve since come to accept as normal. In 2009, Ferrell’s unfortunate tendency toward pathological lying and light theft made her the internet’s main character for weeks on end. She was fodder for countless Gawker updates and a detailed profile in The Observer titled “The Hipster Grifter” before she ended up serving time in jail and changing her name to evade her past. Conversely, consider Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame, sentenced to prison in 2018 for defrauding investors of more than $26 million, who, during the 2024 presidential campaign, served as a conduit between rappers and Donald Trump. Or Anna Delvey, convicted in 2019 for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars while posing as an art-world heiress, who, since her jail stint, has gained more than 1 million Instagram followers and drew attention for a recent appearance on Dancing With the Stars in which her court-mandated ankle bracelet featured prominently.

[Read: The scams are winning]

You can understand why Ferrell might think it’s well past time for a comeback. Her new memoir, You’ll Never Believe Me, is subtitled A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist, as if to sublimate the unreliability of its narrator into an honest and unfiltered account. And, for the most part, it works. Ferrell is, as she herself confesses, a gifted communicator and manipulator of words, charming and garrulous and breezily intimate. Her story is compelling by any standard. She tells us she still doesn’t know exactly why she did what she did: tricking her closest friends into cashing bad checks, leaving one on the hook for thousands in bail fees; lying about having terminal cancer; seducing easy marks by writing them notes in which she invited them to “throw a hot dog down my hall.” (Her Instagram handle is still “hotdoghandjobs.”) But she is at least willing to consider the question—which these days is perhaps as much as we can ask for.

New York, in the spring of 2009, was still reeling from the financial crisis, which had revealed profiteering and scammery to be essential American traditions. The implosion of the global economy had fostered a kind of hedonistic nihilism among many recent graduates, which Ferrell worked to her (minimal, it turned out) advantage. But there also just wasn’t that much happening online yet—it was the era after Myspace had normalized online connection and before Instagram had turned creative self-branding into a viable career—which helps explain why the exposure of a very small-time Brooklyn grifter with a prominent chest tattoo fascinated people so much. After The Observer’s Doree Shafrir ran a lengthy feature on Ferrell, uncovering her history of conning her friends and lovers, she became an obsession at Gawker, Gothamist, and other New York–area publications. She was an origin story for an enduring generational cliché: the feckless, inked-up Millennial indulging in petty larceny and shameless self-mythologizing for avocado toast and a Viceland email address. (Remember Hannah Horvath on Girls, quietly filching the cash her parents had left for their hotel maid?)

Ferrell resists this kind of lazy stereotyping. She is, and has only ever been, she insists, entirely her own person. The early chapters of her memoir act as a kind of ABCs of scamming, trying to lightly analyze how she might have been led astray. Adopted from South Korea as a baby, she was raised lovingly by parents who did their best, recalling a home where household goods were often purchased on layaway. When Ferrell was 2, her parents became Mormon converts, packing their family up and moving to Salt Lake City. Ferrell credits Sunday services for providing her with what she describes as “a MasterClass in manipulation,” and a doctor who put her on a diet as a child for unintentionally teaching her to lie (to her parents, about what she’d eaten that day). She writes that, as a teenager, she shoplifted with enthusiasm from big-box stores, as did her friends, but also had a gun drawn on her once for stealing a Sidekick from an acquaintance’s little sister.

With regard to her first con, which she orchestrated in Utah when she was 18, Ferrell writes, “It all sort of happened.” The mark was Charlie, her “brilliant, emotionally mature … caring, and trusting” boyfriend at the time; the scam was to get him to cash a check from her at his bank and pass her the funds (which she didn’t have in her account). That was it. After scoring her first $500 from Charlie, Ferrell repeated the scheme with other friends and acquaintances, sometimes ripping off new people to pay back the old ones when the checks bounced. “I didn’t steal money for drugs,” she writes. “I stole money in hopes that people wouldn’t forget me.” I’m not a therapist, but it’s hard not to psychoanalyze Ferrell’s behavior: the need to feel loved and tended to, coupled with the compulsion to lie and steal, forcing the people closest to her to reject her in ways that would ultimately affirm her worldview. When she was arrested for check fraud, identity fraud, and forgery, she marveled at how flattering her mug shot was and wondered whether she could buy it as a high-res print. She then persuaded another friend to pay her bail, before skipping town when a group of her victims banged on her door demanding their money back.

[Read: Millennial burnout is being televised]

Ferrell fled Utah for New York, where she had dreams of working at Vice or some other idealized cult brand. At first, she wanted to turn over a new leaf. But, she writes somewhat unconvincingly, she “grappled with how to be good in a world that punishes kind people. Mr. Rogers always said to ‘look for the helpers’ in times of turmoil, but whenever I found them they’d be getting kicked in the face by a richer, more ambitious person in power.” Still, she insists, “I didn’t want to blame the world for the way I was.” She’d often laser in on men at parties and concerts, send them sexually aggressive notes, and then pinch whatever she could from them. She’d reportedly love-bomb friends with offers of VIP passes; if they proved resistant, she’d occasionally tell them she had terminal cancer or a psychotic ex-boyfriend who was threatening her, or that she was pregnant. (Not all of this is in the book—I’m relying on other sources.) “I could have gone anywhere to find my marks, but I liked to shit where I ate,” Ferrell writes. This was ultimately her downfall—when her mug shot first appeared online, it wasn’t hard for gossip bloggers to find people who knew her. Some even had Ferrell stories of their own.

A strong personal brand is helpful for a Millennial internet personality; it’s less so for a con artist. You might wonder why people got so caught up with what Ferrell was alleged to have done at the time, given the $1.3 trillion value of subprime loans in 2007, or the $18 billion lost in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme before his arrest in 2008. But the reality is that money lost to institutions can feel depressingly clinical. The betrayal of being robbed by a friend, or a lover, or a hipster with a pixie cut who likes all the same music you do and signs her notes “Korean Abdul-Jabbar,” is different—more intimate, and much harder to anticipate. Combine this dynamic with revelations about Ferrell trying to scam for things as trivial as Flight of the Conchords DVDs and cab fare, and you have all the absurd, small-scale ingredients for a bona fide internet spectacle.

The title of Ferrell’s memoir is, if you recall, You’ll Never Believe Me, and we probably shouldn’t—there’s enough that she seems to omit, or gloss over, that her account is best taken as an interpretation of events rather than as historical record. But she’s commendable for the ways in which she does try to confess, reflect, self-analyze, adjudicate. Her inability to check her worst impulses seems to have caused her considerable pain, to the point that when she was finally arrested, she writes, she was smiling in the photos—“an expression of pure relief.” Of all the infamous, shameless scammers who emerged after her, none has tried as she has to wrestle with the need to cheat others and the psychology behind the art of the steal. For that, consider You’ll Never Believe Me a job worth waiting for.