Lee Jae-myung, South Korea’s opposition leader, survives a stabbing

With a parliamentary election due in April, Lee Jae-myung was quick to start campaigning in the New Year. On the stump in Busan, South Korea’s second-most populous city, on January 2nd, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party (DP), which hopes to enlarge its majority in parliament, criticised the country’s ruling party and promised solutions to his audience’s cost-of-living problems. Then things went off-script. A man in the crowd wearing a blue paper crown lunged at Mr Lee, and stabbed him in the throat with a knife.