North Korea blasts U.S. over release of 'The Interview'

(CNN) -- North Korea issued a statement on its official state news agency on Saturday denouncing Sony Pictures Entertainment's release of the movie "The Interview." It called President Barack Obama the "chief culprit" who forced the production company to "indiscriminately distribute" the picture.

The statement attributed to the National Defense Commission also denounced the United States for blaming North Korea for a hacking attack on the moviemaker earlier this month.

"If the U.S. is to persistently insist that the hacking attack was made by the DPRK, the U.S. should produce evidence without fail, though belatedly," the statement publish by KCNA said.

In the screwball comedy, a tabloid journalist, who is granted an interview with the communist dictatorship's leader, is asked to assassinate him. But when he arrives, a fictional version of dictator Kim Jong Un, played by actor Randall Park, charms him.

In the end, the journalist confronts the fictional Kim over abuses in the country, and kills the leader, when the two do battle.

Sony Pictures IT systems were hacked by a group calling itself "Guardians of Peace" or GoP, which complained about the pending release of the movie. The FBI has blamed North Korea for that cyberattack.

Threats were also issued that there would be 9/11 style attacks on theaters that showed the film.

The movie was not released as scheduled, and Sony Pictures later said film distributors had decided not to show the movie for security reasons.

President Obama expressed disappointment over the move, saying free speech had not been upheld.

Sony then arranged for direct distribution online via its own services, YouTube and through independent cinemas.

Credit: Ben Brumfield - CNN 

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Ukraine votes to drop non-aligned status

President Petro Poroshenko has said Ukraine needs a new guarantee of security

Ukraine's parliament has voted to drop the country's non-aligned status and work towards Nato membership.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the move "counterproductive" and said it would boost tensions.
The BBC's David Stern in Kiev says it is not clear when Ukraine will apply for Nato membership and many officials see it as a distant prospect.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko pledged to seek Nato membership over Russian support for rebels in the east.
Russia, which annexed the Crimean peninsula in March, denies supplying the rebels with weapons. However, it is subject to EU and US sanctions over the crisis.
In a vote in Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday, MPs overwhelmingly backed the move by 303 to eight.
Speaking before the vote, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said Ukraine was determined to pivot towards Europe and the West.
"This will lead to integration in the European and the Euro-Atlantic space," he said.
The non-aligned status, which Ukraine adopted in 2010 under Russian pressure, prevents states from joining military alliances.

 

 Pro-Russian rebels still control large areas of eastern Ukraine

Analysis: Steve Rosenberg, BBC News, Moscow
For the Kremlin, the idea that Ukraine might one day join the European Union is like a bad dream. But the thought of Ukraine joining Nato is a nightmare.
Russia has long complained about Nato "expanding" east, up to Russia's borders. The Kremlin would view Ukraine's membership of the alliance as a direct threat to its national security.
That's unlikely to happen any time soon, especially with the conflict continuing in eastern Ukraine.
But Moscow has been quick to denounce the Ukrainian parliament for renouncing the country's non-aligned status.
Today's vote in the Rada, Ukraine's parliament, certainly drives another wedge between Kiev and Moscow. And it may complicate efforts to resolve the current crisis.
But critics of the Kremlin argue that it is Russia's direct involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine which is pushing Kiev closer to Nato.

Addressing foreign ambassadors on Monday night, President Poroshenko said Ukraine's "fight for its independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty has turned into a decisive factor in our relations with the world".
Russia has made clear that it opposes Ukraine's move towards Nato.
Andrei Kelin, Russia's envoy to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), said on Tuesday: "It's an unfriendly step towards us. This political vector will only add to nuisances and acuteness in ties."
Fragile ceasefire In a Facebook post on Monday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that Ukraine's rejection of neutrality would have "negative consequences".
"In essence, an application for Nato membership will turn Ukraine into a potential military opponent for Russia," he wrote.
A Nato spokesman in Brussels said on Tuesday that any accession to the alliance would probably take years, Reuters reported.
Some Nato members are also lukewarm towards accepting Ukraine, says the BBC's David Stern in Kiev.

 

Thousands have been killed and about one million have been displaced by fighting in Ukraine

The roots of the current conflict go back to Ukraine's pro-EU street protests at the end of last year that led to the fall of Russian-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych in February.
After Crimea was annexed, pro-Russian separatists seized parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine and later declared independence.
Since then, nearly 5,000 people have died and another million have been displaced by fighting.
A ceasefire was signed by both sides in Minsk in September but observers says some fighting is continuing.

 

Credit : David Stern - BBC 

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Why did North Korea's internet go down?

If you've been following the Sony, North Korea and the US government saga then you should know what this is about. But let me give a brief summary because I'm about to board a flight.

Sony Pictures released a movie called The Interview, a comedy about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un.. North Korean didn't find it funny and hacked into Sony's computers, rendering thousands of computers inoperable and forced Sony to take its entire computer network offline. That wasn't enough, they then threatened terror attack on US citizens if Sony doesn't cancel showing the movie, forcing Sony to pull the interview from theaters and losing almost $200m. Then the US govt got involved and told Sony to go ahead and release the movie, that they don't take lightly to threats and promised to retaliate for the attack on Sony. It looks like they've kept their to promise. North Korea is currently offline. Lol

"Internet connectivity between North Korea and the outside world is currently suffering one of its worst outages in recent memory, suggesting that the country may be enduring a mass cyber attack a few days after President Obama warned the US would launch a "proportional response" to North Korea's hack against Sony

North Korea, which has four official networks connecting the country to the Internet -- all of which route through China -- began experiencing intermittent problems yesterday and today went completely black, according to Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research in Hanover, New Hampshire." Bloomberg reports.

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