North Korea has been suffering severe internet outages, with one analyst saying the country's access to the web was entirely cut.
The disruption comes days after the US accused North Korea of being behind a cyber-attack on Sony Pictures.
US President Barack Obama had promised a "proportional" response, though officials would not comment on any US involvement in the current outages.
Analysts said technical problems or a cyber-attack could be to blame.
"For the past 24 hours North Korea's connectivity to the outside world has been progressively getting degraded to the point now that they are totally offline," said Doug Madory of internet analysis company Dyn Research.
Arbor Networks, an internet technology service, said it had detected denial-of-service attacks against North Korea's infrastructure beginning on Saturday.
Only a small proportion of people have access to the internet in North Korea, one of the world's most secretive countries.
Film pulled
Last week, the US government said an FBI investigation had shown that North Korea was behind a hacking attack on Sony, which led to unreleased films and private emails being leaked online. North Korea denied being responsible.
But North Korea also praised the attack on Sony, and had for months condemned a Sony comedy, The Interview, which depicts the assassination of the North Korean leader. Sony eventually cancelled the cinema release of the film.
Mr Obama had said that the US would respond to the attack on Sony "in a place and time and manner that we choose".
On Monday, state department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the US would not discuss publicly "operational details about the possible response options, or comment on those kind of reports in any way, except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen''.
The internet disruption came as the UN Security Council discussed North Korea's human rights for the first time, despite opposition from China and Russia.
US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power dismissed North Korea's demand to launch a joint investigation with the US into the attack on Sony, and threats to retaliate if the US refused.
"It is exactly the kind of behaviour we have come to expect from a regime that threatened to take 'merciless countermeasures' against the US over a Hollywood comedy, and has no qualms about holding tens of thousands of people in harrowing gulags," she said.
North Korean diplomat Kim Song said a decision on how to respond to the Security Council's move would be made in Pyongyang. "We totally reject the decision to bring DPRK [North Korea's] human rights record to the UN Security Council," he told Reuters.
By E.J. Dionne Jr.WASHINGTON—Have we gone stark raving mad?
The question is brought to mind by the new gun law signed last week in Georgia by Gov. Nathan Deal. You might have thought that since the United States couldn’t possibly have more permissive firearms laws than it does now, nothing more could be done to coddle the gun lobby and tip the balance of our statutes away from law enforcement. Alas, you would be wrong.
The creativity of the National Rifle Association and other organizations devoted to establishing conditions in which every man, woman and child in our nation will have to be armed is awe inspiring. Where imagination is concerned, the best absurdist artists and writers have nothing on the NRA. No wonder Stephen Colbert has decided to move on from the realm of satire. When parody becomes reality, the challenges facing even a comedian of his talents can become insurmountable.
You might not have thought that the inability of people to pack while praying was a big problem. Georgia’s political leaders think otherwise, so the new law allows people to carry guns in their houses of worship. True, congregations can set their own rules, but some pastors wonder about the confusion this provision will create, and those who would keep their sanctuaries gun-free may worry about being branded as liberal elitists. Maybe the Georgia Legislature will help them by requiring a rewrite of the Scriptures. “Blessed are the peacemakers” can become “Blessed are the gun owners.”
You will also be able to tote weapons into bars and their parking facilities if the bar grants you permission. I can’t wait to see the next beer ad depicting a gunfight over who pays for the next round.
Georgia thinks you should be able to take guns into government buildings that don’t have screening devices or security guards. Second Amendment enthusiasts tend not to like tax increases, but as The Associated Press reported, the city of Vienna, Ga., (pop. 3,841) would have to shell out about $60,000 a year to increase security at city buildings. “Do we raise taxes to provide the police protection or do we take the risk of potential injury to our public?” asked Mayor Pro Tem Beth English, who also is president of the Georgia Municipal Association. Too bad if this gun lobby subsidy comes out of the school budget.
Oh yes, and while conservatives claim to hate the centralization of power, this law wipes out a series of local gun regulations. The gun supremacists just don’t trust those pesky local elected officials.
People with a gun license who try to carry a weapon onto an airplane get a nice break under this bill. If they’re caught with a gun at a security checkpoint, nothing happens as long as they leave the area. Try, try again. Watch out if you connect through Atlanta.
And law and order goes out the window. As Niraj Chokshi noted in The Washington Post, this statute gets rid of state requirements that firearms dealers maintain records of sales and purchases. Databases on license holders that span multiple jurisdictions are banned. Those who commit gun crimes must be chuckling, “Can you find me now?”
Nothing better reveals the utter irrationality of our politics for the whole world to see than this madness about guns—and no issue better demonstrates how deeply divided our nation is by region, ideology and party.
The New York Times found that in the 12 months after the Sandy Hook shootings, 39 laws were enacted tightening gun restrictions; 25 were passed by state governments under full Democratic control. Seventy laws were passed loosening gun restrictions, 49 of them in Republican-controlled states. According to The Wall Street Journal, 21 states strengthened firearms restrictions in 2013, and 20 weakened them.
Nowhere else in the world do the laws on firearms become the playthings of politicians and lobbyists intent on manufacturing cultural conflict. Nowhere else do elected officials turn the matter of taking a gun to church into a searing ideological question. But then, guns are not a religion in most countries.
The program for the NRA’s annual convention, held over the weekend in Indianapolis, listed sessions on “Survival Mindset: Are You Prepared?”; “Creating a Constitutionally Centered Estate Plan”; and “Refuse to be a Victim.”
Party on, guys. I can’t wait for you to figure out the ways in which even Georgia’s law is too liberal. In the meantime, the nation’s unarmed majority might ponder how badly we have failed in asserting our own rights.
THE HAGUE — The United States and its closest allies on Monday cast Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized democracies, their most exclusive club, to punish President Vladimir V. Putin for his lightning annexation of Crimea, while threatening tougher sanctions if he escalates aggression against Ukraine.
President Obama and the leaders of Canada, Japan and Europe’s four strongest economies gathered for the first time since the Ukraine crisis erupted last month, using a closed two-hour meeting on the sidelines of a summit meeting about nuclear security to project a united front against Moscow.
But they stopped short, at least for now, of imposing sanctions against what a senior Obama administration official called vital sectors of the Russian economy: energy, banking and finance, engineering and the arms industry. Only further aggression by Mr. Putin — like rolling his forces into the Ukrainian mainland — would prompt that much-harsher punishment, the countries indicated in their joint statement, called the Hague Declaration.
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President Obama spoke Monday at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in front of the Rembrandt painting “The Night Watch.”CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
“The biggest hammer that can drop is sectoral sanctions, and the clearest trigger for those is eastern and southern Ukraine,” the senior administration official said.
Some critics of the administration said the suspension of Russia from the G-8, which administration officials acknowledged was largely symbolic, showed a lack of resolve among the allies to take tougher steps to undo Mr. Putin’s annexation of Ukraine.
But it signified a firming of Western resolve compared with the early days of the Crimea crisis, when Germany and some other allies said it was premature to consider excluding Russia from the club of industrial democracies. Having Russia as part of that group since 1998 was meant to signal cooperation between East and West, and its exclusion inevitably raises new echoes of Cold War-style rivalry.
Announcing that they would boycott a Group of 8 meeting planned for Sochi — Mr. Putin’s Black Sea showcase for the recent Winter Olympics — the seven countries who met here said they would instead gather by themselves in June in Brussels, headquarters of NATO and the European Union.
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President Obama and six other leaders on Monday joined European Union officials, in foreground, at the nuclear security summit in The Hague.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
“We will suspend our participation in the G-8 until Russia changes course,” the seven countries declared in what constituted a subtle appeal to Russian leaders outside Mr. Putin’s circle to press for a switch in direction.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia eagerly sought to join the tight circle of the world’s top economies, eventually gaining entry in 1998. For all that Mr. Putin shrugged off the threat of canceling the Sochi summit this month — a shoulder shrug imitated here by his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Monday — it is a blow to the Kremlin’s search for prestige.
Mr. Putin took membership in the group so seriously that he went all out when it came time for Russia to host the annual meeting for the first time. He rebuilt a broken-down czarist-era palace outside his hometown, St. Petersburg, in part with the summit in mind, adding a series of new mansions to the grounds for each leader to stay in. The Kremlin hired a Western public relations agency to promote its status as host.
“Obviously, it’s mostly symbolic, but symbols do matter,” said Michael A. McFaul, the just-departed American ambassador to Moscow. “The G-8 was something they wanted to be part of. This for them was a symbol of being part of the big-boy club, the great power club — and the club of democracies, I might add.”
The Obama administration voiced satisfaction that the West was united in punishing Russia, both now and in future, if it does not reverse course. “There really wasn’t much disagreement” at the meeting either about Russia or the need to swiftly aid Ukraine, the senior administration official said.
Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who with her foreign minister has had the most contact with Mr. Putin and other Russian officials during this crisis, has been among the most forthright in rejecting Mr. Putin’s actions, despite the potential costs to Germany’s economy.
German businesses sold almost 40 billion euros of goods to Russia last year, and bought Russian imports of the same value, almost exclusively oil and natural gas supplies that meet about one-third of Germany’s energy needs.
But Ms. Merkel has strengthened Germany’s response over the past two weeks after she perceived Mr. Putin as violating promises by annexing Crimea and opting for old-fashioned nationalism and the use of military force over the talk of cooperation and respect for borders that have governed East-West relations in recent decades.
The support of Germany, the largest economy in Europe and a longtime bellwether on Russian relations, is viewed as crucial to enforcing tougher sanctions if they become necessary down the road. The administration official said that any such sanctions would have “consequences for the global economy and individual countries.”
“The cost is far greater for the Russians, who stand much more to lose,” the official added.
Russia argues that Crimea has effectively been Russian territory since the 18th century and was put under Ukrainian sovereignty only by the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1954 as a gesture of good will inside the Soviet Union. It says its military intervention was meant to protect Russian speakers from Ukrainian nationalists who helped topple the previous, more pro-Russian government.
But Western leaders have condemned the military incursion as a violation of both international law and specific Russian agreements with Ukraine and the outside world, and disputed Russian claims that ethnic Russians faced threats to their safety.
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Russian troops firing into the air and backed by armored vehicles stormed a Ukrainian airbase in Crimea on Saturday.CreditDmitry Serebryakov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The leaders met on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit arranged in advance of the Ukraine crisis. Ms. Merkel, speaking to German reporters, noted that the two issues were deeply linked. Ukraine, she recalled, renounced its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in 1994 by concluding the Budapest Memorandum, an agreement with the United States, Britain and Russia to guarantee the integrity of Ukraine.
That accord “has been flagrantly violated,” she noted.
Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, stressed in a speech to the full summit meeting that he worried some current or future nuclear powers could view the weapons as crucial to protect themselves against invasion, undermining hopes of reducing their spread.
“Nuclear weapons should be seen as a liability and not an asset,” he said.
Also on the sidelines of the nuclear summit meeting, Mr. Lavrov held talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andriy Deshchytsia, for the first time since Russia’s move into Crimea. The two defense ministers spoke by telephone last week, but the meeting — about which little was revealed — was the first such face-to-face encounter between members of the current governments in Moscow and Kiev.
There was no mention in the Monday declaration of how much assistance the West will now give Ukraine, either in cash or in bolstering a relatively weak acting government until elections scheduled for May 25.
Ukraine has said it needs €1 billion in immediate assistance, and the European Union is readying a further €11 billion, or about $15 billion, for this year, mostly through lending by European institutions. The declaration emphasized instead the “central role” of the International Monetary Fund in “lessening Ukraine’s economic vulnerabilities, and better integrating the country as a market economy in the multilateral system.”
“We remain united in our commitment to provide strong financial backing to Ukraine,” The Hague Declaration said, specifying that it would bolster trade and strengthen security in the key field of energy.
European powers that depend heavily on Russia for natural gas also indicated that they would pursue a strategy to reduce dependence on Russian energy by June, though any effort to shift suppliers is likely to take many months or years.
Claretha Briscoe, left, of Hollandale, Miss., with family. She earns too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to get subsidies on the new health exchange.
A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.
Gladys Arbila of Houston with her son, Christian Vera. Texas chose not to expand the Medicaid program, so Ms. Arbila does not qualify for it or for new federal insurance subsidies.
Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.
Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.
People shopping for insurance on the health exchanges are already discovering this bitter twist.
“How can somebody in poverty not be eligible for subsidies?” an unemployed health care worker in Virginia asked through tears. The woman, who identified herself only as Robin L. because she does not want potential employers to know she is down on her luck, thought she had run into a computer problem when she went online Tuesday and learned she would not qualify.
At 55, she has high blood pressure, and she had been waiting for the law to take effect so she could get coverage. Before she lost her job and her house and had to move in with her brother in Virginia, she lived in Maryland, a state that is expanding Medicaid. “Would I go back there?” she asked. “It might involve me living in my car. I don’t know. I might consider it.”
The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansionare home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.
“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”
The disproportionate impact on poor blacks introduces the prickly issue of race into the already politically charged atmosphere around the health care law. Race was rarely, if ever, mentioned in the state-level debates about the Medicaid expansion. But the issue courses just below the surface, civil rights leaders say, pointing to the pattern of exclusion.
Every state in the Deep South, with the exception of Arkansas, has rejected the expansion. Opponents of the expansion say they are against it on exclusively economic grounds, and that the demographics of the South — with its large share of poor blacks — make it easy to say race is an issue when it is not.
In Mississippi, Republican leaders note that a large share of people in the state are on Medicaid already, and that, with an expansion, about a third of the state would have been insured through the program. Even supporters of the health law say that eventually covering 10 percent of that cost would have been onerous for a predominantly rural state with a modest tax base.
“Any additional cost in Medicaid is going to be too much,” said State Senator Chris McDaniel, a Republican, who opposes expansion.
The law was written to require all Americans to have health coverage. For lower and middle-income earners, there are subsidies on the new health exchanges to help them afford insurance. An expanded Medicaid program was intended to cover the poorest. In all, about 30 million uninsured Americans were to have become eligible for financial help
North Korea has denied a recent cyber-attack against Sony Pictures
