BEIJING/SEOUL — China on Sunday warned against "troublemaking" on its doorstep, in an apparent rebuke to North Korea.
The North, led by 30-year-old Kim Jong-un, has been issuing vitriolic threats of war against the United States and U.S.-backed South Korea since the United Nations imposed sanctions in response to its third nuclear weapon test in February.
North Korean officials told diplomats late last week to consider leaving Pyongyang because of the tension, but embassies appeared to view the appeal as more rhetoric and staff have stayed put.
China, North Korea's sole financial and diplomatic backer, has shown growing irritation with Pyongyang's warnings of nuclear war.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, addressing a forum on the southern island of Hainan, did not name North Korea but said no country "should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain".
Stability in Asia, he said, "faces new challenges, as hot spot issues keep emerging and both traditional and non-traditional security threats exist".
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi expressed similar frustration in a statement late on Saturday, relating a telephone conversation with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
"We oppose provocative words and actions from any party in the region and do not allow trouble making on China's doorstep," Wang said, according to a ministry statement on its website.
On Sunday, the ministry expressed "grave concern" at rising tension and said China had asked North Korea to "ensure the safety of Chinese diplomats in North Korea, in accordance with the Vienna Convention and international laws and norms".
China's embassy, it said, was "understood" to be operating normally in Pyongyang.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, addressing the Hainan forum, said avoiding conflict on the peninsula was vital. "There, any aggression is a threat to the interests of every country in the region," she said.
British Foreign Minister William Hague said North Korea's nuclear ambitions had to be taken seriously.
Interviewed by Sky News, he said the international response "should also be very clear, very united and calm at all times because it's important not to feed that frenetic rhetoric that we've seen over the last few weeks".
Switzerland's Foreign Ministry offered to mediate, saying it was "always willing to help find a solution, if this is the wish of the parties, such as hosting meetings between them".
Kim, the third member of his dynasty to rule North Korea, is thought to have spent several years in Switzerland being educated under a pseudonym. He took over in December 2011 after the death of his father Kim Jong-il, who confronted South Korea and the United States throughout his 17-year rule.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Hackers target Israeli government websites
JERUSALEM -- A weekend cyberattack campaign targeting Israeli government websites failed to cause serious disruption, officials said Sunday. The attacks followed warnings in the name of the hacking group Anonymous that it was launching a massive attack.
Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, of the government's National Cyber Bureau, said hackers had mostly failed to shut down key sites.
"So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real damage," Ben Yisrael said. "Anonymous doesn't have the skills to damage the country's vital infrastructure. And if that was its intention, then it wouldn't have announced the attack ahead of time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart," he said.
Posters using the name of the hacking group Anonymous had warned they would launch a massive attack on Israeli sites in a strike they called (hash)OpIsrael starting April 7.
Israel's Bureau of Statistics was down on Sunday morning but it was unclear if it was hacked. Media said the sites of the Defense and Education Ministry as well as banks had come under attack the night before but they were mostly repelled.
Israeli sites reported brief cyberattacks on the stock market website and the Finance Ministry website Saturday night. But the two institutions denied the reports.
Israeli media said small businesses had been targeted, and some websites' homepages were replaced by anti-Israel slogans. In retaliation, Israeli activists hacked sites of radical Islamist groups and splashed them with pro-Israel messages, media said.
Shlomi Dolev, an expert on network security and cryptography at Ben Gurion University, said attacks of this kind will likely become more common. "It is a good test for our defense systems and we will know better how to deal with more serious threats in the future," he said.
Dolev said Anonymous had declared on its forums that the main assault would be in the evening. Hackers have had little success in their attempts to take over and change Israeli sites so far and are planning "denial of service" attacks where sites are overwhelmed and communications are hindered.
He said Israel is well prepared to deal with the attacks. "This is a real battle. It is good training for our experts," he said.
Hackers have tried before to topple Israeli sites.
In January last year, a hacker network that claimed to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national airline and claimed to have published details of thousands of Israeli credit cards.
A concerted effort to cripple Israeli websites during November fighting in Gaza failed to cause serious disruption. Israel said at the time that protesters barraged Israel with more than 60 million hacking attempts.
An official of the militant Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip praised the current attack. "God bless the minds and the efforts of the soldiers of the electronic battle," Ihab Al- Ghussian, Gaza's chief government spokesman, wrote on his official Facebook page.
Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, of the government's National Cyber Bureau, said hackers had mostly failed to shut down key sites.
"So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real damage," Ben Yisrael said. "Anonymous doesn't have the skills to damage the country's vital infrastructure. And if that was its intention, then it wouldn't have announced the attack ahead of time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart," he said.
Posters using the name of the hacking group Anonymous had warned they would launch a massive attack on Israeli sites in a strike they called (hash)OpIsrael starting April 7.
Israel's Bureau of Statistics was down on Sunday morning but it was unclear if it was hacked. Media said the sites of the Defense and Education Ministry as well as banks had come under attack the night before but they were mostly repelled.
Israeli sites reported brief cyberattacks on the stock market website and the Finance Ministry website Saturday night. But the two institutions denied the reports.
Israeli media said small businesses had been targeted, and some websites' homepages were replaced by anti-Israel slogans. In retaliation, Israeli activists hacked sites of radical Islamist groups and splashed them with pro-Israel messages, media said.
Shlomi Dolev, an expert on network security and cryptography at Ben Gurion University, said attacks of this kind will likely become more common. "It is a good test for our defense systems and we will know better how to deal with more serious threats in the future," he said.
Dolev said Anonymous had declared on its forums that the main assault would be in the evening. Hackers have had little success in their attempts to take over and change Israeli sites so far and are planning "denial of service" attacks where sites are overwhelmed and communications are hindered.
He said Israel is well prepared to deal with the attacks. "This is a real battle. It is good training for our experts," he said.
Hackers have tried before to topple Israeli sites.
In January last year, a hacker network that claimed to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national airline and claimed to have published details of thousands of Israeli credit cards.
A concerted effort to cripple Israeli websites during November fighting in Gaza failed to cause serious disruption. Israel said at the time that protesters barraged Israel with more than 60 million hacking attempts.
An official of the militant Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip praised the current attack. "God bless the minds and the efforts of the soldiers of the electronic battle," Ihab Al- Ghussian, Gaza's chief government spokesman, wrote on his official Facebook page.
LGBT activist jump into immigration fray, seeking same-sex partner protections, rights
Petitioning to come to the United States as a foreign national is complicated. There’s visa paperworkquotas in many cases, and lengthy wait times. One misstep could mean a lengthy separation from your loved ones.
And that's just for straight people.
As pro-reform interest groups prepare to fight for their specific priorities in pending immigration reform legislation, LGBT activists aren’t standing on the sidelines.
“There is a shared struggle among the immigrant and the LGBT communities,” said Steve Ralls of Immigration Equality, an organization that offers legal aid to LGBT immigrants. “There is a growing recognition that if we can get fair immigration reform through Congress we can work on a lot of issues together moving forward.”
Gay rights activists say there are several fronts in the immigration fight -- from specific provisions for gay Americans and permanent residents seeking to bring a non-citizen partner to the country, to protections for undocumented LGBT individuals, to a broader call for equal rights.
“We’re investing in immigration reform because it is a social justice issue and we have a responsibility to advocate for the kind of world we want to live in,” said Maya Rupert, policy director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “But beyond that, there are LGBT people who are going to be directly impacted by every provision in the ultimate legislation, so we have to make sure that it’s being done in a way that is inclusive and conscious of their needs.”
That means both legal and undocumented immigrants, Rupert said.
The number of LGBT immigrants is difficult to count, but researcher Dr. Gary Gates of UCLA’s Williams Institute used existing Census, Gallup and Pew Research Center data to calculate it. Gates estimates that about 900,000 LGBT immigrants live in the United States. About two-thirds of those are documented -- meaning that they are naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents or holders of a temporary visa. One-third -- about 267,000 -- are undocumented according to the estimate.
For documented LGBT immigrants, a key provision that activists have focused on is the inclusion of legislation called the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) in a final comprehensive reform bill.
Partial victory with DOMA?
Currently, a U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident can petition for a visa for a foreign-born spouse -- but only if the spouse is of the opposite sex. That applies even if the same-sex couple is legally married in another country or in a U.S. state that recognizes gay marriage.
UAFA would make same-sex spouses or permanent partners of U.S. citizens eligible to petition for a family-based visa.
(Proponents of UAFA could win a partial victory of this issue if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Defense of Marriage Act this summer, but, unless UAFA passes, same-sex foreign national spouses would still only be eligible for a visa petition if they get married in a state that recognizes their relationship.)
Activists point to an ally in Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, an original Senate sponsor of the UAFA legislation and the head of the panel that will first review a draft immigration bill. The White House also specifically included the provision for same-sex immigrant permanent partners in a January fact sheet outlining the president’s priorities for reform.
A path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is also getting heavy support from LGBT groups, who note that a significant portion of undocumented LGBT people in the United States may be here because they faced discrimination in their country of origin.
“You can imagine the fear that an undocumented person faces with the uncertainty in current law if their deportation would mean the return to a home country where they cannot be out, where they cannot have a relationship or they would be subject to intense persecution,” says Ralls. “So a path to citizenship is critical for all undocumented people, and for undocumented LGBT people it is in many cases a critical safety issue for them.”
Public opinion shifting
Since 1994, the U.S. has classified persecution on the basis of sexual orientation as grounds to seek asylum. But the process can be arduous and confusing, and asylum-seekers have to offer rigorous documentation of hardship. Those whose claims are denied risk deportation.
Although many Latino groups heavily involved in the immigration reform movement -- including theLeague of United Latin American Citizens, the National Council de la Raza and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus -- have offered support for the inclusion of LGBT protections in any final legislation, there’s opposition within the Latino community as well as from outside groups.
In February, Sen. Marco Rubio -- a key player in the Senate Gang of Eight -- said that the inclusion of LGBT protections could hamper passage of the legislation. (Arizona’s Sen. John McCain has echoed that concern as well.)
"I think if that issue becomes a central issue in the debate it's going to become harder to get it done because there will be strong feelings on both sides,” Rubio said at an event sponsored by Buzzfeed.
As recently as a decade ago, the Hispanic and LGBT communities could have been considered quite the opposite of allies.
In 2006, a Pew Research Center study found that just 31 percent of Hispanics favored allowing gay marriage, compared to 56 percent who opposed it.
But in 2012, those numbers were almost a mirror image, with 52 percent of Hispanics backing gay marriage and about a third saying they are not in favor of legal marriage for gays and lesbians.
Amid the legal complications and the data, and regardless of how any final legislation reads, those involved in the issue say that the debate is raising awareness about a long-ignored population.
“Having a number that indicates that this is a sizable group -- more than 250,000 LGBT undocumented, nearly a million LGBT immigrants -- it’s not so much the overall number that’s important, it’s the fact that there is an estimate,” says Dr. Gates of the Williams Institute. “Unless you’re counted, you tend not to count.”
And that's just for straight people.
As pro-reform interest groups prepare to fight for their specific priorities in pending immigration reform legislation, LGBT activists aren’t standing on the sidelines.
“There is a shared struggle among the immigrant and the LGBT communities,” said Steve Ralls of Immigration Equality, an organization that offers legal aid to LGBT immigrants. “There is a growing recognition that if we can get fair immigration reform through Congress we can work on a lot of issues together moving forward.”
Gay rights activists say there are several fronts in the immigration fight -- from specific provisions for gay Americans and permanent residents seeking to bring a non-citizen partner to the country, to protections for undocumented LGBT individuals, to a broader call for equal rights.
“We’re investing in immigration reform because it is a social justice issue and we have a responsibility to advocate for the kind of world we want to live in,” said Maya Rupert, policy director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “But beyond that, there are LGBT people who are going to be directly impacted by every provision in the ultimate legislation, so we have to make sure that it’s being done in a way that is inclusive and conscious of their needs.”
That means both legal and undocumented immigrants, Rupert said.
The number of LGBT immigrants is difficult to count, but researcher Dr. Gary Gates of UCLA’s Williams Institute used existing Census, Gallup and Pew Research Center data to calculate it. Gates estimates that about 900,000 LGBT immigrants live in the United States. About two-thirds of those are documented -- meaning that they are naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents or holders of a temporary visa. One-third -- about 267,000 -- are undocumented according to the estimate.
For documented LGBT immigrants, a key provision that activists have focused on is the inclusion of legislation called the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) in a final comprehensive reform bill.
Partial victory with DOMA?
Currently, a U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident can petition for a visa for a foreign-born spouse -- but only if the spouse is of the opposite sex. That applies even if the same-sex couple is legally married in another country or in a U.S. state that recognizes gay marriage.
UAFA would make same-sex spouses or permanent partners of U.S. citizens eligible to petition for a family-based visa.
(Proponents of UAFA could win a partial victory of this issue if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Defense of Marriage Act this summer, but, unless UAFA passes, same-sex foreign national spouses would still only be eligible for a visa petition if they get married in a state that recognizes their relationship.)
Activists point to an ally in Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, an original Senate sponsor of the UAFA legislation and the head of the panel that will first review a draft immigration bill. The White House also specifically included the provision for same-sex immigrant permanent partners in a January fact sheet outlining the president’s priorities for reform.
A path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is also getting heavy support from LGBT groups, who note that a significant portion of undocumented LGBT people in the United States may be here because they faced discrimination in their country of origin.
“You can imagine the fear that an undocumented person faces with the uncertainty in current law if their deportation would mean the return to a home country where they cannot be out, where they cannot have a relationship or they would be subject to intense persecution,” says Ralls. “So a path to citizenship is critical for all undocumented people, and for undocumented LGBT people it is in many cases a critical safety issue for them.”
Public opinion shifting
Since 1994, the U.S. has classified persecution on the basis of sexual orientation as grounds to seek asylum. But the process can be arduous and confusing, and asylum-seekers have to offer rigorous documentation of hardship. Those whose claims are denied risk deportation.
Although many Latino groups heavily involved in the immigration reform movement -- including theLeague of United Latin American Citizens, the National Council de la Raza and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus -- have offered support for the inclusion of LGBT protections in any final legislation, there’s opposition within the Latino community as well as from outside groups.
In February, Sen. Marco Rubio -- a key player in the Senate Gang of Eight -- said that the inclusion of LGBT protections could hamper passage of the legislation. (Arizona’s Sen. John McCain has echoed that concern as well.)
"I think if that issue becomes a central issue in the debate it's going to become harder to get it done because there will be strong feelings on both sides,” Rubio said at an event sponsored by Buzzfeed.
As recently as a decade ago, the Hispanic and LGBT communities could have been considered quite the opposite of allies.
In 2006, a Pew Research Center study found that just 31 percent of Hispanics favored allowing gay marriage, compared to 56 percent who opposed it.
But in 2012, those numbers were almost a mirror image, with 52 percent of Hispanics backing gay marriage and about a third saying they are not in favor of legal marriage for gays and lesbians.
Amid the legal complications and the data, and regardless of how any final legislation reads, those involved in the issue say that the debate is raising awareness about a long-ignored population.
“Having a number that indicates that this is a sizable group -- more than 250,000 LGBT undocumented, nearly a million LGBT immigrants -- it’s not so much the overall number that’s important, it’s the fact that there is an estimate,” says Dr. Gates of the Williams Institute. “Unless you’re counted, you tend not to count.”
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