North Korea's National Defense Commission addressed the Sony hack in a 1,722-word statement littered with poor English and spelling errors that was published by the country's official news agency, KCNA, on Sunday. 

The statement, described as "an official stand of the army and the people" of North Korea, included dramatic threats and praise for the hackers. In it, North Korea called America an "ill-famed cesspool of injustice" and urged the US to "honestly apologize to mankind for its evil doing."

Despite expressing admiration for the hackers, who called themselves the "Guardians of Peace," North Korea's statement denied any involvement in the hack.

North Korea vowed to launch the "toughest counteraction" in response to US attempts to blame and punish it for the cyberattack.

"Fighters for justice including 'guardians of peace' who turned out in the sacred drive for cooperation in the fight against the U.S. to defend human justice and conscience and to dismember the U.S. imperialists .... are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world," the statement said. "The just struggle to be waged by them across the world will bring achievements thousands of times greater than the hacking attack on the Sony Pictures Entertainment."

The statement focused on four main points:

• The Sony hack was a "righteous deed."
• Evidence linking North Korea to the cyberattack was weak.
• "The Interview" was a US plot.
• North Korea will fight back "in all war spaces."

It concluded by demanding for the US to apologize.

"The U.S. should reflect on its evil doings that put itself in such a trouble, apologize to the Koreans and other people of the world and should not dare pull up others," said the statement.

Read on for more detailed summaries of the key points in the statement.

North Korea "highly estimates" the Sony hackers:

The hackers released statements saying they objected to the portrayal of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Sony's comedy "The Interview." Sony subsequently canceled the movie's Dec. 25 release.

In the statement, North Korea, which refers to itself as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, described "The Interview" as an "undesirable reactionary film" that "hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK." Without citing any evidence, the statement claimed people in the US also objected to the movie and supported the cyberattack on Sony.

"Even political and social circles of the U.S. commented that it is quite wrong to defame the head of the state for the mere reason that his politics is different from that of the U.S. and it is in the hostile relationship with the latter and, therefore, the Sony Pictures Entertainment got into a serious trouble and paid a due price," the statement said.

North Korea has previously denied any involvement in the hack. The statement reiterated these denials but noted the country approved of the attack on Sony.

"The NDC of the DPRK highly estimates the righteous action taken by the 'guardians of peace,' though it is not aware of their residence," said the statement. 

A case based on "obscure sci-tech data":

The US government has claimed it has evidence conclusively linking North Korea to the attack. According to the FBI, this includes specific code and internet addresses North Korea has used in for other hacks in the past that were associated with the assault on Sony.

In the statement, which noted Sony suffered "tremendous losses," North Korea criticized the alleged proof presented by the FBI as being based "on obscure sci-tech data." It also argued South Korea, Pyongyang's arch rival, falsely accused the north of the other cyberattacks referenced by the FBI.

"No matter how big and disgraceful the loss may be, the U.S. should not pull up others for no reason," the statement said.

North Korea's statement claimed its internet addresses were "already known several times" and that the "the method of cyber warfare is almost similar worldwide." The statement attempted to demonstrate the logical fallacy of the FBI's claims by theorizing someone could frame America for a hack by using code the US government had been associated with. 

"If somebody used U.S.-made hacking programs and codes and applied their instruction or encoding method, perhaps, the 'wise' FBI, too, could not but admit that it would be hard to decisively assert that the attack was done by the U.S.," said the statement. 

Some experts have also questioned the FBI's evidence. 

The "U.S. administration was deeply involved":

The statement claims there is "clear evidence that the U.S. administration was deeply involved in the making of such dishonest reactionary movie." Though none of this alleged evidence is detailed in the statement, it seems to be referring to emails that showed two State Department officials screened the movie. 

"The facts glaringly show that the U.S. is the chief culprit of terrorism as it has loudly called for combating terrorism everywhere in the world but schemed behind the scene to produce and distribute movies inciting it in various countries of the world," the statement said. 

North Korea vows to fight back "in all war spaces":

In a press conference on Friday, President Barack Obama vowed to have a "proportional" response to the Sony hack, which he claimed was definitively linked to North Korea. The statement described this as "a disgraceful behavior." It said North Korea has "already launched the toughest counteraction," which will go far beyond Sony and target US "citadels" in "all war spaces" including within American territory. 

"The DPRK has already launched the toughest counteraction. Nothing is more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction. Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans," the statement said.

"The army and people of the DPRK are fully ready to stand in confrontation with the U.S. in all war spaces including cyber warfare space to blow up those citadels. Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism, by far surpassing the 'symmetric counteraction' declared by Obama."

North Korea's full statement is below: 

U.S. Urged to Honestly Apologize to Mankind for Its Evil Doing before Groundlessly Pulling up Others

Pyongyang, December 21 (KCNA) -- The Policy Department of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK issued the following statement Sunday:

Strange thing that happened in the heart of the U.S., the ill-famed cesspool of injustice, is now afloat in the world as shocking news.

The Sony Pictures Entertainment, the biggest movie producer in the U.S., which produced the undesirable reactionary film "The Interview" daring hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK and agitating even terrorism and had a plan to distribute it, was exposed to surprisingly sophisticated, destructive and threatening cyber warfare and has been thrown into a bottomless quagmire after suffering property losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The public in the U.S. is now describing this case as "disgrace suffered by Sony Pictures Entertainment,""very sorry thing caused by the U.S.,""Sony Pictures Entertainment showing a white flag before hackers" and the "unprecedented disaster suffered by the U.S."

Those who meted out a stern punishment of justice were reported to be cyber experts styling themselves "guardians of peace".

Seized with terrible horror and threat in face of their merciless hacking attack in retaliation against unjust actions, many movie and drama distributors in North America including 41 states of the U.S. and Canada immediately canceled the screening of the reactionary movie. And it was reported that the Sony Pictures Entertainment which directly sponsored its production and distribution hastily issued a statement on Dec. 25 that it would suspend the screening of the undesirable movie which had been planned in 63 countries.

The NDC of the DPRK highly estimates the righteous action taken by the "guardians of peace," though it is not aware of their residence.

It, at the same time, considers as fortunate the step taken by the Sony Pictures Entertainment to give up the overall distribution of the above-said movie due to the decision and strong pressure of the movie and drama distributors for stopping the screening of the reactionary movie, though belatedly.

This is an official stand of the army and the people of the DPRK on what happened in the heart of the U.S.

This stand is taken by the DPRK because the movie "The Interview" is an undesirable and reactionary one justifying and inciting terrorism which should not be allowed in any country and any region.

Another reason is that the movie is run through with a story agitating a vicious and dastardly method of assassinating a head of a legitimate sovereign state.

No wonder, even political and social circles of the U.S. commented that it is quite wrong to defame the head of the state for the mere reason that his politics is different from that of the U.S. and it is in the hostile relationship with the latter and, therefore, the Sony Pictures Entertainment got into a serious trouble and paid a due price.

For these reasons, the DPRK is more highly praising the "guardians of peace" for their righteous deed which prevented in advance the evil cycle of retaliation-- terrorism sparks terrorism.

It is quite natural that the movie and drama producers should refrain from undesirable deeds contrary to the noble mission to lead morality and civilization.

But what matters is that the U.S. and its followers are groundlessly trumpeting that the recent cyber attack was made by the DPRK.

The FBI issued the results of the investigation into the hack at the Sony Pictures Entertainment on December 19.

According to them, it suffered tremendous losses.

One may say this is the due price incurred by wrong deed, the evil act of hurting others.

The U.S. released a statement asserting that this loss was caused by the DPRK.

No matter how big and disgraceful the loss may be, the U.S. should not pull up others for no reason.

The FBI presented a report on the results of technical analysis of hacking program used by the "guardians of peace" for this attack, citing it as the ground that the serious hacking was caused by the DPRK.

The report says the malignant code had access to north Korea's IP already known several times and the hacking methods applied in the "March 20 hacking case" and during cyber warfare against media and various other computer networks in south Korea in recent years are similar to that applied against the Sony Pictures Entertainment this time, being another ground that "this was done by the north".

The report, in particular, adds that the malignant code and algorithm applied during the attack are similar to what was used during the hacking attack on south Korea, citing it as a proof.

Not satisfied with those groundless "evidence", the FBI is letting loose ambiguous remarks that it is hard to fully prove due to the "protection of sensitive information sources."

This means self-acknowledgement that the "assertion about the north's deed" came from an intentional allegation rather than scientific evidence.

It is a common sense that the method of cyber warfare is almost similar worldwide. Different sorts of hacking programs and codes are used in cyberspace.

If somebody used U.S.-made hacking programs and codes and applied their instruction or encoding method, perhaps, the "wise" FBI, too, could not but admit that it would be hard to decisively assert that the attack was done by the U.S.

Moreover, the DPRK has never attempted nor made a "cyber-attack" on south Korea. The rumor about "cyber-attack" by the DPRK was a concoction made by the south Korean puppet regime and its plot.

After all, the grounds cited by the FBI in its announcement were all based on obscure sci-tech data and false story and, accordingly, the announcement itself is another fabrication. This is the DPRK's stand on the U.S. gangster-like behavior against it.

What is grave is that U.S. President Obama is recklessly making the rumor about "DPRK's cyber-attack on Sony Pictures" a fait accompli while crying out for symmetric counteraction, strict calculation and additionally retaliatory sanctions.

This is like beating air after being hit hard. A saying goes every sin brings its punishment with it. It is best for the guilty to repent of its evil doings and draw a lesson when forced to pay dearly for them.

The DPRK has clear evidence that the U.S. administration was deeply involved in the making of such dishonest reactionary movie.

It is said that the movie was conceived and produced according to the "guidelines" of the U.S. authorities who contended that such movies hurting the dignity of the DPRK supreme leadership and inciting terrorism against it would be used in an effective way as "propaganda against north Korea".

The U.S. Department of State's special human rights envoy went the lengths of urging the movie makers to keep all scenes insulting the dignity of the DPRK supreme leadership in the movie, saying it is needed to "vex the north Korean government".

The facts glaringly show that the U.S. is the chief culprit of terrorism as it has loudly called for combating terrorism everywhere in the world but schemed behind the scene to produce and distribute movies inciting it in various countries of the world.

It is not exaggeration to say in the light of the prevailing situation that the U.S. administration and President Obama looking after the overall state affairs of the U.S. have been behind the case.

Can he really cover up the crimes he has committed by trying so hard to falsify the truth and turn white to black.

So we watched with unusual attention what had been done by the "guardians of peace" to avert terrorism and defend justice.

Yet, we do not know who or where they are but we can surely say that they are supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK.

The army and people of the DPRK who aspire after justice and truth and value conscience have hundreds of millions of supporters and sympathizers, known or unknown, who have turned out in the sacred war against terrorism and the U.S. imperialists, the chieftain of aggression, to accomplish the just cause.

Obama personally declared in public the "symmetric counteraction", a disgraceful behavior.

There is no need to guess what kind of thing the "symmetric counteraction" is like but the army and people of the DPRK will never be browbeaten by such a thing.

The DPRK has already launched the toughest counteraction. Nothing is more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction. Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans.

The army and people of the DPRK are fully ready to stand in confrontation with the U.S. in all war spaces including cyber warfare space to blow up those citadels.

Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism, by far surpassing the "symmetric counteraction" declared by Obama.

This is the invariable toughest stand of the army and people of the DPRK.

Fighters for justice including "guardians of peace" who turned out in the sacred drive for cooperation in the fight against the U.S. to defend human justice and conscience and to dismember the U.S. imperialists, the root cause of all sorts of evils and kingpin of injustice, are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world.

The just struggle to be waged by them across the world will bring achievements thousands of times greater than the hacking attack on the Sony Pictures Entertainment.

It is the truth and inevitability of the historical development that justice prevails over injustice.

Whoever challenges justice by toeing the line of the biggest criminal U.S. will never be able to escape merciless punishment as it is the target of the sacred drive for cooperation in the fight against the U.S.

The U.S. should reflect on its evil doings that put itself in such a trouble, apologize to the Koreans and other people of the world and should not dare pull up others.

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Yesterday, North Korea's four internet networks went offline for nine hours.  

Reuters explained whom the outage affected:

"Current and former U.S. law enforcement and security officials said only a tiny number of people in North Korea's leadership have access to the Internet, and that almost all its Internet links and traffic pass through China."

Dyn Research notes that "North Korea has significantly less Internet to lose, compared to other countries with similar populations: Yemen (47 networks), Afghanistan (370 networks), or Taiwan (5,030 networks)."

It's unclear who or what caused the outage. Dyn, which first noticed the irregularities, says that the incident "seems consistent with a fragile network under external attack" as well as "more common causes, such as power problems."

Matthew Prince, CEO of US-based CloudFlare, told Reuters that it wouldn't be that hard to overload North Korea's fragile network with a basic distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. He added that North Korea's internet is now restored, which "is pretty good evidence that the outage wasn't caused by a state-sponsored attack, otherwise it'd likely still be down for the count."

Alternatively, a cyberattack leading to a temporary outage could be a message to North Korea's leadership (and perhaps its benefactors in Beijing).  

Shutting down North Korea's internet for a day strikes me as a measured & appropriate first response to Sony hack.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 23, 2014

If North Korea suffered from some kind of cyberattack, it's likely related to the Sony hack. A hacker group named Guardians of Peace took over the computer network of Sony Pictures, forcing it to cancel the release of the movie "The Interview."

The US government has formally blamed North Korea. Pyongyang has praised the hack but denies involvement.

In any case, for some perspective on North Korea's connectivity on a good day, here's a look at North Korea at night in 2013:

SEE ALSO: Here's North Korea's Over-The-Top Official Statement On The Sony Hack

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Syria has been at war for nearly four years. The most recognizable images of the country today depict bombed-out buildings, piles of rubble, and displaced citizens.

A collection of images taken fifty years earlier by Charles W. Cushman, an avid traveler and amateur photographer, are a stark contrast.

Though Syria saw a number of coups d'etat in the 1960s and in the decades before and after, Cushman's photos of downtown Damascus in 1965 paint a more mundane picture, showing families gathering, men riding donkeys, and shoppers in bustling bazaars.

These photos are being shared with permission from the Indiana University Archives.

Two years before Cushman visited Damascus, Syria's government was overthrown in a coup d'etat.

The military then overthrew the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in 1966, the year after Cushman's visit.

But these photos show a more mundane side of the country, giving a rare glimpse into everyday life in the capital.

WWI was one of the first truly modern conflicts. Fought mainly along trenches, the war saw the introduction of chemical weapons, tanks, and aerial combat, alongside the first widespread use of machine guns. All of these developments brought a degree of mechanized slaughter to the battlefield that had never been seen in any previous conflict.

Intermixed with all this destruction is the "Christmas Truce" of Dec. 25, 1914. On that day, German and British soldiers "walk[ed] about together all day giving each other cigars and singing songs," as British General Walter Congreve wrote in a  newly discovered letter.

The soldiers also played soccer during the now-famous truce. 

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce, The Open University has created a collection of images from throughout World War I of soldiers participating in friendly games of soccer. 

All ranks took the opportunity to enjoy a game of soccer. Here, a British general is about to kick off a friendly match between British and Italian troops on the war's Italian front line. 

The games provided a much-needed way for soldiers to relax during the long years of the war.

The games proved to be an extremely popular form of entertainment for players and spectators both. Soldiers crowded the sidelines for this match near the Italian front.

Games would spontaneously break out among soldiers whenever they had free time and no matter what they were wearing — as was the case during this impromptu game on Christmas Day in Greece, in 1915.

Given the lack of easily accessible supplies on the front, games were generally played with whatever spare equipment could be found. This game took place on Christmas, 1916, along the Balkan front.

World War I took a heavy human and psychological toll. Some armies held soccer matches during the war as a way to maintain their soldiers' flagging morale. Here, a major general presents a cup to a winning soccer team during a tournament in 1918.

SEE ALSO: These incredible colorized photographs bring World War I to life

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"In early 2007, I called Dad and asked him if he would invite President Vladimir Putin of Russia to Walker's Point (the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine)," Bush writes in his new book 41: A Portrait Of My Father. 

Reflecting on his father's life and leadership, former President George W. Bush describes how the pair hosted Putin for a weekend of boating and discussions about missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Former president George H.W. Bush was thrilled to process the request. "Just let me know what you need, son," he said. 

"When Putin arrived on July 1, 2007, Dad met his plane at the airport in New Hampshire and accompanied him on the helicopter ride to Walker's Point. Then he took both of us for a speedboat ride," Bush writes.

"Although initially startled by the idea of a eighty-three-year-old former President driving the boat at top speed, Putin loved the ride. (His interpreter looked like he was about to fly out the back of the boat.) 

"The next morning, we had a long conversation about missile defense, in which we found some common ground. We then went fishing. Fittingly, Putin was the only one who caught anything," according to the memoir.

(In 2009, the US and Russia announced a "reset" in relations. It hasn't worked out.)

NOW WATCH: 11 Mind-Blowing Facts About Russia

SEE ALSO: 7 Amazing Quotes Showing The Awkward Tension Between Vladimir Putin And The US

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Russia is in the midst of an intense military buildup, and the country's deteriorating economy is magnifying the cost.

During 2015 alone, Russia's national defense budget is expected to be 3.3 trillion rubles. At the time of the announcement in October, this was worth $81 billion, but with respect to today's conversion that's worth slightly over $60 billion.

Meanwhile, Russia is expected to enter a deep recession in 2015 as its economy contracts.

Nevertheless, the Kremlin plans on spending over 20 trillion rubles ($364 billion right now) over the next five years, with almost 80% of the funds being used for the purchase of "high tech weapons" involved with nuclear, space, reconnaissance, and communications.

The plan includes major upgrades for its land, navy, and air forces: New missiles by 2020, new submarines by 2016 (and nuclear submarines by 2020), and 150 new airplanes and helicopters by 2015 — and much, much more, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

Originally, the upgraded military plans were designed when the government was expecting 6% GDP growth through the decade.

'We Just Cannot Afford It'

Back in October (before the ruble crash), new Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov expressed concerns about financing the new defense expenditure plans, according to Reuters.

"A new defense program will be prepared now, and in its framework we want to reconsider the amount of resources that will be spent from the budget in order to make it more realistic," Siluanov stated.

"When we were adopting the defense program, the forecasts for the economy and budget revenues were completely different. Right now, we just cannot afford it," he added.

Despite Russia's recent economic troubles, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been publicly supportive of the continued military expansion and modernization.

Significant Investment Already

For 2013, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that Russia's military spending was around $87.8 billion.

Although this sum is significantly less than both the US and China (at $640 billion and an estimated $188 billion, respectively), Russia's military spending makes up a greater percentage of its GDP than either of the other two nations.

As a share of GDP, Russia's military expenditures are an estimated 4.1% for 2013, an increase from 2004 when they made up 3.5%.

Contrastingly, the US is at 3.8% (a slight decrease from 2004's 3.9%), and China is an estimated 2% (a slight decrease from 2004's 2.1%).

"Russia's spending has risen as it continues to implement the State Armaments Plan for 2011-2020, under which it plans to spend 20.7 trillion rubles on new and upgraded armaments. The goal is to replace 70% of equipment with 'modern' weapons by 2020," according to SIPRI's report.

'A Real, Full-Fledged Economic Crisis'

Not everyone in Moscow is gung ho about the whole military expenditure plan.

Back in 2011, former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was reportedly asked to step down from his position by then-President Medvedev after a dispute over budget priorities.

Among things discussed that day? Defense spending.

Evidently, those in favor of increasing the military expenditures have gotten their way since then. In nominal terms, the Kremlin has upped its military spending by a whopping 92.3% since 2010, according to IHS Jane's Information Group.

On Monday, Kudrin stated that Russia's economy is entering crisis mode.

"Today, I can say that we have entered or are entering a real, full-fledged economic crisis. Next year we will feel it clearly," he said in a news conference. "The government has not been quick enough to address the situation ... I am yet to hear ... its clear assessment of the current situation."

It remains to be seen how exactly the ruble's collapse will affect the Kremlin's military overhaul. Going by the comments of Russia's last two finance ministers, Putin's grand plan is unaffordable.

NOW WATCH: 11 Mind-Blowing Facts About North Korea

SEE ALSO: Russia's Brain Drain Is Astounding

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There's a wild new theory about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

It's from a former airline executive, who also happens to be a novelist.

The theory is that the U.S. Navy shot down the plane to prevent a 9/11-like terrorist attack.

Marc Dugain, an author and former CEO of a now-defunct French regional airline, told a radio station and French magazine Paris Match that he thinks the plane might have been downed near a U.S. military base on an island in the Indian Ocean after the plane's systems were hacked.

The Daily Mail reports that Dugain cited a fisherman near the island of Diego Garcia, where the U.S. operates a large naval base, who said he saw what looked like a Malaysia Airlines plane on March 8, the day the jet disappeared. Other residents on the Maldives islands reported similar sightings around the time the plane disappeared.

Dugain also said islanders found an empty fire extinguisher from the missing jet washed up on shore, but this report has not been confirmed, according to The Independent.

Dugain theorizes that hackers took control of the plane remotely and steered it off of its planned flight path and toward the U.S. military base for an attack, leading the military to shoot it down. He said a fire on board the plane (which would explain the empty extinguisher) could have forced the crew to shut down their devices and stop electronic communication to control towers and radar.

The disappearance of MH 370 is one of the most bizarre and tragic aviation mysteries of all time. 

This isn't the first time that someone from within the aviation community has aired theories about what happened.

In October, Emirates airline CEO Sir Tim Clark told German newspaper Der Spiegel and the Sydney Morning Herald that the lack of wreckage from the plane and the pings the jet reportedly sent out over the Indian Ocean seemed suspicious and that he thought information was being withheld, according to News.com.au and the Daily Mail.

While aviation industry officials have warned of the possibility of cyber criminal and terrorists taking control of airplane systems through hacking, Dugain's theory seems to be rooted more in conspiracy ideas than any solid evidence.

The U.S. government has denied that the plane flew anywhere near the military base in question, and experts have mapped the plane's pings to place it in the southern Indian Ocean before it vanished, not the central part where the base is located.

Search parties have repeatedly failed to bring forth any wreckage from the missing plane, which vanished with 239 people on board. Investigators have not offered any conclusive explanation as to what happened to the plane after it vanished from radar.

SEE ALSO: Remote Islanders In The Indian Ocean Claim They Saw The Missing Malaysia Plane

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Iraq has lost its last remaining shreds of national unity as the war against ISIS further fractures the country along ethnic and sectarian lines.

In August, Iraq's current Prime Minister, Haidar al-Abadi, took over leadership of the country. Seen as a potential reformer and an inclusive figure by the standards of the country's politics, the US believed that Abadi could have helped restore Iraq's national unity in fact of the ISIS assault. 

That has not happened so far and Abadi's attempts to unite Iraq have largely been ignored. According to Tim Arango of The New York Times, Abadi ordered Iraq's military and its allied Shiite militias to fly the Iraqi national flag instead of Shiite religious banners. Military commanders and soldiers have not heeded the order. 

"At the V.I.P. checkpoint to the Green Zone, the government enclave in Baghdad, a soldier explained recently that when the flag order was handed down, people chose their faith over their commander in chief," the Times report explained. "There were no Iraqi flags at the checkpoint, only the black-and-green flags of Imam Hussein, the revered Shiite martyr."

The flying of sectarian flags against a direct decree of the country's Prime Minister underscores how deeply divided Iraq currently is.

In the North, Iraqi Kurdistan proudly flies the Kurdish flag as the Peshmerga continue to be the most effective force on the ground at countering ISIS and enforcing stability.

And in the vast majority of western Iraq, ISIS's black banners continue to fly despite US-led coalition airstrikes and attempts by the Iraqi Security Forces and Shiite militias to retake lost ground.

Meanwhile, those Shiite and government forces battling ISIS themselves seem to have little interest now in preserving any semblance of a unifying Iraqi national identity.

“The secondary identities — cultural, religious, our ethnicity — have prevailed,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s former national security adviser, told The New York Times. “We all went to our little corners. Over the last decade, we have been looking for a new identity.”

The constant focus on belonging to a confessional group, without any vision for a greater national Iraq, is already starting to strain the cobbled together alliance of militias, the remnants of the Iraqi Security Forces, and the Kurdish Peshmerga.

Already, Kurds and Shiite, nominal allies against ISIS, have nearly come to blows after jointly retaking a region over who should administer the area and whether internally displaced Sunnis should be allowed to return to their homes. 

SEE ALSO: How ISIS became one of the world's most dangerous terrorist groups

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The Sony hacking saga took an even stranger turn yesterday when North Korea lost internet access for roughly 9 1/2 hours. The cause of the outage can't be conclusively determined.

But it appears likely that the country's paltry web infrastructure — which consists of a mere four networks and just over 1,000 IP addresses — was the target of a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) conceivably motivated in some way by the events surrounding last month's Sony breach and the controversy surrounding The Interview.

The North Korean outage was both an utterly empty gesture and evidence of how nearly anyone can spark a potential international incident if sufficiently motivated to do so.

There are few countries where the internet is less embedded in daily life than North Korea, where web access is severely curtailed and internet outages have almost no practical impact on the vast majority of the population. And the country's network is so underdeveloped, and so unprotected, that any actor capable of launching a moderately-sized DDOS attack could potentially take it down.  

"The pool of people who could do this is prohibitively large," Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Dyn Research and the analyst who first spotted the outage, told Business Insider when asked to speculate as to who could be responsible. While cautioning that the cause of outage still isn't known, Madory says that the "the set of actors, nation states, hacker groups or just angst-ridden teenagers that know maybe too much about computers" is incredibly vast, and would even include people without the technical know-how to attack North Korea on their own.

"It's a commoditized service," Madory said of DDOS attack capabilities. "It could be someone with no skills and just a credit card who knows how to purchase this service and direct it at an external router interface of North Korea."

Madory speculates that North Korea's entire internet infrastructure handles about as much volume as a mid-sized office in the United States. The trouble is that a country with nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and a standing army of around 700,000 personnel is probably much easier to take offline than the average American retail chain.

The US State Department's pointed refusal to deny responsibility for the outage shows how even a technically simple hack can take on global significance when nation states are involved. An unsophisticated DDOS attack — one that wasn't even waged by the US, in all likelihood — was almost immediately framed as part of a larger geopolitical faceoff between the US and North Korea. 

The reality is much more mundane. North Korea's web infrastructure is small and highly vulnerable. 

North Korea's connection to the global internet comes entirely through China Unicom, a state-owned telecom giant based in neighboring China. If the outage was the result of a DDOS attack, China Unicom would have seen it unfold in real time and might even have information that would help identify the culprits. Both the company and its state owner have remained silent. 

The entirety of North Korea's global web traffic is directed through China Unicom routers in Shenyang, an industrial city about 110 miles west of the North Korean border. 

"It doesn't seem like there's not a lot of diversity in the physical path going between China and North Korea," Madory explained. 

There's only one route, at least speaking in more figurative, networking terms. "When you look at their autonomous system, there's a single peer and a single path to the Internet," Jason Lancaster, a senior threat analyst at Hewitt-Packard, explained to Business Insider. An autonomous system is a meta-network usually under the management of a single entity or authority. The AS is one of the broader internet's principle units of organization.

The entirety of web traffic in North Korea falls under a single AS, which communicates with only one other AS that belongs to China Unicom.  "That link logically is a single path," Lancaster told Business Insider.

That doesn't mean that it's physically a single cable or just one room of routers or servers: it isn't publicly known how many fiber-optic cables run under the Chinese-Korean border. There's circumstantial evidence to suggest the link isn't built to handle a high volume of traffic, suggesting a limited physical as well infrastructure.

But that makes sense, because North Korea's web presence is very small. AS131279, the AS covering North Korea's connection to the global web, is the 29,517th largest in the world by number of IP addresses hosted. It hosts 1,024 IP addresses, 4 networks, 18 domains — and, tantalizingly, a single adult domain.

To get an idea of just how small North Korea's internet is, compare the activity on North Korea's AS to the China Unicom "backbone" AS with which it's linked. 

The country's internet connection isn't just paltry. It's also poorly secured. "We have not observed any sort of advanced controls in place," says Lancaster, "and previously when there's been attacks or outages and these sorts of things they weren't particularly well-managed."

This chart from Dyn Research shows that North Korea is far from the only country vulnerable to an attack that could knock the country off ot he internet for some period of time. The map organizes countries "according to the Internet diversity at the international frontier," with the darker-shaded countries depending on fewer connections to the global web, as of November of 2012. 

As the map suggests, we may be in an era where an unaccountably vast range of individuals and groups can wage a successful and anonymous attack on a country's vital infrastructure with relatively little trouble.

And one of those countries has proven a willingness to mount provocative attacks against US-based businesses — and to possess an illicit nuclear arsenal as well. Yesterday's outage shows that it's perilously easy to take a belligerent rouge-state offline, another troublesome variable in the cyber-standoff unfolding across the Pacific. 

SEE ALSO: Look at how bizarre North Korea's internet is

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The Taiwan Navy unveiled its new self-designed stealth missile corvette in Ilan. The vessel has a wave-piercing twin-hull design which helps it to avoid radar detection.

Produced by Devan Joseph. Video courtesy of Associated Press.

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London (AFP) - A letter from a World War I soldier describing the "extraordinary sight" of a spontaneous Christmas ceasefire between German and British soldiers was published on Wednesday, 100 years after it was written.

British army officer Alfred Dougan Chater wrote the letter to his mother from a freezing trench on the western front in 1914, describing an event remembered as a moment of fleeting humanity in a four-year war that killed more than 16 million.

"I am writing this in the trenches in my 'dug-out' - with a wood fire going and plenty of straw it is rather cosy, although it is freezing hard and real Christmas weather," wrote Chater.

The letter appears to be written in two parts -- the first on Christmas Day and the second on December 27.

"I think I have seen today one of the most extraordinary sights that anyone has ever seen. About 10 o'clock this morning I was peeping over the parapet when I saw a German, waving his arms, and presently two of them got out of their trench and came towards ours."

"We were just going to fire on them when we saw they had no rifles, so one of our men went to meet them and in about two minutes the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas."

An officer of the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders, Chater wrote that soldiers had been "wandering about at will on the top of the parapet" and that a joint burial service was held for dead British and German soldiers retrieved from no man's land.

"We exchanged cigarettes and autographs, and some more people took photos," Chater wrote.

"I don't know how long it will go on for... We are, at any rate, having another truce on New Year's Day, as the Germans want to see how the photos come out!"

British newspapers went on to publish photos of the soldiers mingling, beginning a celebration of the truce revived in recent months alongside events to mark the centenary of the war.

Last week British and German soldiers played a friendly football match in the English garrison town of Aldershot to mark a game supposedly held between the trenches in 1914.

The truce did not last, and Chater was badly wounded three months later. But he survived to marry the sweetheart he had left behind, and died in England in 1974.

The letter was released by Britain's Royal Mail, which recently published stamps of photographs of the truce, after it was passed to the company by a member of Chater's family. 

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LOS ANGELES/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sony Pictures will allow "The Interview" to play in more than 200 U.S. theaters as of Christmas Day, reversing its decision to pull the film, after coming under criticism from President Barack Obama and others for caving in to pressure from North Korea.

The White House praised Sony's about-face, which the studio said would result in "a limited theatrical release" of the film, which stars Seth Rogen and James Franco and is about a fictional plot to assassinate North Korea leader Kim Jong Un.

"The decision made by Sony and participating theaters allows people to make their own choices about the film, and we welcome that outcome," presidential spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement.

It was another surprising twist in a saga that started four weeks ago, when a massive cyberattack now blamed on North Korea crippled the Hollywood studio. The hacking has grown into a geopolitical headache and a global symbol of attacks on free expression.

On Friday, Obama had called Sony's decision to pull the $44 million movie a mistake, suggesting it could set a precedent in which "some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States."

Congressional Republicans and Democrats, as well as Hollywood luminaries such as George Clooney, had also assailed the canceled release, with some accusing the studio of self-censorship.

Franco and Rogen, who also co-directed the film, broke their silence after Sony made the announcement.

"The people have spoken! Freedom has prevailed!" Rogen said, while Franco added, "VICTORY!!!!!!! The PEOPLE and THE PRESIDENT have spoken!!!"

Sony Pictures Entertainment Chief Executive Michael Lynton said the studio was looking for more options to screen the film, which major U.S. theater chains pulled because of threats from hackers who warned of a September 11, 2001 style of attack.

Lynton said in Tuesday's statement: "We have never given up on releasing 'The Interview' and we're excited our movie will be in a number of theaters on Christmas Day." He said the studio, a unit of Sony Corp, was trying to secure other platforms and more theaters "so that this movie reaches the largest possible audience." 

TICKETS SELL QUICKLY

One of the first signs of a breakthrough for Sony came in a tweet from Tim League, founder of the Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, saying it planned to show the movie. Tickets sold out for many of the screenings within minutes of being offered online.

Most of the 200 or so theaters are believed to be independent exhibitors and some said they would take some extra security precautions for the first screenings. The major movie chains that had bowed out last week, such as AMC Theatres and Regal Cinemas, had not yet addressed the reversal.

"I think everybody has been doing a certain amount of this on the fly," said Jan Klingelhofer, a film buyer from Oakland, California, who got the movie into at least two theaters.

Legal experts said theater owners, not Sony, would bear the brunt of legal liability in the event of violence at the shows.

In one case that has similar themes, victims of the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, brought a case against the theater owner Cinemark USA. In August, the judge overseeing the case refused to dismiss the lawsuit and allowed it to move forward.

Even so, Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, said movie theaters would have "a pretty strong defense" in such a case because, although there is a general threat concerning "The Interview", it is not specific or foreseeable.

Theater owners and film buyers told Reuters that Sony shared its plans to have the movie play on video-on-demand (VOD) beginning on Dec. 25. Sony has not confirmed the VOD plan.

As of yet, however, no major U.S. cable or satellite operator has plans to offer the film to their subscribers.

THREAT NOT DEEMED SERIOUS

A national security official said U.S. authorities did not rate the threats by hackers against theatergoers seriously, but it was not yet clear whether U.S. agencies would issue any additional warnings of possible attacks on exhibitors.

North Korea experienced Internet problems during the weekend and a complete outage of nearly nine hours before links were largely restored on Tuesday; U.S. officials said Washington was not involved.

Links were restored at 0146 GMT on Tuesday, but two brief outages occurred later in the day, said U.S.-based Dyn Research, a company that monitors Internet infrastructure.

Matthew Prince, CEO of U.S.-based CloudFlare, which protects websites from web-based attacks, said the fact that North Korea's Internet was back up "is pretty good evidence that the outage wasn't caused by a state-sponsored attack; otherwise it'd likely still be down for the count."

South Korea, which remains technically at war with North Korea, said meanwhile it could not rule out involvement by its neighbor in a cyberattack on its nuclear power plant operator involving non-critical data.

North Korea has denied it was behind the cyberattack on Sony and has vowed to hit back against any U.S. retaliation, threatening the White House and the Pentagon.

Some of the internal emails leaked by the hackers who attacked Sony suggest it is considering a sale of its Sony/ATV Music Publishing unit, the Wall Street Journal reported.

(Additional reporting by Meeyoung Cho and Sohee Kim in Seoul, David Brunnstrom and Mark Hosenball in Washington, Ben Blanchard and Megha Rajagopalan in Beijing, Jeremy Wagstaff in Singapore, Liana Baker in New York, Jon Herskowitz in Austin, Lawrence Hurley in Washington and Mary Milliken in Los Angeles; Writing by Christian Plumb; Editing by David Storey, Steve Orlofsky and Ken Wills)

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Vladimir Putin may be the wild card in world affairs right now, but he didn't gain that influence overnight.

The Russian President's ascension to power is filled with spies, armed conflicts, oligarchs, oil and (of course) judo.

So here's how a onetime "nobody" climbed up the ranks to become the "World's Most Powerful Person."

Vladimir Putin was born in Leningrad on Oct. 7, 1952.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is the only child of a decorated war veteran and factory worker in the slums of Leningrad. He grew up in a Soviet Union styled communal apartment with two other families — as was typical at the time.

Source: Encyclopedia, TIME

As a teen Putin worked at his school's radio station, where he reportedly played music by the Beatles and other Western rock bands.

The photographer Platon — who took Putin's infamous Time Magazine cover in 2007 — said that Paul is Putin's favorite Beatle, and "Yesterday" is his favorite song.

However, "by [Putin's] own account, his favorite songs are Soviet standards, not Western rock. He has been deeply conservative his whole life," Karen Dawisha wrote in her new book, "Putin's Kleptocracy." 

Source: Encyclopedia

Early on in life, Putin got into judo. He was his university's judo champion in 1974.

Former deputy finance minister and first deputy chairman of the Central Bank Sergey Alaksashenko believes that Putin's love of judo says something about his foreign policy.

"Unlike chess, a judo fighter should not wait for the opponent's move. His strategy is to wait until he gets a chance to execute a single quick move — and then take a step back. Successful judo fighters must anticipate their opponents' actions, make a decisive, preemptive move and try to disable them," he wrote in the Moscow Times.

Source: Encyclopedia

The US Navy tweeted out a hawkish holiday card featuring a cargo ship carrying presents and a destroyer warship lurking in the background. The card includes the play on words, "presence matters because your presents matter."

The #PresenceMatters campaign refers to the Navy's increased goal of being able to use aircraft carriers to act from the sea without landing on foreign territory.

"With our aircraft carriers, we don’t rely on access to another nation’s runways, we bring our own. The world’s oceans give the Navy the power to protect America’s interests anywhere, and at any time. When our national security is threatened by the existence of a weapons facility or a terrorist camp on the other side of the world, presence matters,"according to Juan Garcia, Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  

The sheer dominance of the US Navy is clear when the number of American aircraft carriers is compared to other countries:

Here is the tweet:

Happy Holidays from #USNavy Sailors on watch, keeping sea lanes safe and open. #PresenceMatterspic.twitter.com/lrypZ2XzcM

— U.S. Navy (@USNavy) December 24, 2014  

And here's the card from last year: 

SEE ALSO: NORAD Releases Specs On Santa's Sleigh, Which Goes 'Faster Than Starlight' And Runs On Hay

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North Korea was taken offline for 9 1/2 hours earlier this week, possibly as the result of a distributed denial of service attack. It wouldn't take much to DDOS the entirety of North Korea: the country has only one pathway to the internet, through a connection with a "backbone" network hosted by a Chinese state-owned telecom company.

Prosperous and politically open countries, like the United States, are connected to the internet through tens of thousands of meta-networks deeply embedded in the web's global architecture. Needless to say, not everywhere is like this. North Korea isn't the only country with a single internet choke-point. 

A late 2012 blog post from Dyn Research— whose head of internet analysis, Doug Madory, was the first to make this week's North Korean outage public — looks at the countries that are most at risk for wide-scale outages. The post found that countries with fewer than 10 internet service providers were at heightened risk for a national outage; countries with more than 40 had almost no risk at all.

Countries with only 1 or 2 national providers were at "severe risk." Incredibly, 61 political entities fell into this category in November of 2012, including authoritarian states like Turkmenistan and Syria, poor or chaotic countries like Libya and Yemen, and small yet prosperous and open countries like Barbados, Monaco, and Andorra. Sparsely-populated islands understandably litter the list of severe-risk countries. But it also includes Ethiopia, a single-party dictatorship with a population of over 94 million.

This map shows which countries have the fewest connections to the global web, putting them the most at risk for disconnection:

Dyn's map is over two years old. But it gives an idea of how many places still depend on a single, often government-controlled connection to the global web.

And it shows how vulnerable much of the world's internet is to a DDOS attack requiring little actual technical skills.

SEE ALSO: It's alarmingly easy to take North Korea's internet offline

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At this point, anyone who doubts that North Korea helped hack Sony is disagreeing with several top cybersecurity firms and the US intelligence community.

Nevertheless, many smart people are highly skeptical that a tinpot dictatorship with almost no internet connectivity could compromise an American-based subsidiary of a multinational corporation.

The prevailing alternative theories — detailed by oft-cited security researcher Bruce Schneier— include that independent North Korean nationals hacked Sony, that a Sony insider ("Sony's Snowden") did it on their own, or that hacktivist pranksters did it for the lulz (ie, for a good bit of sadistic fun).

While all are possibilities, there is no conclusive evidence corroborating any of these theories.

On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence suggesting North Korean involvement.

What We Know

On Nov. 24, computer screens of Sony employees flashed a warning indicating the company's computer systems had been compromised and data had been stolen.

Sony's systems were subsequently crippled. A unknown group calling itself GOP claimed credit for the hack.

Over the next few weeks, all hell broke loose in the entertainment world. Hackers dumped information online and news organizations scrambled to cover every possible angle. Threats of violence against movie theaters led to Sony canceling the Dec. 25 theatrical release of "The Interview," a film in which Seth Rogen and James Franco play talk show hosts enlisted by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

(Sony backpedaled by offering the film to independent theaters, and the movie will now be distributed via YouTube.)

American officials concluded that North Korea was “centrally involved,” and intelligence officials told The New York Times that the US intelligence community"concluded that the cyberattack was both state-sponsored and far more destructive than any seen before on American soil."

The FBI's public assessment, undertaken with assistance from other intelligence services such as the NSA, cited technical analysis of the code and overlap of techniques used in previous attacks of this kind.

Immediately after the attack, cybersecurity experts began looking at the code and techniques involved in the breach. Kaspersky Lab and other cyber security firms found that the malware involved in the Sony incident is capable of wiping disk drives and other data. Kaspersky dubbed the malware "Destover," noting that similar malware had been used in previous attacks.

Computer researcher Kurt Baumgartner, drawing on Kaspersky's initial investigation, detailed how the Destover malware used in the Sony hack looks a lot like two previous "wiper" attacks: One called "Shamoon," which targeted 30,000 Saudi Aramco workstations in 2012, and another called "Dark Seoul," which targeted South Korean banks and two of the country's top broadcasters the following year.

Furthermore, Kaspersky notes that the defacement placed on Sony employee computers is similar to the warning message in the "Dark Seoul" attack, even down to the skull icons.

An assessment by HP published on Dec. 19 detailed how "several factors support that North Korea played a role in the attacks."

HP noted that "it is difficult to discern whether the regime acted alone. It is plausible that the actors responsible for this attack relied on the assistance of an insider."

Jason Lancaster, senior threat intelligence analyst at HP, noted to Business Insider that "the system that was used by the author of the malware use in the Sony case was compiled on a windows system with a Korean language set, specifying its keyboard. ... So the keyboard for the system that was used to compile this malware ... was done in the same way as other malware associated to it."

Investigative journalists at Krebs on Security noted that like DarkSeoul, "the Destover wiper executables were compiled somewhere between 48 hours prior to the attack and the actual day of attack."

And CrowdStrike, a security firm that focuses heavily on identifying attribution and actors behind major cybercrime attacks, had independently concluded that North Korea orchestrated the hack before the FBI officially blamed Pyongyang.

“We have a high-confidence that this is a North Korean operator based on the profiles seen dating back to 2006, including prior espionage against the South Korean and US government and military institutions,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer and co-founder at CrowdStrike.

“These events are all connected, through both the infrastructure overlap and the malware analysis, and they are connected to the Sony attack,” Alperovitch added. “We haven’t seen the skeptics produce any evidence that it wasn’t North Korea, because there is pretty good technical attribution here.”

Despite these assertions from experts and officials in the know, the frank skepticism persists:

One day media analysts are going to look at Obama's Friday press conference as one of the greatest presidential snookerings in US history.

— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) December 24, 2014

"I worry that this case echoes the 'we have evidence — trust us' story that the Bush administration told in the run-up to the Iraq invasion," Schneier writes.

As skeptics come to terms with the evidence pointing to North Korea, which may have had help from other groups, statements like these will not age well.

Armin Rosen contributed to this report.

SEE ALSO: Here's North Korea's Over-The-Top Official Statement On The Sony Hack

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One of the greatest war movies ever made is Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir's 1937 film about a group of French prisoners of war held in a German aristocrat's castle during World War I.

In the climactic moment of the film (spoilers ahead), the German baron Von Rauffenstein corners the French officer de Boeldieu in the midst of an escape attempt and pleads with his French counterpart to surrender himself.

They're both of upper-class background, and although the officers have developed a grudging mutual respect that occasionally verges on actual friendship, they each understand that there are rules and protocol that they have no choice but to follow to follow in such a situation, even without any commanding officers present. Boeldieu refuses to surrender. Von Rauffenstein reluctantly shoots him, almost as a formality. 

The "Grand Illusion" highlights the delusion that the prevailing rules and protocols of pre-war European society could blunt the horrifying realities of the conflict. As this scene demonstrates, the opposite ended up being true: The war overwhelmed those rules and exposed their illusory character. By 1918 the former European order, governed through centuries-old dynastic families and rigid social hierarchies, would be in ruins.

Similarly, in the end of "Grand Illusion," the false edifice of honor and duty demolishes any sense of fellow-feeling between the film's protagonists, and guarantees that the movie ends in an empty act of violence.

The Christmas Truce of 1914, in which German and French soldiers temporarily stopped fighting to celebrate the holiday, was another example of this grand illusion asserting itself. It represents the eclipse of a failed values system that was in the process of destroying itself and should not be romanticized.

 The European countries entered World War I believing the conflict would be over within a matter of months — the allied and central powers may never have rushed to war had they anticipated such a prolonged confrontation. The Christmas truce shows that by December 1914, the delusions of a quick, sanitized war hadn't totally lifted. The fact that the armies believed that conflict could be halted for the niceties of mutual celebration only shows the depths of the sides' denial.

The Christmas truce — after which the armies went right back to fighting one another, and which did nothing to actually advance the cause of peace — shows that on some level, the European powers still hadn't reconciled themselves to the nature of the disaster they'd started. Like Boeldieu and Von Rauffenstein's aristocratic code, the truce was illusion made manifest, the last gasp of the bankrupt order that the Great War would violently upend.

Crucially, there was no truce in 1915. By 1916, poison gas was being used on European battlefields. By Christmas in 1918, over 16 million people had been killed in World War I. The most important legacy of the Christmas Truce, which has been memorialized in movies and remembered as evidence of mutual respect and humanity amidst the horrors of war, is that there was only one of them.

The illusions that the event epitomized are thankfully a thing of the past, or at least less ingrained than they were in 1914. And the world is better off for it — better off for having fewer delusions about the brutal and often inhuman character of war. 

SEE ALSO: The US Navy Tweeted An Intense Holiday Card

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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was elected largely on the premise that he's a moderate. But his 2015 budget proposal suggests that he's more interested in preserving the repressive regime than moving the country toward the middle.

Emanuele Ottolenghi and Saeed Ghasseminejad, both fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, write in the Wall Street Journal that while Rouhani did soften sanctions on Iran and help lead the country on a path out of recession, his 2015 budget is great for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), intelligence branches, and clerical courts that serve the repressive regime of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei.

There's some increased healthcare spending built into the budget to help appease middle- and lower-class Iranians, but the budget also includes an increase in government tax revenue and defense spending and a substantial reduction in bread subsidies.

"Rouhanomics," therefore, "isn’t a recipe for economic growth but for balancing middle-class discontent," according to the op-ed.

Ottolenghy and Ghasseminejad write:

Not only is Rouhanomics going to inflict economic pain on the very constituency that swept the new president to power, but it will also empower the regime apparatus tasked with taming the inevitable discontent of Mr. Rouhani’s constituents. ... 

The bottom line is that Mr. Rouhani’s budget appears aimed at streamlining public spending without cutting off welfare completely, but at the same time strengthening the institutions tasked with internal repression and external adventurism.

This increase in defense spending comes at a time when oil revenues — which are estimated to account for about a third of the public budget — are dropping significantly.

Meanwhile, activists say the number of executions and political prisoners hasn't changed much during Rouhani's tenure, and the press is still heavily restricted.

"After a year in office, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has achieved a steady thaw in relations with the West but failed so far to deliver on campaign promises of more freedom at home," Babak Dehghanpisheh of Reuters reported in September.

Hardline Iranians are still restricting political and social freedoms. For example, earlier this year, several young Iranians got suspended sentences of six to 12 months in jail and 91 whip lashes for making a music video for Pharrell Williams' "Happy" that showed women without hijabs dancing with men, according to Reuters.

Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University, told Reuters in September that Rouhani doesn't consider internal human rights issues to be a high priority right now and is instead focusing on diplomatic relations with the West — one area where he has made tangible progress.

The US greatly upgraded its relations with Iran last year. A phone call between Rouhani and President Barack Obama represented the first time US and Iranian leaders had spoken since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Obama and Rouhani discussed Iran's nuclear program.

Iran and Western nations haven't reached a deal yet on Iran's nuclear program. The talks have been extended into next year.

Meanwhile, the foreign arm of the IRGC has been running the Assad regime's campaign against secular and Islamist rebels in Syria. The Iran-backed government in Damascus continues to rain barrel bombs on civilian areas while Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate routs US-backed rebels, ISIS runs a self-declared caliphate, and Tehran sends fighters from multiple countries to bolster Assad.

The IRGC has also co-opted the government in neighboring Iraq, where Shia militias — some of them backed by Iran — are using the fight against the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) to burn Sunni communities to the ground. Iran is also running Baghdad's air war.

"The United States is not the first player in Iraq. Iran is the first player in Iraq. They think Sunni fighters will be like militias for the Sunnis," Najim al Jabouri, a retired Iraqi army general who is now a fellow at the National Defense University in Washington, told Jonathan Landay of McClatchy last month. "I think Iran is working very hard to stop the United States' strategy in Iraq."

Now that Rouhani's own budget reflects the power of the IRGC, Ottolenghi and Ghasseminejad note that the people "in the West, and inside the country, who had entertained illusions of reform will be disappointed."

SEE ALSO: Iran's Military Mastermind Is 'The Leader Of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, And Yemen'

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Whether North Korea was responsible for the Sony hack or not, the consensus is that North Korea has some of the best hackers in the world.

There have been some reports recently about North Korea’s special cyber warfare unit, known as Bureau 121. The North Korean government has made grooming its “cyber warriors” a top priority for decades, and has given first class treatment to its hackers.

Jang Se-yul, a North Korean defector who now leads an organization called North Korea People’s Liberation Front in Seoul, could have been one of them. 

Before defecting to South Korea in 2007, Jang went to Mirim University, the country’s top engineering college, which is now called the University of Automation. Although he wasn’t a hacker — his major was War Game Strategy, focused on cyber warfare simulations — Jang took classes with the hackers that are now in Bureau 121. After graduation, Jang worked at North Korea’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance, the intelligence agency that Bureau 121 is a part of. He says he still keeps in touch with some of those hackers.

Business Insider had a chance to speak with Jang and hear more about the inner workings of North Korea’s elite hacking force. Here’s what he told us:

How they’re trained: Mirim University produces most of the hackers that get placed in Bureau 121. It’s a highly competitive program, with each class accepting only about 100 students out of 5,000 applicants. They take six 90-minute classes every day, learning different coding languages and operating systems, from C to Linux. Jang says a lot of time was spent dissecting Microsoft programs, like the Windows operating system, and how to attack the overall computer IT systems of enemy countries like the US or South Korea. 

But the core principle is to develop its own hacking programs and computer viruses without having to rely on programs already built in the outside world. Jang says he believes North Korean hackers are as good as the top programmers at Google or CIA, if not already better. “Especially in terms of coding, I’m confident they’re better because they’ve invested in it for so long,” he says.

What it’s like to work for Bureau 121: They’re all very sophisticated professional hackers, with almost nine years of intense training by the time they get hired. They’re split into different focus groups based on countries to attack, like the US, South Korea, and Japan. Once they’re placed in their respective groups, they spend nearly two years traveling to their assigned country, learning the language and culture. The ability to travel outside of North Korea and make US dollars is part of the reason so many North Koreans want this job. Jang estimates there are about 1,800 cyber warriors in Bureau 121.

Their living conditions are much better than most North Koreans': they receive high salaries, a free apartment over 2,000 sq ft in downtown Pyongyang, and their family can move to Pyongyang as well, which is a big privilege. They’re among the top 1% who are happy with their lives in North Korea. In fact, with free access to the internet, these hackers are all aware of what’s going on in the outside world and how reclusive their country is — but they still won’t leave their country. “No matter how hard you try to convince them, they won’t leave — even if you offered them a job at the Blue House (the official residence of the South Korean president),” Jang says.

The ultimate goal: North Korea realizes they have no chance fighting their enemies in conventional warfare. But in cyber space, they can create chaos with relatively few resources. It’s why the North Korean government has spent so much effort in this area since the 1980s. They call it the “Secret War.” Jang says the ultimate goal is to attack the central IT infrastructure of enemy countries, primarily the government, and steal as much information as possible while also causing social pandemonium. 

According to Jang, the North Korean hackers say attacking South Korean government servers is like “swimming while touching the ground.” Although he wouldn’t be able to say for sure how advanced their skills are, Jang says the hackers could probably “easily” crack into company servers, too.

He also said he’s “absolutely sure” North Korea is behind the Sony hacks. The fact that people are still skeptical of North Korea’s involvement is the very reason North Korea is so focused on cyber attacks: they can cause massive confusion without being definitively fingered.

The bigger problem is this is only going to get worse. “The US is definitely not in a safety zone. North Korea’s prepared for this for over 20 years. The U.S. shouldn’t take them lightly,” he said.

NOW WATCH: 11 Mind-Blowing Facts About North Korea

SEE ALSO: Stop Saying North Korea Didn't Hack Sony

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US Central Command released a statement on Wednesday afternoon disputing a claim made by the jihadist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL) that they shot down a Jordanian F-16 aircraft earlier in the day. 

"Evidence clearly indicates that ISIL did not down the aircraft as the terrorist organization is claiming," the statement said.

Islamic State fighters in the Syrian city of Raqqah released photos showing a man they identified as a captured Jordanian pilot. The Jordanian Armed Forces, which are part of the international coalition fighting ISIS, confirmed one of its warplanes went down on a mission in the area. 

CENTCOM's statement included a quote from General Lloyd J. Austin III, who is overseeing the American military operations against ISIS. Though Austin confirmed a Jordanian pilot was captured by the group, he suggested the F-16 crashed on its own.

"The Jordanians are highly-respected and valued partners and their pilots and crews have performed exceptionally well over the course of this campaign," Austin said. "We strongly condemn the actions of ISIL which has taken captive the downed pilot.  We will support efforts to ensure his safe recovery, and will not tolerate ISIL's attempts to misrepresent or exploit this unfortunate aircraft crash for their own purposes."

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