Richard Haass: “A debate is under way about how best to respond to North Korea’s cyberattack on Sony, an attack designed to punish the firm for making a movie that humiliated Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Ideas range from a cyberattack to weaken North Korean political and military assets to relisting the country as a state sponsor of terrorism, presumably accompanied by new sanctions.”

“These ideas are fine as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. The serious threat posed by North Korea far transcends cyberspace. Only one approach is commensurate with the challenge: ending North Korea’s existence as an independent entity and reunifying the Korean Peninsula.”

Gawker: “Long before the FBI made it official, North Korean blame for the attack against Sony was taken as a given… But independent, skeptical security experts have been poking holes in this theory for days now. Evidence provided by the FBI last week in an official accusation against the North Korean government was really more of a reference to evidence—all we got were bullet points, most of them rehashing earlier clues. It still doesn’t seem like enough to definitively pin the attacks to North Korea.”

CNBC: North Korea suffering major internet outages

Former Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin warned that Russia will face a “full-blown economic crisis” next year that will cause a series of defaults and the loss of its investment grade credit rating, the Financial Times reports.

Wonk Wire: Russian tax collectors seize cats

“When a retired Chinese general with impeccable Communist Party credentials recently wrote a scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of support, he exposed a roiling debate in China about how to deal with the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un,” the New York Times reports.

“For decades China has stood by North Korea, and though at times the relationship has soured, it has rarely reached such a low point, Chinese analysts say.”

“Kenyan lawmakers on Thursday voted through a tough anti-terror bill amid chaotic scenes in parliament and a brawl between opposition and government MPs,” AFP reports.

“Divisions over the legislation triggered heated exchanges between lawmakers that culminated in a brawl, forcing the vote to be repeatedly delayed on Thursday. It was finally approved to loud boos from opposition MPs, who bombarded Speaker of Parliament Justin Muturi with books and documents.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin said “the country’s economic troubles will pass in no more than two years, and accused the West of seeking to subdue and disarm Russia to gain control over its natural resources,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba after more than a half-century of enmity would leave only North Korea on America’s Cold War blacklist, and only Iran, Sudan and Syria as countries that are regarded by the United States government as pariah states that sponsor terrorism,” the New York Times reports.

“Political historians said the steps announced Wednesday to restore relations with Cuba were akin to events in the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter that led to normalized ties with China in 1979 after three decades of hostility, and events in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton that led to the establishment of relations with Vietnam in 1995, 20 years after the war.”

“American intelligence officials have concluded that the North Korean government was ‘centrally involved’ in the recent attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers, a determination reached just as Sony on Wednesday canceled its release of the comedy, which is based on a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader,” the New York Times reports.

“Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was still debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism campaign… Some within the Obama administration argue that the government of Mr. Kim must be directly confronted, but that raises the question of what consequences the administration would threaten — or how much of its evidence it could make public without revealing details of how the United States was able to penetrate North Korean computer networks to trace the source of the hacking.”