UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Vietnam's U.N. ambassador urged China on Tuesday to withdraw its oil rig and more than 100 ships from the South China Sea to create "an environment" for negotiations on the disputed waters.

But Ambassador Le Hoai Trung said in an interview with The Associated Press that Beijing refuses to engage in dialogue and insists there is no dispute, claiming the area around the rig belongs to China.

The escalation in tensions is the most serious in years between Vietnam and its massive northern neighbor, which claims nearly all of the South China Sea.

China sent the rig into the disputed waters on May 1, provoking a confrontation with Vietnamese ships, complaints from Hanoi and street protests that turned into bloody anti-Chinese riots. Hundreds of factories were damaged, and China said four of its citizens were "brutally killed" and over 300 injured.

Trung said "some extreme elements" provoked by China's deployment of the rig undertook actions which the government "very much regrets." He said many suspects have been arrested and prosecuted, and the government has taken measures to prevent a repetition of the violence.

Both Vietnam and China have taken the dispute over the rig to the United Nations, circulating rival documents among the U.N. General Assembly's 193 member states. Vietnam has said it is considering legal action against China in an international court.

China has accused Vietnam of "illegally and forcefully" disrupting the rig's operation by sending armed ships and ramming Chinese vessels.

The oil platform is located about 32 kilometers (20 miles) from the China-controlled Paracel Islands, which Vietnam claims, and 278 kilometers (173 miles) from the coast of Vietnam.

Trung said Vietnam has "the legal basis and historical evidence to affirm our sovereign rights over the area" where the rig is deployed, which the country says is part of its exclusive economic zone and continental shelf.

The ambassador said China's refusal to discuss the dispute is provocative and raises "serious concerns."

"We don't want to be provocative with this issue," he said. "We want to have negotiations, to have dialogue, or any other means of peaceful settlement of the dispute."

He added, "Up until now we exercise our restraint, but of course we always, like any other country, reserve the right of self-defense."

Trung stressed, however, that after decades of war the Vietnamese people want peace "and friendly relations with China."

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Two Men Use Girl As Human Shield — Until Her Father Guns Them Down

A St. Louis couple is likely thankful to have guns in their home after they were forced to use them to defend their daughter against two men Monday night.

The men, one of whom had an extensive rap sheet, confronted the couples’ 17 year-old daughter after she stepped outside of the house to go to her car, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Cortez McClinton, 33, and Terrell Johnson, 31, held a gun to the girl’s head and used her as a shield as they entered the family home, where a five-year old child was also present.

The girl’s father and mother witnessed the abduction, and both retrieved their guns. When McClinton and Johnson entered, the father fired several shots, hitting both men. The girl’s mother fired one shot but missed.

Johnson died at the scene. McClinton was wounded but was able to scramble off. He had his brother take him to the hospital.

In 2010, McClinton was charged with shooting another man. Charges were eventually dropped due to lack of witness participation. He also had drug possession and distribution charges against him.

McClinton is charged with second-degree murder, kidnapping, burglary, and criminal armed action and is being held on $1 million bond.

(h/t The Blaze)

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HANOI/BEIJING (Reuters) - Vietnam said on Wednesday a Chinese oil rig at the centre of an increasingly bitter territorial dispute appeared to be on the move again, as China denied Vietnamese accusations that it had sent warships to the scene.

The rig's deployment triggered anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam last month that killed at least four workers.

Scores of Vietnamese and Chinese ships, including coastguard vessels, have squared off around the rig despite a series of collisions after the platform was towed to the area in early May.

In a statement, Vietnam's Directorate of Fisheries said the rig had shown signs of moving towards the east and southeast.

China had 119 vessels in the rig's operating area, it added, including six naval ships and four circling military aircraft.

However, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed as "completely incorrect" the accusations that China had sent six warships, adding that the rig operations were commercial in nature.

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In this May 7, 2012 file photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, CNOOC 981, the first de …

"Because Vietnam keeps forcefully and illegally carrying out interference, we have sent official Chinese government ships to guarantee security on the scene, but we have not sent military ships," she told a daily news briefing.

The Haiyang Shiyou 981 rig is drilling between the Paracel islands, which China occupies, and the Vietnamese coast. Vietnam has said the rig is in its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone and on its continental shelf.

China says it is operating within its waters.

China claims about 90 percent of the South China Sea, but parts of the potentially energy-rich waters are also subject to claims by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

Hua said Vietnam had sent a large number of armed ships to interfere in the rig's operations, though she would not confirm whether the rig had moved.

Video Shows Vietnam Fishing Vessel Sink After Coll …Play Video

She added that rig operations, which started on May 2, are expected to go on until the middle of August.

"We hope that it can be completed smoothly and safely," she said, accusing Vietnam of having stirred up last month's violence against foreign companies.

"Vietnam's government incited certain domestic lawbreaking elements to smash up and burn foreign companies, including Chinese ones...There has still been no compensation for this," Hua said.

In a separate statement, China's defence ministry accused the United States of stirring up regional tension, especially through joint military exercises and by sending "wrong messages" on territorial disputes.

"This has made regional peace and stability even more chaotic," it said, in comments responding to a Pentagon report last week on China's military spending and ambitions that Beijing has already condemned. [ID:nL1N0ON06M]

The United States was the real threat, it added, pointing to U.S. cyber-warfare and missile defence capabilities and the fact that U.S. defence spending far exceeded China's.

(Reporting by Ho Binh Minh in HANOI, and Ben Blanchard in BEIJING; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

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Vietnam says China is moving disputed oil rig

Hanoi asserts that Beijing's flotilla in the rig's South China Sea region includes 119 ships.
6 naval vessels?

OSLO, Norway (AP) — In early March, a mysterious ship the size of a large passenger ferry left a Romanian wharf, glided through the narrow Bosporus that separates Europe and Asia, and plotted a course toward Scandinavia.

About a month later, at the fenced-in headquarters of Norway's military intelligence service, the country's spy chief disclosed its identity. It was a $250 million spy ship, tentatively named Marjata, that will be equipped with sensors and other technology to snoop on Russia's activities in the Arctic beginning in 2016.

"There is a demand from our political leadership to describe what is going on in this region," Lt. Gen. Kjell Grandhagen said in an interview at the hilltop surveillance base outside Oslo. Of particular interest, he said, are Russia's ambitions to develop oil and gas and shipping opportunities in the Arctic — and the "military aspects in terms of being able to defend that."

As climate change eats away at the sea ice covering the North Pole, Arctic nations are fishing for secrets in East-West spy games echoing Cold War rivalries. The military dimension remains important, but this time there's an economic aspect, too: getting a leg up in the competition for potential oil and gas resources, along with newly accessible shipping lanes and fishing waters.

Even before the Ukraine crisis put a chill on cooperation between Russia and the West in the Arctic— joint military exercises have been suspended and Canada skipped a meeting of an Arctic environmental task force in Moscow in April —Western nations in the region accused Russia and China of launching cyber-attacks and other espionage operations.

In Canada, a naval officer was sentenced a year ago to 20 years in prison for spying for Russia. And in December police arrested a Toronto-based employee of Lloyds Register accused of trying to supply China with sensitive information about Canada's plans to build Arctic patrol ships. The Chinese government called the allegations groundless.

"Canada has been experiencing levels of espionage comparable to the height of the Cold War," the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service's oversight committee said in a report late last year. The intelligence service has been reorganized to put more focus on Canada's northern perimeter.

The Arctic — surrounded by the U.S., Canada, the Nordic countries and Russia — was a fault line during the Cold War as NATO and Soviet submarines spied on each other beneath the ice cap. After a lull following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the Arctic is regaining its strategic importance as warming makes it more accessible. Summer sea ice reached a record low in 2012 and scientific projections suggest it could disappear completely this century.

Shipping is already growing, albeit from low levels, in the Northern Sea Route north of Russia. The melt is also opening a new energy frontier — the Arctic is believed to hold an estimated 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its untapped gas.

The most accessible resources are within national boundaries and are undisputed. Security analysts say the risk of conflict lies further ahead, if and when the ice melts enough to uncover resources in areas where ownership is unclear. The U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia are expected to have overlapping claims.

Critics say the U.S. is lagging behind in the race. A recent climate change report by a panel of retired generals found that despite a slew of planning documents, the U.S. has limited capabilities to operate in the Arctic. It said the Coast Guard has only one fully ready icebreaker and the U.S. Navy has few ice-hardened vessels that can operate in the Arctic, other than nuclear submarines.

"The geopolitical situation is ever more nuanced and complex. The risk of maritime events, or even unpredictable flashpoints, endemic to national security is growing," retired Admiral Frank Bowman warned in the report.

In April, the first oil supplies were unloaded from an ice-resistant platform in Russia's Pechora Sea, a development that President Vladimir Putin described as "our first step in developing the Arctic sea shelf."

Even amid the current focus on Ukraine, Putin stressed at a national security meeting that Russia needs "to maintain Russia's influence in the region and maybe, in some areas, to be ahead of our partners."

In 2007 Russia resumed long-range strategic bomber flights over the Arctic and planted a Russian flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole. More recently, it asserted control over the Northern Sea Route with naval deployments and by reopening a military base on the New Siberian Islands.

Meanwhile, Russia has been accused of using clandestine means to glean secrets about the Arctic plans and activities of its Western "partners":

—In Denmark, political science professor Timo Kivimaki two years ago lost his job at the University of Copenhagen and served 2½ months under house arrest for violating Danish espionage laws. The case is classified but in a rare interview, Kivimaki told The Associated Press he was arrested on his way to a meeting with a Russian diplomat, carrying a briefcase with public documents about Danish experts studying Arctic policy. Kivimaki said he wanted to foster peaceful relations between Arctic stakeholders and denied his activities had anything to do with espionage. Denmark's domestic intelligence service, PET, declined to comment on the case.

—In Norway, security officials say the country's Arctic plans and know-how, including cutting-edge technology for offshore drilling in harsh weather conditions, is attracting unwanted attention from foreign spies. Without mentioning the nations involved, Norway's counter-espionage chief Eirik Haugland said spies have tried to identify critical points in Norway's Arctic infrastructure "just in case" of a future conflict.

Haugland said a foreign agent traveled to northern Norway a few years ago to map the landing point of an underwater communications link with Svalbard, a strategic archipelago halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. "If you sabotage this cable, people on Svalbard are quite blind. But also we (on the mainland) are quite blind about what's going on in Svalbard," Haugland said.

Documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have prompted Norway to be more open about the fact that spying goes the other way, too.

An NSA document, dated April 17, 2013, and cited by Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet in December, said the Norwegian Intelligence Service had helped the NSA with access to "Russian targets in the Kola Peninsula" — home to Russia's Northern Fleet — as well as reports on Russian energy policy.

The NSA wanted to deepen its intelligence exchange with its NATO ally "on Russian political, natural resources and energy issues," Dagbladet quoted the document as saying.

Grandhagen, the Norwegian intelligence chief, declined to comment but said it's no secret that Norway cooperates on intelligence matters with the U.S.

"You give something and you get something back in other areas. And we give information in areas where we have a good competence and good access," Grandhagen said. Asked what that might be, he said: "I think our understanding of our neighborhood is an area where we are strong."

Grandhagen said Russia also is modernizing its capabilities to collect intelligence, including in cyberspace. He declined to comment on Russian media reports that Moscow this year will reopen a Cold War-era military base in Alakurtti, near the land border with Finland, and staff it with surveillance experts to monitor NATO's activities in the Arctic.

"What I can say is we're aware that Russia has a significant intelligence apparatus including various means to monitor activity on our side," Grandhagen said.

Russia's Foreign Ministry and the SVR foreign intelligence service didn't answer AP requests for comment.

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Associated Press reporters Matti Huuhtanen in Helsinki, Jim Heintz in Moscow and Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.

Quiet return of Cold War-style spy games

A $250 million Norwegian spy ship is being dispatched to snoop on Russia's activities in the Arctic.
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