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North Korea calls Obama a 'monkey' as it blames US for internet shutdown
Pyongyang accuses US of responsibility for recent outages
Row over cyber attack on film studio Sony Pictures continues
Hackers can’t stop crowds flocking to see The Interview
Xbox Live and PSN recover from Christmas hack
Associated Press in Seoul
theguardian.com, Saturday 27 December 2014 13.54 GMT
North Korea has compared President Barack Obama to a monkey and blamed the US for shutting down its internet amid the hacking row over the movie The Interview.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday.
The North has denied involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures, but has expressed fury over the comedy, which depicts the assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Sony initially called off the release of the film, citing threats of terror attacks against US cinemas. Obama criticised the decision, and the movie opened this past week.
On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, which is led by Kim and is the country’s top governing body, said Obama was behind the release of The Interview. It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s policy department said in a statement carried by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency.
It is not the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top US and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, the North called US secretary of state John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean president Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s official news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey”.
The defense commission also blamed Washington for intermittent outages of North Korean websites this past week, which happened after the US had promised to respond to the Sony hack. The US government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.
According to the North Korean commission’s spokesman, “the US, a big country, started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing tag”.
DPRK refers to the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The commission said the movie was the result of a hostile US policy toward North Korea, and threatened the US with unspecified consequences.
North Korea and the US remain technically in a state of war because the Korean War, which was fought between 1950 and 1953, ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The rivals also are locked in an international standoff over the North’s nuclear and missile programmes and its alleged human rights abuses.
The US stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against North Korean aggression.
Following the hacking attack, Sony opted for a limited release of The Interview. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
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Pyongyang accuses US of responsibility for recent outages
Row over cyber attack on film studio Sony Pictures continues
Hackers can’t stop crowds flocking to see The Interview
Xbox Live and PSN recover from Christmas hack
Associated Press in Seoul
theguardian.com, Saturday 27 December 2014 13.54 GMT
North Korea has compared President Barack Obama to a monkey and blamed the US for shutting down its internet amid the hacking row over the movie The Interview.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday.
The North has denied involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures, but has expressed fury over the comedy, which depicts the assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Sony initially called off the release of the film, citing threats of terror attacks against US cinemas. Obama criticised the decision, and the movie opened this past week.
On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, which is led by Kim and is the country’s top governing body, said Obama was behind the release of The Interview. It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s policy department said in a statement carried by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency.
It is not the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top US and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, the North called US secretary of state John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean president Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s official news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey”.
The defense commission also blamed Washington for intermittent outages of North Korean websites this past week, which happened after the US had promised to respond to the Sony hack. The US government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.
According to the North Korean commission’s spokesman, “the US, a big country, started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing tag”.
DPRK refers to the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The commission said the movie was the result of a hostile US policy toward North Korea, and threatened the US with unspecified consequences.
North Korea and the US remain technically in a state of war because the Korean War, which was fought between 1950 and 1953, ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The rivals also are locked in an international standoff over the North’s nuclear and missile programmes and its alleged human rights abuses.
The US stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against North Korean aggression.
Following the hacking attack, Sony opted for a limited release of The Interview. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
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