N. Korea calls Obama 'monkey' in hacking row

SEOUL — North Korea called President Barack Obama "a monkey" and blamed the US on yesterday for shutting down its Internet amid the hacking row over the comedy "The Interview."

North Korea has denied involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures but has expressed fury over the comedy depicting an assassination of its leader Kim Jong Un. Sony Pictures initially called off the release citing threats of terror attacks against US movie theaters. Obama criticized Sony's decision, and the movie has opened this week.

On yesterday, the North's powerful National Defense Commission, the country's top governing body led by Kim, said that 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 the official Korean Central News Agency.

It wasn't 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 news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the "shape of a monkey."

The defense commission also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this 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.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on yesterday.

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 a tag." DPRK refers to the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The commission said the movie was the results 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 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The rivals also are locked in an international standoff over the North's nuclear and missile programs and its alleged human rights abuses. The US stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against North Korean aggression.