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North Korea blames US for internet shutdown North Korea calls Obama a 'monkey' as it blames US for internet shutdown
(about 7 hours later)
North Korea accused the US on Saturday of being responsible for internet outages it has experienced in recent days amid a confrontation between them over the hacking of the film studio Sony Pictures. 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.
North Korea’s main internet sites experienced intermittent disruptions early in the week for reasons that US tech companies said could range from technological glitches to a hacking attack. There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday.
“The United States, with its large physical size and oblivious to the shame of playing hide and seek as children with runny noses would, has begun disrupting the internet operations of the main media outlets of our republic,” North Korea’s national defence commission said in a statement. 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.
The commission said Barack Obama was behind the release of Sony’s film The Interview, a comedy about the fictional assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. The commission racially abused the president, calling him a “monkey inhabiting a tropical forest”. 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.
In comments carried by North Korea’s official KCNA news agency, a spokesman for the commission rejected an accusation by the US FBI that North Korea was behind the cyber attack on Sony Pictures and demanded the US produce the evidence for its accusation. “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.
“Obama had better thrust himself to cleaning up all the evil doings that the US has committed out of its hostile policy against [North Korea] if he seeks peace on US soil. Then all will be well,” he said. 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”.
North Korea experienced internet problems last weekend and a complete outage of nearly nine hours before links were largely restored on Tuesday. 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.
US officials said Washington was not involved. 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”.
Following the hacking attack on Sony, the studio cancelled the release of The Interview. DPRK refers to the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
After criticism from Obama that it was caving into pressure from North Korea, Sony reversed its decision and decided on a limited release. The commission said the movie was the result of a hostile US policy toward North Korea, and threatened the US with unspecified consequences.
The film took in more than $1m in a Christmas Day release in 331 mostly independent theatres after large movie theatre chains refused to screen the comedy following threats of violence from hackers. 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.