North Korea blasts U.S over release of 'The Interview', calls Obama a monkey

North Korea called President Barack Obama "a monkey" and blamed the U.S. on Saturday 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. After Sony Pictures initially called off the release in a decision
criticized by Obama, the movie has opened this week.

On Saturday, 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.

"If the U.S. is to persistently insist that the hacking attack was made by the DPRK, the U.S.
should produce evidence without fail, though belatedly," the statement publish by KCNA said.

He also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, after
the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday.
According to the North Korea commission's spokesman, "the U.S., a big country, started
disturbing the Internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children
playing a tag."

The commission said the movie was the results of a hostile U.S. policy toward North Korea, and
threatened the U.S. with unspecified
consequences.

North Korea and the U.S. 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 U.S.
stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against North Korean aggression.