North Korea unleashes racist slurs against Barack Obama

Seoul: After bombarding South Korea`s female president with sexist invectives, North Korea`s state news agency has fired off racist insults against President Barack Obama that US officials condemn as "disgusting."

North Korea is notorious for inflammatory, warlike rhetoric against its rivals South Korea and the US but had rarely used racial slurs in its verbal attacks. Pyongyang`s tone has grown angrier in recent weeks as it threatens to conduct a fourth nuclear test. In a lengthy May 2 dispatch released only in Korean, Pyongyang`s Korean Central News Agency published comments from a factory worker who said Obama has the "shape of a monkey" and made many other crude insults. "It would be better for him to live with other monkeys at a wild animal park in Africa ... And licking bread crumbs thrown by onlookers," worker Kang Hyok at Chollima Steel Complex was quoted as saying. Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, said yesterday that the North Korean dispatch was "offensive and ridiculous and absurd." "I don`t know how many words I can use up here to describe the rhetoric ... It`s disgusting," she told reporters at the Foreign Press Centre in Washington. The North`s rhetoric against Obama and South Korean President Park Geun-hye intensified after they held a summit in Seoul late last month. During his visit, Obama said at a joint news conference with Park that it may be time to consider further sanctions against North Korea, and that the US will not hesitate to use its military might to defend its allies. Recent state media dispatches criticising Park are full of sexist tirades such as "old prostitute coquetting with outside force."