Clinton, North Korea trade insults

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By Nicholas Kralev

PHUKET, Thailand | So much for diplomacy with North Korea.

The Pyongyang government and the Obama administration's chief diplomat Thursday escalated a war of words, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton telling Pyongyang it has "no friends" and North Korea calling her "vulgar" and criticizing her appearance.

Representatives of both nations were at an annual Asian security summit that the countries have used in the past to engineer high-level encounters. This year, the two traded insults and even found themselves competing for the same stage to address the media.

The back-and-forth further diminished hopes that the Obama administration will be able to lure North Korea back to long-stalled nuclear talks.

Mrs. Clinton said Thursday that the Stalinist state "has no friends left" to defend it, pointing to an almost universal reprimand of the North at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

"Unfortunately, the North Korean delegation offered only an insistent refusal to recognize that North Korea has been on the wrong course," Mrs. Clinton told reporters. "In their presentation today, they evinced no willingness to pursue the path of denuclearization, and that was troubling."

She said countries throughout Asia - including North Korean ally China - as well as Europe and Russia made it clear to Pyongyang that it has "no place to go."

Earlier, the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang released a statement personally attacking Mrs. Clinton as a "funny lady" with odd looks.

"Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping," a ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency.

The insults were an apparent response to Mrs. Clinton's characterization of North Korea earlier this week as a "spoiled child" and "unruly teenager" constantly seeking attention.