With its latest response in the country's on-going flap with the US, Agence France-Presse reports North Korea called President Barack Obama a "monkey" today. The racial slur comes after a recent double blow to North Korea: the country suffered yet another Internet outage Saturday and Sony officially released The Interview, its fictional Kim Jong-Un assassination film, on Thursday. North Korea has fingered Washington for the outages and insists President Obama encouraged US theaters to re-embrace The Interview.

"Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest," a spokesman for North Korea's National Defence Commission said in a statement published by the country's official KCNA news agency. "If the US persists in American-style arrogant, high-handed, and gangster-like arbitrary practices despite repeated warnings, the US should bear in mind that its failed political affairs will face inescapable deadly blows."

An apparent DDoS attack knocked North Korea off the 'net earlier this week, and it experienced another mass outage Saturday evening. This one even affected North Korea's telecommunication networks, according to Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency (via AFP).

"At Pyongyang time 7:30 pm (1030 GMT) North Korea's Internet and mobile 3G network came to a standstill, and had not returned to normal as of 9:30 pm," Xinhua said. AFP noted Xinhua reporters in the North found the Internet to be "very unstable" throughout the day.

After initially canceling the film's release in light of terrorist threats, Sony's impromptu and small-scale release of The Interview earned $1 million on Christmas according to The New York Times. The film was originally set to open in 2,000 US theaters, but it ultimately played in only 331 nationwide—the NYT noted some were as small as 170 seats. According to the paper, it cost Sony $44 million to make the film and the company spent at least $35 million on marketing when the cancelation drama began. (Note that the earnings only apply to the theatrical release of the film as studios typically don't publicly release online and video-on-demand sales figures.)