N. Korea calls Bush 'dictator'

WASHINGTON -- North Korea lashed out at President Bush yesterday for criticisms he made about the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, at a news conference Thursday. Pyongyang asserted that the North Korean nuclear crisis will never be resolved while Bush remains in office.

Bush is ''a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. The statement described Bush as the ''world's dictator" who as president had ''turned the world into a sea of blood."

North Korea declared in February that it had produced nuclear weapons and refused to return to six-nation disarmament talks. Yesterday's statement seems to signal the end of that diplomatic process, heightening the stakes in the impasse. The Bush administration has warned Asian allies in the past week that satellite images suggest that North Korea is preparing its first underground nuclear test.

''We can no longer tolerate and wait for a shift in the [US] policy," the North Korean statement concluded. ''Quite just is the path chosen by us, and we will proceed straight and square along that path."