North Korea took aim at the United States on Thursday for convening a U.N. Security Council meeting, saying the "provocative act" had helped it decide which path to take in deadlocked nuclear talks.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced a year-end deadline in April for the United States to drop its insistence on unilateral denuclearization, warning that Pyongyang could take a "new path" amid the stalled talks. Top U.S. officials, however, have brushed off the deadline as "artificial."
"By holding the meeting, the U.S. did a foolish thing which will boomerang on it, and decisively helped us make a definite decision on what way to choose," a spokesman for the North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.