Obama calls North Korea unproductive, broken and oppressive after visit: Finally, something we can all agree upon

After squinting through binoculars into a nation frozen in time, US President Barack Obama reeled off a contempt-laden and startlingly frank indictment of North Korea.

The Stalinist remnant of the Cold War was, in Obama's eyes, nothing but a nation which cannot make "anything of any use", "doesn't work", and even its vaunted weapons exports were hardly state of the art.

"It is like you are in a time warp," Obama said Sunday, after he toured a rocky border post in the demilitarised buffer zone that has split the Korean peninsular for longer than he has been alive.

"It is like you are looking across 50 years into a country that has missed 40 years or 50 years of progress," Obama marvelled later, after taking a helicopter back to teeming, prosperous Seoul, just 25 miles (40 kilometres) away.

Obama, who is locked in his first showdown with the North's new leader Kim Jong-Un over a planned rocket launch, stood behind a bullet proof screen four inches thick and surveyed rocky hills and wooded slopes in North Korea. Read More