North Korea blasts Park for her proposals on North

North Korea on Tuesday launched scathing verbal attacks on South Korean President Park Geun-hye as it denounced her recent proposals calling for bolstering exchanges with the communist country. The North's main Rodong Sinmun newspaper called her an eccentric old maid, an idiot and a hen over her comments on North Korea's economic difficulties and its homeless children. Park's comments "are an unpardonable insult" to the North, the newspaper said. The North's verbal attacks came more than a month after the rival Koreas agreed to halt cross-border slander during their first high-level talks in seven years. The North's latest diatribe came four days after Park said her heart ached when she saw recent footage of North Korean homeless children in foreign media. "Children who lost their parents in the midst of economic distress were left neglected out in the cold, struggling from hunger," she said last week during a speech at the Dresden University of Technology in the former East German city of Dresden. She also said Seoul will work with the United Nations to implement a program to provide health care support for pregnant women and infants in North Korea through their first 1,000 days. On average, North Korean children are much shorter than their South Korean neighbors of the same age, due to poor diet, according to aid officials. South Korea has vowed to continue humanitarian assistance to the North regardless of political tensions. The Rodong Sinmun, an official mouthpiece of the North, said Park's comments on pregnant women and infants in North Korea are "disgusting," noting that Park cannot get married. The newspaper also claimed Park's policy on unification with North Korea is designed to hurt the North's ideology and its socialist system. Park has called for inter-Korean exchange and cooperation to recover a sense of common identity as she laid out a road map for how the two rival Koreas should work toward unification. She has made strong pitches for unification in recent months, saying it would be an economic "bonanza" for the two Koreas as well as a blessing for neighboring countries because it will touch off massive investments in North Korea, mainly infrastructure projects. Still, the Rodong Sinmun said Park's unification policy is designed to hurt the North's ideology and its socialist system.