Box Office: North Korea is directly blaming President Obama for the release of the movie The Interview. A statement from North Korea’s National Defense Commission says, “U.S. President Obama is the chief culprit who forced the Sony Pictures Entertainment to ‘indiscriminately distribute’ the movie and took the lead in appeasing and blackmailing cinema houses and theatres in the U.S. mainland to distribute the movie.”

You can’t make this stuff up. The statement also says, “Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest.”

The movie is a comedy about two journalists hired by the CIA to assassinate the ridiculous real-life dictator Kim Jong-un. In the North Korean statement that could have been a line from the movie, the government said, “If the U.S. persists in American-style arrogant, high-handed and gangster-like arbitrary practices despite the repeated warnings of the DPRK, the U.S. should bear in mind that its failed political affairs will face inescapable deadly blows.”

North Korea is also blaming the US for its recent Internet outage, and they might not be wrong.

World: Ukraine and eastern rebels traded prisoners yesterday; 146 soldiers for 222 rebels. A the same time Ukraine put the squeeze on Russian-annexed Crimea, closing bus and rail links to the Crimean peninsula. And the US credit card companies Visa and MasterCard announced they will no longer support bankcards issued in Crimea, putting the crimp on shopping and travel for Crimeans.

>More than 100,000 Malaysians have been forced from their homes by coastal flooding brought on by heavy rains.

> Pakistan claims that it has killed the mastermind behind the Taliban attack on the Army Public School that left 132 children dead.

Nation: The funeral for Off. Rafael Ramos, one of the two NYC cops assassinated a week ago, is being held today in Queens, NY. Despite a rift with his police force and being disinvited from police funerals, Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to speak. The funeral will be attended by thousands of uniformed officers from New York and around the country.

Car and Driver: Tesla is introducing a new electric roadster that is designed to get 2/3 more mileage than the current model, up to 400 miles on a charge. The company is improving its batteries.

Social Notes: Actor/directorClint Eastwood is now officially divorced from his wife of 18 years, Dina Marie. Director Tim Burton and actress wife Helena Bonham Carter have split after 13 years … we think it’s because she finally realized his movies are disturbing. Michael Sam, the NFL’s first openly gay draftee, says there are plenty of other gay players in the league and some of them called him to say they were grateful for being open.

Get Out: Egypt has banned the latest Hollywood retelling of Exodus because of purported historical inaccuracies. Egypt objects to the notion that Jews built the pyramids and they say it was an earthquake, not a miracle, that parted the Red Sea for Moses and his followers. The Egyptians appear to have no objection to Moses being played by Christian Bale.

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