The North Koreans "have said a lot of things," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where President George W. Bush is enjoying a week-long vacation on his ranch.

McClellan noted that a new series of talks would take place in the coming weeks, adding that the United States hoped to send a "clear message" urging North Korea to stop developing nuclear weapons.

North Korea launched a fresh verbal attack against Bush on Tuesday, calling him a "fascist tyrant" as a South Korean official headed to China in the latest effort toward resolving the nuclear row with Pyongyang.

The communist country's official mouthpiece -- which compared Bush with Hitler on Monday in comments dismissed as inappropriate by the US State Department -- repeated remarks that it did not believe dialogue could defuse the standoff, and North Korean officials opted not to participate in a planning meeting on Monday for next month's scheduled talks in Beijing.

The strongly worded statements were issued in response to Bush's description last week of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il as a tyrant.

The State Department expressed confidence that Pyongyang would attend six-party talks, involving China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the United States, to resolve the nuclear crisis in the Korean Peninsula.

The standoff over the North's quest for nuclear weapons began in October 2002, when Washington accused Pyongyang of operating a secret program based on enriched uranium, in breach of a 1994 accord on freezing its separate plutonium program.

Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program but has restarted its plutonium program.

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