North and South Korea to arena joint ice hockey workforce

North and South Korea own agreed to abolish their first-ever joint Olympics workforce and march collectively below a « unification flag » at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Video games subsequent month.

The step forward on Wednesday follows a 300 and sixty five days of escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula, amid several missile launches and a purported take a look at of a hydrogen bomb by the North.

The two countries will arena a single females’s ice hockey Olympics workforce, South Korea’s Yonhap files agency talked about, quoting a joint assertion by officials from every countries.

Each Koreas own appeared collectively at the openings of previous Olympic Video games, but this could maybe well well be the first joint workforce in one sport.

Yonhap talked about the North will additionally send a 230-member cheering squad and a 30-member taekwondo workforce to the video games, which could grasp blueprint in the South’s Pyeongchang from February 9 to 27.

The North’s Olympic delegation will employ a land path to unsuitable into the South. That can heed the opening of the land border facet freeway for the first time since February 2016, the agency talked about.

North Korea will additionally send a delegation to the Paralympics in Pyeongchang in March. 

‘Astronomical different’

The two countries are peaceable technically at wrestle, due to this of the 1950-fifty three Korean wrestle ended with a truce and no longer a peace treaty.

Earlier on Wednesday, at some level of a assembly with Olympic athletes, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in hailed the North’s participation in the Winter Video games as « a fine different to thaw the South-North Korea relationship that is frozen solid ».

The settlement adopted a third round of inter-Korea talks at the border village of Panmunjom, the first excessive-stage talks between the two Koreas in better than two years.

The measures agreed on by North and South Korea require approval by the World Olympic Committee (IOC); delegates from the two Koreas will meet IOC officials in Switzerland this weekend.