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Korean Peninsular North Korea to send art troupe to South's winter olympics

NORTH KOREA will send a 140-member art troupe to the Winter Olympics in South Korea and may even field a joint ice hockey team, the two sides of the divided peninsula agreed yesterday.

The two Koreas met for the second time in a week yesterday to try to hammer out details for the North’s participation in next month’s Games.

North Korea said the art troupe will comprise 80 orchestra members and 60 members who sing and dance. The North Koreans will perform twice, once in Seoul and then in the city of Gangneung, where some of the Olympic competitions will be held, according to South Korean delegates who attended the meeting.

Separately, South Korean Sports Ministry spokesman Hwang Seong Un said that the two Koreas have agreed in principle to field a joint women’s ice hockey team.

It would be the Koreas’ first unified Olympic team ever but is subject to International Olympic Committee approval.

The two sides agreed to meet again tomorrow for working-level talks before an IOC meeting on Saturday to present the proposal.

Pyongyang agreed last week to send an Olympic delegation and hold military talks aimed at reducing frontline animosities in its first formal talks with South Korea in about two years.

The North hinted on Sunday that it could cancel its plans to send an Olympic delegation after Seoul’s “sordid acts” — President Moon Jae In’s decision to credit Donald Trump with getting the North to sit down.

“They should know that [the] train and bus carrying our delegation to the Olympics are still in Pyongyang,” the Korean Central News Agency said in an uncharacteristically mild threat.

It also accused Seoul of letting Washington deploy strategic assets like an aircraft carrier near the Korean Peninsula during the Olympics. The US claims that the extra muscle is down to routine training and scheduled upgrades.

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