THREATS FROM NORTH KOREA: North Korea calls for unity with South as hockey players begin Olympics training

A delegation of North Korean officials and ice hockey players crossed the DMZ on Thursday for joint Olympics training, as Pyongyang called for all Koreans to seek unification of the two nations.

The group included 12 North Korean players who will form a combined women’s ice hockey team with their southern counterparts at next month’s Winter Olympics in the South Korean mountain resort of Pyeongchang.

The athletes were met in Jincheon with flowers from their South Korean counterparts, as well as head coach Sarah Murray, who previously had called the government’s decision to form a joint team a “tough situation.”

Under an agreement worked out during the first official talks between the two Koreas in two years, the joint team will wear unity jerseys and march under a unified peninsula flag at the Games’ opening ceremony on February 9.

South Korea has prepared “all contingency scenarios” in case North Korea makes any provocative moves during the Olympics, but the games remain an opportunity for “peaceful engagement,” South Korean foreign minister Kang Kyung-wha told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We just need to make the best of it.”

Source: Reuters