NORTH KOREA ACCEPTS SOUTH OFFER OF TALKS NEXT WEEK

SEOUL: Nuclear-armed North Korea on Friday accepted the South’s offer of talks next week, hours after Seoul and Washington agreed to defer joint military exercises which always infuriate Pyongyang until after the Winter Olympics.

The meeting, the first since December 2015, will take place in Panmunjom, the truce village in the fortified Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula.

Tensions have been high after the North carried out multiple missile launches in 2017, including a number of ICBMS, and its sixth atomic test, by far its most powerful to date.

The tentative rapprochement comes after the North’s leader Kim Jong-un warned in his New Year speech that he had a nuclear button on his desk, but at the same time offered Seoul an olive branch, saying Pyongyang could send a team to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South.

Seoul responded with an offer of talks between the two, and earlier this week the hotline between them was restored after being suspended for almost two years.

Late Thursday, the South’s President Moon Jae-in and his US counterpart Donald Trump agreed to delay the giant Foal Eagle and Key Resolve joint military drills until after the Winter Olympics, which begin in Pyeongchang on February 9.

That announcement came hours after Trump said highlevel talks between North and South would be “a good thing”.

A unification ministry official told AFP that the North faxed a message to Seoul accepting the proposal for talks on Tuesday.

A spokesman told journalists that the agenda would include the Pyeongchang Olympics “and the issue of improving inter-korean relations”.