North Korea's New Charm Offensive: Cheerleaders

If you're keeping score at home, you can ratchet your North Korean hostility-o-meter down a notch. Pyongyang has just announced that it will send a cheerleading squad along with its athletes to this year's Asian Games in South Korea for the first time since 2005, the BBC reports. That might sound like a minor gesture, but in a statement North Korea said that its "sincere decision" would "melt the frozen North-South relations with the heat of national reconciliation, while displaying the entire Korean people's will of unification."

The squad will likely consist of "around 100 20-something women who are chosen on the basis of appearance and ideology," a South Korean official tells Yonhap. North Korea has repeatedly called for an end in hostilities, with the latest call coming on June 30, but it has also continued to conduct missile tests, and South Korean leaders have dismissed its overtures as insincere. (More North Korea stories.)