World Notes SPORT

The Russians are coming. That was the word from Moscow last week as the Soviet Union confirmed that it will send some 520 athletes to the Seoul Summer Olympics in September. The announcement meant that U.S. and Soviet athletes will meet in Summer Olympic competition for the first time since 1976. Two nations that will not be there, though, are North Korea, which pulled out of the Games after its demand to be host for half the events was denied, and Cuba.

North Korea's anger over the games was dramatically underscored last week when South Korean officials formally charged their Communist neighbor with blowing up a Korean Air Lines jetliner in November "with the aim of discouraging foreign countries from participating in the Seoul Olympics." KAL Flight 858, with 115 people aboard, vanished off the Burmese coast; wreckage was later found floating in the Andaman Sea.

Before a national television audience, Kim Hyon Hui, 26, a North Korean agent, tearfully described how she had placed a bomb disguised as a radio on the Baghdad-Seoul flight. The timer was set to go off several hours after she and her partner, Kim Sung Il, 69, disembarked in Abu Dhabi. The pair swallowed cyanide capsules when they were arrested shortly after the jetliner vanished. Kim Sung Il died, but Kim Hyon Hui recovered and was taken to Seoul, where she will soon stand trial.