PNG UPS PRESSURE ON REFUGEES TO LEAVE AUSTRALIAN CAMP

SYDNEY: Papua New Guinea officials deployed police vehicles and buses around a shuttered Australian refugee camp on Monday as a deadline passed for some 400 detainees to move from the controversial center. Hundreds of men have refused to leave the Manus Island camp in an increasingly tense stand- off with authorities since Australia declared the facility closed on October 31 and shut off electricity and water. Refugees said police filled in wells and drilled holes in storage tanks that they had been using to hold drinking water, as part of the effort to force them out on Monday. Inmates sent out photos showing a line of buses and police vehicles outside the camp, built on a former PNG naval base, a day after Immigration Minister Petrus Thomas gave them 24 hours to get out. More than 100 of the refugees have left for three “transition” centers on Manus since it was officially closed. The remaining men, who have been held on Manus for more than four years, insist they should be resettled in third countries and not simply transferred to another detention camp in PNG.

NKOREAN SOLDIER SHOT WHILE DEFECTING TO SKOREA

SEOUL: to South Korea at the truce village of Panmunjom, the South’s military said. The soldier crossed to the South side of the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, the only portion of the border Demilitarized Zone where forces from the two sides come face- to- face, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. “Our military has taken in a North Korean soldier after he crossed from a North Korea post towards our Freedom House,” the statement said, referring to a building on the South side of the village which is bisected by the border. The defector was taken to hospital after being shot by another North Korean soldier, the South’s military said. Details of his condition were not immediately available. Military defections across the heavily fortified DMZ dividing the two Koreas are not uncommon, but they are rare at Panmunjom— a major tourist attraction.

ISRAEL ARRESTS TOP ISLAMIC JIHAD MILITANT AS TENSIONS RISE

JERUSALEM: Israel’s army said on Monday it had arrested a senior Islamic Jihad militant as tensions with the group rose after the army blew up one of its tunnels from Gaza. The army arrested overnight the “senior operative” in Arraba near Jenin in the north of the occupied West Bank, Israel’s military said. A source with Islamic Jihad confirmed that one of its leaders, Tareq Qadaan, was detained as part of an “arrest campaign.” There were no immediate details on whether others were arrested. Tensions have risen between Israel and Islamic Jihad after the army blew up a tunnel that stretched from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory on October 30. Such tunnels have been used in the past to carry out attacks. The operation resulted in the deaths of at least 12 Palestinian militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

FUEL REMOVAL DEVICE INSTALLED AT MELTDOWN- HIT FUKUSHIMA REACTOR

TOKYO: Workers at Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have installed a device to remove nuclear fuel from a meltdown-hit reactor nearly seven years after the crisis was sparked by a tsunami, a spokesman said Monday. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co ( TEPCO), said it started putting a crane on the roof of unit No. 3 on Sunday to extract a total of 566 rods from its fuel pool. It will be the first removal of fuel rods from one of the three reactors that melted down when the tsunami struck the plant in March 2011. TEPCO has already removed fuel rods from unit No. 4 whose reactor core was empty when the tsunami crashed ashore. It plans to start removing rods from the fuel pool of unit No. 3 “sometime around the middle of the next fiscal year” starting in April 2018, TEPCO spokesman Atsushi Sugiyama said. It has yet to start removing any fuel from the reactor cores of the three meltdown-hit units, as the complicated decommissioning process is expected to last for decades.