NORTH KOREA
Soldier shot while fleeing
A North Korean soldier yesterday defected to the South after being shot and wounded by the military, South Korea said. The soldier was found on the south side of the border village of Panmunjom, about 50m south of the military demarcation line, wounded in his shoulder and elbow, a South Korean Ministry of National Defense official said. He defected from a guard post nearby and was being treated in hospital. “The defector was urgently transferred to hospital in a helicopter of the UN Command, and there was no exchange of fire with our side,” the official said. “Since it was an area exposed to the North, we had to crawl toward there to get him out,” they added.
JAPAN
Plant preps fuel removal
Workers at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant have installed a device to remove nuclear fuel from a meltdown-hit reactor, a spokesman said yesterday. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, said it on Sunday started putting a crane on the roof of unit No. 3 to extract 566 rods from its fuel pool. It is to be the first removal of fuel rods from one of the three reactors that melted down when a tsunami struck the plant in March 2011. The firm plans to start removing rods from the fuel pool of unit No. 3 “some time around the middle of the next fiscal year,” 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.
PANAMA
President to visit China
President Juan Carlos Varela is to travel to China to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Friday, the first official visit by a Panamanian leader to the Asian nation coming five months after they established diplomatic relations. The meeting will serve to “establish a new economic, trade, tourist and diplomatic outlook for the country, leading to more than a dozen agreements that will be signed,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. In June, Panama gave Beijing a major victory as it broke formal relations with Taiwan.
INDONESIA
Police attacked with arrows
Indonesian police shot dead two men suspected of burning down a police station complex after they fired at them with bows and arrows, officials said yesterday. All the main buildings at the police headquarters in Dharmasraya regency in West Sumatra were burned to the ground in Sunday’s attack. There were no casualties. “We are investigating links between the fire and the two terrorists who were killed,” national police spokesman Rikwanto said.
HONG KONG
Powder mailed to consulate
Police in hazmat suits yesterday entered the US consulate in Hong Kong after an envelope containing white powder sparked a security alert at the complex. Visa appointments were canceled and members of the public lining up to enter were ordered to leave. Uniformed police officers were also seen donning gas masks outside the building in the busy Central district. The consulate later said the powder was found not to be hazardous. “We can confirm that an envelope containing white powder was opened inside the consulate general today,” a consulate spokesperson said. “The incident has now been resolved. Visa appointments for the rest of the day remain canceled.”
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
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