Negative Blogs

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia’s most volatile volcano spewed clouds of ash high into the sky Wednesday, forcing some international airlines to again cancel flights and U.S. President Barack Obama to cut short his visit.

The official death toll, meanwhile, climbed by more than 40 to 191.

Disaster officials said earlier figures had not included people who died of respiratory problems, heart attacks and other illnesses linked to the fiery mountain.

Mount Merapi, located in the heart of Java island, roared back to life two weeks ago, shooting searing clouds of gray soot and debris up to six kilometres into the air almost daily, with lava and rock cascading down its slopes.

More than 350,000 people have been evacuated to cramped emergency shelters.

Obama sliced several hours off his whirlwind 24-hour tour to Indonesia over concerns about the volcanic ash, which has been carried by westerly winds toward the capital, Jakarta. He flew to South Korea for the Group of 20 summit.

Safety concerns also prompted several international carriers to again cancel flights into and out of Jakarta, 450 kilometres from Merapi, said Syaiful Bahri, who oversees operations at the airport.

Among them were Cathay Pacific, Value Air and Qantas.

Merapi has erupted many times in the last century, killing more than 1,400. On Friday, it experienced its most explosive blast in more than a century. At least one yet-to-be evacuated village was incinerated, setting on fire houses, trees and fleeing residents.

Muhammad Anshori, a disaster official, said Wednesday the official death toll since the first eruption on Oct. 26 had climbed to 191 — up from 153 earlier in the day.

Another 600 have been hospitalized, some with burns covering 95 percent of their body.

More than 340,000 people living along its slopes and villages near the base have been evacuated, he said. They are now living in more than 80 government camps. Many complain about poor sanitation, saying the toilets and water are filthy.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 235 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanoes because it sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped string of faults that lines the Pacific Ocean.

By ctv.ca

Indonesian soldiers search for victims of Mount Merapi eruption in Cangkringan, Indonesia, Wednesday, Nov 10, 2010. (AP Photo)

Jakarta, Indonesia (CNN) — A passenger plane crashed into a shallow waterway and broke in two after overshooting the runway in a remote area of Indonesia’s eastern Papua province on Tuesday, injuring 78 people on board.

Bambang Ervan, a spokesman for Indonesia’s Transportation Ministry, said investigators to the airport in the coastal town of Manokwari where the Merpati Nusantara Airlines Boeing 737-300 had been attempting to land.

There were reports that bad weather may have been a factor.

The injured, many of whom suffered fractures, were taken to hospitals in the area. In all, the plane was carrying 103 passengers, including three children and three infants.

Ervan said the aircraft bounced on the runway during landing, skidded and plunged into a nearby canal.

Merpati, a cash-strapped state-owned airline which is in the process of upgrading its aging fleet, flies many of the more remote routes across Indonesia.

Last year Merpati suffered two plane crashes in Papua. In July, a Merpati flight lost its front wheels as it took of from the town of Biak. A month later, another flight — a Twin Otter aircraft — crashed, killing 16 people on board.

Air accidents are not infrequent in Papua, a mountainous area in the easternmost part of Indonesia. Two cargo planes and several smaller aircraft also crashed in the province last year.

Indonesia has made efforts in recent years to improve its safety record. Last year the European Union’s Safety Commission lifted a ban on four Indonesian carriers.

In Hong Kong, Tuesday, a Cathy Pacific flight from Surabaya in Indonesia made an emergency landing injuring eight people.

Flight 780 from Surabaya, Indonesia, was carrying 309 passengers and 13 crew members, Cathay Pacific CEO Tony Tyler said at a news conference.

Passengers and crew deplaned through the Airbus 330’s evacuation slides. The injured were taken to the territory’s Princess Margaret Hospital.

Tyler said a full investigation will follow but engine trouble may have played a part in the incident.

The north runway at the Hong Kong International Airport was closed for almost three hours after the emergency landing.

Soldiers and police examine a Merpati Airline 737 after it skidded off the runway on landing in Manokwari, Indonesia, Tuesday.

A major earthquake has shaken Indonesia’s northwest island of Sumatra, prompting a brief tsunami warning and sending residents rushing for higher ground.

The U.S. Geological Survey says a 7.7 magnitude earthquake occurred at sea about 215 kilometers northwest of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The quake was felt throughout northern Sumatra and in Malaysia. Local news reports say that patients from some area hospitals were evacuated and that some residents fled to high ground in case of a tsunami. Electricity in some areas was cut off but so far no major damage has been reported.

The Indonesia Meteorology and Geophysics Agency issued a tsunami warning following the quake, but lifted it two hours later.

Susan Potter, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, says because the earthquake originated deep below the surface of the earth, the chances of it producing a major tsunami are low.

“This earthquake occurred at approximately 31 kilometers. To be an extremely shallow earthquake, it would be around 10 kilometers or so,” said Potter.  “An extremely large earthquake above the magnitude eight that was an extremely shallow depth, around a depth of 10 kilometers, would be prime candidate for creating, I am not saying definitely a large tsunami, but perhaps a regional tsunami or a tsunami in general. So the deeper the earthquake occurs, the less likely it is to cause a large scale tsunami.”

Earthquakes are common in this region. Indonesia is located on the Pacific Ocean’s so-called Ring of Fire, where the continental plates meet. A 9.1 magnitude quake off Aceh in December 2004 triggered a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

Stephen Almsteier has been a development worker in Aceh for the last five years. He says he has felt hundreds of earthquakes in this region and that this last one, and the aftershocks that followed, were not that strong.

“Obviously after several years here we’re kind of used to aftershocks. People react in a different way,” said Almsteier.  “Once I realized that the aftershock was over I didn’t leave my room, but obviously enough people here are very traumatized and some people did leave their houses and rooms in the center of town.”

The U.S. Geological Survey says earthquakes of magnitude 7 and above occur on average 17 times a year.

Residents flee their homes after an earthquake in Singkil, Aceh province on Sumatra island, Indonesia

There is no such thing as a dull decade. The arc of history is long—to maul a line by Dr. Martin Luther King—and it bends toward stuff happening. Even the 1970s, generally regarded as the ugly stepdecade of the 20th century, played host to a White House scandal that sprawled on for months, metastasizing into the only presidential resignation in American history. Beat that, 1980s. (OK, no sweat: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union …) Still, there are decades when a few earthquakes shuffle the terrain and jostle the nerves—and then there are decades when the world splits open to the boiling core and remakes itself.

Maybe after a generation or two have passed, the events of the 21st century’s first 10 years will recede in significance. With time, perhaps 9/11 will go back to being just another day in September. It sure seems unlikely from here. Indeed, the 10-year period beginning in 2000 has been marked by a string of colossal events that, in any other decade, would have been the undisputed story of their time. It has been a dazing and bedazzling era, almost biblical in its bookending events: the televised tragedy of 9/11 and the election of America’s first black president—a man whose name meant nothing to anyone outside of politics until just a few years before his ascension to the most powerful office in the world. Just think: Hurricane Katrina—a catastrophe so vast it nearly wiped off the map an entire American city—rates a distant, even debatable, third among this decade’s biggest headlines. The Boston Red Sox, trailed around by the Curse of Babe Ruth since 1919, finally won the World Series—twice!—but they, too, must get in line behind two ongoing wars, a global financial collapse, a cataclysmic tsunami, torture, Bernie Madoff, and on and on.

The one thing this decade hasn’t had, oddly, is a name. We could never seem to agree on one. Is it the Aughties? The Double-Zeroes? The Oh-Ohs? The 2K’s? The Zeds? It shouldn’t matter, except that it’s hard to wrap your arms around something when you don’t even know what to call it. “The ‘50s,” “the ‘60s”—for Americans, the terms conjure a specific, albeit oversimplified, portrait of those eras in America. But perhaps it’s fitting that this decade should remain stubbornly absent a name. It’s been too big, too vast, too cataclysmic, too transformative for just one.

And in any case, a decade is just an empty unit of time, arbitrarily walling off of events that exist both within and beyond them. They are mostly useful as a means to an end: when we get to the close of one decade, we use it as an excuse to indulge in two beloved pastimes, looking backward and making lists. As 2010 draws closer, Newsweek.com will be doing plenty of both. “NEWSWEEK 20/10” will commemorate the end of the decade by unveiling 20 top-10 lists over the next four weeks, each one surveying the past decade from a fresh perspective and featuring guest essays by some of the biggest names of the world, many of whom made the news they’ll be writing about. Additionally, thanks to a first-of-its-kind partnership with Facebook, NEWSWEEK is proud to offer readers the ability to reorder every one of the lists in “Newsweek 20/10.” It’s your chance to play along and tell us what we got wrong.

Along with our package of 20 lists, NEWSWEEK’s leading writers—a group that includes Fareed Zakaria on global affairs, Howard Fineman on U.S. politics, Daniel Gross on the economy, Sharon Begley on science, and Daniel Lyons on technology—will take turns over the coming days sharing “One Big Thought About the Decade.” We’ll also unveil a giant, decade-spanning slideshow, “120 Pictures, 120 Months,” in which our photography editors have chosen one picture to represent every month of the decade. (OK, technically, there are only 118 pictures because we haven’t gotten through the last two months of the decade yet. Once we get far enough into December, we promise to add in the 119th and 120th photographs in our series and complete the journey.) Finally, in the last week of November, we’ll wrap things up with a game of alternative history called “The Gore Decade,” in which a series of writers imagine what the last 10 years would’ve looked like if Al Gore had won the coin-flip election of 2000—essentially, a retrospective of the decade that didn’t happen. Hard money training

It took just a few minutes on Friday morning for Indonesia to be jolted back to the early years of this century - to a time when annual bomb attacks by militant Islamists linked to the group Jemaah Islamiah terrorised the country.

Friday’s bombs seem to bear all the hallmarks of those earlier attacks.

The targets were luxury hotels used by foreigners in the most developed part of the capital, Jakarta. One of the hotels, the Marriott, has even been hit before.

The method too appears to be familiar. Initial reports said the bodies of two suicide bombers had been found at one of the sites.

It feels all too much like the bad old days - the days of 2002 when attacks on the tourist island of Bali killed more than 200 people; or of 2003 when the Marriott suffered its first attack; or 2004 when the Australian embassy was hit; or a year later - again in Bali - when suicide bombers blew themselves up in beachside restaurants.

Jemaah Islamiah (JI), or the radical networks it spawned, have been blamed for every one of those attacks.

And all eyes will once again be on them.

But the militant landscape in Indonesia has changed since those years of violence.