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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

Rescue workers used excavators Thursday to pull out victims, some screaming in pain, from the heavy rubble of buildings felled by a powerful earthquake that killed at least 531 people. The death toll was expected to rise.

The brunt of Wednesday’s 7.6-magnitude earthquake, which originated in the sea off Sumatra island, appeared to have been borne by Padang town where 376 people were killed. Four other districts accounted for the remaining deaths.

The region was jolted by another powerful earthquake Thursday morning, causing damage but no reported fatalities.

More than 500 buildings including hotels, schools, hospitals and a mall were destroyed or damaged in Padang. Thousands of people were believed to be trapped in the rubble.

“Oh God, help me! help me!” Friska Yuniwati, a 30-year-old woman, screamed in pain, as she was carried to an ambulance in downtown Padang. She had been pulled out minutes earlier from the rubble of a house, her face covered in bruises and eyes shut.

Padang’s state-run Djamil Hospital was overwhelmed by the influx of victims and families. Dozens of injured people were being treated under tents outside the hospital, which was itself partly damaged.

“Let’s not underestimate (the disaster). Let’s be prepared for the worst. We will do everything we can to help the victims,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said in Jakarta before flying to Padang, a coastal city of 900,000 and capital of West Sumatra province.

A total of 531 people were confirmed dead and 440 were seriously injured, the Social Affairs Ministry’s crisis center said. Thousands were believed trapped, said Rustam Pakaya, head of the Health Ministry’s crisis center.

One focus for emergency workers was a collapsed 4-story concrete building in downtown Padang, where 30 children had been taking classes when the quake struck. Four students were found alive and six bodies were dug from the rubble. Dozens were missing, said Jamil, a volunteer. “It’s getting very difficult now to find more victims,” he said. Hard money training