Lilianti Bachtiar may abandon the hotel business completely after the tsunami that smashed into Indonesia’s Java coast recently, badly damaging her 26-room hotel. The killer waves slammed into the back of the Grand Mutiara hotel overlooking the beach at Pangandaran, obliterating its kitchen.
The death toll from a tsunami that hit the southern coast of Indonesia’s main island of Java on Monday has reached 525, according to the country’s national coordinating body for disaster management. Rescue workers dug with bare hands on Wednesday in a grim search for more bodies after a second tsunami to strike Indonesia in as many years.
Rescuers on Tuesday desperately sifted through wreckage for survivors of a tsunami that killed more than 340 people and left scores missing when it slammed into Indonesia’s Java coast. In a harrowing reminder of the 2004 disaster that left 220 000 dead across Asia, walls of water up to 3m high smashed ashore Monday.
East Timor’s capital was returning to normal on Friday after Australian troops took to the streets to restore order and stop bloody clashes between the Timorese military and rebel soldiers. One day after some of the worst violence since independence in 2002 left at least 15 people dead, residents of Dili began leaving their houses.
An eight-year-old Indonesian girl who died last year has been confirmed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the nation’s 24th bird-flu fatality, a health ministry official said on Tuesday. Runizar Rusin, the head of the ministry’s bird-flu command post, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that samples taken from the girl were only recently sent to Hong Kong for testing.
Standing astride a fume-choked footpath in the Indonesian capital, her year-old baby perched on a hip, Dewi bin Suparno signals cars with a surreptitious finger. Suparno is among an increasing number of poor women becoming "car jockeys" — someone who rides in a car so it can meet the quota of three people required to travel at peak times in Jakarta’s so-called fast lanes.
Indonesian police came close on Friday to arresting one of Asia’s most-wanted terror suspects, a police source said, as the hunt for the Bali bombing masterminds intensified. The suicide bombers could prove hard to trace, police said, because they come from a new generation of attackers.
Indonesian police on Monday were hunting the suspects who helped suicide bombers attack the resort of Bali, leaving at least 19 dead and raising fears of more violence from Islamic militants. Authorities said Saturday’s carnage bore the hallmarks of a group linked to al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, that has waged a bloody campaign against Western interests since 1999.
Hundreds of people rallied in a third day of demonstrations across Indonesia on Saturday to protest a government decision to more than double fuel prices to keep an economic crisis at bay. Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets in more than 10 cities in the islands of Java, Lombok and Sulawesi on Saturday.
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/ 21 September 2005
For many poor residents of Indonesia’s densely populated capital, Jakarta, having chicken on the dinner table is a luxury that seldom comes. Now many are forcing themselves to decline the rare treat of fried or curried chicken amid a widening bird-flu outbreak and lack of public information about the virus.