A powerful earthquake rattled southern Indonesia yesterday, killing at least 15 people crushed by falling rock or collapsed buildings and sending thousands fleeing outdoors for safety in the middle of the work day.
Hospitals quickly filled with scores of injured people after the magnitude 7.0 quake struck off the southern coast of the main island of Java, where most of Indonesia’s 235 million people live. The death toll was expected to rise.
“The earthquake was shaking everything in my house very strongly for almost a minute,” said Heni Maryani, a resident in the town of Sukabumi. “I grabbed my children and ran out, I saw people were in panic, women were screaming and children were crying.”
Disaster officials said homes and buildings had collapsed in three districts in densely populated West Java. About 30 people were trapped under rocks and dirt in one village, the official Antara news agency reported.
A tsunami warning was issued after the quake struck at 2:55pm, but revoked an hour later.
Muharaham Ardan, a university lecturer in the town of Tasikmalaya, about 115km from the epicenter, said it was the biggest quake he had ever felt.
Priyadi Kardono, a spokesman for the Disaster Management Agency, reported 15 deaths in the districts of Cianjur, Tasikmalaya and Sukabumi in West Java.
Antara reported that 12 families, or about 30 people, were trapped in houses buried by a landslide in Rawa Hideung village. Six bodies had been recovered and the fate of many others was unknown, a resident, Agus Sobandi, said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion