Foreign medical teams reached further into Indonesia’s disaster zone yesterday, treating victims of last week’s massive earthquake but also dealing with crowds wanting help for other illnesses.
Like most of Indonesia, West Sumatra had no functioning health system even before the quake and an influx of international aid has prompted all sorts of people to seek help.
Large parts of the provincial capital of Padang and villages in nearby mountains were flattened in the Sept. 30 quake or buried by landslides. The official death toll stood yesterday at 704 but could reach into the thousands. Around 180,000 buildings — half of them homes — were severely damaged or flattened, Indonesia’s Disaster Management Agency said.
Many villages were swept away by landslides in the remote hilly terrain to Padang’s north. Roads were severed or so badly damaged that they are only passable on foot or motorbike, prompting some survivors to complain that aid was too slow in coming.
Aid workers from at least 20 countries are descending on West Sumatra, including the largest contingent of US military since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed around 130,000 people in nearby Aceh Province.
“We have treated nearly 400 people in the past four days,” said Yoshi Kazu Yamada, the deputy of a Japanese medical team in Padang Pariaman district, where about 100 people were lining up outside tents waiting for treatment.
“At first it was flesh wounds, but now it is more people seeking help for chronic conditions like diabetes,” he said. “These problems were not caused by the quake but they need care. Our facilities are free so people are coming from all around the region — people who would not have gone to see a doctor before.”
Efforts have shifted the search for survivors to providing relief to cut off villages and those left homeless — many of them huddling in makeshift shelters and cook meager meals of rice and noodles over open fires or eat vegetables from their fields.
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the