A powerful earthquake shook parts of Indonesia’s main island of Java on Friday, damaging buildings and houses and sending people into the streets, but no casualties were reported.
Officials said there was no danger of a tsunami.
The US Geological Survey said the epicenter of the magnitude 6.6 earthquake was in the Indian Ocean about 88km southwest of Labuan, a coastal town in Banten Province.
Photo: Reuters
Its hypocenter was at a depth of 37km, it said.
Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Director Dwikorita Karnawati said there was no danger of a tsunami, but warned of possible aftershocks.
High-rises in Jakarta swayed for more than 10 seconds and some ordered evacuations, sending streams of people into the streets. Even two-story homes shook strongly in the satellite cities of Tangerang, Bogor and Bekasi.
Earthquakes occur frequently across the sprawling island nation, but it is uncommon for them to be felt in the capital.
“The tremor was horrible ... everything in my room was swinging,” said Laila Anjasari, a Jakarta resident who lives on the 19th floor of an apartment building, “We ran out and down the stairs in panic.”
At least 257 houses and buildings were damaged, mostly in Pandeglang, the closest district to the epicenter, Indonesian National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Abdul Muhari said.
Minor damage was also reported elsewhere, but there were no reports of injuries.
Indonesia is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on major geological faults known as the Pacific “Ring of Fire.”
In January last year, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed at least 105 people and injured nearly 6,500 in West Sulawesi Province.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh Province.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited