Eleven dead in Indonesian Papua landslide: officials

JAKARTA – ELEVEN people have been found dead following a landslide at a hospital staff housing complex in eastern Indonesia on Tuesday, bringing to an end the search for bodies, police and officials said.

‘We have recovered all eleven bodies at about 5pm (4pm Singapore time),’ regional police chief Max Donald Aer told AFP, adding that a six-month-old baby was among the dead.

Five people, including the baby’s mother, were saved and were being treated at a hospital intensive care following the slide in the easternmost province of Papua, he said.

A hill behind the housing complex gave way in the early hours of Tuesday after heavy rains hit the provincial capital of Jayapura, although the hospital, which was 50 metres away, was not damaged, he said.

The state-run Antara news agency reported that heavy rains, which began on Monday evening, had caused up to two metres of flooding in some areas of the hilly city, causing massive traffic congestion.

Landslides and flooding are common in Indonesia during the rainy season, which hits a peak from December to February.

Earlier this month more than 110 people were killed on Indonesia’s main island of Java following a series of landslides and flooding. — AFP

Excerpted from Strait Times (AFP).

Well done

On Saturday the 5th of this month, over 16000 kilometers away from Jakarta, Dian and Ingmar (= Bonnie & Pelopor) invited us ( Babes, my wife, and me) to come and watch this movie at their home in Utrecht, The Netherlands. A friend of Dian’s smuggled the DVD into the country just before new year.

So we watched a technically well made, sweet, slightly tragic, even moving, positive story and a lot of (very) beautiful sceneries. And now it seems we have seen an Oscar nominee!

A minor critical note: the moral lessons are too obvious, too much stressed and too conventional to my taste. But, well, let’s say there’s no account for tastes. And we enjoyed it anyhow ( to be honest and exact: I rated it on my favourite movie site 4 out of 6 stars).

colson’s last blog post..That’s odd