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MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia – Searing gas avalanched down an Indonesian volcano with a thunderous roar, torching houses and trees and incinerating villagers as they fled Mount Merapi’s worst eruption in a century. Scores of bodies found Friday raised the death toll to 122.

The injured — with clothes, blankets and even mattresses fused to their skin by the 1,400 degree Fahrenheit (750 degree Celsius) heat — were carried away on stretchers following the first big explosion just before midnight.

All Friday, Merapi shot towering plumes of ash that dusted the windshields of cars 300 miles (480 kilometers) away. Bursts of hot clouds occasionally interrupted aid efforts, with rescuers screaming “Watch out! Hot cloud!”

The intensifying eruptions have baffled scientists who have monitored the mountain for years and left them uncertain what to expect. Dozens of explosions that followed Merapi’s initial blast Oct. 26 had been predicted to ease pressure behind a magma dome.

The danger zone where residents have been ordered to flee has now been expanded to 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the crater.

Friday’s explosion — said by volcanologists to be the biggest since the 1870s — hit hardest in Bronggang, a village nine miles (15 kilometers) from the crater. Soldiers joined the rescue operations, pulling at least 78 bodies from homes and streets blanketed by ash up to one foot (30 centimeters) deep.

Crumpled roofs, charred carcasses of cattle and broken chairs — all layered in white soot — dotted the smoldering landscape.

The volcano, in the heart of densely populated Java island, has erupted scores of times in the past, killing more than 1,500 people in the last century alone. But tens of thousands of people live on its rolling slopes, drawn to soil made fertile by lava and volcanic debris.

“The heat surrounded us and there was white smoke everywhere,” said Niti Raharjo, 47, who was thrown from his motorbike along with his 19-year-old son while trying to flee.

“I saw people running, screaming in the dark, women so scared they fell unconscious,” he said from a hospital where they were both being treated for burns.

“There was an explosion that sounded like it was from a war … and it got worse, the ash and debris raining down.”

The greatest danger posed by Merapi has always been pyroclastic flows — like those that roared down the southern slopes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour).

With bodies found in front of houses and in streets, it appeared that many of the villagers died from the searing gas while trying to escape, said Col. Tjiptono, a deputy police chief.

More than 150 injured people — with burns, respiratory problems, broken bones and cuts — waited to be treated at the tiny Sardjito hospital, where the bodies piled up in the morgue, and two other hospitals.

“We’re totally overwhelmed here!” said Heru Nogroho, a spokesman at Sardjito.

In terms of the amount of volcanic material released — 1,765 million cubic feet (50 million cubic meter), “it was the biggest in at least a century,” Gede Swantika, a state volcanologist, said as plumes of smoke continued to shoot up more than 30,000 feet (10,000 meters).

More than 100,000 people living along Merapi’s fertile slopes have been evacuated to crowded emergency shelters, many by force, in the last week. Some return to their villages during lulls in activity, however, to tend to their livestock.

They were told to stay away Friday. The government also announced an $11 million program to buy the cows on the mountain to keep farmers off its slopes, and to provide compensation for animals lost in the eruptions.

Even scientists from Merapi’s monitoring station were told they had to pack up and move down the mountain. They were scrambling to repair four of their five seismographs destroyed by the heavy soot showers.

Before Friday, the death toll from Merapi stood at 44, with most dying in its first blast on Oct. 26. With the new deaths around Bronggang it climbed to 122, the National Disaster Management Agency said.

In 1994, 60 people were killed by Merapi, while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were torched, leaving up to 1,300 dead.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 235 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanos because it sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped string of faults that lines the Pacific Ocean.

The volcano’s initial blast occurred less than 24 hours after a towering tsunami slammed into the remote Mentawai islands on the western end of the country, sweeping entire villages to sea, killing at least 428 people and severely taxing Indonesia’s relief services.

There, too, thousands of people were displaced, many living in government camps.

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Associated Press writers Irwan Firdaus, Ali Kotarumalos and Niniek Karmini in Jakarta contributed to this report.

Source : Yahoo

A film festival organizer in Belfast may have just stumbled across concrete proof that time traveling is possible: extra scenes from Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 “The Circus” show a woman speaking on a cell phone.

Since word of what the footage may show got out, short clip has gone viral, causing quite a stir with people online, regardless of whether they are Chaplin fans or not.

As NineMSN informs, the footage was discovered by George Clarke on a Charlie Chaplin DVD. It was shot in 1928.

The short clip, which you can also see embedded below, at the end of the article, shows a woman passing in front of the camera – or a figure that looks like a woman, more exactly.

She’s seen holding her hand up to her face as if she’s holding a cell phone in her hand – and she’s clearly talking to someone. She’s also seen smiling as she moves away.

There’s absolutely no doubt that she has something in her hand and that she’s speaking into the device. Plus, there’s no one else there for her to speak to, apart from a man who crosses the same frame seconds before her.

Because Mr. Clarke can come up with no possible reasonable explanation for what the woman is holding, he believes she’s a time traveler – and she’s actually having a conversation on a cell phone.

“Right now the only conclusion I can come to, which sounds absolutely ridiculous I’m sure to some people, but it’s a time traveler. It’s kind of strange, you can’t explain it,” Mr. Clarke says.

However, there might be an explanation for the odd cameo appearance after all. Since the video went viral, it has prompted quite a heated debate.

As expected, many hold the clip to be a fake, with the woman added sometimes later. Others, though, think she may be using a 1920s-era hearing aid, which would have looked very much like one of today’s cell phones.

“The person probably had one of those old hearing aids (that were about the size of a modern Razor cell phone). I believe that the person was simply trying to test it out real quick while walking down the street. They were adjusting it to their ear, then speaking to see if they could hear themselves,” user LelouchXLamperouge says.

See the clip below for yourself and make up your mind afterwards.

Source : http://news.softpedia.com/news/Charlie-Chaplin-s-Time-Traveler-1928-Film-Shows-Woman-with-Cell-Phone-163278.shtml

So what you think? :p

KOMPAS.com- Tak banyak mungkin pemimpin seperti Wali Kota Tangerang Wahidin Halim ini. Dia rela turun langsung menemui warganya, meski harus berbasah-basah nyemplung air yang sedang menggenangi kawasan Ciledug.

Peristiwa ini terjadi Selasa pagi tadi, dan sudah diberitakan pula di media ini. Tanggapan pembaca juga termasuk luar biasa terhadap Pak Wali yang pernah disorot tajam ketika mengegolkan Perda Antipelacuran beberapa tahun lalu. Tercatat berita itu dibaca 14.520 kali dengan komentar yang sempat ditayangkan sampai pukul 20.00 sekitar 40.

Awalnya, Wahidin dan rombongan mengendarai mobil dinas berupa jeep mewah. Akan tetapi sesampainya di lokasi banjir, mobilnya ternyata mogok. Tanpa canggung dia kemudian lepas baju dan turun ke lokasi banjir.

Wahidin yang menggunakan kaos oblong berwarna coklat yang dipadukan dengan jins dan jaket berwarna biru dongker datang bersama Wakil Walikota Arief R Wismansyah dan Kepala Polres Metro Tangerang Kota Komisaris Besar Tavip Yulianto meninjau kesigapan petugas penanganan bencana yang sudah bekerja membantu dan mengevakuasi warga sejak Senin malam kemarin.

Awalnya, Wahidin menggunakan sepatu resmi saat meninjau lokasi banjir. Akan tetapi, setelah ikut mencebur dalam banjir di Jalan KH Hasyim Ashari, Wahidin langsung berjalan dengan tanpa alas kaki. Bahkan, saat naik ke perahu karet di Puri Kartika, Pak Wali tidak menggunakan alas kaki apapun juga.

“Lebih enakan begini,” kata Wahidin kepada Kompas yang mengikuti peninjauan dengan menggunakan perahu karet.

Wahidin juga sesekali memegang dayung dan mendayung perahu karet yang ditumpangi rombongan. (Pingkan Elita Dundu)

source : kompas.com

~(teriring doa bagi Indonesia)~

JAKARTA, Indonesia – A powerful, 7.7-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami that pounded villages on remote islands off westernIndonesia, killing at least 23 people and leaving more than 160 others missing, witnesses and officials said Tuesday.

The fault that ruptured Monday, running the length of the west coast of Sumatra island, also caused the 9.1-magnitude quake that unleashed a monster tsunami around the Indian Ocean in 2004, killing 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

The death toll from the quake late Monday, which struck 13 miles (20 kilometers) beneath the ocean floor, was expected to climb as reports on damage and injuries began trickling in Tuesday.

Mujiharto, who heads the Health Ministry’s crisis center, said a 10-foot (three-meter) -high wave washed away hundreds of houses on Pagai and Silabu, part of the remote and sparsely populated Mentawai island chain.

“We have 200 body bags on the way, just in case,” he said.

Separately on Tuesday, emergency officials were rushing to evacuate several thousand residents from the slopes of the country’s most volatile volcano, Mount Merapi, as scientists warned that pressure building beneath its lava dome could trigger one of the most powerful blasts in years.

Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity due to its location on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire — a series of fault lines stretching from the Western Hemisphere through Japan and Southeast Asia.

Getting to the Mentawais, a popular surfing spot 175 miles (280 kilometers) from the Sumatra coast takes 12 hours and the islands are reachable only by boat.

A group of Australians said they were hanging out on the back deck of their chartered surfing vessel, anchored in a nearby bay, when the temblor hit. It generated a wave that caused them to smash into a neighboring boat, and before they knew it, a fire was ripping through their cabin.

“We threw whatever we could that floated — surfboards, fenders — then we jumped into the water,” Rick Hallet told Australia’s Nine Network. “Fortunately, most of us had something to hold on to … and we just washed in the wetlands, and scrambled up the highest trees that we could possibly find and sat up there for an hour and a half.”

By daytime Tuesday, the toll from the quake and tsunami was rising.

Ade Edward, a disaster management agency official, said 23 bodies were found in coastal villages — mostly on the hardest hit island of Pagai — and another 167 people were missing.

Water in some places reached roof tops, and in Muntei Baru, a village on Silabu, 80 percent of the houses were damaged.

Some 3,000 people were seeking shelter Tuesday in emergency camps, Edward said, and the crews from several ships were still unaccounted for in the Indian Ocean.

The quake also jolted towns along Sumatra’s western coast — including Padang, which last year was hit by a deadly 7.6-magnitude tremor that killed more than 700. Mosques blared tsunami warnings over their loudspeakers.

“Everyone was running out of their houses,” said Sofyan Alawi, adding that the roads leading to surrounding hills were quickly jammed with thousands of cars and motorcycles.

“We kept looking back to see if a wave was coming,” said 28-year-old resident Ade Syahputra.

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Associated Press writer Irwan Firdaus contributed to this report.

source : yahoo.com

~(teriring doa bagi Indonesia)~

Sleman – Semburan awan panas (wedhus gembel) Gunung Merapi membuat warga Kaliurang, Kabupaten Sleman panik. Sirine early warning system (EWS) berbunyi meraung-raung. Sementara hujan abu semakin pekat dan bau belerang semakin menyengat.

Merapi mulai memuntahkan awan panas sekitar pukul 17.02 dan 17.30 WIB, Selasa (26/10/2010). Hingga pukul 18.45 WIB, semburan wedhus gembel masih terjadi.

Debu vulkanik yang menyembur sebelumnya juga telah beterbangan di daerah Kaliurang, sekitar 5 KM dari puncak Merapi. Dengan turunnya wedhus gembel, hujan debu semakin pekat. Bau belerang juga semakin menyengat.

Sejak diketahui wedhus gembel keluar dari puncak Merapi, alat EWS langsung berbunyi. Mendengar bunyi alarm itu, warga pun berebut dan berlari menuju angkutan-angkutan evakuasi. Petugas SAR yang telah siaga di Kaliurang kemudian membagikan masker, karena debu makin pekat dan bau belerang makin menyengat.

Hingga saat ini, proses evakuasi masih terus dilakukan. Sebagian besar warga diungsikan ke posko pengungsian di Desa Hargobinangun, Pakem.

Sementara itu, sebelum wedhus gembel meletup, hujan deras sempat mengguyur Yogyakarta dan Sleman. Saat erupsi terjadi, puncak Merapi juga masih tertutup kabut dan suasana sangat gelap.

source : detik.com

~(teriring doa bagi Indonesia)~