Indian Ocean

Mohamed Taki Abdulkarim,62, president of the three-island nation of Comoros, died Thursday, the country's religious leader said Friday. French radio reported that he suffered a heartattack. He was the fourth president of the Comoros islands, in the Indian Ocean.Pub Date: 11/08/98

Status: Day 10, Leg 2Standings:Boat, Nautical miles to finish1. Swedish Match, 1,880.12. Innovation Kvaerner, 2,232.03. Toshiba, 2,384.54. EF Language, 2,561.15. Silk Cut, 2,581.86. Chessie Racing, 2,598.37. EF Education, 2,668.08. Merit Cup, 2,677.59. BrunelSunergy, 2,706.5(as of 00: 2: 25GMT)Boat beat: The French-owned Kerguelen Island, some 8,000 miles from France, has a long history with the Whitbread, having sheltered boats in need of repair. At the Antarctic Convergence, where the warm waters of the Indian Ocean mix with the frigid Antarctic waters, the average temperature is 35 degrees, with the winds, known as the "Screaming Fifties," in excess of 56 mph on 140 days of the year.

Geographers and cartographers label it with different names, but blue-water racers know it as the Southern Ocean, that expanse of chaos and calamity that girdles the globe beneath the five great capes of the Southern Hemisphere.The Track Chart of the World published by the Defense Mapping Agency Hydrographic Center in Washington terms the regions of the Southern Ocean as the South Atlantic, South Pacific and Indian oceans. The fleet in the coming Whitbread Round the World Race will have close encounters with each of them.

You can travel with the fuel that powered Bryan Peterson's boat around the world. Or you can eat it.The fuel, a thinner version of the stuff you pour on a salad or use to cook French fries, is made from soybean oil. Sure, it's three times more expensive than regular fuel, but if you burn it in your boat's engine, the exhaust will smell like Mom's kitchen at dinner time."

Moscow -- Valentin Rasputin lives deep in Russia, on the edge of Siberia, pressing a thousand years of conquering czars and toiling peasants close to his soul.Mr. Rasputin, a writer who is nearly as famous inside Russia as Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn is outside the country, holds dear the vision of an intensely spiritual nation, cleansed by centuries of suffering.As he writes and speaks about the kind of Russia he wants to emerge from the chill grasp of the Soviet years, he watches unhappily as Snickers candy bar wrappers flutter across the streets of Irkutsk, where he lives.

It was late in the game, and neither team was gaining any ground. Then Gardenville Elementary School took a wrong turn at Kiev, and Hamilton Elementary surged to victory in the Indian Ocean.So went the final minutes yesterday in the second Baltimore Globetrotters competition, when 144 city fifth-graders proved they knew their way around the world.Unlike last week's National Geography Bee, the Globetrotters contest stresses map skills over memorization. If the students know where to look, they can easily find the answers in the 30 seconds allotted.

MATTHEW COYLE, 10, son of Richard and Melissa Coyle and brother of Megan Coyle, of Mystic Woods Court in Mount Airy.School: Fourth-grader at Mount Airy Elementary School.Honored for: Being the top Carroll County scorer in the statewide geography bee held April 2 at Bowie State University.Matthew was especially disappointed because he still believes his last answer was right, even though the judges said it was wrong.He had made it through preliminary rounds until a tiebreaker question between him and two other boys was asked.

Q: I am interested in going to the Seychelles Islands. Where I can get travel information? I also need to know about beaches.A: The Seychelles, a group of 100 islands in the Indian Ocean a thousand miles east of Tanzania and 700 miles northeast of Madagascar, are known for their beaches, fishing and diving as well as for their rare flora and fauna.Since there is no nonstop service from the United States, your flight is likely to stop in Europe, probably at Gatwick in England, a popular jumping-off point for Mahe, the islands' political and economic center.

UPPER MARLBORO -- The suspect was Udo Proksch, once the playboy owner of a chandelier-lit Vienna cafe who peddled pastries to Austria's ruling elite -- and may have run guns for Italy's Red Brigades.The sleuths? A team of specialists from Eastport International Inc. that included Bill Lawson, 33, a former boat mechanic from Annapolis who drives a pickup when he's not overseas on the trail of some saboteur."We've investigated a lot of international incidents," shrugs the fireplug-shaped Mr. Lawson, sitting in a cubicle brimming with technical manuals at Eastport's headquarters, a pastel-colored warehouse and office building in a business park here.

WASHINGTON -- A North Korean cargo vessel suspected of carrying Scud missiles bound for Iran or Syria eluded a U.S. Navy fleet and docked undetected at an Iranian port, U.S. officials acknowledged yesterday.Independent naval experts were dumbfounded by the Navy's failure to intercept the ship. One suggested the interception was called off to avoid upsetting U.S. allies in the region.Pentagon officials denied that. "We were certainly looking for it, right up until the time we found it in Bandar Abbas," Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said in an interview.

Planes are falling from the sky. I feel like Chicken Little even writing that sentence, but several tragic events over the past six months, including two in June, have given me pause. As an air traveler, I've known all along that neither planes nor pilots are invincible - Capt. Scully not withstanding. But recent events have made this crystal clear. In February, a Continental commuter jet crashed into a Buffalo neighborhood, killing everyone on board and one man on the ground. That same month, a Turkish Airlines plane crashed short of a runway in Amsterdam, breaking into three pieces and killing nine of the 135 people on board, including the pilots.

Quietly, and perhaps without fully realizing it, the U.S. military has begun embracing a new, wide-ranging international role that will compel it to intervene in many countries throughout the world. Yet this is a role that virtually every country would support and one that should be widely embraced here as well: the role of global first responder. The Myanmar military government's shocking and disastrous refusal of international assistance in the wake of the recent devastating cyclone has masked one broader positive development - the surprising speed at which aid, especially on the part of the U.S., was offered.

Dec. 26 2004 More than 200,000 people, mostly in southern Asia, were killed by a tsunami triggered by the world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years beneath the Indian Ocean.

While we on the Atlantic coast wait anxiously for tropical storms Barry, Chantal, Dean and Erin to appear, we forget that people elsewhere have their own storm threats and name lists to worry through. In the Eastern North Pacific they await Alvin, Barbara, Cosme and Dalila. In the Central North Pacific it's Kika, Lana, Maka and Neki. There are separate name lists - and varied naming rules - for the Western North Pacific, for Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Indian Ocean (two)

Pope's Turkish visit an apparent success ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Pope Benedict XVI was greeted in Turkey with a lecture on how the Christian West scorns Islam. He left yesterday with Istanbul's chief Islamic cleric speaking lyrically of better days ahead between the faiths. Few predicted how boldly - and with such apparent success - the pontiff would seek to remake his battered image in the Muslim world during four days of speeches, sermons and symbolic gestures that included an instantly famous moment of silent prayer in a mosque while facing Mecca.

Where are all the Europeans? The Japanese? The people who, since the first resort opened in 1972 in the Maldives Republic, have been making the tiny nation of 1,200 islands one of the world's great tourist pamperers? The travelers are not coming, at least not in force, not since the tsunami in December. Tourism, the Maldives' No. 1 moneymaker, usually accounts for more than a fifth of the national income, and it's down by 49 percent so far this year. The government had expected tourism tax revenues to come to $43 million by December's end; new projections put the figure at $31 million.

ACCORDING TO experts, "the earth is still ringing like a bell" from the devastating post-Christmas Indian Ocean earthquake - now believed to have had a magnitude of 9.15 on the Richter scale - and tsunami. Aftershocks and tremors still rattle the region. The tsunami killed more than 225,000 people across 12 Indian Ocean countries, making it the most deadly in recorded history. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand suffered the greatest human losses. In addition, 2,500 foreign tourists from more than 40 countries perished, including 33 Americans.

THE ONCE-in-a-lifetime tsunami that swept away the lives, homes or livelihoods of millions from Southeast Asia to Africa now offers unprecedented opportunities for reconciliation in several embittered regions racked by years, even decades, of bloody strife. It may be naively optimistic to hope that - after the world's aid pours in and the rebuilding begins - the greater need for unity will lessen the hatred festering behind the long-running civil wars in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and rising government frictions with Thai Muslims.

In some ill-fated stretches of Indonesia's Aceh province, the ocean roared inland as far as 10 miles. Elsewhere around the Indian Ocean basin, the line of damage extended only a few hundred yards from the beach. Why the difference? Indonesia's proximity to last weekend's 9.0 magnitude earthquake clearly contributed to the roiling "wall of water" estimated at more than 30 feet high that swept through the provincial capital of Banda Aceh on the island of Sumatra. But scientists say a number of geographical features also can help to either dissipate or focus a tsunami's enormous energy and determine how far and how fast it surges ashore.

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off Indonesia yesterday morning moved the island of Sumatra about 100 feet to the southwest, pushing up a gigantic mass of water that collapsed into a tsunami that devastated shorelines around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The quake was the largest since a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1964 and was one of the biggest ever that scientists recorded. It triggered the first tsunami in the Indian Ocean since 1883, civil engineer Costas Synolakis of the University of Southern California said.