Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Thousands of government officials, industry lobbyists, environmental campaigners and observers are arriving on the Indonesian island of Bali for two weeks of talks starting today that are aimed at breathing new life into the troubled 17-year-old global-climate treaty. But few participants expect this round of talks to produce significant breakthroughs. At most, they say, it will result in new commitments to negotiate to update the original treaty by the end of 2009.

THE NEW government, though not democratically elected, is popular because the preceding regime was so bad. The reformers pledge to end corruption, hold the country together, restart the economy and restore national honor.That could be Pakistan, where Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf made himself absolute ruler after a coup.It equally describes Indonesia, where Abdurrahman Wahid was indirectly elected president and Megawati Sukarnoputri vice president last week, replacing the transitional successor to a dictator.

THE ASIAN disease did not hit the healthy United States when it reached Brazil, which devalued its currency Wednesday. But spread of the ailment to the world's eighth-largest economy means the sickness has infected the Western Hemisphere.U.S. trade with Brazil is small but growing, while U.S. private investment in Brazil is huge. So the threat of inflation and devaluation in Brazil is more to U.S. portfolios than to U.S. exporters.The $41.5 billion credit pledged to Brazil by the International Monetary Fund and Group of Seven nations in November, in return for deficit reduction, was in the U.S. national interest.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which was published yesterday.ARMED thugs have killed hundreds in East Timor, a long-suffering land north of Australia. Thousands have fled by land, air or sea.Militias with guns, grenades and machetes are smashing the East Timorese for voting overwhelmingly to end Indonesia's 24-year occupation and become an independent nation.Indonesia's guarantee of order and safety after the plebiscite has proved worthless. The world community's reliance on that guarantee now looks naive.

THE Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit this weekend in New Zealand must press Indonesia to allow peacekeepers into East Timor and to keep its pledge to respect the territory's referendum for independence.No one is proposing that an uninvited force would fight Indonesia. What APEC members do threaten is a withdrawal of world efforts to lend and invest the world's fourth-largest nation out of its recession. That is a formidable coercion.But in refusing, Indonesia -- or its army calling the shots -- has a powerful defense: its own fragility.

DELAY in announcing results of the June 7 election until July 9 increases the potential for unrest in Indonesia. But one thing is already clear: Most of the voters -- at present count, four-fifths of them -- favored throwing out the ruling Golkar Party and President B. J. Habibie with it.Throughout the count, the Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P) has led with more than one-third of the total, roughly double that of the second-place party. This means that twice as many people want Megawati Sukarnoputri, the gentle, 52-year-old daughter of the founding president of the country, as leader as want anyone else.

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- He is 59 years old and nearly blind. He speaks passable English, comes from a long line of Muslim clerics and has studied in Egypt, Iraq and Canada.He totters about with a cane, tirelessly preaches religious tolerance and heads the largest Muslim group in the world's most populous Muslim nation.These are some of the spare and more obvious facts about Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia's newly elected president.His policies and political vision are less known, as are any political alliances he might have struck to help win the presidency.

DILI, East Timor - An end to years of tragedy in this tiny province has never seemed so close. It has also never seemed so far.After more than two decades of bloody rule, Indonesia's foreign minister suddenly announced late last month that his country might consider independence for the impoverished half-island.But, as United Nations-sponsored talks on East Timor's future continued Monday in New York, the people of the mountain territory appear increasingly divided.Civilian militias who have armed themselves and vowed to defend East Timor's link with Indonesia are accused in the recent deaths of several unarmed civilians.

CHANGE COMES HARD and in very small increments in the world of foreign policy, where a decades-old concern about violations of human rights is colliding with the self-interests and sovereignty of nations, even of nations that seem to have made strong commitments to the human rights agenda.Why did it take the United States so long to help craft a solution to the violence in East Timor when it was seemingly so aggressive in condemning human rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia? Why was Britain so passionate in its condemnation of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and so late to the game in condemning the violence in East Timor?

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Abdurrahman Wahid, a partly blind and frail Muslim cleric who previously had never run for political office, was elected Indonesia's president yesterday in a stunning upset that steers the world's fourth-most-populous nation into uncharted waters.The powerful military immediately said it will support Wahid, who won this nation's first free presidential election in 44 years and was quickly sworn in.Wahid's defeated rival, Megawati Sukarnoputri, called on her supporters to respect the results.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Indonesians yesterday that she wants to open a "robust partnership" with their fast-growing country, President Barack Obama's boyhood home. Arriving here on the second stop of her first trip as the top American diplomat, Clinton also announced that the Obama administration intends to sign a treaty moving the U.S. closer to a key regional group, the Association of South East Asian Nations. The Bush administration declined to sign the treaty, a move that critics took as a sign of its lack of interest in the region and preoccupation with the Middle East.

Earthquakes kill three in part of Indonesia JAKARTA, Indonesia : A series of powerful earthquakes killed at least three people in eastern Indonesia today, cutting power lines and badly damaging buildings. A 7.6-magnitude quake struck at 4:43 a.m. local time about 85 miles from Manokwari, Papua, at a depth of 22 miles, the U.S. Geological Agency said. It was followed by a strong 7.5 aftershock. Three bodies were found, including that of a 10-year-old girl, a hospital director said. Nineteen other patients were treated for injuries.

ALI ALATAS, 76 Indonesian diplomat was once considered for top U.N. post Former Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, who had the delicate task of representing Indonesia during an often-brutal dictatorship and was once considered for the top job at the United Nations, died yesterday in Singapore, a week after suffering a stroke. Mr. Alatas was the country's highest-ranking diplomat from 1988 until 1999 - the year after longtime President Suharto was swept from power after a wave of pro-democracy street protests.

Former Biden aide chosen for Senate seat WILMINGTON, Del. : Edward Kaufman, a former aide to Sen. Joe Biden, was named yesterday by Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner to fill the Senate seat Biden is leaving for the vice presidency. Kaufman is president of a political and management consulting firm based in Wilmington. He served on Biden's Senate staff 1973-1994, including 19 years as chief of staff. He is an advisory board member to President-elect Barack Obama's transition team. Speculation on Biden's successor had centered in recent weeks on his son, Attorney General Beau Biden.

Obama officially steps down as Illinois senator CHICAGO : On the day he formally stepped down as Illinois' junior senator, President-elect Barack Obama released an open letter to state residents, saying they had taught him lessons he would draw on during his presidency. Obama, whose resignation after nearly four years in the Senate was a formality in the aftermath of his Nov. 4 election victory, thanked Illinois residents in a nostalgic letter published in newspapers throughout the state yesterday.

At first, he thought it must be a hoax. The man in the picture didn't have hands at the ends of his arms; he had what looked like tree branches - two masses of tangled, overgrown bark. In more than 20 years of practicing medicine, Dr. Anthony Gaspari, chief of dermatology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, had seen terrible skin conditions, but he'd never seen anything so incredible or so bizarre. "It was just so outrageous, so unusual, I wasn't convinced the hands were real," the doctor remembers.

Science always seems to fall short in its explanations of love and courtship. Hormones, chemistry, evolution, genes, all the usual suspects are inadequate for the task. But rarely have we witnessed a scientist so thoroughly misjudge the nature of romance (and thus Valentine's Day) as did a Singapore primatologist who spent 20 months observing the behavior of 50 long-tailed macaques in Indonesia. It seems these macaques, a kind of monkey found in North Africa and parts of Asia, have a recognizable prelude to sexual encounters.

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Former President Suharto, an army general who rose to power in Indonesia with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and ruled for 32 years during an era of rapid economic growth and extraordinary graft, died yesterday in Indonesia. He was 86. Suharto's unyielding opposition to communism won him the backing of the United States during the height of the Cold War, although he was one of the most brutal and corrupt rulers of that era. He governed the world's fourth-most-populous nation with a combination of paternalism and ruthlessness from 1965 until he was ousted in spring 1998.

In the fall of 2002, the Indonesian island of Bali, once known for its luscious beaches and vibrant Hindu culture, became synonymous with terror and radicalism. After a massive bombing in Bali's nightclub district killed more than 200 people, the world suddenly realized what many locals had known for years: Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation on Earth, faced a serious internal terror threat. Even before the Bali attack, Indonesia had suffered a wave of bombings in the winter of 2000, and earlier that year someone had bombed the Jakarta Stock Exchange.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia -- Flying around the world to stem climate change isn't easy to defend. And that was just one of the environmental quandaries facing some 10,000 delegates, policy experts, activists and journalists at climate talks in Bali, which ended Saturday with a framework plan to trim the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Free bicycles, for instance, were available on loan to delegates who wanted to ride between the meeting's various side events. They got plenty of use. But a share of negotiators and journalists alike, exhausted after days of overnight talks and dripping sweat in Bali's steamy heat, took one guilty look at the bikes and then waved for an air-conditioned taxi instead.