A volcano in Indonesia's West Sumatra province erupted early yesterday, belching black smoke and volcanic ash on nearby areas, officials and news reports said.
There were no reports of injury from the Mount Talang eruption, officials said.
Volcanologists ordered residents living within a 1km radius of the 2,575m Mount Talang -- about 60km from the provincial capital of Pandang -- to immediately leave their homes.
"We have urged those residents living in the dangerous areas to be evacuated and temporarily sheltered in a safer area on higher ground," said Isa Nurahmadan, an expert at the Bandung Directorate General of Volcanology in West Java.
The state-run Antara news agency said that Mount Talang started spewing volcanic ash on nearby areas at about 3:42am.
Rio, a vulcanology expert at the nearby monitoring office, said he was not sure whether there would be a larger eruption from the volcano, or how long the current eruption would last.
"Mount Talang erupted at about 3:42am this morning, sending volcanic ash onto its slope areas," Rio, who uses only one name, told Antara.
Nurahmadan said the Directorate General of Vulcanology has upgraded the status of Talang volcano to "alert," meaning that residents living in areas classified as dangerous have to be ready to flee their homes "at any time."
"We don't know for sure whether there will be a major eruption from the Talang volcano, but we already deployed a team of experts this morning to West Sumatra for close monitoring," Nurahmadan said.
He said the activity of Mount Talang increased following a series of earthquakes that have jolted Sumatra in recent months.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS