Police in the capital of Indonesia's Aceh province fired water cannon yesterday to disperse hundreds of tsunami survivors protesting the slow delivery of aid, witnesses said.
About 200 demonstrators who had besieged the Banda Aceh office of the main tsunami reconstruction agency late on Tuesday were forced to disband after a first attempt to end their protest ended with them hurling rocks at police.
About 1,000 homeless survivors had initially blocked the entrance to the headquarters of the Aceh Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency (BRR), preventing officials from leaving in a bid to force them to agree to disburse swifter aid, a BRR official said on condition of anonymity.
Negotiations between officials and the protesters, organized by a local non-governmental organization (NGO), had stalled late on Tuesday over the way the relief funding would be channeled to them, the official told reporters.
"In principle, their demands have been agreed to by the BRR in writing, but the agreement was rejected by the head of the forum who wants the deal to be struck directly between the NGO and the BRR," the official said.
About 150 police including some paramilitary forces -- many of them armed with batons and plastic shields -- remained on guard around the BRR office while the demonstrators maintained a lookout point across the street.
The head of the agency, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, was due to give a press conference late yesterday.
Indonesia was the nation worst-hit by the December 2004 tsunami, which killed some 168,000 Acehanese.
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist
US ELECTIONS: US President Joe Biden mistakenly introduced Ukrainian President Zelenskiy as Russian President Vladimir Putin at a NATO summit on Thursday US President Joe Biden vowed he would remain in this year presidential race, but two critical mistakes in the span of two hours deepened concerns about his mental acuity that threaten his campaign. Biden, 81, saw the culmination of this week’s NATO summit as a chance to reassure allies who for two weeks had fretted about his abilities following his first debate performance against former US president Donald Trump. Over a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a nearly hour-long news conference, he spoke confidently on a range of complex issues from the tax code and trade policy to
HIGH TENSIONS: Local media reported that police had fired into the air to try to disperse an angry crowd at the garbage dump, while investigators called for calm and cooperation A total of eight bodies, all female, have been recovered so far from a garbage dump near Nairobi, Kenya’s acting police chief said yesterday, after authorities a day earlier confirmed they had found more bags filled with dismembered female body parts, the latest macabre discovery that has horrified and angered the country. Detectives have been scouring the site in the Mukuru area of Nairobi since the mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday in sacks floating in a sea of garbage. On Saturday, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said that five bags had been retrieved from
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the