Two strong earthquakes rattled Asia yesterday, triggering alerts for a tsunami that harmlessly lapped Japan’s northern coast and another in Indonesia that didn’t materialize but briefly sent residents fleeing to high ground.
The more powerful of the quakes, with a preliminary magnitude of 7.0, hit at 9:21am off Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido at a depth of about 120km, the nation’s meteorological agency said.
A 10cm tsunami rippled to shore 35 minutes later, but there were no signs of damage.
“There was some light shaking, but it was nothing major,” said Yukio Yoshida, a police spokesman in Hokkaido.
Authorities temporarily advised about 10,600 residents of Ofunato in Iwate Prefecture, about 200km northwest of Tokyo, to evacuate their homes and ordered people to stay away from beaches.
An hour earlier, northeastern Indonesia was hit by a 6.6 magnitude quake that struck 90km beneath the Molucca Sea, the US Geological Survey said.
Though on the same tectonic plate, the temblors were unrelated, local officials said.
A tsunami alert was briefly issued over the radio and television and people in the Maluku capital of Ternate, which was closest to the epicenter, fled from houses and buildings as the earth rumbled beneath them.
The feared wave never came, however, and there were no reports of casualties or damage.
“I ran out of the hotel with other guests and we fled to high ground,” Benyamin Otte said.
“I could see people on the beach, checking to see if the were any signs of a tsunami, but everything looked normal. Within a half hour, we were heading back down,” Otte said.
Indonesia and Japan are both prone to seismic upheaval due to their location on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
In December 2004, a massive earthquake off Indonesia’s Sumatra island triggered a tsunami that battered much of the Indian Ocean coastline and killed more than 230,000 people — 131,000 of them in Aceh province alone.
A tsunami off Java last year killed nearly 5,000.
Japan also is one of the world’s most earthquake prone nations.
In 1995, a 7.2 magnitude quake in the western port city of Kobe killed 6,400 people and experts believe Tokyo has a 90 percent chance of being hit by a major quake over the next 50 years.
In related news, at least seven people were killed and 47 injured in the powerful earthquake that struck southern Iran on Wednesday, the Mehr news agency reported yesterday.
“Based on the latest information, seven people were killed and 47 have been injured,” Hormozgan Provincial Governor Abdolali Saheb Mohammadi was quoted as saying.
The US Geological Survey said the 6.1 magnitude quake jolted an area southwest of the port of Bandar Abbas, the capital of Hormozgan.
The quake occurred on Qeshm island, a popular tourist and free-trade island which lies just off the coast from Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic Gulf oil route.
“The earthquake yesterday afternoon hit the same area as another three years ago and with the same magnitude, but because of reconstruction since, there was no serious damage now,” Saheb Mohammadi said.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
FAKE NEWS? ‘When the government demands the press become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment, something has gone very wrong,’ a civic group said The top US broadcast regulator on Saturday threatened media outlets over negative coverage of the Middle East war, after US President Donald Trump slammed critical headlines from the “Fake News Media.” The US president since his first term has derided mainstream media as “fake news” and has sued major outlets over what he sees as unfair coverage. Brendan Carr, head of the US Federal Communications Commission — which oversees the nation’s radio, television and Internet media — said broadcasters risked losing their licenses over news coverage. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
INFLUTENTIAL THEORIST: Habermas was particularly critical of the ‘limited interest’ shown by German politicians in ‘shaping a politically effective Europe Jurgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96. Habermas’ publisher, Suhrkamp, said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich. Habermas frequently weighed in on political matters over several decades. His extensive writing crossed the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a vision of modern society and social interaction. His best-known works included the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas, who was 15 at the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, later recalled the dawn of
RSS