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Powerful quake hits
Sulawesi, no tsunami
JAKARTA: A powerful earthquake
struck an area off Indonesia’s northern
Sulawesi early yesterday, killing at
least four people and injuring nearly
60 after hundreds of houses collapsed,
a disaster official said.
Indonesia briefly issued a
tsunami warning which was lifted
later, the meteorological office said.
The magnitude 7.5 quake was at
a depth of 21km, with its epicentre
136km northwest of the provincial
capital of Gorontalo, the US
Geological Survey said.
A series of further weaker
aftershocks struck in the same area
of the Celebes Sea bordering the
southern Philippines.
Rustam Pakaya, head of the
Indonesian health ministry’s crisis
centre, said information so far
Residents listen to information presented by the police at the Oakridge mobile home communtiy in the Sylmar area of Los
Angeles on Sunday, during the height of the fires.
Gutted homes, ashes as fires still burn
LOS ANGELES: Thousands of Southern
Californians returned home to find
their houses burned to the ground, or
miraculously intact yesterday, after a
wind-whipped weekend firestorm swept
through bone-dry canyons and hillsides.
“It was really hard when we first got
here. It was shocking. We were all crying,”
Brittney Fowler, 23, said as she picked
through the rubble of her family’s large
modern house in Yorba Linda, in Orange
County.
Hot winds and record temperatures
in the 30s Celsius were forecast to ease
off yesterday, but several fires burned
through Sunday night and thick, choking
smoke hung heavily over neighbourhoods
briefs
Deposed Thaksin now
in Dubai, says aide
BANGKOK: Thailand’s ousted prime
minister Thaksin Shinawatra is staying in
Dubai as he seeks a new home after his
British visa was revoked this month.
Billionaire Thaksin has been living in
exile since August to avoid jail sentences
showed four people had died, one in
Gorontalo after a building collapsed
and three in the district of Buol in
Central Sulawesi province.
He said 59 people were injured.
Around 800 houses were
damaged in Buol, Pakaya said,
adding there were reports of
collapsed schools and homes in
Gorontalo.
A telephone operator in
Gorontalo said the quake could be
felt strongly in the city.
“It felt quite big and caused
panic,” the operator told Reuters,
adding that the telephone network
had been disrupted.
In Australia, cyclone-like storms
ripped across the southeast corner
of the state of Queensland, killing
one man, destroying houses and
40km away.
Wildfires have scorched more than
8,000ha since Thursday night in foothills
north of Los Angeles, in Orange County
canyons to the south-east, and in celebri-
ty-heavy Montecito near Santa Barbara, to
the north. Mobile homes, apartments and
multimillion dollar mansions were among
the estimated 1,000 homes destroyed.
Officials began lifting evacuation
orders on Sunday for more than half the
estimated 50,000 people who fled at the
height of the fires but firefighters said
it would take days to extinguish all the
blazes.
No deaths or major injuries have been
reported and the cause of the fires was
at home.
Since Britain cancelled Thaksin’s visa
on Nov 7, he has travelled to several cities
including Beijing and Hongkong – where
he divorced his wife in a surprise move
late last week, an aide said.
Thaksin has links to the United Arab
Emirates, having sold Premier League
Club Manchester City to Sheikh Mansour
bin Zayed al Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi United
Group (ADUG) in September.
Family and intelligence sources
claimed that the divorce, carried out on
Friday, was for financial or legal reasons.
– AFP
theSun | TUESDAY NOVEMBER 18 2008
leaving more than 230,000 homes
and businesses without power,
authorities said yesterday.
The storms cut a path of
destruction on Sunday night from
the state capital Brisbane to the
tourist havens of the Gold Coast and
the Sunshine Coast.
“It looks like there’s been a bomb,
a great big bomb go off in all the
streets – it’s just terrible,” Brisbane
resident Davina Thomas told local
radio yesterday.
The storms carried destructive
winds, large hail and torrential rain
and caused flash flooding. A 20-year-
old man was killed when he was
sucked down a drain in Brisbane.
Seventy thousand homes in the
area devastated by the storms are
still without power. – Reuters
REUTERSPIX
not known.
Southern California is in a drought
after minimal rainfall for two years that
has turned the terrain into a tinder box
while population growth over the past 20
years has seen once arid brushland on
city outskirts turned into housing develop-
ments.
Many people returned to devastating
scenes of homes reduced to ashes in
streets where neighbouring houses were
unscathed.
California’s fire season, which tradi-
tionally run from June to October, has been
a year-round menace as global warming
has brought higher winter temperatures
and less rainfall. – Reuters
Aborigines oppose
name change of
Mt Niggerhead
SYDNEY: An Australian aboriginal group
has opposed a plan to re-name Mount
Niggerhead, a rocky outcrop in the
northeast, saying the new name is just
as offensive, local media reported.
Niggerhead, located in Victoria state,
has been the centre of debate for dec-
ades, prompting the state government
to recently announce its name would
change to Jaithmathangs. – Reuters