A giant python attacked an Indonesian man, nearly severing his arm, before hungry villagers chopped up the reptile and ate it, a police chief said Wednesday.
Security guard Robert Nababan crossed paths with the giant creature while patrolling an oil palm plantation in the remote Batang Gansal subdistrict of Sumatra island on Saturday.
“The python was 7.8 metres long (25.6 feet), it was unbelievably huge,†local police chief Sutarja, who like many Indonesians only has one name, told AFP.
Sutarja said the 37-year-old Nababan, who sometimes liked to eat snake, tried to catch the giant python and stuff it in a gunny sack.
But the huge serpent fought back and bit him on his left arm, nearly severing it from his body.
Nababan was then rushed to a hospital in a neighbouring town for treatment.
The police chief said the intervention of another security guard and several local residents, one of whom hit the snake with a log, helped to save the man’s life.
Hungry locals later killed the snake and displayed its body in the village before dicing it up, frying it and feasting on it.
Giant python, which regularly top 20 feet in length, are commonly found in Indonesia and the Philippines.
In March, a 25-year-old Indonesian farmer has been discovered inside the belly of a giant python after the swollen snake was caught near where the man vanished while harvesting his crops on the eastern island of Sulawesi.
Is this a member of Indonesia’s lost pygmy tribe? Mysterious small figure is caught on camera scurrying out of the undergrowth in remote area of northern Sumatra.
The person was spotted in Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra. He appeared to be half-naked and ran down a dirt track carrying a large stick. After a group of bikers chased him, the man dived into bushes and disappeared.
A mysterious half-naked ‘tribesman’ was seen running down a dirt track in Indonesia by a group of bikers.
The small man was spotted near Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra.
Some viewers guessed the man could be a member of the mythical Mante tribe, who are said to be forest dwellers.
A group of bikers were mystified when they came across a half-naked tribesman running down a dirt track in Banda Aceh, Indonesia
The motorcyclists were travelling down the track when they saw the bald man leap out of the trees.
The footage shows one of the bikers falling on the ground as the mystery figure runs away from the group.
One of the bikers continues down the track in pursuit of the skittish man, who jumps into the bushes by the side of the road.
The group stop at the spot where the man disappeared and look for him in the bushes.
A biker, who has a camera fitted to its helmet, chases the mystery figure down the path. The figure appears to be naked and is carrying a large stick
The grass is so high that they can no longer see the figure as he slipped into the trees behind.
A couple of the motorcyclists venture into the bushes to try and see where the ‘tribesman’ went and find the large stick he was carrying.
Some viewers think that the mysterious man is a member of a lost pygmy tribe in Indonesia.
The mythical Mante tribe are said to be smaller than the average man and flee when they see people from the outside world.
The only record of the supposed tribe was in the 17th century, when it was claimed two Mante tribesmen were captured and presented to the Sultan.
But most people think the Mante people are simply legend.
At first the video is blurry and difficult to make out. A bunch of men standing around a python begin slicing its belly down the middle. It soon becomes apparent that something of note is inside the giant snake, but it’s not immediately clear what has drawn so much attention.
Then you see it: An entire grown man, swallowed whole, lies dead inside the python.
According to local news reports, the body found inside the 23-foot-long snake turned out to be 25-year-old Akbar Salubiro, a harvester who worked on a palm oil plantation on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. He was reported missing on March 26.
Local media also report that the snake involved is a reticulated python. These snakes are among some of the largest in the world, growing over 20 feet long and weighing more than a hundred pounds.
Irma Bule was in the habit of performing with several cobras as on stage props. One of them, at least, was a King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah), and clearly someone had blundered.
Indonesian pop singer Irma Bule died this week after being bitten by a snake used as an on-stage prop during a live performance on Sunday.
“The accident happened in the middle of the second song when Irma stepped on the snake’s tail,” audience member Ferlando Octavion Auzura told local website merdeka.com.
“The snake then bit Irma on the thigh.” …
It’s thought that Bule believed the cobra had been defanged. She was well known for using snakes during live performances – a relatively common practice in the region – and had previously appeared with pythons and boa constrictors.
45 minutes after the bite took place, the performance was abandoned as Bule started vomiting and collapsed. She was subsequently taken to hospital, where she was later confirmed to have died.
Statue of ten year old Barack Obama in Menteng Park, Jakarta
Indonesia authorities announced yesterday that they are considering acquiescing to demands that a statue of Barack Obama as a little boy, erected by relatives and friends in a Jakarta park “to motivate children to study hard and dream big,” be removed. 56,000 Indonesians have signed a petition calling for the ouster of Obama’s statue. The location ought to be used for the statue of an Indonesian, critics contend. Obama lived in Indonesia for only four years as a child.
AFP
David Scrimshaw, writing in the Winterhaven (Florida) NewsChief (though mistaken about this intriguing question being new) identifies a key biographic detail demonstrating that, yes, Virginia, there are unanswered questions about Barack Obama’s native born citizenship.
Despite the inclination of establishment media to dismiss issues of Obama’s citizenship status, questions continue to surface in wider circles of American society.
We’ve all seen the e-mails about Barack Obama’s citizenship. This is a new twist we hadn’t known. Interesting. More questions. And this time some good questions.
It can be resolved by Obama answering one simple question: What passport did you use when you were shuttling between New York, Jakarta, and Karachi?
So how did a young man who arrived in New York in early June 1981, without the price of a hotel room in his pocket, suddenly come up with the price of a round-the-world trip just a month later? And once he was on a plane, shuttling between New York, Jakarta and Karachi ,what passport was he offering when he passed through Customs and Immigration?
The American people not only deserve to have answers to these questions, they must have answers.
It makes the debate over Obama’s citizenship a rather short and simple one.
Q: Did he travel to Pakistan in 1981, at age 20?
A: Yes, by his own admission.
Q: What passport did he travel under
A: There are only three possibilities. 1. He traveled with a U.S. passport, 2) He traveled with a British passport, or 3) He traveled with an Indonesia passport.
Q: Is it possible that Obama traveled with a U.S. passport in 1981?
A: No. It is not possible. Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department’s “no-travel” list in 1981.
Conclusion: When Obama went to Pakistan in 1981, he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport. If he was traveling with a British passport, that would provide proof that he was born in Kenya on Aug. 4, 1961, not in Hawaii as he claims. And if he was traveling with an Indonesian passport, that would tend to prove that he relinquished whatever previous citizenship he held, British or American, prior to being adopted by his Indonesian stepfather in 1967.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the American people need to know how he managed to become a “natural born” U.S. citizen between 1981 and 2008.
Australia’s former prime minister Paul Keating, as the Sydney Morning Herald explains, does not think much of Barack Obama’s choice of Treasury Secretary.
When Barack Obama announced his champion to rescue the world from economic ruin, it was the first time most Americans had ever heard the name Tim Geithner.
The initial impression was good. The stockmarket surged and the pundits swooned. “Exactly a decade ago, he was Uncle Sam’s golden-boy emissary sent into the stormy centre of what was then the world’s worst financial crisis [the Asian crisis],” reported The New York Post.
The paper gushed: “Just 36 at the time, he’d been raised in Asia and knew the culture so intimately he scored successes and won confidences that other diplomats couldn’t match. Geithner earned widespread plaudits for pulling together quarrelling Asian finance ministers into a $US200 billion rescue of their economies.”
“A fantastic choice,” said a Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi analyst, Chris Rupkey, as the Dow rose by nearly 6 per cent. Even one of Obama’s political rivals, the hard-bitten Republican senator Richard Shelby, agreed Geithner was “up to the challenge”.
If anyone in the US media had thought to ask a former Australian prime minister for his assessment, they would have heard a different view. And they would not have been so surprised at Geithner’s performance since.
In a speech to a closed gathering at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Thursday, Paul Keating gave a starkly different account of Geithner’s record in handling the Asian crisis: “Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis.”
In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription.
Geithner thought Asia’s problem was the same as the ones that had shattered Latin America in the 1980s and Mexico in 1994, a classic current account crisis. In this kind of crisis, the central cause is that the government has run impossibly big debts.
The solution? The IMF, the Washington-based emergency lender of last resort, will make loans to keep the country solvent, but on condition the government hacks back its spending. The cure addresses the ailment.
But the Asian crisis was completely different. The Asian governments that went to the IMF for emergency loans – Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia – all had sound public finances.
The problem was not government debt. It was great tsunamis of hot money in the private capital markets. When the wave rushed out, it left a credit drought behind.
But Geithner, through his influence on the IMF, imposed the same cure the IMF had imposed on Latin America and Mexico. It was the wrong cure. Indeed, it only aggravated the problem.
Keating continued: “Soeharto’s government delivered 21 years of 7 per cent compound growth. It takes a gigantic fool to mess that up. But the IMF messed it up. The end result was the biggest fall in GDP in the 20th century. That dubious distinction went to Indonesia. And, of course, Soeharto lost power.”
An August 25 WSJ article blamed a management plan by outside environmentalists which prevented feeding of komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) by residents of Kampang Komodo for the large monitor lizard’s increased opportunism and aggression, and for occasional incidents of human predation.
We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance,” says Widodo Ramono, policy director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian branch and a former director of the country’s national park service. “We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings.”
This sounded like a good story to me and I blogged it here.
On the other hand, I have since found via Steve Bodio, that Carel Brest van Kempen, a Nature artist who knows his Oras as well as the local area, has a very different perspective, and makes a persuasive case contradicting the WSJ.
Mr. van Kempen says the village traces its origin to a penal colony, was settled by piratical Bugis fisherman from Sulawesi (whose ancestors were so naughty, he alleges, they inspired the English term “bogeymen”). The village has grown to 1600 residents, and Mr. van Kempen disapproves. “An unchecked human explosion will doom the dragons, ” he believes. Drastic measures were imposed by a 25-year plan drafted by outside experts. Mr. van Kempen endorses that plan, considering it “a thoughtful and practical attempt at a rather Sisyphean task.”
That Sisyphean task is obviously keeping the ora habitat free of local settlements.
The Management Plan bans a number of destructive and effective fishing methods, including explosives and poisons, reef gleaning, long lines, gill nets and demersal (bottom) traps, effectively restricting fishermen to using hook and line and traditional light nets. It also imposes catch limits and denies access to grouper and Napoleon Wrasse spawning grounds. A long list of fish species is proscribed, as are all marine invertebrates except squid. Some rather Draconian measures have been taken on land. All immigration has been disallowed; not even marriage confers a right to residency in the Park. Dogs and cats have been banned, as have most other domestic animals save goats and chickens, and restrictions have been put on use of fresh water. The gathering of firewood is no longer allowed and the laws prohibiting hunting of deer, pigs and buffalo are being strictly enforced. It’s the fishing restrictions, though, that have impacted the already struggling villagers the hardest, and they’ve caused considerable anger. There have been shootouts between rangers and fishermen, resulting in several deaths. Balancing the needs of the burgeoning villagers and those of the finite ecosystem is difficult, and the fact that it’s being imposed from outside causes real resentments.
If one actually reads the plan, one is obliged to conclude that the poor ignorant villagers, persons of low education who thoughtlessly reproduce themselves and get in the way of ecological progress are being first prevented from fishing by the most effective techniques and for the most marketable catch. Meanwhile, a totalitarian regime regulating intimate details of daily life (Don’t spray pesticides! How much water are you using? No dogs or cats, or wives from off-island, either!) must make things unpleasant indeed for residents, who are clearly being not all that subtly nudged to pack up and go away.
Once they’re gone, in comes the multi-million-dollar beach resort for eco-tourism, offering reef snorkling and dragon watching for beaucoup dollars per diem.
Steve Bodio and Matt Mullinex were dazzled by the details that van Kempen throws around, and by his obvious personal acquaintance with the neighborhood. I’m not persuaded. I remain permanently suspicious of Sarastro and all his expert planners, and on the basis of habitual preference for underdogs, I remain on the side of those local fishermen who are clearly getting pushed around.
The oras will clearly make out. The Indonesian government can make a good buck selling glimpses of this kind of unique wildlife to tourists, so they’ll be well protected.
A prominent Philadelphia attorney and Hillary Clinton supporter filed suit this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission. The action seeks an injunction preventing the senator from continuing his candidacy and a court order enjoining the DNC from nominating him next week, all on grounds that Sen. Obama is constitutionally ineligible to run for and hold the office of President of the United States.
Phillip Berg, the filing attorney, is a former gubernatorial and senatorial candidate, former chair of the Democratic Party in Montgomery (PA) County, former member of the Democratic State Committee, and former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania. According to Berg, he filed the suit–just days before the DNC is to hold its nominating convention in Denver–for the health of the Democratic Party.
“I filed this action at this time,” Berg stated, “to avoid the obvious problems that will occur when the Republican Party raises these issues after Obama is nominated.”.
Berg cited a number of unanswered questions regarding the Illinois senator’s background, and in today’s lawsuit maintained that Sen. Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen or that, if he ever was, he lost his citizenship when he was adopted in Indonesia. Berg also cites what he calls “dual loyalties” due to his citizenship and ties with Kenya and Indonesia.
Even if Sen. Obama can prove his U.S. citizenship, Berg stated, citing the senator’s use of a birth certificate from the state of Hawaii verified as a forgery by three independent document forensic experts, the issue of “multi-citizenship with responsibilities owed to and allegiance to other countries” remains on the table.
In the lawsuit, Berg states that Sen. Obama was born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii as the senator maintains. Before giving birth, according to the lawsuit, Obama’s mother traveled to Kenya with his father but was prevented from flying back to Hawaii because of the late stage of her pregnancy, “apparently a normal restriction to avoid births during a flight.” As Sen. Obama’s own paternal grandmother, half-brother and half-sister have also claimed, Berg maintains that Stanley Ann Dunham–Obama’s mother–gave birth to little Barack in Kenya and subsequently flew to Hawaii to register the birth. …
Should Sen. Obama truly have been born in Kenya, Berg writes, the laws on the books at the time of his birth hold that U.S. citizenship may only pass to a child born overseas to a U.S. citizen parent and non-citizen parent if the former was at least 19 years of age. Sen. Obama’s mother was only 18 at the time. Therefore, because U.S. citizenship could not legally be passed on to him, Obama could not be registered as a “natural born” citizen and would therefore be ineligible to seek the presidency pursuant to Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution.
Moreover, even if Sen. Obama could have somehow been deemed “natural born,” that citizenship was lost in or around 1967 when he and his mother took up residency in Indonesia, where Stanley Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian citizen. Berg also states that he possesses copies of Sen. Obama’s registration to Fransiskus Assisi School In Jakarta, Indonesia which clearly show that he was registered under the name “Barry Soetoro” and his citizenship listed as Indonesian.
The Hawaiian birth certificate, Berg says, is a forgery. In the suit, the attorney states that the birth certificate on record is a forgery, has been identified as such by three independent document forensic experts, and actually belonged to Maya Kasandra Soetoro, Sen. Obama’s half-sister.
I doubt that this lawsuit will succeed, or that Barack Hussein Obama will be proven to have been born in Kenya or to have lost his citizenship via adoption by Mr. Soetero, but I would not be prepared to dismiss completely the possibility of there being substance in any of these contentions. Barack Obama is a peculiar candidate of very unusual background, and is remarkably little known. We have no Office of Eligibility for Public Office in the United States which routinely investigates the qualification of candidates with respect to citizenship. Frankly, with respect to many offices, I doubt that anyone would care very much. In the case of the Presidency, though, questions about major candidates with a serious possibility of being elected really should be investigated and resolved by impartial and responsible authorities.
Barack Obama is almost certainly going to be found to be, yes, Virginia, really a US citizen, but I tend to think American voters would prefer to know for sure.
Bob Owens, who blogs as Confederate Yankee, informs us that Jack Stokes, Associated Press manager of media relations confirmed the authenticity of the photograph of Barack Obama’s school registration in Indonesia.
Owens then proceeds to discount totally the document’s significance, point by point:
Did Barack Obama have Indonesian citizenship? We don’t know anything from this picture other than that his stepfather Lolo Soetoro apparently claimed that he did. Would it impact Barack Obama’s current viability as a U.S. presidential candidate if Lolo Soetoro or Obama’s mother changed Obama’s citizenship to Indonesian? Not according to the U.S. State Department, which states plainly, “In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship.†As Barack Obama was a child, not of legal age to surrender his citizenship, then all further discussion of this point is irrelevant.
The way this kind of thing works is that foreign governments commonly have one perspective on citizenship, and the US has another. Many countries recognize dual citizenship, the US does not. It is most likely that Barack Obama enjoys Kenyan citizenship and Indonesian citizenship from the perspectives of those countries.
Mr. Owens is correct enough is arguing that the circumstances of his birth and childhood adoption were not Obama’s choice, and there is no rational reason to hold his inadvertent possession of dual citizenship with other countries against him. But, these little details are factual parts of his life history which is a highly exotic one. Voters are entitled to the facts, and are entitled to make of them whatever they choose. It is not the privilege of Senator Obama or his media allies to decide exactly what facts of Barack Obama’s life, family background, and upbringing are and aren’t relevant and to edit out the details they prefer to conceal.
Was Barack Obama’s name actually changed to Barry Soetoro? Again, all we see is that this was what his stepfather allegedly wrote on his school registration, a document of far less formality than a birth certificate, passport, adoption form, or citizenship papers.
Give me a break. That Barack Obama was formerly known as Barry seems to be general knowledge. Second husbands often adopt their stepchildren, and in many cases stepchildren do take that second husband’s name. When the second marriage doesn’t work out, or a breach in relations with the stepfather occurs, they sometimes change back. It ought hardly to be thought remarkable that somebody living in everyday America in the 1960s and 1970s would prefer to be known as “Barry.” And it isn’t altogether surprising either that a young man of college age with fashionable attitudes in post late-1960s America might want to emphasize an African identity and resume the full “Barack.”
Name changes in America occur all the time without benefit of formal processes. It is particularly common for young people to change the way they like to be addresses at watershed moments like college. There’s really no point is disputing the obvious fact that he used to be called Barry Soetero, especially since the name change is unlikely to cause much political difficulty for him.
Perhaps Obama can be fairly accused of misrepresenting himself by failing to note his name was once Soetoro in the Illinois attorney’s registration record, but it would most likely be viewed as a technical faux pas, not a mortal sin. The purpose of the name change form in the Illinois bar is to accurately reflect name changes associated with marriages and divorces of attorneys already registered on the roll of attorneys admitted to the practice of law in Illinois. Far from being a major offense, this charge is a perversion of the intent of why the roll of attorneys is maintained.
Maybe so, but in a country in which allegations that somebody might have missed a National Guard meeting 30 years earlier can become a significant presidential campaign issue, Senator Obama will have to face the music for ancient errors and omissions just like anybody else.
Was Barack Obama a Muslim? Again, just because his stepfather allegedly wrote that in the blank does not necessarily mean that he was.
This picture of a school registration page is a photo of something that is not a legal document. At best, it indicates the possibility that Lolo Soetoro considered Barack Obama his adoptive son, that Obama had Indonesian citizenship, and that Soetoro considered Obama a Muslim.
At this point, Mr. Owens goes too far.
There’s this parochial school registration certificate out there somewhere as well saying I was Roman Catholic in 1954, and guess what? it’s perfectly correct.
Kids attending elementary school really do tend to belong to the religion favored by their parents, or in a case like Mr. & Mrs. Soetero’s, to the religion of the more religiously committed parent. Stanley Dunham Obama Soetero was a red-diaper baby and an atheist, so it’s perfectly natural that young Barry Soetero would be raised in the religion of his adopted father.
There is not an iota of a reason to believe that as a boy Obama had any personal loyalty to Christianity, or any connection to it whatsoever, beyond attending a Catholic school, doubtless on the basis of instructional quality.
Of course, this does not prove that Barack Obama is the Twelfth Imam, or even a Muslim, today. But, face it, Mitt Romney had trouble with his Mormon background in the GOP primaries this year, and the Mormons didn’t fly airplanes into the World Trade Center. Obama obviously really did have an officially Muslim childhood. He attended a mosque where he banged his forehead on the floor. He received instructions at the local Islamic religious school called a madrassa.
Those facts have whatever relevance the voters choose to place upon them. Obama’s skin color and mellifluous voice are inherited assets he didn’t choose which have been of great political benefit to him. His religious background wasn’t choosen either, and it may harm him politically, but what I think is even more likely to harm him to a much greater degree is his manifest willingness to lie, and his inevitably getting caught lying.
According to Day-Life, the above is a news agency photograph taken by Tatan Syuflana, captioned as follows by that agency.
This registration document, made available on Jan. 24, 2007, by the Fransiskus Assisi school in Jakarta, Indonesia, shows the registration of Barack Obama under the name Barry Soetoro into the Catholic school made by his step-father, Lolo Soetoro. The document lists Barry Soetoro as a Indonesian citizen, born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, and shows his Muslim step-father listed the boy’s religion as Islam.
Via Larry Johnson, who admits that it is not yet confirmed as a real document.
If it is real, of course, it then confirms that Barack Obama does hold joint Indonesian citizenship (which was already fairly obvious), and it also then confirms that he has lied very brazenly about having been a Muslim as a child.
I don’t believe that Barrak Obama is today a Muslim, but a Muslim background would be a serious campaign liability at any time. During a shooting war with radical Islam, it could only be a very serious liability. Among other considerations, Barack Obama would certainly be considered to be an apostate Muslim by many extremists, who would then, were he to be elected, believe they had a religious obligation to kill the President of the United States.
A background that makes a candidate a specific target for assassination by fanatics is an inconvenience to say the least.
It’s easy to understand why Obama would want to conceal this kind of obscure detail about his life. His Islamic boyhood was a long time ago in a distant country, and he would naturally look upon it as remote and irrelevant to his life today.
But Presidential politics is a game played for the highest of possible stakes, and the American voting public is traditionally very strict when it comes to correct play. Mistakes, evasions, exposed lies are usually fatal. Lying about something serious, lying about any detail damaging enough to affect the outcome is typically not forgiven or overlooked.
If the photo is not a hoax, Barry Soetero could be in very serious trouble.
Apparently, the Obama birth certificate published on Daily Kos, later demonstrated to be a forgery was the result of an effort to avoid embarrassing discussion the real document bearing the candidate’s adopted name of Barry Soetero, and consequent issues connected with his dual citizenships.
Apparently, having a Kenyan birth father automatically makes Mr. Soetero a citizen of Kenya, and being adopted by an Indonesian father makes him an Indonesian citizen, too. Triune citizenship is bound to provoke campaign discussion. John McCain isn’t going to say: “Do you really want to elect a Kenyan and/or an Indonesian President of the United States?” but plenty of other people will.
Obama’s real Indonesian surname and dual citizenship is an even bigger problem, because it provokes further discussion of, and investigation into, his childhood personal ties to Islam.
I don’t think changing one’s name or possessing (even more than one form of) dual citizenship necessarily dooms a presidential candidacy in this day and age, but getting caught prevaricating never does any presidential candidate a bit of good.
