Volcano peril halts all Bali airport flights
KARANGASEM, Indonesia — A Bali volcano with a deadly history continued to erupt Tuesday, spitting ash 2½ miles high and stranding tens of thousands of tourists for a second day.
Lava was welling in its crater, but it remained unclear how bad the eruption might get or how long it could last.
Authorities have raised the alert for Mount Agung to the highest level and told 100,000 people to leave an area extending six miles from its crater. Its last major eruption in 1963 killed about 1,100 people.
Officials extended the closure of Bali’s international airport for another 24 hours over concerns that jet engines could choke on the thick volcanic ash, which was moving across the island.
Tourists waiting for planes stared at information screens reading “canceled” for every flight. Airport spokesman Ari Ahsanurrohim said more than 440 flights were canceled Tuesday, affecting nearly 60,000 passengers, about the same as Monday. Without aircraft, getting in or out of Bali requires traveling hours by land and boat to an airport on another island.
Experts said a larger, explosive eruption is possible or Agung could stay at its current level of activity for weeks.
“If it got much worse, it would be really hard to think of. You’ve got a huge population center, nearly a million people in Denpasar and surroundings, and it’s very difficult to envision moving those people further away,” said Richard Arculus, a volcano expert at Australian National University.
“There are many examples in history where you have this kind of seismic buildup — steam ejections of a little bit of ash, growing eruptions of ash to a full-scale stratosphere-reaching column of ash, which can presage a major volcanic event,” he said.
A NASA satellite detected a thermal anomaly at the crater, said senior Indonesian volcanologist Gede Swantika. That means a pathway from the storage chamber in the volcano’s crust has opened, giving magma easier access to the surface.
CAIRO — Amnesty International has condemned an Egyptian court’s sentencing of 16 men to three years in prison each on “debauchery” charges and urges authorities to overturn the ruling.
Najia Bounaim of the Britain-based rights group said the sentences were another example of Egypt’s ongoing persecution of homosexuals and the LGBT community.
She said on Tuesday that Amnesty considers the prosecution violated “the rights of these men to be treated equally, regardless of their perceived sexual orientation.” At least five of them were subjected to forced anal examinations.