Russian passenger jet reported missing in Indonesia

An image of Russian Sukhoi Superjet

A Russian Sukhoi Superjet 100 passenger plane with 46 people aboard has gone missing on a demonstration flight in Indonesia, reports say.

The plane disappeared from radar screens during a flight from Jakarta meant to last 30 minutes, a blogger with the Sukhoi delegation said.

A helicopter was dispatched to look for the jet, thought to have been flying near a mountain, Sergey Dolya said.

Emergency services confirmed a Sukhoi plane was missing.

The plane, which took off at 07:00 GMT, is believed to have had about four hours' fuel aboard, the BBC's Karishma Vaswani reports from Jakarta.

Gagah Prakoso, spokesman for Indonesia's national search and rescue agency, said 46 people had been aboard the plane, which vanished from radar near Bogor, a city in West Java province.

He told BBC News it was unclear who was on board because they were people invited by Sukhoi, but they were "likely to be reps of Indonesian airlines".

Eight of those are Russians, Dolya tweeted.

As darkness fell, the helicopter search was called off but rescuers continued looking for the plane on the ground, he said.

'Guests aboard'

The plane took off from east Jakarta's Halim Perdanakusuma airport, which is used for some commercial and military flights, at 14:00 (07:00 GMT), the Indonesian search and rescue agency spokesman said.

"At 14:50 it dropped from 10,000ft [3,000m] to 6,000ft," the agency told AFP.

Herry Bakti, head of the transport ministry's aviation division, said the aircraft had been on the second of two demonstration flights, and those on board were invited guests.

The Russian embassy in Jakarta said in a statement earlier this week that a Sukhoi Superjet 100 demonstration would take place in Jakarta on Wednesday, AFP added.

The embassy could not be immediately reached for comment.

The Superjet, a mid-range airliner that can carry up to 100 people, is military plane-maker Sukhoi's first commercial aviation plane.

It was created by a joint venture, majority-owned by Sukhoi, with Italy's Finmeccanica and a number of other foreign and Russian firms also involved.

Gagah Prakoso told the BBC that Sukhoi had been offering the Superjet to Indonesian airlines.

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2 students from China fatally shot near Los Angeles campus

Students bring flowers to the site of the slayings of their friends in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES –  Gunfire shattered the window of the BMW near the University of Southern California campus just after midnight, striking two Chinese graduate students inside.

The driver was able to make it from the car, through the rain, to a house where he pounded on the door pleading for help.

Ying Wu and Ming Qu, who police say were believed to have been dating, were dead by the time they got to the hospital Wednesday morning as police spread out looking for a killer suspected of bungling a carjacking.

The slayings shook the campus, which has a large international student population, and laid bare a parent's worst nightmare: having their child harmed in a faraway place.

Hundreds gathered Wednesday night on campus for a candlelight vigil in memory of Wu and Qu.

"The hearts of the Trojan family are broken," said Dean of Religious Life Varun Soni who opened the ceremony.

Votive candles in the shape of a heart and white roses and lilies sat at the foot of the Tommy Trojan statue, the university's collegiate symbol, where grieving students dressed mainly in black and faculty gathered for the vigil.

Clay Dube, executive director of the USC-China Institute told the crowd that Wu and Qu were brave, serious and diligent and they had traveled a long way to study here.

"The families have invested so much in these children, so much love, so much hope, and the children know that. They know the expectation is they will come here and succeed," Dube said.

At USC, the international student presence is enormous -- it has the largest number of any university in the U.S. Roughly 19 percent of the school's 38,000 students are from overseas, including 2,500 from China.

And some students said the shooting could be a cautionary tale for others who want to study overseas.

"If parents hear about this in China, it might affect their decision," said Chrissy Yao, a Chinese-American who moved to the U.S. when she was 10 and is a senior engineering student. "Since two lives were lost, I think concerns will remain for quite a while."

Police said the shooting occurred around 1 a.m. and may have been a robbery or a carjacking attempt. Witnesses said the car was in the roadway, not at the curb, at the time of the shooting.

Later Wednesday, bouquets of roses, daisies, gladiolas and calla lilies sat next to a small table on the walkway of the home to which Qu ran for help. On the table was a remembrance book with a sign that read: "We will give this book to the parents of Ying Wu and Ming Qu. Write here in English or Chinese if you would like to share your thoughts with them."

Gloria Tigolo lives on the tree-lined street of two-story homes and apartment buildings and said she heard a gunshot. She said she went downstairs but didn't go outside because it was raining.

Investigators said earlier that several shots were fired at the couple.

Four people have been killed this year in the area, police said, but violent crime in the area is down 20 percent this year. Neighborhood watch signs are posted along the street and police were trying to determine if there are any surveillance cameras in the area.

Tigolo said she would often see Wu, 23, in the neighborhood, wearing dark sunglasses but rarely saw her drive.

Qu managed to get out of the car and run to a nearby home, where he pounded on the door, police Cmdr. Andrew Smith said. It wasn't known if anyone answered the door before the man collapsed. Qu would have celebrated his 24th birthday on Thursday.

The gunman fled on foot, and no description has been yet released by authorities.

Jiewen Zhu, a 24-year-old financial engineering graduate student from northern China, said she called her mother after hearing the news of the shooting.

"I just left a message to tell her I am fine, I'm OK -- I just don't want them to worry," she said. "This is really bad that it happened to us and our students, but I didn't feel so threatened."

Jessie Cai, 21, is an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and an international student from China who lives in the West Adams neighborhood. Cai said she is shaken over the shooting and is thinking of moving out of the area as a result.

"I do worry because we get a lot of crime alerts but we never actually catch the criminals," she said. She said she hasn't told her parents about the shooting yet, but she is sure "they will be freaking out" about it.

USC is in an urban center within a mile of gang-infested neighborhoods that have been plagued by high crime. The last time a USC student was killed was in September 2008 when Bryan Frost, 23, of Eagle, Idaho, was fatally stabbed by a former usher at USC football games.

Travion Ford was sentenced to 16 years to life after being convicted of second-degree murder. The two men were involved in an off-campus altercation.

Nearly 35 percent of the school's 7,226 international students are Chinese, according to the university's 2011 figures. In addition to China, 17.5 percent of USC's international students are from India, 10 percent from South Korea, 5.5 percent from Taiwan, 4.4 percent from Canada, 2.3 percent from Iran and just above 2 percent each from Hong Kong and Indonesia.

Just as Chinese students are the largest segment at USC, they comprise nearly one-fourth of the nearly 724,000 international students attending colleges and universities in the U.S.

In recent years, they have helped fuel record international student enrollment on U.S. campuses.

The types of students who come from abroad tend to skew wealthier because they often have less access to financial aid and must foot more of the bill themselves. With China's economic boom, more families can now afford to send their children overseas.

Both victims were graduate students studying electrical engineering. Their hometowns were not immediately released and messages left for the Chinese consulate were not immediately returned.

Yao, the senior engineering student, said she hopes that campus police could expand their patrol areas near the campus to provide better safety for students.

The West Adams district, where the shooting took place, has seen some revitalization.

Beatriz Moreno, who lives across the street with her family from where the shooting occurred, said the neighborhood has been cleaned up. She said the last shooting she could remember on her street was in 2003.

"We used to see this every day," she said. "There are mostly families here. This is not normal."

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Powerful 8.6-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Off Coast of Indonesia

The epicenter of the 8.7 magnitude earthquake that struck just off the coast of Indonesia

A powerful earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia, triggering a tsunami watch for countries across the Indian Ocean. The 8.6-magnitude quake was centered 20 miles beneath the ocean floor about 270 miles from Aceh's provincial capital.

The tremor was so powerful it was felt in Singapore, Thailand, Bangladesh, India and Malaysia, where tall office buildings shook for more than a minute, according to the Associated Press.

An 8.2-magnitude aftershock was reported off the coast of northern Sumatra with an epicenter 382 miles from Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, around 6:43 a.m., according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Acehnese people run shortly after a powerfull earthquake hit western coast of Sumatera in Banda Aceh

Workers at the Hermes Palace Hotel in Banda Aceh described a scene of panic, near the coast, as people fled to higher ground. Employee Cut Arlista said the shaking was so strong that water from the hotel pool spilled out, although the 70 guests at the hotel were not evacuated.

"People were crying, and everybody was running inland as fast as they can," Arlista told ABC News.

The nature of the quake made it less likely a tsunami was generated because the earth moved horizontally, rather than vertically, and therefore had not displaced large volumes of water, Bruce Presgrave of the USGS told the BBC.

"We can't rule out the possibility, but horizontal motion is less likely to produce a destructive tsunami," he said.

Still, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said a tsunami watch was in effect for Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Myanmar, Thailand, the Maldives and other Indian Ocean islands, Malaysia, Pakistan, Somalia, Oman, Iran, Bangladesh, Kenya, South Africa and Singapore, according to the AP.

The tsunami warning was extended until 9 a.m. E.T.

The latest quake struck off the west coast of Sumatra, the same region devastated by a magnitude-9.1 earthquake in December 2004. That tremor triggered a catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed 230,000 people.

"I think a lot of people learned from the past," Arlista said. "Everybody knew to run as soon as the earthquake hit."

Gary Peart, an Australian worker at the Lumba Lumba Diving Center on the beach in Banda Aceh in the province of Aceh, Indonesia, said the quake lasted quite a while.

"It was long for an earthquake," he said. "Maybe a minute and a half, and then it got slowly, slowly stronger, and then it faded away."

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Mother, daughter reunite after 16 years apart

Rosnia hugging her mother during a reunion at Kampung Pengalat Besar

KOTA KINABALU: For 16 years, a housewife here never stopped praying for her daughter to return after she ran away from home to elope with her boyfriend.

The prayers of Saina Ibrahim, 52, were answered on Thursday when she was finally re-united with her daughter Rosnia Sapili, thanks to Papar Umno Youth.

Saina said she was heartbroken when Rosnia, her eldest child, abandoned their home at Kg Pengalat Besar in Sabah's south-western Papar district to elope with her boyfriend to Sulawesi, Indonesia.

“I never stopped searching and hoping for her to come back one day,” Saina said as she hugged her daughter, who now has three children of her own.

Rosnia, 36, said she made the rash decision of leaving the family after being convinced by her Indonesian boyfriend's sweet promises of a happy life with him.

Naive and madly in love at the time, Rosnia ran away with the man and married him but her dream life crumbled in just four years when he left her and their sons.

“It was really tough bringing up my children alone without anyone to help me.

“I thought of coming home many times but I was too ashamed and did not have money,” Rosnia said.

She also claimed that she had never seen her eldest son since her husband took him away when he was three.

Papar Umno Youth chief Armizan Mohd Ali said the Umno division undertook the mission to locate Rosnia and tracked her down to Ujung Padang after hearing of Saina's plight a year ago.

He said the cost of the mission was borne by Papar MP Datuk Rosnah Abdul Rashid Shirlin and Kawang assemblyman Datuk Gulam Haidar Khan Bahadar.

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Indonesian women stripped of mini skirt rights

Indonesian women at demonstration

Indonesia's powerful religious affairs minister has declared that mini-skirts are pornographic and would be banned under the country's tough new anti-porn laws.

Minister Suryadharma Ali has been appointed to run Indonesia's new anti-porn task force, announced by president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono earlier this month.

He told reporters in Jakarta yesterday that before deciding what they must ban as pornography, the task force would consult widely to come up with "a set of universal criteria", adding that "one [criteria] will be when someone wears a skirt above the knee", according to the Jakarta Post.

Once a standard of pornography was established, the task force would apply it nationwide across all ethnicities, the newspaper reported.

Entrenched corruption is tearing apart the ruling Democratic Party and imprisoning its members of parliament. While thousands are demonstrating on the streets about fuel price rises and the cost of living,  the Indonesian government's response has been to crack down hard on short skirts.

Earlier this month, the country's parliamentary speaker Marzuki Alie announced he would draft rules banning female politicians and staff members from wearing mini skirts, saying, "there have been a lot of rape cases and other immoral acts recently and this is because women aren't wearing appropriate clothes".

"You know what men are like. Provocative clothing will make them do things."

The president announced the anti-pornography task force earlier this month to try to remove it entirely from Indonesia. Judging by a recent Google survey, Indonesians consume porn at least as enthusiastically as other people, despite a large majority of the population being Muslim.

Yudhoyono put Suryadharma, the religious affairs minister, in charge of the task force's day to day operation.

The minister is no stranger to controversy. In January he said the Shiite version of Islam, a minority interpretation in Indonesia, was heretical because it deviated from mainstream muslim teaching.

Declaring a sect heretical in Indonesia can be dangerous. Last year a machete-wielding mob attacked and killed three members of the "heretical" Ahmadiyah sect.

Suryadharma's department is also controversial. In February, Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission questioned the whereabouts of millions of dollars in interest earned on the deposits that pilgrims paid to the department to join the waiting list for a trip to Mecca.

These deposits, added to donations made to the poor, make the religious affairs department the wealthiest in the Indonesian government. 

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