Indonesia

For decades, Uni Histayanti has performed the enigmatic movements of her country's traditional pendet pendet dance. She learned the rhythms as an infant and years ago opened a dinner theater here in the Indonesian capital where, dressed in native costume, she performs nightly. As she flutters her arms bird-like, darts her eyes and tilts her head at exotic angles, she invokes the welcoming spirit of the Hindu-majority Bali island where it originated centuries ago. That's why it floored her to hear that neighboring Malaysia had reportedly tried to seize the pendet as its own. It's pure cultural piracy, Histayanti insists.

The last time Indonesia allowed Peace Corps volunteers to work here, they weren't sent into villages to teach English or build schools. The Americans were assigned to whip athletes into shape for the 1964 Olympics. The peculiar aid to reluctant hosts didn't work out: Jakarta ended up boycotting the Tokyo Games, and thugs from the Indonesian Communist Party, which accused the American coaches of being CIA agents, ran them out of the country in 1965, less than three years after they had arrived.

TO connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping. Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh. They move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.

The teenager lay dazed amid the settling dust and debris, his leg trapped by a fallen concrete wall. He sensed that he was going to die. So he made a decision: He would cut off his own limb to save his life. Ignoring the major blood loss, taking deep breaths as he concentrated on the terrible task at hand, the 18-year-old construction worker cut halfway through his right leg just below the kneecap. Finally, too weak to continue, he begged for help, and a fellow worker finished the job for him in the aftermath of the magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck Sumatra in September.

Expect a far more powerful earthquake than last week's magnitude 7.6 temblor to hit the devastated Indonesian city of Padang and surrounding areas in the next few decades. That's the word from a team of leading seismologists, who said the worst is yet to come, although they cautioned that predicting the timing of earthquakes is an inexact science at best. After a three-day review of seismic evidence using global-positioning equipment, scientists with the Earth Observatory of Singapore, or EOS, found that the Padang earthquake did little to relieve the stored tension at the juncture of two tectonic plates.

The monkey, shackled to an iron stake, paced a narrow strip of dirt filled with its own excrement. As people laughed and pointed, the creature bared its teeth and lunged at the end of its line. "He gets angry," said one trader at the teeming animal market here. "Like a little person." Irma Hermawati gets angry too. The 31-year-old Javanese native is an investigator for the nonprofit group ProFauna, which lobbies on behalf of what she believes is Indonesia's most precious resource: its indigenous wildlife.

Yusman Roy, a former boxer and a convert to Islam, is serving two years in prison because he believes that Muslims should pray in a language they can understand. Roy, who led bilingual prayer sessions at his small East Java boarding school, is seen as a heretic by conservative Muslims here. They believe true prayer can be conducted only in Arabic. Roy's desire to pray in Indonesian has sparked such an outrage that he was convicted last year in criminal court of "spreading hatred."

Threats to shut down a U.S. Navy medical research lab here may undermine the hunt for mutating viruses that could set off the next flu pandemic, Western scientists warn. Indonesia suspended negotiations with the United States over the fate of Naval Medical Research Unit No. 2 last month after senior politicians said it didn't benefit Indonesia and could be a cover for spying. The U.S. Embassy firmly denied that the facility is used to gather intelligence, and said most of the lab's staff members are Indonesians helping with research carried out in cooperation with local health officials.

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off Indonesia on Sunday morning moved the entire island of Sumatra about 100 feet to the southwest, pushing up a gigantic mass of water that collapsed into a tsunami and devastated shorelines around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The quake was the largest since a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1964 and was one of the biggest ever recorded by scientists.

TEACHING high school chemistry, she was the picture of propriety, not an inch of flesh exposed except her hands and a cheerful face framed by a tightly pinned head scarf. Her students were separated according to the Islamic school's strict rules: boys on one side of the class, girls on the other. Lessons stuck to dry theory, like rote explanations of the periodic table and how atoms and molecules bond.

This isolated Sumatran village, where monkeys frolic in the jungle canopy and residents take easy evening swims in the mud-colored Kampar River, is the unlikely center of a tense international battle of wills. Logging lobbyists, environmental activists and even foreign diplomats, including the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, have visited in recent months. Job fairs, door-to-door visits and community meetings have become a constant. It's a little like the New Hampshire presidential primary season, in an equatorial climate.

The government here has banned a controversial Australian-made film that depicts the Indonesian military's reported 1975 execution of six foreign journalists in East Timor. Indonesia's film censorship board announced last week that all screenings of the political thriller "Balibo," which documents the killings of the so-called Balibo Five, are forbidden. The five -- two Australians, two Britons and a New Zealander -- were working for Australian television networks when they were allegedly murdered by Indonesian troops during the 1975 invasion of East Timor.

The wild bull elephant stood menacingly in the clearing, trumpeting in annoyance and anger, its brain racing with a chemical that unleashes a throbbing and unceasing headache. It was the heart of mating season, and the bull was desperately seeking a mate. Was this really a good moment to be sitting on top of another elephant just a few hundred feet away? But Syamsuardi, a native of the wild Sumatran forest, had his strategy ready: He would pit his own elephant against the amorous stranger.

The teenager lay dazed amid the settling dust and debris, his leg trapped by a fallen concrete wall. He sensed that he was going to die. So he made a decision: He would cut off his own limb to save his life. Ignoring the major blood loss, taking deep breaths as he concentrated on the terrible task at hand, the 18-year-old construction worker cut halfway through his right leg just below the kneecap. Finally, too weak to continue, he begged for help, and a fellow worker finished the job for him in the aftermath of the magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck Sumatra in September.

The monkey, shackled to an iron stake, paced a narrow strip of dirt filled with its own excrement. As people laughed and pointed, the creature bared its teeth and lunged at the end of its line. "He gets angry," said one trader at the teeming animal market here. "Like a little person." Irma Hermawati gets angry too. The 31-year-old Javanese native is an investigator for the nonprofit group ProFauna, which lobbies on behalf of what she believes is Indonesia's most precious resource: its indigenous wildlife.

Malaysian authorities have confiscated more than 15,000 Bibles because they referred to "God" as "Allah," a translation that has been banned in this Muslim-majority country, Christian church officials said. The Rev. Hermen Shastri, general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, said authorities seized a consignment of 10,000 copies sent from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Kuching, in Sarawak state, on Sept. 11 because the Indonesian-language Bibles contained the word "Allah." An additional 5,100 Bibles, also imported from Indonesia, were seized in March, said an official from the Bible Society of Malaysia.

A magnitude 7 earthquake struck deep under the sea in eastern Indonesia, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. At a depth of 86 miles, the quake was too far below Earth's surface to cause a tsunami, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was 225 miles southeast of Ambon in the Molucca Islands. It came as Indonesia is trying to recover from a quake last month that killed more than 1,000 people on the western island of Sumatra.

For decades, Uni Histayanti has performed the enigmatic movements of her country's traditional pendet pendet dance. She learned the rhythms as an infant and years ago opened a dinner theater here in the Indonesian capital where, dressed in native costume, she performs nightly. As she flutters her arms bird-like, darts her eyes and tilts her head at exotic angles, she invokes the welcoming spirit of the Hindu-majority Bali island where it originated centuries ago. That's why it floored her to hear that neighboring Malaysia had reportedly tried to seize the pendet as its own. It's pure cultural piracy, Histayanti insists.

Expect a far more powerful earthquake than last week's magnitude 7.6 temblor to hit the devastated Indonesian city of Padang and surrounding areas in the next few decades. That's the word from a team of leading seismologists, who said the worst is yet to come, although they cautioned that predicting the timing of earthquakes is an inexact science at best. After a three-day review of seismic evidence using global-positioning equipment, scientists with the Earth Observatory of Singapore, or EOS, found that the Padang earthquake did little to relieve the stored tension at the juncture of two tectonic plates.

The 2004 Sumatra earthquake that set off a deadly tsunami also seems to have caused more earthquakes along the San Andreas fault in the last few years, according to a study from UC Berkeley. The study analyzed 20 years of data in the Parkfield area, which sits on the fault, and found that the disastrous earthquake weakened the fault, changing both the frequency and strength of earthquakes in the area. "So you will have many earthquakes, but the magnitude will be smaller than expected," said Taka'aki Taira, a seismologist at UC Berkeley who headed the study.