INDONESIA A NEWS

Five medical experts from Indonesia are graduating Thursday from a course at Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center on coping with natural and man-made catastrophes. They are among a group of 27 physicians and nurses from 17 countries taking part in a simulated mass casualty event (MCE). Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, but it has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Rambam management said the simulation is part of the eighth course of its kind, being held from November 6 through the end of this week. It is jointly sponsored by Rambam, the Foreign Ministry and the Health Ministry. Rambam’s staffers are experts in trauma, emergency and mass casualty situations due to being the main hospital in the North. For years, the hospital has received soldiers injured on the northern border and beyond, as well as civilians caught in home-front wars and terrorist attacks. “In the course, we learn how to build a system for operating in emergency, trauma and MCE. We did not come to ...

Indonesian authorities have cancelled the licenses of 28 Indonesian agencies that specialized in recruiting Indonesian workers for jobs overseas, including Kuwait, accusing them of violating the Southeast Asian country's labor laws, according to an insider. The insider revealed that the Indonesian labor ministry had assessed over 387 recruitment agencies, stressing that the results showed that only 28 of these had been violating the law against sending workers to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Malaysia, which were blacklisted for Indonesian domestic workers to travel to for work. According to the Indonesian Minister of Manpower and Transmigration, Mohaymen Eskandar, the assessment report showed that these agencies had been forging documents on agency workers' age, training and medical records. In other news, the Iraqi parliament's White Bloc (WB) recently urged their country's envoy to the UN to demand that Iraq be exempted from the UN's Chapter Seven on t...

The United Steelworkers (USW) requested yesterday that the U.S. Department of Justice immediately begin to investigate whether Freeport-McMoRan has been bribing security forces in Indonesia. The Indonesian police have recently been quoted in the local media acknowledging that they accepted millions of dollars from Freeport-McMoRan’s Indonesian subsidiary PT Freeport to provide security for the miner’s operations in Papua, Indonesia. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bans companies from paying foreign officials to do or omit to do an act in violation of his or her lawful duty. Police personnel providing security for Freeport-McMoRan operations in Papua have recently played a highly controversial role in a strike by some 10,000 miners. This includes firing on strikers during a demonstration on October 10, killing two and injuring eight others. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, Inc. (FMCG, NYSE: FCX) is a mining company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona that operates in a number of ...

I still cannot get one sound from the Feb. 6 Cikeusik mob attack on a handful of Ahmadiyah followers out of my head. At some point the shouting and mayhem, which millions have seen on YouTube, seems to subside as a lifeless body in the mud is beaten with wooden staves. There follows a series of sickening wet slaps against the corpse as a crowd shouts in approval.  But that man and two other victims were not murdered, according to prosecutors who chose the lightest possible charges to throw up against the clearly identifiable suspects in the Banten province attack. On Thursday, a court made it official, handing out sentences of three to six months to 12 men accused of leading and carrying out the assault.  Dani bin Misra, a 17-year-old, smashed a victim’s skull with a stone; he was charged with manslaughter and got three months. The leader of the mob of about 1,000 people who attacked 20 Ahmadis, Idris bin Mahdani, was convicted of illegal possession of a machete and got ...