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Groton Daily Independent
Monday, Dec. 04, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 148 ~ 33 of 43
“At all volcanoes we can expect uctuations in activity. This does not mean that the threat is over,” said Heather Handley, a volcanologist at Sydney’s Macquarie University. “It is clearly still in an active phase.”
In the 1963 eruption, there were small ash explosions in February followed by a lava ow and then a large explosive eruption on March 17, she said. A second major eruption occurred two months later “so activity can stop and start again,” said Handley.
At the muddy Rendang camp, bare-chested 77-year-old Nyoman Arse remembered the 1963 disaster in great detail and was unperturbed by Agung’s ash eruptions in the past week.
Recalling events when he was 24, Arse said the mountain sent out ash for a month and then exploded about the same time as Galungan, an important religious celebration in majority Hindu Bali that in 1963 fell in mid-March.
“I saw the rocks coming down the mountain with a very loud noise,” he said, imitating crashing sounds. “The rocks were huge,” he said. “What’s happening now is still nothing.”
Yemen’s rebel alliance unravels amid Sanaa street clashes By AHMED AL-HAJ, Associated Press
SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Snipers took over rooftops in residential areas, tanks deployed and militiamen set up checkpoints Sunday across the Yemeni capital, where ghting forced families to hunker down indoors in anticipation of more violence.
Five days of bombings and heavy gun re have underscored the unraveling of the already fragile alli- ance between Yemen’s strongman and former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the Shiite rebels known as Houthis. The two sides joined ranks three years ago and swept across the capital, Sanaa, forcing the country’s internationally recognized president to ee the country and seek military intervention led by Saudi Arabia.
After months of political and military stalemate, the street battles between Saleh’s forces and the Houthi militiamen have marked a turning point in the con ict. The two sides had been enemies before the six- year-war that began in 2004 when Saleh was a president. Their alliance, in the eyes of many Yemenis, was doomed to fail given their stark differences.
The Iran-backed rebels perceive themselves as a religious awakening movement, while Saleh is a prag- matic politician, shifting political alliances, buying tribal loyalties and exploiting Yemen’s power fault lines throughout his three-decades in power before he was ousted after the country’s Arab Spring uprising in 2011.
Over the past 48 hours, in a series of surprise announcements, all of Yemen’s political players spoke about turning a new page and unifying against the Houthis — a new alliance that appeared to have been in the making for some time as the Shiite rebels have accused Saleh of working against them.
The Houthis, who descended from their northern enclave and seized Yemen’s capital in 2014 with the help of Saleh’s forces, are now becoming isolated in the face of popular anger.
Pictures of angry Yemenis tearing down posters of the Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik a-Houthi, in Sanaa ooded social media as street ghting there appeared to split the capital in two, with northern areas under Houthi control and southern ones under Saleh’s ghters.
Clashes between ghters loyal to Saleh and the Houthis rst erupted last week when Saleh accused the rebels of storming his giant mosque in Sanaa and attacking his nephew, the powerful commander of the special forces, Tarek Saleh.
Both sides have set up checkpoints, placed snipers on rooftops and sealed off entrances to the city. Bombings and sporadic gun re rocked the southern part of Sanaa on Sunday, where Houthi militants stormed Saleh’s Yemen Today TV network, beat up its director, and held over 40 journalists and crew members inside the building, Yemen’s Press Syndicate said.
Many state institutions — including the airport, state TV headquarters and the of cial news agency — remained under the control of the Houthis, despite earlier reports that Saleh’s forces had taken them over.