(MAKASSAR, Indonesia) — An early warning system that might have prevented some deaths in the tsunami that hit an Indonesian island on Friday has been stalled in the testing phase for years.

The high-tech system of seafloor sensors, data-laden sound waves and fiber-optic cable was meant to replace a system set up after an earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 250,000 people in the region in 2004. But inter-agency wrangling and delays in getting just 1 billion rupiah ($69,000) to complete the project mean the system hasn’t moved beyond a prototype developed with $3 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

It is too late for central Sulawesi, where walls of water up to 6 meters (20 feet) high and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake killed at least 832 people in the cities of Palu and Donggala, tragically highlighting the weaknesses of the existing warning system and low public awareness about how to respond to warnings.

“To me this is a tragedy for science, even more so a tragedy for t..

(CANBERRA, Australia) — A South Pacific airline announced Monday that a passenger died when a plane crashed into a Pacific lagoon in Micronesia last week.

Air Niugini had initially said all 47 passengers and crew had survived when a Boeing 737 crashed near the Chuuk island runway on Friday.

The Papua New Guinea national carrier said on Saturday one passenger had not been accounted for, but witnesses had reported he had reached a dinghy as U.S. Navy sailors and local residents rescued people from the sinking plane.

But Air Niugini chief executive Tahawar Durrani said the man’s body was found by divers in the lagoon on Monday. The airline has not identified the man or released his nationality.

“Our outreach team is in touch with the man’s family and we are making arrangements to repatriate his body,” Durrani said in a statement.

Four passengers were in stable conditions at a Chuuk island hospital and will be taken soon to Guam for further treatment, Air Niugini said.

A Chuuk State ..

A Japanese politician who was kicked out of an assembly session last year after bringing her 7-month-old baby to the chambers was forced to leave again — this time, for sucking on a cough drop during assembly.

Yuka Ogata, a member of the Kumamoto city assembly in south-western Japan, was speaking at the podium when confronted by the assembly’s chairman about having something in her mouth. Ogata explained that she had a cold and was using cough drops to prevent disrupting the meeting with her cough. Despite there being no formal rule on eating and drinking in the chamber, assembly members found her cough drop consumption offensive, choosing to suspend the meeting to discuss how to discipline Ogata, eventually voting for her to read an apology they composed out loud. Ogata refused, resulting in her being suspended from the assembly for the rest of the day. Between both incidents, the assembly was delayed for eight hours.

According to Kyodo News, Kumamoto mayor Kazufumi Onishi wants an ..