Indonesian authorities issued a tsunami alert Wednesday after eruptions at Ruang mountain sent ash thousands of feet high. Officials ordered more than 11,000 people to leave the area.
The volcano on the northern side of Sulawesi island had at least five large eruptions in the past 24 hours, Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation said. Authorities raised their volcano alert to its highest level.
At least 800 residents left the area earlier Wednesday.
Indonesia, an archipelago of 270 million people, has 120 active volcanoes. It is prone to volcanic activity because it sits along the “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped series of seismic fault lines around the Pacific Ocean.
Iran’s attack against Israel over the weekend has spurred a flurry of bipartisan legislative action in Congress, uniting lawmakers against the country even as the risk of a larger regional war looms.
Several measures introduced and passed in the House and Senate seek to both publicly condemn Iran and punish the Islamic Republic financially. Lawmakers have denounced Iran’s actions, which came in response to a suspected Israeli strike weeks earlier on an Iranian consular building in Syria that killed two Iranian generals.
“The world is on fire, and history will judge us for our action,” said Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, during a news conference Tuesday.
The swift, bipartisan condemnation of Iran has put on sharp display the durability of American support for Israel, even amid growing partisan division over how the country is handling its more than six-month war with Hamas.
The family of a Minnesota man who was killed by a state trooper during a traffic stop filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Wednesday, alleging that the fatal shooting was unjustified and unlawful.
The lawsuit names Troopers Ryan Londregan, who shot Ricky Cobb II, and Brett Seide, who made the initial stop. Londregan, a white officer, was already facing murder charges for killing Cobb, a Black man, in what has become a politically charged case in the city where the murder of George Floyd by police nearly four years ago sparked global protests demanding racial justice.
“Ricky Cobb was a productive citizen of this community, and we will not let you vilify him,” family attorney Bakari Sellers said at a news conference. “We will not let you punish him in his death. We want him to be allowed to rest in peace. And today is another step in the journey of bringing those officers who caused his death to justice.”
Londregan’s lawyer, Chris Madel, disputed the allegations, which parallel the charges in the separate criminal case.
“We will fight the civil lawsuit with the same vigor that we’ve fought the criminal matter,” Madel said.
Family attorney F. Clayton Tyler told reporters they named only the two troopers in the lawsuit because the state would be immune under federal law. But they don’t rule out filing a separate action later in state court naming the State Patrol, after they gather more evidence, or updating the allegations in the federal lawsuit.
Daniela Kopřivová can be reached at kopr1448@stthomas.edu.