Word: grounding
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...Ground Forces Indonesia is both blessed and cursed by geology. Volcanic ash contributes to the archipelago's fecund soil. Yet eruptions periodically kill thousands. Indonesia is also rich in minerals and oil, exporting nearly half a million barrels a day. All told, the country's buried wealth accounts for almost 30% of its total exports. But the same grinding geologic processes that make this wealth possible also bedevil Indonesia with disasters like the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 160,000 people in Sumatra. Lusi is unlike any previous disaster, however. Unfolding in implacable slow motion...
...morning of June 2, 2006, Ahmad Mudakir, a 33-year-old factory worker from Porong, a sleepy district in eastern Java, was in his front yard tinkering with his motorbike. A little after 8 a.m. he felt a rumbling in the ground - worrying, but not wholly unexpected in this seismically fitful corner of Indonesia. What happened next was anything but expected. Mudakir watched as a neighbor, who had been inside eating breakfast, came tumbling into the street. "There was an explosion," Mudakir recalls. "Then the mud started to flow." He gaped in amazement as a geyser of scalding sludge shot...
...weight of the soil ruptured a natural-gas pipeline, causing a massive fireball that incinerated 13 workers. According to an International Monetary Fund estimate, Lusi has already cost Indonesia $3.7 billion in damage and damage control. And things are likely to get worse. As mud spews up from the ground, the area around the eruption is gradually sinking. Eventually, Porong could become a giant sucking wound in the Earth...
...Turkish government seemed unmoved by the Iraqi cabinet's statement on Tuesday condemning Turkey's incursion as a "violation of Iraqi sovereignty" and a "unilateral military action." The Turkish military sent ground troops into northern Iraq last Thursday to take on guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party...
...similar drama played out in December, when the Turkish government responded to PKK attacks with a series of air strikes in northern Iraq. But the scale of this month's fighting, along with Turkey's use of significant ground forces, has provoked a more serious crisis. Several thousand Turkish troops have entered several miles into northern Iraq, and with reinforcements moving south through Turkey the operation does not seem to be winding down. According the Turkish military's website 24 of its soldiers and 230 PKK guerrillas have been killed since the operation began...