Inundated: Motorists battle their way through Denpasar on Tuesday as heavy rains continue to flood many areas of Bali. Photograph: Juliyusman Sine/The Bali Times

SINGARAJA Mystery surrounds the deaths of a French couple at a small hotel in Banjar, Buleleng, on Monday. They were found dead in the bathroom about 7pm, only an hour after they checked in. Police named the couple as husband and wife Oliver Marroni, 35, and Marron Scapin, 34. The woman was naked but the [...]

By Hector How Indonesia chooses to govern itself is wholly a matter for Indonesians to decide. Those of us who live here without benefit of citizenship may merely observe the processes, form views about these and their utility or function, or more often the lack thereof; and if we can break through the all but [...]

By Abbas Barzegar Many of us are still bewildered by the bizarre news of the 19-year-old Somali-born American citizen, Muhammad Osman Mohamud, arrested on 25 November for attempting to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Putting aside questions regarding the nature of the FBI’s involvement in this case, it appears that despite [...]

By Hasni Abidi Should we be concerned about the fate of Christian communities in the Arab world? This issue hits the headlines time and again whenever a church is attacked in Iraq or Egyptian Copts are bullied. Most recently an appeal by a group of Arab intellectuals to rise above sectarian divisions was published in [...]

In a country as vast size as Indonesia, a centralised system of jurisprudence is the only way order can be maintained and certainty provided for society. But here, nationally enacted laws are in many places made irrelevant because of the customary laws of regions. This should not be allowed to continue. In Bali, like many [...]

The jailing of an American man in Lombok on a charge of blasphemy, following an incident at a mosque in the south coast community of Kuta in circumstances that are still far from clear but which the man concerned apparently accepts as justice, is instructive from another aspect of the case. The altercation that brought [...]

By Novar Caine It is extraordinary to think that while people cavort, oftentimes hedonistically, in Bali, at the other end of the country people are being whipped for minor transgressions, if even that. Things like kissing, an apparent shock-offence that saw an adulterous pecking couple publicly caned in Aceh last week. Morality police in country’s [...]

By the time we’d negotiated the Saturday afternoon traffic from Ungasan to the Kuta hospital, the blood pressure reading of the driver and patient sent medical staff into a serious spin and the passengers needed a hefty sedative and a lie down. We thought we’d left early enough to avoid the seething masses of maddened [...]

US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has pulled its blood pressure drug Thelin off the market due to a potentially life-threatening risk of liver damage. Pfizer said it was voluntarily withdrawing Thelin in the European Union, Canada and Australia and is also suspending all clinical tests on the drug that treats pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a rare, [...]

A major trial that aimed to see if a common bone-strengthening drug could help prevent recurrences of breast cancer found it did not benefit most patients. The five-year study, known as the AZURE trial, followed 3,360 women with advanced breast cancer who had already undergone surgery. The study randomly assigned some to take the osteoporosis [...]

By Dr Robert Goldman Longevity News and Review provides readers with the latest information in breakthroughs pertaining to the extension of the healthy human lifespan. These news summaries are compiled by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M; www.worldhealth.net), a non-profit medical society composed of 22,000 physician and scientist members from 105 nations, united in [...]