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It seems that hardly a day goes by without reports of another tourist offending local customs on Bali. There are bikini-clad yoginis doing ‘downward dog’ poses in temple gateways and half-naked hooligans arguing with traffic police over their lack of a crash-helmet. While the world asks what’s caused this sudden rush of inappropriate behaviour, travellers who know the island well are wondering why it’s taken so long for Balinese to stand up and say, “enough is enough!” In 1972 the iconic surf-movie Morning of the Earth showed a naked hippy teaching elderly Balinese fishermen how to smoke cannabis. Four centuries...

In the clips shared to social media, masses of garbage could be seen charging down canals and storm drains, the water carrying it virtually invisible for all of the junk. “These are the trash tsunamis of Indonesia and it will all end up in the ocean,” clean-up environmentalist Gary Bencheghib, who shared the clip, wrote. “We can no longer turn a blind eye to these waves of plastic.” “The trash is not the problem. It’s the people. If they don’t waste from the beginning, there will still be trash but maybe better managed,” another wrote. Others called for a more...

Jakarta/Hong Kong (CNN) — Indonesia's controversial sex laws will not affect foreign tourists visiting Bali, officials have confirmed in a statement issued Monday. "Based on the provisions of the new Indonesian criminal code, visitors who visit or live in Bali would not need to worry," said Balinese governor Wayan Koster, adding that there would be "no checks on marital statuses at tourist accommodations like hotels, villas, guest houses or spas, or inspections by public officials or community groups." Like most major tourism hotspots around the world, Bali suffered vast economic turmoil during the Covid-19 pandemic. International travelers have been returning...

A bomb maker in the 2002 Bali attacks that killed 202 people was released from an Indonesian prison on parole on Wednesday after serving half his 20-year sentence, despite the opposition of Australia’s prime minister, who described him as “abhorrent”. Umar Patek was a leading member of the al-Qaeda-linked network Jemaah Islamiah, which is blamed for the bombings at two nightclubs in Kuta Beach. Indonesian authorities have said Patek was successfully reformed in prison and they will use him to influence other militants to turn away from terrorism. Patek 55, whose real name is Hisyam bin Alizein, received a total...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted the invitation extended to him by Joko Widodo, President of the Republic of Indonesia, to participate in the G20 summit in November. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine is set to attend the summit. Source: Interfax, a Russian news agency, quoting Yuri Ushakov, an aide to Vladimir Putin Quote from Ushakov: "Yes, we have confirmed that we will participate [in the G20 summit - ed.]. For now, they have invited us to attend in person. There’s plenty of time [until the summit - ed]. I hope that the pandemic will allow this meeting to take...

Balinese culture, a perpetual exercise in sophisticated subtlety, makes no distinction between the secular and the supernatural – sekala and niskala. Sekala is what our senses may discern. As in the ritualized gestures of world leaders – real and minor – at a highly polarized G20. Niskala is what cannot be sensed directly and can only be “suggested.” And that also applies to geopolitics. The Balinese highlight may have featured an intersection of sekala and niskala: the much ballyhooed Xi-Biden face-to-face (or face to earpiece). The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs preferred to cut to the chase, selecting the Top...

President Joe Biden abruptly canceled a G20 meeting on Tuesday, as world leaders gathered in Indonesia to conduct the official business of managing world affairs. However, the official explanation for Biden’s last minute drop-out has many wondering once again if something is seriously wrong with the president. Watch: “Breaking news would be that President Biden is missing the G20 leaders dinner,” Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy reported. “He is supposed to be at a supper right now, 8:10 in the evening here in Bali, Indonesia, with everybody that flew in. If you’re the U.S. president, you spent basically...

Another day, another embarrassing display by a very old President. It's obvious someone had written down for Biden who he was supposed to call on from the Press Corps during a presser he did after attending the ASEAN Conference in Cambodia and ahead of attending the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia. To have this kind of display on the world stage . . .

President Joe Biden on Monday acknowledged that his promise to legalize abortion nationwide would not come to fruition in the next Congress. “I don’t think there’s enough votes to codify,” Biden said at a press conference in Bali, Indonesia after a reporter asked him about the future of his promises on abortion. The president made the issue of legalizing abortion nationwide a critical part of his midterm campaign message.

President Biden is preparing for a candid and in depth conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping when the two leaders meet privately on Nov. 14 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, the White House said Thursday. It will be the first face-to-face meeting between Biden and Xi after a handful of phone calls between the two leaders, and the president had earlier said he expects to lay out his “red lines…and to determine whether or not they conflict with one another.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stormed off and headed home early after being snubbed by other diplomats at the G20 summit — who refused to take a group photo with him over his nation’s invasion of Ukraine. Foreign ministers who gathered in Bali, Indonesia, this week, did not pose for a traditional “family”-style group photo, after several of them reportedly refused to be pictured with Vladimir Putin’s chief envoy. The Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken led the photo-op boycott.

The female protestor who sparked fury today when she glued herself to priceless artwork in the National Gallery has been accused of being a jet-setting sailor who has racked up tens of thousands of air miles. Student Hannah Hunt, 23, is the co-founder of Just Stop Oil whose social media pages are adorned with exotic holiday pictures from locations including Bali, Australia and the Canary Islands. The aspiring psychologist has contributed to chaos across the country, after she was pictured glueing herself to roads, camping in the rafters of a major oil depot in Essex and today stuck pictures over...

Bali monkeys are raiding people's homes for food after not receiving the normal amount of treats from tourists due to the coronavirus pandemic. Macaque monkeys have begun hanging on residents' roofs and waiting for the opportunity to strike as they have been missing out on the bananas and peanuts normally provided to them by tourists, The Associated Press reported. The Sangeh Monkey Forest sanctuary, located close to the villagers, is home to 600 monkeys who normally get plenty of food from the 6,000 visitors a month; however, pandemic travel restrictions have proven detrimental to Bali's tourism industry with the monkeys...

The paper, published in a Royal Society science journal, studied monkeys at Uluwatu Temple in Bali, Indonesia, who frequently steal items from humans -- such as bags, hats, sunglasses, tablets and phones -- and hold them to ransom in exchange for offerings of food. It found adult wild long-tailed macaque monkeys were intelligent enough to comprehend which items had the highest value to the visitors, such as an electronic item, and would only release it after receiving food they perceived to be of corresponding value. The authors said the behavior displayed "unprecedented economic decision-making processes" among the monkeys observed as...

An American woman and self-described digital nomad will be deported from Indonesia after posting tweets that sparked a social media backlash over perceived western privilege and lack of cultural awareness, after she said Bali was “LGBT friendly”. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation and its LGBT community has for years faced discrimination and sometimes violent attacks. Only 9 per cent of Indonesians agreed that homosexuality is acceptable, according to a survey by the Pew research centre last June. In a series of tweets at the weekend, Kristen Gray wrote about the perks of her decision to move to the...

At age 60, she wasn’t entirely sure where Bali was. By age 62, she was living there. Sherry Bronson, now 69, spent much of her life in Minnesota, where she raised three daughters and worked in real estate. But she didn’t love it: “I have hated the weather in Minnesota since I was a child,” she says. So in 2010, when her oldest daughter, who was teaching in South Korea, asked her to come to Bali so they could celebrate Sherry’s 60th birthday together, Sherry — after, she recalls with a laugh, Googling “Where’s Bali?” — jumped at the...

CITIZEN WARRIOR Our goal is to oppose Islamization by exposing, marginalizing, and disempowering orthodox Islam. Demoting Islam's Religion Status The following article is written by Martel Sobieskey and is reprinted here with his permission. ONE THING is certain, Islam is not a religion by anything Americans believe one to be -- not even close. In fact, Islam is the antithesis of what we deem to be religious. Above all, Islam is a totalitarian political machine of bloodthirsty conquest which zealously advocates the downfall of the U.S. government. Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. . ." because he...

One Russian man was arrested at a Bali airport for attempting to smuggle a drugged baby orangutan in his luggage out of the air hub and back to his home country. The tourist now faces up to $7,000 in fines and five years in prison. On Friday night, Andrei Zhestkov was detained at Ngurah Rai International Airport before boarding a flight back to Russia, The Independent reports. Officials found the 2-year-old orangutan fast asleep in a basket, evidently drugged with allergy pills, after a routine security screening. Zhestkov, 27, reportedly told officials that he had been given the protected primate...

<p>DENPASAR, INDONESIA (AFP) - A British woman was handed a six-month jail term on Wednesday (Feb 6) for slapping an immigration officer in Bali after she missed her flight because of an expired tourist visa.</p> <p>A court on the Indonesian holiday island found Auj-e Taqaddas, 43, guilty of assaulting the officer at Ngurah Rai international airport in July last year.</p>

Tens of thousands of people have evacuated their land in Bali as the nearby volcano Mount Agung angrily spits ash and its magma rises. Many Balinese hold the mountain sacred and accept its occasional outbursts as moral admonishments whereas geologists consider this activity a routine part of Earth’s behavior. But scientists have found another force - climate change - affects the frequency of eruptions. Now a new study shows even relatively minor climate variations may have such an influence. If they are right, today’s global warming could mean more and bigger volcanic eruptions in the future. The new study is...