1. NINE COUNTRIES TO PARTICIPATE IN WEST SUMATRA'S 'AIRWAVE FLY FOR FUN'.

At least 15 athletes from nine countries and 40 domestic athletes are slated to participate in an "Airwave Fly for Fun" event, which will take place in Agam district, West Sumatra province in May 16-23, a spokesman said.
Indonesian Minister of Culture and Tourism I Gde Ardika is expected to open the 2004 Airwave Fly for Fun event, organizing committee member Anwar Soerjomataram said.
Foreign participants are expected to come from Japan, Italy, USA, Australia, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, while the domestic athletes are among others from Yogyakarta and Jakarta, he said.
The event is also aimed to promote tourist resorts in Agam district, about 100 km north of West Sumatra provincial capital of Padang, Anwar cited.
According to him, two launching locations for the event provided by the organizing committee are Bukit Lawang at Lake Maninjau and Tapal Ilalang at Matur subdistrict with the landing site at Bayur village, Tanjung Raya subdistrict, Agam district.
Anwar said, the Fly for Fun event is sponsored by the Austria's parachute maker "Airwave".

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2. FOREIGN BADMINTON TEAMS ARRIVE FOR THOMAS AND UBER CUP CHAMPIONSHIP.

Badminton teams of Denmark and the United States arrived here on Monday for the final rounds of the men's Thomas Cup and women's Uber Cup group championship scheduled to be held here from May 7 to 16.
Upon arrival the two teams proceeded to Hilton Hotel which is located near the venue of the championship.
The 26-member Danish team was the first to arrive in Indonesia for the championship.

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3. INDONESIAN UNIVERSITY CHIEFS MEET US COUNTERPARTS IN WASHINGTON.

Thirty-eight university rectors and vice rectors from across Indonesia recently met with 78 US unversity officials in Washington DC.
According to the Indonesian Embassy, the purpose of the meeting which took place on April 28-30, 2004, was to discuss ways of developing and improving the quality of Indonesia's higher education and enadbling it to answer future challenges.
The meeting was attended also by representatives of the US International Development Agency (USAID), the US-Indonesia Association (Usindo), the Fullbright Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
At the meeting, Indonesia's Director General of Higher Education Satryo Soemantri Brodjonegoro outlined a number of new initiatives and approaches that needed to be implemented to improve Indonesia's national education system.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Miller Crouch noted that when he visited Bali in October 2003, US President George W Bush had pledged to provide US$150 million in educational assistance to Indonesia over a six-year period. This showed that the US was very concerned about education in Indonesia, he said.

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4. INDONESIA'S S SULAWESI TO HOLD TOURISM, TRADE, INDUSTRIAL EXPO.

The regional development board of Indonesia's South Sulawesi province will hold a tourism, trade and industrial expo here in September.
"The expo will exhibit main products from the five provinces in Sulawesi," the board's secretary general, Ikrar M Saleh, told South Sulawesi Governor HM Amin Syam.
The five provinces are North Sulawesi, Gorontalo, Central Sulawesi, Southeasat Sulawesi and South Sulawesi.
The expo will be the third to be held after those held in Manado (North Sulawesi) and Gorontalo (Gorontalo), he added.

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Indonesian Marine and Fishery Ministry will launch the Wallacea Indonesia 2004 expedition in the waters of the eastern part of Indonesia, Minister Rokhmin Dahuri said.
The three-month expedition beginning on May 22 will reminisce about British explorer, Alfred R Wallacea, who launched expeditions in Indonesian islands in the 19th century,_ he said.
The upcoming expedition will begin from the container port in Makassar, capital city of South Sulawesi on May 22.
Wallacea who lived between 1854 and 1862 and made the expeditions to Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku and Nusa Tenggara islands collected about 125 thousands of specimen of flora and fauna from his expedition.
Since Wallacea spent his explorations mostly in land and forests, the ministry along with Indonesian scout members, navy personnel and South Sulawesi administration officials will focus their expedition on marine flora and fauna during the next expedition, the ministry said.
The upcoming expedition which is to include surveys on oceanography, geology, geomorphology, geography, archeology will also involve expedition experts from Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, and the Netherlands, he said.
Some 100 divers will be tasked to take an inventory of Indonesian marine resources items during the exhibition, he said.
Rokhim said Indonesian fishery experts will conduct a survey on fresh water fish in two lakes in Sulawesi as fish there have characteristic that distinguish them from other fish in other Indonesian parts.

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6. MORE US AND BRITISH TOURISTS VISIT BALI.

The number of foreign tourists, particularly from the United States and Britain, visiting the world-renowned tourist island of Bali has tended to increase, an immigration official said.
Head of the immigration office at Bali's Ngurah Rai international airport, I Gede Widiartha said here Thursday that the number of tourist arrivals from the two countries over the past few months was quite encouraging.
The Ngurah Rai immigration office put the number of foreign tourists flying directly to the island in April at 111,022, 5,962 of whom came from Britan and 5,273 from the United States.
Widiartha said Britain ranked fifth in terms of the number of tourists visiting the island in April, with the United States trailing behind in the sixth place.
"Japan ranked first with 20,947 tourists and Australia was in the second place with 19,066 tourists," he said.
He said Taiwan came in third with 14,608 tourists, followed by Germany with 7,576 tourists.
The number of tourists from South Korea and Malaysia was recorded at 5,032 and 4,383 respectively.
According to Widiartha, the number of tourist arrivals to the island in the same period last year was only 63,750, 3,833 of whom came from Britain, and 2,402 from the United States.
Although the US and British governments had issued a "travel warning" and a "travel advisory" to their citizens for traveling to Indonesia, many Americans and Britons still visited some tourist resorts in Indonesia, Bali in particular, he said.

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7. SUSI SUSANTI GETS HALL OF FAME AWARD FROM IBF.

Indonesian former badminton champion Susi Susanti was awarded a "Hall of Fame" award by the International Badminton Federation (IBF).
"I was happy to accept the award and thanked all the Indonesian people who have made it possible for me to receive it," she said in a short speech made after the handing of the award by IBF chief Korn Thapparansi.
Susi Susanti (33) and her husband Alan Budikusuma were the first Indonesian badminton players to win gold medals from respectively women's and men's single events in the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992.
Susi was the fifth Indonesian badminton player to receive the award after Rudy Hartono, Dick Sudirman, Christian Hadinata and Liem Swie King.
The mother of three children grabbed a bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, world champion title in 1993 and All England champion title five times.
The decision to give the award to Susi was made at an IBF meeting held on the sidelines of current men's Thomas Cup and women's Uber Cup group championships.
To the dismay of badminton fans in the country Indonesia failed to retain the Thomas Cup on Friday after losing 2-3 to Denmark at the quarterfinals. The country's Uber Cup team had failed in an earlier stage to take the women's badminton supremacy symbol.

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8. DUTCH LIBRARY TO HAND OVER TENS OF THOUSANDS OF BOOKS ON INDONESIA.

The Netherlands will hand over hundreds of thousands of historical and cultural books on Indonesia's West Kalimantan province, which had been kept for tens of years in Dutch libraries and archives, to the Sintang district administration, a government official has said.
The books were written by Dutch historians in Dutch, English and Indonesian, Sintang district head, Elyakim Simon Jalil, said here over the weekend.
The Sintang administration will send officials to the Netherlands in November to pave the way for the grant, he said.
He said his office does not know exactly the number of books to be handed over to the Sintang administration, which has been busy building an archive for the books.
The district head said the Dutch government's decision to hand over the books reflects its appreciation of the Sintang administration's serious commitment to set up a district archive, he said.
Several Dutch officials visited Sintang to observe the building of the district archive recently, he said, adding that 15 foreign professors will help select the books to be brought to Indonesia.
Dutch colonizers controlled Indonesia from the 1600s to the 1940s.

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The management of North Sumatra's Medan Soccer Association (PSMS) is recruiting players from Latin American countries, such as Chile and Argentina, in a bid to improve its team's performance next season.
"We need at least two foreign players who will assume the center and striker positions to improve our rank in the second round of the 10th Indonesian League," association secretary, Erwin Lubis, told ANTARA when contacted by phone. The association is checking two Chilean and one Brazilian players for the positions, he said.

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Ten Dutch journalists visiting North Sumatra have pledged to help promote tourism in the Indonesian province when they return home.
The Dutch journalists are here to see relics of the Dutch colonial period.
"We will promote the interesting tourism sites we have seen," De Telegraaf daily reporter, Guido van de Kreeke, said.
The Dutch developed some of North Sumatra's tea and clove plantations.
North Sumatra was among the places in Indonesia visited by European tourists between the 1980s and 1990s, when the Indonesian flag carrier, Garuda Indonesia, served direct flights between Jakarta and Amsterdam.
Association of Indonesian Tourism Operators (Asita) chairman, Ben Sukma, said recently that the number of foreigners traveling to North Sumatra will likely increase after Garuda reopens its flights from Medan to Amsterdam recently.
Meanwhile, head of the provincial tourism body, Henry Hutabarat, said Lake Toba, south of here, the panoramic mountains of Karo district, the Lagundri and Sorake beaches in Nias district,
and the red-haired orangutans in the tropical forest near the Bahorok river in Langkat district have been attracting many foreign tourists for the past few years.
At least 2,933 Dutch tourists visited North Sumatra in 2003, he said.

The Habibie Center will hold a basic course on human rights for government offices, non-governmental organizations, and the people.
The course will be held following the United Nations' declaration of the years 1995 to 2004 as the decade of human rights education, the center said here Monday.
It expressed hope that human rights education would influence the way of life of people from all walks of life, including civilians, policemen and militarymen.
National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) chairman Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, Habibie Center chairman Muladi, and director general for human rights Hafid Abbas will deliver speeches during the course, the center said.
The Habibie Center was set up by former Indonesian president Habibie, who replaced Soeharto after the latter was forced out of office in May 1998 following clamors across the country for reform.

Some 11,000 foreign tourists, mostly from Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Japan and Europe, visited Indonesia's South Sulawesi province in 2003.
Data from the provincial tourism office released on Monday showed that the figure was 10 percent higher than the 9,956 foreign tourists who spent their holidays in South Sulawesi in 2002.
The tourists spent from US$65 to US$100 per day, giving the province an income of Rp25 billion, South Sulawesi Governor Amin Syam said recently.
Meanwhile, the number of Indonesian tourists who came to the province also increased from 571,625 in 2002 to 622,935 in 2003.
South Sulawesi last year invited Indonesian and foreign travel writers and television crews to promote its tourism industry and Began providing tourism information through the Sulawesi Tourism Information Center (STIC).

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