"The latest report we get, the death is 69 and 15 missing," he told Xinhua by telephone from the province.

He said that the natural disaster also damaged hundreds of houses.

The rescue team was searching those who were still missing, said Wahid.

So far, there was no aid arrival yet in the area, he said.

Indonesia, which is located in tropical areas, often suffers from landslide due to rampant deforestation.

The quake had a magnitude of 3.3 with the epicenter being off the shore of Lake Erie, northwest of Ashtabula near Painesville.

Several other earthquakes have hit northeast Ohio so far this year. The last one hit near Mentor in May, with a magnitude of 3.0.

The quakes before that ranged in magnitude from 2.0 to 2.6

At risk in Arizona are hundreds of homes, lodges, picnic areas, campgrounds and structures in the area of Slide Rock State Park, a popular recreation spot that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

"The fire just behaved badly," said Matt Shobert, chief of the Sedona Fire District. "It definitely moved and has the potential to threaten some structures."

The fire started Sunday as a transient's campfire and spread quickly, forcing the evacuation of about 400 homes and businesses in the canyon more than 90 miles north of Phoenix. About 100 homes in five subdivisions on the north side of Sedona were also evacuated.

Meanwhile, firefighters in Colorado battled an 8,960-acre wildfire that forced the evacuation of more than 270 homes.

The fire, ignited by lightning and first reported Sunday, was burning in logging debris, dry grass and drought-stressed pines near Fort Garland, about 150 miles south of Denver.

"I've never seen a fire that size," Myers Archoata said as he sat in his pickup along U.S. 160. "I've lived here all my life. We've had fires, but we've been able to put them out."

Gov. Bill Owens was scheduled to visit Fort Garland on Wednesday to sign an executive order providing $3 million in state relief funds, a spokesman said.

In Santa Maria, Calif., firefighters battled a 10,000-acre blaze that stopped short of reaching a critical ridgeline in Los Padres National Forest.

No homes were threatened as the fire burned away from the small town of New Cuyama, about 45 miles east of Santa Maria.

No asteroids are presently known to be on collision courses with Earth. But existing holes in the ground suggest that inevitably one will eventually be found. There is no firm plan for how to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid, though scientists have pondered firing rockets at them, moving them gently with solar sails, or nudging them with nuclear explosions.

Lock and load

The new idea is to capture a relatively small asteroid-perhaps 100 feet (30 meters) wide-by sending a robot to it.

The robot would heave material from the asteroid's surface into space, and the reaction force would gradually direct the asteroid to a Lagrange point, one of a handful of nodes along Earth's orbit where the gravity of Earth and the Sun balance out. Scientists know that objects can be kept stable at a Lagrange point with little or no energy.

The captured rocky weapon would be held there, traveling around the Sun ahead of or behind the Earth, held until needed.

Then, if a large asteroid threatens to hit us, the small one is moved into its path, using the same heaving technique. The rocks collide, and the big one is broken into somewhat less harmfull bits.

The collision disperses the fragments of the incoming asteroid, so that not all of them hit the planet.

But...

Depending on the relative masses of the two objects, between 10 and 20 percent of the incoming asteroid mass would still hit, "but the fragments would be dispersed all over the Earth and, hopefully, none would be large enough to reach the ground with a large remaining destructive power," said Didier Massonnet of the CNES research center in France.

Massonnet and colleague Benoit Meyssignac say the collision should be engineered to occur at least 620,000 miles (1 million kilometers) from Earth and would take about eight months to execute from the Lagrange point.

The plan is detailed in the July-September, 2006 issue of the journal Acta Astronautica. The researchers first floated it at a scientific conference last fall.

One small asteroid that could fit the bill already been identified; it is called 2000 SG344, and Massonnet suspects there are many others that would work.

Fuel for thought

The researchers admit their entire scheme is not quite ready for prime time.

"We are more confident in our capability to capture the asteroid than in our capability to redirect it to an incoming body," Massonnet told SPACE.com. "The scenario of this last stage requires further studies on the very unstable trajectories which will be required."

Meanwhile, there is another aspect to the plan that could make it appealing.

Material mined from a small, nearby asteroid could provide liquid oxygen for other space missions more efficiently than mining it from the Moon, which other researchers have proposed. Liquid oxygen could be used as fuel at a cosmic gas station that would allow spacecraft to be launched from Earth with much smaller tanks and therefore more cheaply.

Other researchers have suggesting mining asteroids for their metals.

"Several thousands of tons of oxygen might become available sitting on the outer rim of Earth's gravity field," the researchers write.

Gilmore declined to blame Congress or the
Homeland Security Department for the security gaps. But he mildly criticized a national response plan, issued by Homeland Security in 2004, as too vague to help communities in the first 72 hours following disasters.

"This isn't going to get done until the communities take charge of their own futures," he said.

Gilmore now chairs the National Council on Readiness and Preparedness, a nonprofit group aiming to give businesses and charities greater roles during disasters. Doing so, the council says, will ease demands on emergency responders as they attend to the most urgent needs.

The council and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University will develop new response guidelines for local and state officials after holding a series of town meetings, starting next month in Detroit, to gage community emergency needs.

The council is privately funded by eight private firms and six individuals, including the Sprint Corp. and author Patricia Cornwell.

Meanwhile, House Democrats rapped the Bush administration for what they called continued vulnerabilities in U.S. rail and mass transit systems nearly a year after the London subway and bus bombings on July 7.

"Rail and mass transit security absolutely is not a priority," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (news, bio, voting record) of Mississippi, top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. "Americans deserve more than this type of wait-and-see approach to homeland security."