A time bomb was found and defused in a shopping mall in Balikpapan. No one took responsibility for the bombing attempt, and it may have been part of am extortion attempt by gangsters. Criminal violence is far more common than terrorist violence.
In Papua province, on the island of New Guinea, separatist rebels ambushed a convoy of vehicles and killed five people. They also burned down buildings at a construction camp and destroyed a bridge. There are hundreds of tribes in Papua, and some of them want the Indonesian "outsiders" gone. The eastern half of New Guinea is an independent nation, in which the tribes cannot agree enough to rule effectively.
