MAKASSAR: At least 13 people died when a passenger boat overloaded with holidaymakers celebrating Eid capsized off the Indonesian island of Sulawesi on Wednesday, officials said.
Twenty-four surviving passengers were admitted to hospital but dozens are believed still missing, said local disaster agency head Amiruddin, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
The packed traditional wooden boat — known locally as a jolloro — left Makassar, provincial capital of South Sulawesi, in the afternoon for a short journey to the tiny resort island of Barrang Lompo, some 15 kilometers northwest of the city’s coast.
“The boat reportedly hit a large wave amid bad weather and capsized,” Amiruddin said.
The passengers were thought to be Barrang Lompo natives who work in Makassar and were heading home to spend the Islamic holiday Eid Al-Fitr with their families.
Makassar police chief Aris Bachtiar said the boat was overloaded. “We are still investigating,” he said, adding that the captain had been detained.
Almost 32 million Indonesians are on the move this week in the annual Eid exodus, official figures showed Wednesday.
It was the latest deadly maritime accident in the vast Indonesian archipelago, which relies heavily on boats to ferry people around its 17,000 islands but has a patchy safety record.
On New Year’s Day, nine people died after a passenger boat capsized when traveling from the city of Tarakan to Tanjung Selor on Borneo island.
13 dead as boat capsizes off Indonesia’s Sulawesi
13 dead as boat capsizes off Indonesia’s Sulawesi
South Korea will boost medical school admissions to tackle physician shortage
- Jeong said all of the additional students will be trained through regional physician programs
SEOUL: South Korea plans to increase medical school admissions by more than 3,340 students from 2027 to 2031 to address concerns about physician shortages in one of the fastest-aging countries in the world, the government said Tuesday.
The decision was announced months after officials defused a prolonged doctors’ strike by backing away from a more ambitious increase pursued by Seoul’s former conservative government. Even the scaled-down plan drew criticism from the country’s doctors’ lobby, which said the move was “devoid of rational judgment.”
Kwak Soon-hun, a senior Health Ministry official, said that the president of the Korean Medical Association attended the healthcare policy meeting but left early to boycott the vote confirming the size of the admission increases.
The KMA president, Kim Taek-woo, later said the increases would overwhelm medical schools when combined with students returning from strikes or mandatory military service, and warned that the government would be “fully responsible for all confusion that emerges in the medical sector going forward.” The group didn’t immediately signal plans for further walkouts.
Health Minister Jeong Eun Kyeong said the annual medical school admissions cap will increase from the current 3,058 to 3,548 in 2027, with further hikes planned in subsequent years to reach 3,871 by 2031. This represents an average increase of 668 students per year over the five-year period, far smaller than the 2,000-per-year hike initially proposed by the government of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, which sparked the months long strike by thousands of doctors.
Jeong said all of the additional students will be trained through regional physician programs, which aim to increase the number of doctors in small towns and rural areas that have been hit hardest by demographic pressures. The specific admissions quota for each medical school will be finalized in April.
