Obama Likely to Cut Indonesia Trip Short

Barack Obama will likely be forced to shorten what was already supposed to be a brief trip to his one-time home of Indonesia, thanks to the eruption of Mount Merapi. The trip was originally supposed to be a 24-hour affair, running from midday today to midday tomorrow, but now Obama’s likely to leave tomorrow morning, which could endanger what the Washington Post terms the “centerpiece” of the trip: a speech reaching out to Muslims at the University of Indonesia.

The speech was to be a kind of sequel to the one he gave last year in Cairo. “Our hope is that while we may have to truncate some of the morning, we can get in the speech,” Robert Gibbs told the press. The abbreviated schedule will definitely prevent the president from visiting any childhood haunts from his four years in Indonesia, the AP reports, though he’ll surely mention his history with the country in the speech. (More Barack Obama stories.)