Instagram followers of flight attendant Alfiani Hidayatul Solikah increased from 2,000 to 21,000 following the crash.

One of the photos was her photo with her colleagues.

Solikah wrote that she was not perfect but she enjoys every moment and smiles whether it’s a good or a bad situation as this is the best choice.

On Saturday afternoon, two days before the accident, Sukartini found that a zebra dove had fallen into a water tank located on the second floor of her house. She saved the bird and put it in a cage, never thinking that this, she said, could be an omen for her only daughter, Alfiani Hidayati Solikah.

“The bird is still alive,” Sukartini said, as quoted by kompas.com.

Sukartini revealed her story while receiving Madiun Regent Ahmad Dawami at her home on Monday evening. The house was filled with family members, all waiting anxiously for news on the 19-year-old flight attendant.

In the living room, there was a picture of Alfiani on the wall, showing her in a flight attendant’s uniform, with her parents. Alfiani had only been working as a flight attendant for two months.

The TV was switched off. Alfiani’s father Slamet chose not to watch the news. Instead, he waited for official news from the government.

“I was watching the TV earlier. I just couldn’t stand it anymore,” said Slamet to tribunnews.com.

Ahmad told the family that the government was ready to help. He also warned the family not to believe news that had not been verified and to wait for official news.

The Lion Air flight JT610 was en route to Pangkalpinang, Bangka Belitung Islands province from Jakarta when it crashed into the Java Sea, 7 nautical miles north of Tanjung Bungin, Karawang. The plane was carrying 189 people, comprising 181 passengers, two pilots and six crew members.

Falling trees killed two people in their car not far from Rome, a man south of the capital and another in the Naples region, authorities said.

Near Savona in the northwest meanwhile, a falling piece of cornice struck and killed an elderly lady.

In Venice, rain-soaked tourists were barred from St. Mark’s Square where local authorities said the “acqua alta” (high water) peaked at 156 centimetres (61 inches) by early afternoon.

    Elevated wooden platforms usually placed on main passageways in the Renaissance city were not high enough to ensure safe passage in the low-lying square.

Families carried children on their shoulders through the surrounding streets. While some tourists donned thigh-high wellies, others had opted to take off their shoes and wade through the water.

The waters have only topped 150 centimetres five times before in recorded history. In 1966, when floods swept through the country, famously devastating Florence’s historic centre, the waters reached 194 centimetres in Venice.

Nearly all of northern Italy was on alert due to the storms, with wind gusts up to 100 kilometres per hour and rainfall in some places equivalent to the amount that falls over several months.

Luca Zaia, head of the Veneto region, said the situation could be worse than when huge floods struck in 2010.

“The ground is already saturated with water, the rivers are full and due to sirocco (a strong hot wind from Northern Africa), the sea is not absorbing (the waters), he said.

Schools were closed in Genoa, Rome and Veneto, as well as in several northern towns and the Sicilian port of Messina.

The tragic accident took place at about 5pm in Xinyu city in southeastern province of Jiangxi, reported Chinese media outlets.

A video shot by a passenger in another car has since made its rounds on social media platforms. In the video, the boy can be seen with his upper body out of the sunroof as the car travels on the empty expressway.

However, their banter turned into gasps of horror and shock when the boy actually crashed into the sign and slumped over.

The video later shows the driver of the car he was in making a phone call.

Chinese news portal The Paper.cn reported that the boy died at the scene. Further investigations are ongoing.

In December last year, a video of a young child in Singapore standing with his body sticking out of a travelling car’s sunroof sparked a debate among netizens.

The car was travelling in Bartley Road East towards Tampines on Dec 6.

While some said that there was nothing wrong with the boy enjoying the breeze, others said it was risky behaviour that could injure the boy.

Hizkia, a student of the University of Indonesia, was aboard the Lion Air flight JT610 traveling from Jakarta to Pangkalpinang, Bangka Belitung Islands, to attend an event as a representative of AIESEC, an international non-profit youth organization focusing on developing leadership skills.

“He traveled all the time,” Kezia told The Jakarta Post on Monday. “He just got back from Bandung last weekend before traveling to the scheduled event in Pangkalpinang.”

“He updated us in the family group chat before he departed in the morning. It was the last thing we heard from him,” she said.

Kezia held high hopes that her brother might have survived the crash, but she went quiet, perhaps realizing that the chances were low.

Other families or friends of the victims sobbed silently while waiting for updates on the search efforts at the crisis center set up by the airline at the airport.

Alvian, an official from state-owned insurance firm Jasa Raharja, who helped the airline register the victims, said over 100 people had arrived at the crisis center to get reliable information surrounding the fate of their loved ones. One-hundred-and-eighty-one passengers and eight crew members were aboard the plane that went missing on Monday morning.

He did not have much information that he could share with them.

Some decided to stay at the center and wait, but 40-year-old Dewi chose to go home after waiting for two hours at the center. Dewi, her daughter and mother decided to stay at home and watch the news to get an update on her cousin, Man Sihombing, who worked as an area manager at the Depati Amir Airport in

Pangkalpinang.

She said Man had divided his time between Jakarta and Pangkalpinang as his family lived on the outskirt of Jakarta.

“He usually flew to Jakarta on weekends to see his wife and three kids and catch the earliest flight on Monday morning so he could go back to work,” she said.

Traveling between the two cities was part of Man’s routine, but the last trip was rather special for the family because he had come back especially to attend his son’s confirmation ceremony.

The Lion Air flight JT610 was the earliest flight available from Jakarta to Pangkalpinang at 6:20 a.m., making it popular among people working in the city. Among the passengers were government officials with the Finance Ministry, the Supreme Audit Agency and the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry, as well as local councillors.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo took his time on the sidelines of an international conference in Bali and shared his deep empathy for the families of the victims.

“I can feel the anxiety of the families of the victims. But we hope the families can wait patiently,” he said.

The news about the JT610 flight also came as a bolt from the blue for Ramlan Manik, 60, and his whole family. Only two days earlier, his son-in-law Rudi Lumbantoruan, who was aboard the plane, celebrated his 11th wedding anniversary with his wife and two children in his hometown Sibolga, North Sumatra. Rudi worked as a plantation manager in Pangkalpinang.

Ramlan would never forget Rudi’s last words to his sister-in-law, who was planning her wedding. “This is a present for you, a pair of shoes, in case I won’t be able to come home for your wedding because I have used all of my annual leave days.”

The Boeing-737 MAX, which went into service just months ago, crashed into the Java Sea moments after it had asked to return to Jakarta on Monday.

Flight JT 610 sped up as it suddenly lost altitude and then vanished from radar 13 minutes after take-off, with authorities saying witnesses saw the jet plunge into the water.

Dozens of divers are taking part in the recovery effort.

Search teams have filled ten body bags with limbs and other human remains, Muhammad Syaugi, head of the Indonesian national search and rescue agency told Metro TV, saying they will be taken to Jakarta for identification and DNA testing.

The remains of a baby were among those found, according to national deputy police chief Ari Dono Sukmanto.

Another 14 bags filled with debris have also been collected.

Shoes, items of clothing and a wallet are among the items found.

“We hope we can see the plane’s main body — everything on the surface of the water has been collected,” Syaugi said.

Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) said there were 178 adult passengers, one child, two infants, two pilots and six cabin crew on board flight JT 610.

Among them were the plane’s Indian captain, 20 Indonesian finance ministry employees and Andrea Manfredi, an Italian former professional cyclist.

The search and rescue agency all but ruled out finding any survivors late Monday, citing the discovery of body parts that suggested a high-impact crash in water some 30-40 metres deep off the coast of Indonesia’s Java island.

“We are prioritising finding the main wreckage of the plane using five war ships equipped with sonar to detect metal underwater,” said Yusuf Latif, spokesman of the Indonesian search and rescue agency.

Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder — which could be key pieces of evidence — are still missing.

‘Unreliable’

The plane had been en route to Pangkal Pinang city, a jumping off point for beach-and-sun seeking tourists on nearby Belitung island, when it dropped out of contact around 6:30 am (2330 GMT).

Lion Air said the plane had only gone into service in August.

The pilot and co-pilot had more than 11,000 hours of flying time between them and had undergone recent medical checkups and drug testing, it added.

On Monday, Lion Air chief Edward Sirait acknowledged the plane had an unspecified technical issue fixed in Bali before it was flown back to Jakarta, calling it “normal procedure”.

A technical logbook detailed an “unreliable” airspeed reading instrument on the Bali-Jakarta flight on Sunday and different altitude readings on the captain and first officer’s instruments, according to the BBC.

Copies of several Lion Air technical documents have been circulating on social media, but they could not be immediately confirmed as authentic.

The company did not return phones calls seeking comment.

Boeing suspended release of the 737 MAX just days before its first commercial delivery last year due to an engine issue, according to airline safety and product review site airlineratings.com.

It said the engines were a product of a joint venture between US-based General Electric and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines.

Lion Air, Indonesia’s biggest budget airline which has been engaged in huge expansion, announced earlier this year it was buying 50 Boeing 737 MAX 10 jets for $6.24 billion.

Indonesia’s air travel industry is booming, with the number of domestic passengers growing significantly over the past decade, but it has acquired a reputation for poor regulation and its airlines had previously been banned from US and European airspace.

Lion has been involved in a number of incidents including a fatal 2004 crash and a collision between two Lion Air planes at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta airport.

From 1970 to 2014, 60 percent of all animals with a backbone — fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals — were wiped out by human activity, according to WWF’s “Living Planet” report, based on an ongoing survey of more than 4,000 species spread over 16,700 populations scattered across the globe.

“The situation is really bad, and it keeps getting worse,” WWF International director general Marco Lambertini told AFP.

“The only good news is that we know exactly what is happening.”

For freshwater fauna, the decline in population over the 44 years monitored was a staggering 80 percent. Regionally, Latin America was hit hardest, seeing a nearly 90 percent loss of wildlife over the same period.

Another dataset confirmed the depth of an unfolding mass extinction event, only the sixth in the last half-billion years.

Depending on which of Earth’s lifeforms are included, the current rate of species loss is 100 to 1,000 times higher than only a few hundred years ago, when people began to alter Earth’s chemistry and crowd other creatures out of existence.

Measured by weight, or biomass, wild animals today only account for four percent of mammals on Earth, with humans (36 percent) and livestock (60 percent) making up the rest.

The great acceleration

Ten thousand years ago that ratio was probably reversed.

“The statistics are scary,” said Piero Visconti, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and one of 59 co-authors of the 80-page report.

“Unlike population declines, extinctions are irreversible.”

For corals, it may already be too late.

Back-to-back marine heatwaves have already wiped out up to half of the globe’s shallow-water reefs, which support a quarter of all marine life.

Even if humanity manages to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — mission impossible, according to some scientists — coral mortality will likely be 70 to 90 percent.

A 2C world would be a death sentence, a major UN report concluded last month.

Half-a-century of conservation efforts have scored spectacular successes, with significant recoveries among tigers, manatees, grizzly bears, bluefin tuna and bald eagles.

“If we didn’t make those efforts, the situation would have been much worse,” Lambertini said.

But the onslaught of hunting, shrinking habitat, pollution, illegal trade and climate change — all caused by humans — has been too much to overcome, he acknowledged.

“Scientists call it the ‘great acceleration’,” he said in a phone interview.

“It is the exponential growth over the last 50 years in the use of energy, water, timber, fish, food, fertiliser, pesticides, minerals, plastics — everything.”

‘New deal’ for nature

The pace of population increase — long taboo in development and conservation circles — also took off around 1950, the date scientists have chosen as the “gold spike,” or starting point, for a new geological period dubbed the Anthropocene, or “age of man”.

In looking for answers, conservationists are turning to climate change for inspiration.

“We need a new global deal for nature,” said Lambertini, noting two key ingredients in the 195-nation Paris climate treaty.

“One was the realisation that climate change was dangerous for the economy and society, not just polar bears,” he said.

Similarly, he argued, threatened ecosystem services long taken for granted — drinkable water, breathable air, heat-absorbing oceans, forests that soak up CO2, productive soil — are worth tens of trillions of dollars every year.

“A healthy, sustainable future for all is only possible on a planet where nature thrives and forests, oceans and rivers are teeming with biodiversity and life,” said Lambertini.

The Paris Agreement, negotiated under the UN convention on climate change, also set a clear target: global warming must be held to “well below” 2C, and 1.5C if possible.

The parallel UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), by contrast, has lots of targets running out to 2020 which are not only too weak, but — with one possible exception — will probably not be met, Lambertini said.

“The CBD is failing,” he told AFP. But an upcoming meeting of the 195-nation body could be the beginning of a “revolution” that will see the Convention re-engineered in 2020 into “a new deal for Nature.”