JAKARTA (Reuters) - Ten people trapped after Indonesia's Semeru volcano erupted have been evacuated to safety, the country's disaster mitigation agency (BNPB) said on Sunday, as the death toll from the disaster climbed to at least 13 and with dozens injured.
Semeru, the tallest mountain on Java island, threw up towers of ash and hot clouds on Saturday that blanketed nearby villages in East Java province and sent people fleeing in panic.
The eruption severed a strategic bridge connecting two areas in the nearby district of Lumajang with the city of Malang and wrecked buildings, authorities said.
BNPB official Abdul Muhari said in a news release that 13 people have been killed after the eruption, two of whom have been identified. Ninety-eight have been injured, including two pregnant women, and 902 have been evacuated, the statement said.
Thoriqul Haq, a local official in Lumajang, said earlier that sand miners had been trapped around their work sites.
BNPB said at least 35 people had been hospitalised, while Lumajang's deputy head said 41 people suffered burns.
Semeru, more than 3,600 metres (12,000 feet) high, is one of Indonesia's nearly 130 active volcanoes. It erupted in January, causing no casualties.
Indonesia straddles the "Pacific Ring of Fire", a highly seismically active zone, where different plates on the earth’s crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Separately, an earthquake of magnitude 6 struck north of Halmahera on Sunday, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) said. Halmahera is about 2,000 km (1,200 miles) northeast of Semeru.
(Reporting by Stanley Widianto and Nilufar Rizki; Editing by Ed Davies)
Forty-nine children died when their overloaded boat capsized in northwest Pakistan, police said Tuesday after divers spent three days dragging bodies from freezing waters.
The boys aged between seven and 14 were all students of a madrassa and had been taken for a day trip to the scenic Tanda Dam lake on Sunday.
"The water of the dam was freezing due to cold weather that impeded the rescue mission. But today the divers were able to dive deep to recover the remaining bodies," said Khateer Ahmad, a senior official with Rescue 1122.
The bodies of a teacher and one skipper were also pulled from the water, he added, bringing the death toll to 51.
Muhammad Umar, who sells tea at a picnic site overlooking the popular weekend tourist destination, said dozens of parents and relatives had gathered over the past few days.
"Every time a body was recovered from the scene, they would jump onto the diver to see if it was their son and every time we would hear them screaming in pain and anguish," he told AFP over the phone on Tuesday.
"I have not witnessed such scenes in my life, it's something that can't be explained in words."
Tanda Dam lake is about five kilometers (3 miles) away from the madrassa -- an Islamic school that offers free religious education -- in Kohat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Police spokesperson Fazal Naeem issued the new death toll on Tuesday after the end of the rescue mission. It was confirmed by the military's media wing.
"The boat was overloaded; its capacity was around 20 to 25 persons," Naeem told AFP.
He added that five people were rescued including four students and one teacher.
Pakistan's army shared images showing divers traversing the lake in rubber dinghies, entering the green waters to pull out the bodies of children.
"I got stuck under the boat," 11-year-old survivor Muhammad Mustafa told AFP from his hospital bed on Sunday.
"My shawl and sweater weighed me down, so I took them off."
"The water was extremely cold and my body went numb. I thought I was going to pass out when a man on an inflatable tube saved me."
Drownings are common in Pakistan, when aged and overloaded vessels lose their stability and pitch passengers into the water.
On the same day, at least 41 people were confirmed dead after their bus crashed into a ravine in southwestern Balochistan province.
In July last year, at least 18 women drowned after an overloaded boat carrying about 100 members of the same family capsized during a marriage procession between two villages.
The microbes living in your food can affect your risk of cancer. While some help your body fight cancer, others help tumors evolve and grow.
Gut microbes can influence your cancer risk by changing how your cells behave. Many cancer-protective microbes support normal, cooperative behavior of cells. Meanwhile, cancer-inducing microbes undermine cellular cooperation and increase your risk of cancer in the process.
We are evolutionarybiologists who study how cooperation and conflict occur inside the human body, including the ways cancer can evolve to exploit the body. Our systematic review examines how diet and the microbiome affect the ways the cells in your body interact with each other and either increase or decrease your risk of cancer.
Cancer is a breakdown of cell cooperation
Every human body is a symphony of multicellular cooperation. Thirty trillion cells cooperate and coordinate with each other to make us viable multicellular organisms.
For multicellular cooperation to work, cells must engage in behaviors that serve the collective. These include controlled cell division, proper cell death, resource sharing, division of labor and protection of the extracellular environment. Multicellular cooperation is what allows the body to function effectively. If genetic mutations interfere with these proper behaviors, they can lead to the breakdown of cellular cooperation and the emergence of cancer.
The food in your diet affects the composition of your gut microbiome.
Cancer cells can be thought of as cellular cheaters because they do not follow the rules of cooperative behavior. They mutate uncontrollably, evade cell death and take up excessive resources at the expense of the other cells. As these cheater cells replicate, cancer in the body begins to grow.
Cancer is fundamentally a problem of having multiple cells living together in one organism. As such, it has been around since the origins of multicellular life. This means that cancer suppression mechanisms have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years to help keep would-be cancer cells in check. Cells monitor themselves for mutations and induce cell death, also known as apoptosis, when necessary. Cells also monitor their neighbors for evidence of abnormal behavior, sending signals to aberrant cells to induce apoptosis. In addition, the body’s immune system monitors tissues for cancer cells to destroy them.
Cells that are able to evade detection, avoid apoptosis and replicate quickly have an evolutionary advantage within the body over cells that behave normally. This process within the body, called somatic evolution, is what leads cancer cells to grow and make people sick.
Microbes can help or hinder cell cooperation
Microbes can affect cancer risk through changing the ways that the cells of the body interact with one another.
Some microbes can protect against cancer by helping maintain a healthy environment in the gut, reducing inflammation and DNA damage, and even by directly limiting tumor growth. Cancer-protective microbes like Lactobacillus pentosus, Lactobacillus gasseri and Bifidobacterium bifidum are found in the environment and different foods, and can live in the gut. These microbes promote cooperation among cells and limit the function of cheating cells by strengthening the body’s cancer defenses. Lactobacillus acidophilus, for example, increases the production of a protein called IL-12 that stimulates immune cells to act against tumors and suppress their growth.
Gut bacteria can influence the effectiveness of certain cancer treatments.
Other microbes can promote cancer by inducing mutations in healthy cells that make it more likely for cellular cheaters to emerge and outcompete cooperative cells. Cancer-inducing microbes such as Enterococcus faecalis, Helicobacter pylori and Papillomavirus are associated with increased tumor burden and cancer progression. They can release toxins that damage DNA, change gene expression and increase the proliferation of tumor cells. Helicobacter pylori, for example, can induce cancer by secreting a protein called Tipα that can penetrate cells, alter their gene expression and drive gastric cancer.
Healthy diet with cancer-protective microbes
Because what you eat determines the amount of cancer-inducing and cancer-preventing microbes inside your body, we believe that the microbes we consume and cultivate are an important component of a healthy diet.
Beneficial microbes are typically found in fermented and plant-based diets, which include foods like vegetables, fruits, yogurt and whole grains. These foods have high nutritional value and contain microbes that increase the immune system’s ability to fight cancer and lower overall inflammation. High-fiber foods are prebiotic in the sense that they provide resources that help beneficial microbes thrive and subsequently provide benefits for their hosts. Many cancer-fighting microbes are abundantly present in fermented and high-fiber foods.
In contrast, harmful microbes can be found in highly-processed and meat-based diets. The Western diet, for example, contains an abundance of red and processed meats, fried food and high-sugar foods. It has been long known that meat-based diets are linked to higher cancer prevalence, and that red meat is a carcinogen. Studies have shown that meat-based diets are associated with cancer-inducing microbes including Fusobacteria and Peptostreptococcus in both humans and other species.
Microbes can enhance or interfere with how the body’s cells cooperate to prevent cancer. We believe that purposefully cultivating a microbiome that promotes cooperation among our cells can help reduce cancer risk.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden will release his proposed budget on March 9, the White House said on Tuesday, setting a deadline before his meeting with the Republican House speaker on Wednesday to discuss the nation's spending.
Biden will ask Kevin McCarthy to release a budget plan in the meeting, and to pledge to meet the nation's debt obligations, according to a White House memo seen by Reuters.
McCarthy and his fellow conservatives, who narrowly won control of the House of Representatives in November, are threatening to block a regular increase of the nation's debt limit unless Biden pledges lower spending. Biden has said any negotiation on previously approved U.S. spending, which is generally approved on a bipartisan basis, was a non-starter.
Republicans have not yet agreed on how fiscal spending should be trimmed, or firmed up the parameters of a 2023 budget.
The White House has seized on the lack of consensus to highlight fringe proposals from some Republicans, including one that abolishes the Internal Revenue Service in favor of a higher sales tax and one that trims Social Security retirement benefits.
Asked what his message will be for McCarthy, Biden told reporters on Monday: "Show me your budget, I’ll show you mine."
McCarthy responded with an admonition to Biden to not rule out negotiations before their White House meeting.
"The first thing they should do, especially as the president of the United States: say he's willing to sit down and find a common ground and negotiate together," McCarthy said on Tuesday.
EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES
While the president can propose a budget plan, both houses of Congress must pass any spending legislation. Biden's fellow Democrats narrowly control the Senate, where spending bills need 60 votes to pass. The House needs a simple majority to pass these bills; McCarthy has ruled out cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the two largest benefit programs.
The showdown over the growing U.S. debt threatens to roil the global economy if the United States defaults. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the country may reach its debt limit as soon as June and has called on Congress to take swift action.
The Treasury Department has already started taking "extraordinary measures" to stave off a default until summer after hitting the U.S. government's $31.4 trillion borrowing limit earlier in January.
On Wednesday, Biden plans to ask McCarthy if he will "commit to the bedrock principle that the United States will never default on its financial obligations" and if he agrees "that it is critical to avoid debt brinksmanship."
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, David Morgan, Nandita Bose; writing by Susan Heavey and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Heather Timmons and Jonathan Oatis)
