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Waste mound collapse at Indonesia’s largest landfill kills 7

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A massive avalanche of garbage at Indonesia’s largest landfill killed seven people after heavy overnight rain triggered a rubbish dump collapse, officials said Tuesday.

More than 300 search-and-rescue personnel, using heavy machinery and sniffer dogs, were deployed to the sprawling dump site late Sunday at the Bantargebang Integrated Waste Treatment Facility in Bekasi, a city just outside the capital of Jakarta. Rescuers worked cautiously amid unstable heaps of waste, said Desiana Kartika Bahari, who heads Jakarta’s Search and Rescue Office.

She said the victims included two garbage truck drivers, three scavengers and two food stall sellers who had been working or resting near the landfill, while six people managed to escape the disaster. No more missing people were reported by families as of Tuesday morning, Bahari said.

Photos and videos released by the National Search and Rescue Agency showed excavators digging through the collapsed mound, where several garbage trucks and small food stalls were buried.

The National Disaster Management Agency’s spokesperson, Abdul Muhari, urged strict safety protocols during the search, noting that rain was forecast in the area and further movement in the trash mounds could endanger those conducting the search.

Sunday’s deadly collapse renewed scrutiny of Bantargebang, a critical but overwhelmed landfill that receives most of Greater Jakarta’s daily household waste. The site has faced repeated warnings about capacity, prompting efforts to overhaul Indonesia’s waste management system.

Late last year, the government announced a two-year deadline to clear Bantargebang through an accelerated waste-to-energy project aimed at reducing chronic over reliance on open dumping. The initiative, backed by a new presidential regulation intended to streamline licensing and encourage investment, calls for converting refuse into electrical or thermal energy.

King penguins are the rare species benefiting from a warming world. But that could change

WASHINGTON (AP) — The warming world has disrupted the timing for plant and animal reproduction, and it's usually bad news for species that depend on each other — like flowers blooming too early and pollinating bees arriving too late. But researchers have found the rare critter that's getting a boost from the change: King penguins. A new study of 19,000 king penguins in a sub-Antarctic island chain found their breeding is starting 19 days earlier than it did in 2000. Mating earlier has increased the breeding success rate by 40%, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Science Advances. The study of timing in nature is called phenology. It's been a major concern for biologists because predators and prey and pollinators and plants are mostly adapting to warmer climates at different rates. And that means crucial mismatches in timing. It's especially common in birds and pollinating species such as bees. Most birds, especially in North America, aren't keeping pace with changes in phenology, according to Clemson University biological sciences professor Casey Youngflesh, who wasn't part of the study.
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