When one of the world's most active volcanoes blows its top, the obvious course of action is to give it a wide berth. Not so in the Philippines, where thousands of tourists are risking their lives to get close to the spectacular flow of lava.

The Philippines' most active volcano oozed lava and shot up plumes of ash yesterday, forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes.

Philippine troops arrested 62 people and discovered another major weapons cache today after martial law was imposed in a southern province following the country's worst political massacre.

Sixteen people, including children, were killed when a fire swept through a residential building as people slept in a slum community in the central Philippines early today.

Celia Mariano Pomeroy lived the first half of her remarkable life in her native Philippines and the second half in England. Here she will be remembered with affection by her former pupils at the primary schools at which she taught in the 1960s and 1970s – Harry Gosling in Tower Hamlets and Joseph Tritton in Battersea – and by the many progressive groups in which she remained active until well into her eighties, notably the National Assembly of Women, Liberation, and migrant workers' organisations.

Dozens of landslides in the rain-soaked mountains of the northern Philippines killed up to 200 people yesterday. The latest calamity brings the total death toll to more than 400 in the Philippines' worst flooding for 40 years.

A powerful typhoon slammed into the northeastern tip of the Philippines today, tearing roofs off houses and uprooting trees, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Philippine officials scampered to send relief aid on Monday to hundreds of thousands hit by weekend floods in and around Manila, while anger mounted over what was seen as an inadequate response from the government.

Philippine officials said the number of dead or missing from Tropical Storm Ketsana climbed to at least 72 people.

When Cory Aquino stepped down after six years as the first woman president of the Philippines, she was widely viewed as having made little impact on her country's deep-rooted social and economic problems.