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News in Brief -(16-03-2019)

March 16, 2019 00:00:00


Nigerian building collapse leaves 20 dead, mostly children

Lagos, Mar 15: Twenty people are confirmed dead in the school building that collapsed in Nigeria on Wednesday, and most of them are children, an official said on Friday. Forty-three other people were rescued, Lagos State Health Commissioner Jide Idris told The Associated Press. The disaster occurred in the heart of Nigeria's commercial capital. Officials have said the three-story residential building had been marked for demolition and that the school was operating illegally on the top two floors. It is still not clear how many people were inside when it collapsed. Rescue crews halted their search on Thursday, saying they had reached the building's foundation without finding any other victims. Some anguished families protested and sifted through the rubble for any sign of their children. Building collapses are all too common in the West African nation, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight. — AP

KL rejects suspect’s release plea over Kim murder case

KUALA LUMPUR, Mar 15: Malaysian authorities have rejected a plea to drop the murder case against Doan Thi Huong, the Vietnamese woman accused of killing the half-brother of North Korea's leader. Vietnam had been pushing for her release, and the decision comes days after her Indonesian co-defendant, Siti Aisyah, was unexpectedly freed. Both women insist they are innocent. Kim Jong-nam was assassinated with liquid VX nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017. Ms Huong says she was tricked into taking part and believed she was part of a TV prank. — BBC

Yemen rebels hold mass funeral for victims of strikes

SANAA, Mar 15: Yemeni rebels held a mass funeral Thursday for civilians killed in strikes in a northern region caught in a battle between insurgents and local tribes. The Huthi rebels' Saba news agency said 17 civilians, including women and children, were buried after the funeral in the capital Sanaa. The United Nations has confirmed that 22 civilians, including 12 children, were killed in strikes on March 9 and 10 in the district of Kushar in Hajjah province, home to a branch of the powerful Hashed tribe. — AFP

Millions hit in Manila’s worst water shortage

MANILA, Mar 15: Manila has been hit by its worst water shortage in years, leaving bucket-bearing families to wait hours to fill up from tanker trucks and some hospitals to turn away less urgent cases. Taps are dry from four to 20 hours per day in the homes of about half of the Philippine capital’s roughly 12 million people due to rolling outages driven by a dearth of rain and inadequate infrastructure. “I have learned to take a bath using only seven pitchers of water,” Ricardo Bergado told AFP as he lined up with his buckets. “I even save the bath water to flush our toilet.” — AFP


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