World Scene

NEW ZEALAND

Quake rocks city, injures many

WELLINGTON | A strong, 6.3-magnitude earthquake rocked the southern New Zealand city of Christchurch on Tuesday, seriously injuring people and damaging buildings throughout the city.

Police said there were reports of multiple fatalities, but Prime Minister John Key told Parliament details were still too shaky for those reports to be confirmed.

Video footage showed parts of buildings collapsed into the streets, which were strewn with bricks and shattered concrete. Sidewalks and roads were cracked and split, and hundreds of dazed, screaming and crying residents wandered through the streets as sirens blared throughout the city.

MALI

36 killed in stampede

BAMAKO | At least 36 people were killed in a stampede Monday when a crowd surged against a metal barrier after a Muslim ceremony, Mali’s minister of interior security and civil protection said.

Sadio Gassame said the stampede at Bamako's Modibo Keita Stadium occurred during a ceremony marking the Muslim holy period of Maouloud. The incident occurred as tens of thousands of people were attempting to leave through a metallic enclosure.

Anguished families gathered outside the capital’s Gabriel Toure Hospital where the staff was preparing to post a list of the dead. At least 64 others were wounded.

NIGERIA

Police kill five terrorism suspects

KANO | Police said Monday they killed five terrorism suspects and uncovered a cache of weapons stashed away in a house in a northern Nigerian region hit by a series of attacks blamed on a radical sect.

The raid uncovered rocket-propelled grenades, firearms and rocket launchers in northeastern Nigeria, where an Islamist sect known as Boko Haram is active.

The raid in Yobe State on Sunday came a day after another cache was separately discovered in a car in neighboring Borno.

Story Continues →