Foreign News
Nepal closes schools as heavy rains bring country to standstill
Officials in Nepal said schools in flood hit aeas will be shut in the coming days as landslides and flash flooding triggered by heavy rains have killed some 150 people.
The order on Sunday came as authorities said students and their parents faced difficulties while university and school buildings damaged by the rains needed repair.
“We have urged the concerned authorities to close schools in the affected areas for three days,” Lakshmi Bhattarai, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, told the Reuters news agency.
Entire neighbourhoods in the country’s capital, Kathmandu, were inundated over the weekend with flash floods reported in rivers coursing through the region. The floods also damaged the highways connecting the city with the remainder of Nepal.
Some parts of Kathmandu reported rain of up to 322.2mm (12.7 inches), pushing the level of its main Bagmati River up 2.2 metres (7 feet) past the danger mark, experts said.
Television images showed police rescuers in knee-high rubber boots using picks and shovels to clear away mud and retrieve 16 bodies of passengers from two buses swept away by a huge landslide, at a site on the key route into Kathmandu.
(Aljazeera)
At least 13 people, including four children, have been killed in two incidents in Nigeria as large crowds gathered to collect food and clothing distributed at annual Christmas events, police say.
In the capital, Abuja, at least 10 people died on Saturday and many more were injured in a scramble to receive gifts of charity being distributed by the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Maitama district.
“This unfortunate event, which took place around 6:30am [05:30 GMT], resulted in a stampede that claimed the lives of 10 individuals, including four children, and left eight others with varying degrees of injuries,” said Josephine Adeh, a police spokesperson.
In a separate incident in Okija in Anambra State in southern Nigeria, three people were killed in a crush at a charity event organised by a philanthropist, state police said.
“The event had not even started when the rush began,” police spokesman Tochukwu Ikenga said. There could be more deaths recorded as officers investigate, he said.
In both incidents, the victims were mostly women and children who were trampled as crowds tried to reach the provisions being offered.
[Aljazeera]
A nine-year-old child and four adults have been killed, and more than 200 injured after a car drove into a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday, officials say.
At least 41 people were critically injured after the incident which lasted around three minutes, police said.
The arrested suspect has been named in local media as Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a 50-year-old Saudi citizen who arrived in Germany in 2006 and had worked as a doctor.
Reiner Haseloff, the premier of Saxony-Anhalt state, said a preliminary investigation suggested the alleged attacker was acting alone.
He added that he could not rule out more deaths due to the number of injured.
The suspect is currently being questioned and prosecutors expect to charge him with murder and attempted murder in due course, the head of the local prosecutor’s office said on Saturday.
Prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens added that the investigation was ongoing but suggested the background to the crime “could have been disgruntlement with the way Saudi Arabian refugees are treated in Germany”.
The suspected attacker has no known links to Islamist extremism – social media and posts online appear to suggest he had been critical of Islam.
Footage from the scene showed numerous emergency services vehicles attending while people lay on the ground.
Further footage then emerged of armed police confronting and arresting a man who can be seen lying on the ground by a stationary vehicle.
Unverified video on social media purports to show a car ploughing into the crowd at the market.
City officials said around 100 police, medics and firefighters, as well as 50 rescue service personnel rushed to the scene.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who travelled to the city on Saturday, described the attack as a “dreadful tragedy” as “so many people were injured and killed with such brutality” in a place that is supposed to be “joyful”.
He told reporters that there were serious concerns for those who had been critically injured – which German media reports is in the dozens – and that “all resources” will be allocated to investigating the suspect behind the attack.
There would be a memorial service for the victims at the Magdeburg Cathedral later on Saturday, he added.
[BBC]
Independent Wexford TD Verona Murphy will be the next Ceann Comhairle (speaker) of Dáil Éireann.
She will become the first woman to ever hold the role after being elected by her fellow TDs (members of the Irish parliment).
Fianna Fáil’s John McGuinness and Seán Ó Fearghaíl as well as Aengus Ó Snodaigh from Sinn Féin also ran for the position.
Politicians in the Republic of Ireland met for the first time since the general election on Wednesday.
[BBC]
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