In brief: Truck crash kills 69 at Nigeria bus depot
LAGOS, Nigeria – A runaway oil tanker truck exploded in a crowded bus station in the south of the country, setting ablaze 12 buses carrying passengers and killing 69 people, Nigeria’s Red Cross and police said Monday.
Red Cross chairman Peter Emeka Kathy said about 30 other victims had been hospitalized with severe burns. He said the truck was barreling down the hill when the brakes failed and it plowed into the bus station at Onitsha, the state capital, before exploding.
Gov. Willie Obiano of Anambra state wept when he visited the scene of Sunday night’s conflagration.
Relatives were visiting morgues Monday to try to identify missing family members.
Witness Joseph Ugwuanyi wrote on his Facebook page that the blaze raged for an hour before firefighters brought it under control.
Nigeria has the highest road accident rate in the world, as well as the largest number of deaths per 10,000 vehicles, according to a report by the Nigerian Building and Road Research Institute.
Unexplained die-off hits antelope species
More than 120,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes – more than one-third of the worldwide population – have died in Kazakhstan since mid-May, and the cause of the “catastrophic collapse” is unclear, officials said.
“Not a single animal survived in the affected herds,” the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, a United Nations-backed effort also known as CMS, said in a statement Thursday.
Two kinds of bacteria exacerbated the die-off, but they are not lethal unless the animal already has a weakened immune system, so experts are still trying to identify the underlying cause, CMS said.
Die-offs are not unusual among saigas, which largely live in Kazakhstan and are recognized for their bulbous, flexible noses that warm up freezing air and filter out dust, CMS said. A 2010 event killed 12,000, and a 1984 event killed about 100,000, it said.
Saigas also have been hit hard by poaching, as the animal’s horns are used in traditional Chinese medicine. CMS said the latest die-off appears to have ended, and there is hope for the endangered antelope’s numbers.
Lion attacks, kills woman in vehicle
JOHANNESBURG – A lion killed an American woman and injured a man driving through a private wildlife park in Johannesburg on Monday, a park official said.
The attack occurred at around 2:30 p.m. when a lioness approached the passenger side of the vehicle and then lunged, said Scott Simpson, assistant operations manager at the Lion Park.
“They had their windows all the way down, which is strictly against policy,” he said. “The lion bit the lady through the window.” The driver then tried to punch the lion and was scratched by the animal.
Park staff quickly chased the lion away from the car, and an ambulance arrived promptly. “Unfortunately, she did pass away,” said Simpson, adding that the U.S. Embassy had been informed.
Dozens charged in factory collapse
DHAKA, Bangladesh – Two years after a garment factory building collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people and drawing worldwide attention to dangerous conditions in Bangladesh’s apparel business, authorities Monday charged 42 people with murder in the country’s deadliest industrial disaster.
The accused included the owner of the Rana Plaza factory complex, Sohel Rana, and national and local officials who oversaw building safety and inspections. Rana and others initially had been expected to face lesser charges of culpable homicide, but the murder charges mean they could face the death penalty if convicted.
Authorities said the severity of the charges was due to the scale of the disaster, a signal that Bangladesh was serious about repairing the image of its troubled garment export industry, the second-largest in the world and supplier to such major U.S. companies as Gap, Fruit of the Loom, Target, Wal-Mart and Macy’s.
Since the disaster, officials have launched a new inspection regime for factories, raised worker pay, allowed unions to register for the first time and pledged other reforms.
Yet of the 42 accused on Monday, some two dozen are fugitives.
Respiratory disease kills 2 in South Korea
SEOUL, South Korea – South Korea today confirmed the country’s first two deaths from Middle East respiratory syndrome as it fights to contain the spread of the virus that has killed hundreds of people in the Middle East.
South Korea has reported 24 cases of the disease since diagnosing the country’s first MERS illness last month in a man who had traveled to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. South Korea’s cases largely have connections to the first patient.
Mexico abandons teacher evaluations
MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s renegade teachers have won a stunning concession from President Enrique Pena Nieto: the indefinite shelving of teacher evaluations.
Twenty civil society groups on Monday lashed out at Pena Nieto, calling the abandonment of teacher evaluations and uniform hiring practices an “unconstitutional” betrayal of promises to wrest control of schools from a powerful union.
“We regret that with this action, the federal government boycotts the implementation of the education reform,” the groups said in a statement. “We demand that President Enrique Pena Nieto reverse this announcement.”
Even with the concession from the Pena Nieto government, angry teachers shut down schools Monday in much of Oaxaca, Michoacan, Guerrero and Chiapas states, closing the doors on millions of students. The strike is to last until June 8.
Striking teachers burned an election office in Juchitan and trashed a similar office in Tehuantepec, both in Oaxaca state, a hotbed of teacher dissent.