Rescuers search for survivors among the rubble of a collapsed building in south Florida.
Residents of the 12-story residential building in Surfside, Florida were jolted awake around 1:30 a.m. Thursday by a deafening bang.
Shortly after, about a third of the building crashed down.
As of Thursday afternoon local time, rescue teams have accounted for 102 people, pulling 37 out of the rubble.
But 99 people are still missing.
“The problem is the building has literally pancaked. It has gone down. And I mean, there’s just feet in between stories where there were 10 feet. That is heartbreaking because it doesn’t mean to me, that we’re going to be successful, as successful as we would want to be to find people alive.”
So far, there has been one confirmed death and 11 people injured.
Local residents that have missing friends and family in the building are waiting for any news.
“Yes, we have that apartment and they’re friends of the family. And just today they had decided to stay the night of all days, they chose the worst one to stay there and this happened.”
More than 80 rescue units are at the scene, working non-stop to look for survivors.
They’re using dogs, cameras and listening devices to find signs for life. Firefighters at the scene said that they had heard some banging noises from underneath the rubble.
Rescue crews are working through the night in 15-minute shifts each wearing 80-pounds of gear.
But the rescue mission is slow-going, as crew members have to manually remove the debris due to the unstable condition of the building.
The Biden administration has offered federal aide to “make sure everything is in place”.
And Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis has issued a state of emergency to help the impacted families.
The condo building was built in the 1980s and was reportedly going through some roofwork at the time of collapse.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said during Thursday’s press conference that the cause of the collapse has not yet been pinned down.
An exhibition commemorating Prince Philip’s life and legacy will be open to the public until Sept. 20 in Windsor Castle. Titled ‘Prince Philip: A Celebration’, the display features over 100 objects from the Duke of Edinburgh’s life.
A new exhibition opening in Windsor Castle on Thursday commemorates the life and legacy of Britain’s Prince Philip, including many fabulous items gifted him over decades of official duties and overseas visits.
Titled ‘Prince Philip: A Celebration’, the display features over 100 objects from the Duke of Edinburgh’s life.
Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth and a leading figure in the British royal family for almost seven decades, died on April 9, aged 99.
The exhibition had been planned as part of the 100th birthday celebrations for Philip, who would have turned 100 on June 10, curator Sally Goodsir told Reuters. “But following his death in April, we have delayed its opening just by a couple of weeks and are still holding it,” she said.
Among the highlights of the display are the coronation robes and coronet worn by Philip to the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and his chair of estate which normally stands beside the queen’s at Buckingham Palace and is displayed at Windsor Castle for the first time.
A rare tornado struck along the Czech Republic’s southern border on Thursday evening, destroying parts of some towns as strong storms swept through the area and injured at least 150 people, emergency services and media reported.
A Czech Television meteorologist said the tornado, reported in towns around Hodonin, along the Austrian border and 270 km (167 miles) southeast of Prague, may have reached F3-F4 levels, with winds hitting 267-322 km per hour in the latter level.
That would make it the strongest in the central European country’s modern history and the first tornado since 2018.
Photos on social media and news websites showed houses and some churches with destroyed roofs, broken windows, and fallen trees and destroyed cars along streets after the storms hit.
A spokesperson for the South Moravia region’s ambulance service said up to 150 people were injured.
Around seven small towns were “massively” damaged, citing an emergency services spokesperson. An official of one municipality, Hrusky, said half of the town was practically levelled to the ground.
Interior Minister Jan Hamacek wrote on Twitter the situation in the area was serious and all emergency services units were at work. Search and rescue teams were also headed to the towns.
FILE PHOTO: Toshiba Corp's CEO Nobuaki Kurumatani attends a news conference at the company's headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, May 15, 2018. REUTERS/Issei Kato
Toshiba Corp kicked off its annual general meeting on Friday, with shareholders set to decide on whether to keep Osamu Nagayama as board chairman. The vote – expected to be very close – is seen by many as a referendum on corporate governance in Japan.
Toshiba shareholders on Friday voted out its board chairman and one other director, in a rebuke against the company.
Osamu Nagayama had been under pressure to resign as chairman after an independent investigation earlier this month accused Toshiba of colluding with the government to block foreign investors from gaining influence on the board.
Nagayama’s supporters say his ouster will set Toshiba back, depriving the company of experienced leadership.
The vote’s breakdown was not immediately disclosed, but according to a Toshiba source, foreign investors had voted in greater number than prior meetings.
For many, the probe and vote results marked a watershed moment for corporate governance in Japan, as experts say that the investigation would have been unthinkable just years ago.
A member of the audit committee, Nobuyuki Kobayashi, was also voted out.
The next chairman will be decided by the newly elected board, set to start that discussion later on Friday.
A group of Russians picked up by police in an area of Chad where the military has recently been battling rebels say they were visiting “rich natural sites” in the country’s north.
A group of Russians detained by police in northern Chad have said they were tourists on a sightseeing trip.
They were picked up last week in a part of the north-central African country where the army battled rebels in April and May – in a conflict that led to the death of President Idriss Deby.
A police spokesperson said they had not broken any laws and were evacuated to Chad’s capital N’Djamena for their own safety.
One of the Russians, Alexey Kamerzanov, acknowledged on Wednesday (June 23) that world travellers do not normally visit Chad.
“…but I checked and saw the Chad Republic is very rich with natural sites, for example the Ennedi plateau, Tibesti plateau, the Lakes of Ounianga, the Sahara desert. For us travellers it’s formidable and interesting.”
Russia’s presence in Africa has been the subject of speculation in recent months. The country deployed security contractors to Chad’s neighbor Central African Republic in 2018.
Analysts said that was part of a strategy to rival Western militaries deployed on the continent.
Three Russians on that military mission were killed during an incident in May in which CAR and Chad troops clashed art a border post.
In Libya, Russian mercenaries support eastern commander Khalifa Hafat’s Libyan National Army, a U.N. panel of experts has reported.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board(JAMB) on Friday released results of candidates who sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) on Saturday, 19th and Tuesday, 22 June 2021.
The board added the result for subsequent days would be released daily.
The board stated these in a statement by its Head of Media, Dr Fabian Benjamin, on Friday morning.
It directed candidates to check their results by sending UTMERESULT to 55019 through the GSM number used by each candidate to obtain profile code and UTME registration with the board and their results would be relayed to them.
The statement reads: “The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has released the results of candidates who sat in more than 720 CBT centres for the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination conducted between Saturday, 19th and Tuesday, 22 June 2021.
“Nevertheless, the Board would still review all the CCTV footages and other technical gadgets for detection of possible examination misconducts.
“Extremely comparatively few results are being withheld for further investigation.
“In addition, the Board would not hesitate to withdraw the results of any candidate subsequently found to have committed any form of examination misconduct.”
Demola Adeleye and his family were sleeping in their three-bedroom bungalow when they were awoken by the sound of bulldozers demolishing the homes around them. In February a task force sent by Lagos state’s New Towns Development Authority (NTDA) started bulldozing all the structures in the coastal neighbourhood of Oke-Egan and evicting the occupants.
“I am pained and depressed,” Adeleye, 38, said with tears in his eyes.”Look at where I have been sleeping with my wife and four children,” he added, pointing to a half-finished building behind his welding workshop where his family has been staying since their house was razed to the ground.
“Whenever I wake in the morning, I cry.”Olakunle Aboyeji, general manager of the NTDA, confirmed the demolitions to the orrespondents and said it had acquired the land in Oke-Egan from the traditional owners, who were compensated with 20 hectares (50 acres) nearby.
The demolitions were the latest in a string of evictions that have ramped up over the past five years as the Lagos government clears slums, homes built on lagoons and other informal settlements to house a rapidly growing population.
Residents say in its push to create more housing the government is destroying their homes without relocating or compensating them.
Lagos is home to more than 20 million people, about 70% of them living in informal settlements, according to the latest government estimates.Anticipating that the state’s growing population would lead to housing challenges, the Lagos government drafted a housing master plan in 1981 and established the NTDA to implement it, the agency states on its website.
About 14 housing projects – more than 7,000 affordable housing units – have been built so far and more than 20 others are in various stages of development, according to the NTDA.”We plan to develop, not demolish,” said Aboyeji. He said the illegal structures at Oke-Egan were torn down to make way for the development of a new housing estate.
He noted that the general public was warned not to purchase any land within the state without seeing a title deed – known locally as a certificate of occupancy.
“The demolitions would not have taken place if there had not been encroachment on the planned sites acquired several years back for the (housing project’s) development,” he wrote in emailed comments.
Oke-Egan residents said more than 400 informal homes were demolished in the neighbourhood in February.
Adeleye said when he bought the land from the traditional owners six years ago, he was assured the sale was legitimate and only found out later that the land had already been bought by the government.
“The landowners told me the land was theirs and not the government’s. So many other people also came and bought land here,” he said. He and others who settled in the area never saw title deeds for the land they bought and did not apply for them, he said.
LAND ACT
Timothy Nubi, director of the University of Lagos’ Centre of Housing and Sustainable Development, said confusing and complicated land ownership laws make it difficult for Nigerians to access land and to know who owns the land they live on.
In 1978, Nigeria passed the Land Use Act, which nationalised all land, and was intended to override customary land rights with the aim of making land more accessible, improving tenure security and boosting development.
But many communities do not recognise the government as the owner of Nigeria’s land, Nubi said.
As a result, even after the government has compensated traditional owners for use of their land to build housing, the owners sometimes sell their land to individuals, he added.
The process of getting a title deed is also expensive and time-consuming, Nubi noted. While there are no reliable figures on land ownership in Nigeria, various estimates by the government and land rights groups say less than 3% of land in the country is registered.
Nubi said the Act should be amended to address the current need for affordable housing in Nigeria.”Let those who are working be able to buy (homes) and those who are poor be able to enjoy social housing,” he said.
RELOCATION AND COMPENSATION
Adeleye said being evicted during the COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible for him to find somewhere new to live.”I do not have jobs as I usually do.
It is hard to find new land to buy in Lagos,” he said.It is also difficult to rent. A one-bedroom apartment in (the area) is now 400,000 naira ($970). I do not have that kind of money.”Four days after the demolitions at Oke-Egan, the evicted families protested in front of the Lagos State House of Assembly, calling on the government to compensate them and provide alternative housing.
But the officials do not plan on paying or relocating the families, said Aboyeji at the NTDA.
He said the residents should have carried out due diligence checks before acquiring the land, such as hiring land surveyors and getting official ownership information. “It is a matter of buyers beware,” he said.While some of the people evicted from Oke-Egan have returned to their home villages, others have relocated to other informal settlements. Nubi said he agreed the residents should have sought government approval before building on the site.
But he added that the government was also wrong to evict people who had built homes and communities from nothing without helping them find somewhere else to live.
“For me, a slum is a triumph of urban poor. No man under the constitution should be denied what he has without adequate compensation,” he said.
Payment Technology company Visa Inc. said on Thursday it had signed a deal to buy European open banking platform Tink and would pay €1.8 billion (US$2.15 billion) for the acquisition.
The total financial consideration of €1.8 billion included cash and retention incentives, the company said. It said Tink would retain its brand and management team, and its headquarters would stay in Stockholm.
Visa would fund the deal from cash in hand and the acquisition would have no impact on Visa’s previously announced stock buy-back programme or dividend policy, it said.
In January, Visa and financial technology company Plaid called off their US$5.3 billion merger agreement following a US government lawsuit aimed at stopping the proposed transaction on antitrust grounds.
Investors have been struggling to interpret signals from the Federal Reserve about how hot it is willing to let inflation run before it begins unwinding pandemic-era monetary stimulus.
Measures of markets’ U.S. inflation expectations hit multi-year highs in mid-May, but fell after comments from some Fed speakers and minutes from the committee’s April meeting sounded more hawkish.
Some investors interpreted that as policymakers having a lower tolerance for an inflation overshoot than previously estimated.
The fall in inflation expectations was exacerbated by the central bank’s policymaking meeting on June 15-16, when the Fed pulled forward projections for its first two rate hikes into 2023. Since then, bets on inflation have nudged back up, likely helped by Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s insistence on Tuesday that the bank would not preemptively raise rates because of the “fear” that inflation may be coming.
The choppiness suggests investors are struggling to make sense of the sometimes conflicting signals from Fed officials, who are facing their first inflation test under a new flexible average inflation framework adopted in 2020.
“There is a lot of uncertainty among bond investors about what exactly has changed since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)” met last week said Tom Graff, head of fixed income at Brown Advisory.
“Some are arguing that the Fed lost its nerve after a couple of inflation prints and won’t ultimately follow through with allowing inflation to stay above 2%.”
Breakeven inflation rates on five- and 10-year Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) have fallen around 25 basis points since hitting 10- and eight-year peaks in May, respectively.
The five-year, five-year forward breakeven inflation rate, which tracks the expected rate of inflation over five years in five years’ time, was recently at 2.2%, below the seven-year high of 2.4% it reached in May. Those measures have rebounded slightly in recent days.
The personal consumption expenditures price index (PCE) – the Fed’s preferred measure for inflation – rose 3.6% in April from a year earlier.
WAVERING FED?
Last August, the Fed adopted a flexible average inflation target (FAIT) that is designed to be somewhat more forgiving to price pressures than in the past, a major shift to the central bank’s approach towards its dual role of achieving maximum employment and stable prices.
Some market participants say the Fed may be less committed to FAIT than when it adopted the policy last summer, when Powell said the central bank would allow prices to rise faster than would have been tolerated in previous cycles.
Last week’s Fed meeting suggested “they’re walking that back,” said Michael Pond, head of global inflation-linked research at Barclays.
“We might have some inflation for now but on a structural basis, this reaction function from the Fed is likely to once again lead to a persistent undershoot,” said Pond.
But not everyone agrees that the Fed’s commitment is wavering.
“I think some people think the Fed is changing tune and abandoning flexible average inflation targeting. I don’t agree, but clearly some people are putting that trade on,” said Graff.
FED RESERVE JUNE MEETING
Powell’s argument has been that this year’s spike in inflation is transitory and related to the reopening of an economy shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Fed’s more hawkish stance at last week’s meeting surprised some market participants because the bank’s inflation forecasts a few years out had not changed dramatically.
The median Fed voter in June expected PCE to rise to 3.4% this year, compared to 2.4% in March. Projections for 2022 and 2023 were 10 basis points higher.
Market participants, weighing on every word from Powell at his address on Tuesday, did not have a clear takeaway.
Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics, said that Powell this week “re-emphasized that they have the tools to bring inflation down.”
“And while I think he was still overall sanguine about the outlook, he did say (they) were surprised about how large and persistent it (inflation) was.”
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