A mass of mostly young people celebrating Halloween festivities in Seoul became trapped and crushed as the crowd surged into a narrow alley, killing at least 149 people and injuring 150 others in South Korea’s worst disaster in years. Emergency workers and pedestrians desperately performed CPR on people lying in the streets after the crush in the capital’s leisure district of Itaewon Saturday night. Choi Seong-beom, chief of Seoul’s Yongsan fire department, said the death toll could rise further and that an unspecified number among the injured were in critical condition. An estimated 100,000 people had gathered in Itaewon for…

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE Russia is suspending its participation in the grain deal after the terrorist attack in Sevastopol on the warships of the Black Sea Fleet and on the commercial vessels employed for security of the grain corridor, Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Saturday. "Taking into account the act of terrorism committed by the Kiev regime with the participation of British specialists on October 29, 2022 against the Black Sea Fleet ships and the civilian vessels employed to safeguard security of the grain corridor, Russia suspends its participation in the implementation of the agreements on the exports of…

Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance, budget and national planning, says the ministry was not consulted before the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) decided to redesign some naira notes. Ahmed disclosed this during the 2023 budget defence session with the senate committee on finance in Abuja on Friday. Godwin Emefiele, CBN governor, had announced that the bank had redesigned some naira notes in the denomination of N100, N200, N500 and N1000. Emefiele had said the decision was in line with the provisions of the CBN Act 2007, adding that the management of the bank “sought and obtained the approval of President…

Commercial activities in the nation’s capital, Abuja, have taken a hit, in response to the terror alerts by both the United States of America embassy and United Kingdom High Commission in Abuja. Similarly, residents have begun to take precautionary measures, since the alarms were raised by the diplomatic community. Palpable fears reached new heights when the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and other countries’ representatives in Nigeria, through their embassies, issued a similar advisory, asking their citizens to “run for their lives”. Many residents of the nation’s capital who were skeptical initially at the beginning of the week when the…