1. Romania’s PM quits after protests

    Romania’s Prime Minister Victor Ponta resigned* on November 4, in a surprise move just hours after mass protests demanding Cabinet resignations as the death toll from a Bucharest nightclub fire reached 32, his ruling leftist party said.

    Ponta, the country’s only sitting premier to stand trial for corruption, had been under pressure to resign from President Klaus Iohannis, who defeated him in last November’s presidential election.

    2. Millions vote in Myanmar polls

    With tremendous* excitement and hope, millions of citizens voted on Sunday in Myanmar’s historic general election that will test whether the military’s long-standing grip* on power can be loosened with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party has secured* victory.

    In a country that was under military rule for almost a half-century, many of the eligible 30 million voters cast ballots for the first time in what was been billed as the nation’s freest election ever. It was the first time even for Suu Kyi, the epitome* of the democracy movement who has defied* the junta for decades.

    3. Bomb likely caused plane crash

    Evidence now suggests that a bomb planted by the Islamic* State militant group is the likely cause of last weekend’s crash of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, U.S. and European security sources said on November 4.

    Islamic State, which controls swathes* of Iraq and Syria, and is battling the Egyptian army in the Sinai Peninsula, said again on Wednesday it brought down the airplane, adding it would eventually tell the world how it carried out the attack. The Airbus A321 crashed Oct. 31, killing all 224 people on board.

    4. Search for Brazil mudslide survivors

    Rescuers for a third day on Saturday searched the site where an avalanche* of mud and mining sludge* buried a village in southeastern Brazil, with at least two people dead and 28 missing.

    Hundreds of firefighters, soldiers and civil defense workers probed the viscous mass that swallowed everything in its path for signs of life.

    The search was suspended at dusk because “it is a high-risk area that is difficult to access,” said Duarte Goncalves Junior, mayor of the nearby city of Mariana.

    The tragedy occurred when waste reservoirs at the partly Australian-owned Samarco iron ore mine burst open, unleashing a sea of muck that flattened the nearby village of Bento Rodrigues on Thursday.

    5. 53 killed in Pakistan building collapse

    A Pakistani official said on Monday the death toll from the collapse of a factory building last week has risen to 53.

    Jam Sajjad Hussain said that rescuers have sifted* through nearly all the debris* from the collapse of a four-story building in the eastern city of Lahore.

    Rescuers have retrieved* 100 living workers from the rubble*, including a teenager whose family assumed he was dead. The cause of Wednesday’s collapse is yet to be determined. The building caved in a week after a powerful earthquake in neighboring Afghanistan killed nearly 400 people in both countries.

    5. Funeral list triggers purge speculation

    A State funeral in North Korea has sparked another fresh round of purge* rumors after one of Kim Jong Un’s most powerful aides was omitted from the official funeral committee list.

    Marshal Ri Ul Sol, who died of lung cancer during the weekend, is to be given a state funeral Tuesday, and the list of 170 names published on Sunday — headed by leader Kim Jong Un — is an official Who’s Who of the top political and military hierarchy.

    A notable absentee, however, is Choe Ryong Hae, a member of the ruling party’s politburo standing committee and seen as one of Kim’s closest confidantes.

    (SD-Agencies)