Apartment collapse

RUSSIAN emergency officials said the confirmed death toll from the collapse of a section of an apartment building has risen to seven, and 37 residents of the building are still missing.

Rescue crews yesterday temporarily halted their search through the rubble in the city of Magnitogorsk while workers tried to remove or stabilize sections of the building in danger of collapse.

Indonesia landslide

SOLDIERS, police and residents fanned out across a damaged Indonesian village yesterday, searching in the mud for possible victims of a landslide caused by torrential rain that killed at least nine people and left 34 others missing.

Tons of mud that rolled from the surrounding hills late Monday buried 30 houses in Sirnaresmi village of West Java’s Sukabumi district. Sixty people who were displaced have fled to a temporary shelter, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman.

UN agency withdrawal

THE United States and Israel officially quit the U.N.’s educational, scientific and cultural agency at the stroke of midnight yesterday, the culmination of a process triggered more than a year ago amid concerns that the organization fosters anti-Israel bias. The withdrawal is mainly procedural yet serves a new blow to UNESCO, co-founded by the U.S. after World War II to foster peace.

UK stabbings

BRITISH counter-terrorism police were investigating stabbings at Manchester Victoria train station that left three people injured, including a police officer, on New Year’s Eve, the Greater Manchester Police said. Police were, however, keeping an open mind as there was no intelligence suggesting a wider threat, the Greater Manchester Police said in a statement posted on Twitter. They said a man is in custody.