News in :90 – Oct. 16, 2024

More than 140 people, including children, were killed and dozens were injured in Nigeria after an overturned gasoline tanker truck exploded in flames while they were trying to scoop up fuel pouring from the vehicle, emergency services said Wednesday.

The accident occurred at midnight in Jigawa state’s Majiya town when the tanker driver lost control of the vehicle while traveling on a highway, police spokesperson Lawan Adam said. Residents rushed to the scene and were scooping up fuel, “sparking a massive inferno,” he said.

“Close to 140 people were put in a mass grave apart from people buried in other places,” Nura Abdullahi, head of the National Emergency Management Agency in the region, told The Associated Press.

Israeli airstrikes pounded areas across Lebanon, killing at least 21 people, officials said Wednesday, including more than a dozen in a southern town where Israeli bombardments in previous conflicts are seared into local memory.

Elsewhere in the south, a city’s mayor was among the dead in a strike that Lebanese officials said targeted a meeting coordinating relief efforts.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the strikes late Tuesday on the southern town of Qana, where 15 people were killed. 

Vice President Kamala Harris rallies in Michigan’s union halls, standing alongside the state’s most powerful labor leader, while former President Donald Trump fires back from rural steel factories, urging middle-class workers to trust him as the true champion of their interests.

As they compete for blue wall states with deep union roots, the presidential candidates are making their case to workers in starkly different terms. And nowhere is that contrast more significant than in Michigan, where both candidates are vying for workers’ support in a race that could mark a pivotal moment for organized labor.

“The American dream was really born here in Michigan,” United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain told a crowd of several hundred while campaigning for Harris in Grand Rapids. Fain, who described Michigan as “sacred ground” for his union at the early October rally, warned that the dream was on “life support” and that unions like his were key to protecting it for American workers.

Abby Madsen can be reached at mads3817@stthomas.edu.