Global news update

Forty-one children were killed in a fire at a shopping centre complex in Kemerovo, Russia, local media has said. Both the RIA and Interfax news agencies reported the figure, saying a list of victims had been made available to relatives. It came as thousands of residents held a rally in the city, demanding a full inquiry into what happened.Protesters, many of them in tears, claimed authorities had been hiding the true death toll and that the number killed was higher. One of them shouted: "Why don't they tell us the truth?" A placard read: "How many victims are there really?" Russian President Vladimir Putin, on a visit to Kemerovo, said earlier that "criminal negligence" was behind the blaze that killed 64 people in the Siberian city. Witnesses reported fire alarms were silent and many doors, including those to a cinema, were locked. The head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, told Mr Putin the doors may have bee...

According to reports, Sergie was rushed to the hospital late on March 25 with pain in his chest and died several hours later in Moscow as the emergency team failed to save his life. Mavrodi’s whose MMM financial pyramid was a typical Ponzi scheme in which earlier investors receive their profits from subsequent investors, promised a returns of 20 percent to 75 percent a month, as well as lotteries and bonuses for investors. Reports say between 10-15 million people in China, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Nigeria lost money invested in the scheme. Mavrodi became a member of the Russian parliament in 1994,  a decision he later said was to ensure he received immunity from prosecution but he was stripped of his mandate in 1996. Found guilty in a Moscow court for financial fraud in 2007, he was sentenced to 4 and half years in a penal colony. In 2015, the Ponzi scheme MMM, started in Nigeria when it launched a new website for Nigerians. About 2.4million Nigerians invested in it as...

    NEWS / ABDUCTIONS Nigerian forces failed to act on mass abduction warnings: Amnesty Rights group investigation says military and police received at least five calls hours before the attack by gunmen. Relatives of missing schoolgirls react in Dapchi, in northeastern Yobe state, after February's mass abduction [Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters] Nigeria's security forces failed to respond to warnings that armed men were on their way to a town where 110 schoolgirls were abducted last month, a human rights group alleged. Amnesty International on Tuesday cited security sources, parents, and escapees as saying the military and police received at least five calls in the hours before the February 19 attack, which reminded many of the abduction of  276 Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram in 2014. Amnesty  interviewed 23 people  who recounted how about 50 figh...