There has been a heavy loss of life in a huge explosion at a built-in gas depot in southern Nigeria. A reporter at the scene says he counted more than 100 bodies.
Witnesses said the bodies of workers and the customers at the depot in Nnewi in Anambra state had been burnt beyond recognition. Abdullahi Abubakar is in Abuja. It is
not clear what triggered the blast at the factory making gas for cooking and heating. But eyewitnesses say the explosion caused a huge fire that took firefighters and
residents several hours to put out. Police authorities have confirmed the incident but are yet to give the number of those affected.
It's emerged in Washington that the American victims of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 will finally receive compensation. A US spending bill passed last week awards
each of the 53 hostages or their estates up to 4.4 million dollars.
Japan is reported to have proposed setting up a government fund aimed at resolving a longstanding row with South Korea about Korean sex slaves during the second world war. The so-called comfort women were forced to work in Japanese military brothels. Japanese media reporting that the prime minister Shinzo Abe has instructed his foreign minister Fumio Kishida to resolve the issue during his visit to Seoul next week.
The archbishop of Canterbury is expected to warn that violence unleashed by the IS group means that Christianity is facing elimination in the very region where it was
born. Justin Welby will use his Christmas Day sermon to compare Islamic extremist group to Herod, the biblical king who massacred babies in a venom attempt to kill
Jesus. Our religious affairs correspondent Caroline Wyatt reports. The archbishop of Canterbury will say that the militants of IS are igniting a trail of fear,
violence, hatred and determined oppression. In his sermon, Justin Welby is expected to describe IS as using indescribable cruelty and say that because of them,
Christians face elimination in the very region in which Christian faith began.
The US National Basketball Association is taking part in television commercials calling for an end to gun violence following a series of mass shootings in the country.
The first adverts, time to reach millions of basketball fans on Christmas Day never mentioned the words 'Gun Control'. Players who appear in the first 30 seconds
commercials speak in personal terms about the effects of gun violence on their lives. One of the adverts stars with NBA star Steven Curry. I heard about a shooting
involving a three-year-old girl over the summer. My daughter Riley is at that age. There was a point when I felt that I was going to die. My parents just always say a
bullet doesn't have a name on it. Someone put up a bullet in the back of my 14-year-old son's head. The gun should never be an option.We are Americans. We don't have live like this. We can all make a difference. You're listening to the world news from the BBC.
Ukraine's parliament has approved a budget for 2016 after a warning from the prime minister Arseny Yatseniuk that failure to do so would plunge the nation to an
economic catastrophe. Approving the budget was a key condition to secure the next tranche of financial aid on the earning to National Monetary Funds loan worth 17.5
billion dollars.
The Swiss government has confirmed that it will hold a referendum on an initiative to stops banks creating money by making loans they cannot cover from their deposits.
The Swiss Sovereign Money Movement collected the 160,000 signatures needed to trigger a referendum under the constitution. It wants the Swiss Central Bank to have sole power to create money. It says it's the only way to guard against another economic crash.
The leaders of Greek Cypriots and Turkey Cypriots communities have for the first time given the joint televised Christmas message, each initially in his own language
and then in the others. The Greek Cypriots president Nicos Anastasiades said he hoped the New Year would allow Turkish and Greek Cypriots to live peacefully in a
reunited country. For his part, the Turkish Cypriots Mustafa Akinci leader wished peace, serenity and prosperity to all Cypriots in 2016.
The first British astronaut on the International Space Station Tim Peake has encountered a few problems phoning home. Alexander has more. You might think the state-
of-the-art technology on the International Space Station would make it fairly straightforward to phone home at Christmas. But former army pilot Tim Peake has had a
couple of snags with his. This is Major Tim to ground control. A woman picked up so he asked, Hello, is that planet Earth？And she did't know who he was. BBC news.