The “Raptor” fighters previously flew to the South in December when Seoul and Washington staged their largest-ever joint air exercise, days after North Korea test-fired a missile believed capable of hitting the US mainland.

The North customarily reacts with anger to the deployment of American stealth fighters, which it fears could be used for surgical strikes against its leadership and strategic facilities.

The confirmation came after local newspapers said eight F-22 jets arrived Sunday at a military airbase in the southern city of Gwangju.

The “Max Thunder” drill will kick off on May 11 for a two-week run, with the reported participation of some 100 aircraft from both countries.

“Max Thunder is a regular exercise that has been on the docket long before a planned US-North Korea summit”, the South’s Defence Ministry said in a statement.

It urged news media to refrain from producing “speculative reports” about the intention of the deployment aside from the routine exercise.

That request came after the conservative Chosun Ilbo daily claimed the aircraft deployment was apparently aimed at heaping pressure on Pyongyang ahead of a planned summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump.

The Panmunjom truce village in the demilitarised zone between North and South, where a rare inter-Korean summit successfully convened last week, has emerged as a possible venue for the Kim-Trump meeting.

Chosun suggested the arrival of F-22 jets could also be aimed at bolstering security in case the North Korea-US summit takes place at Panmunjom.

Survivors described waking in the night to find themselves surrounded by flames and escaping with their children before the tower turned to rubble.

Scores of homeless families were occupying the building, according to officials.However, despite the ferocity of the blaze, only one person was listed as almost certainly dead.

“There are some missing, approximately three, with one very likely a fatality,” Ricardo Peixoto, a firefighters’ commander, told AFP. “We don’t know how many people were in the building so we don’t know whether we’ll find more victims in the ruins.”

So far, 250 people who’d been living in the building have been registered after the blaze, city security official Jose Roberto said.

The fire began overnight and spread rapidly, turning the building into an inferno before it fell down.

Dramatic pictures tweeted by the fire service showed flames shooting up the sides of the whole tower, moments before it was reduced to a heap of smoking ruins. An adjacent church was also damaged.

“We got the call at around 1:30 am (0430 GMT) and we came at once, a few minutes later, and about five floors of the building were on fire,” Peixoto said. “Fifteen or 20 minutes later the building fell.”

Fifty-seven vehicles and 160 firefighters were deployed to the scene, the department said.

Frantic escape

Sao Paulo is Brazil’s financial capital and the most populous city in Latin America, but suffers huge economic inequality.

Poor families often squat in disused buildings or set up tents and shacks on vacant land, sometimes next to wealthy areas.

President Michel Temer, who is Brazil’s most unpopular leader on record, with single-digit approval ratings, got a hostile reception when he briefly visited the scene.

“We want housing!” a crowd chanted.

One survivor, 26-year-old Henrique, said he managed to get out from the third floor with his girlfriend and their dog.

“We woke and the building was already on fire,” he said. “We struggle so much and now we’ve lost everything.”

Another man, Jose Antonio, described the frantic escape from the sixth floor, where he lived with his wife, three children and sister-in-law.

“I was unsure if my son had taken my youngest daughter,” Antonio, 48, told AFP.”There was still time to go back so I returned, I looked around, I patted the mattresses.There wasn’t time to take anything. I patted the mattresses, saw no one was at home anymore, then I went down behind them shouting their names to see if they had gone down.”

Sao Paulo state Governor Marcio Franca said “it was a tragedy waiting to happen….This building didn’t have even the minimum conditions for habitation. The state should not have allowed it to be occupied.”

From a safety point of view, the building was a ticking bomb, Peixoto said.

“There was no security, there were not adequate electrical installations, there were no safe staircases, there were piles of rubbish — there was everything you need to start a major fire,” he said.

Moon made the request in a phone call to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday, a few days after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told the South Korean leader he planned to shut down the test site in May.

“The president sought the support of the United Nations to verify the imminent closure of the DPRK’s nuclear test site, as announced by the DPRK Chairman Kim Jong Un,” said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is North Korea’s official name.

Moon also asked for UN support to “transform the demilitarized zone into a peace zone” between the two Koreas, he added.

Guterres said the United Nations was ready to discuss possible forms of support, but no details were provided.

The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s global nuclear watchdog, has the expertise to carry out verification missions.

Kim told Moon during the summit on Friday that he planned to dismantle the Punggye-ri nuclear test site as the leaders pledged to pursue a permanent peace treaty and denuclearize the Korean peninsula.

The Security Council has imposed tough economic sanctions on North Korea after Pyongyang last year carried out a sixth nuclear test and a series of advanced missile launches.

Guterres on Friday applauded the “truly historic summit” between the Korean leaders and urged them to quickly turn their commitments into action.

Fresh data from the UN health body showed that every corner of the globe is dealing with air pollution, although the problem is far worse in poorer countries.

“Air pollution threatens us all, but the poorest and most marginalised people bear the brunt of the burden,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

WHO’s study, which examined health-hazardous levels of both outdoor and household air pollution, found that “around seven million people die every year from exposure to fine particles in polluted air”.

More than 90 percent of deaths linked to air pollution occur in low- or middle-income countries, mainly in Asia and Africa, it found.

“This is a very dramatic problem that we are facing,” Maria Neira, the head of the WHO’s department of public health and environment, told reporters in a conference call.

The data focused on dangerous particulate matter with a diameter of between 2.5 and 10 micrometres (PM10), and particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5).

PM2.5 includes toxins like sulfate and black carbon, which pose the greatest health risks since they can penetrate deep into the lungs or cardiovascular system.

Strokes, cancer, pneumonia

They can cause diseases like strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory infections such as pneumonia, WHO said.

Particularly worrying, the agency added, was that more than 40 percent of the global population still does not have access to clean cooking fuels and technologies in their homes.

The use of dirty cooking fuel, like burning charcoal, is a major source of household air pollution, which is estimated to cause some 3.8 million premature deaths each year.

“It is unacceptable that over three billion people — most of them women and children — are still breathing deadly smoke every day from using polluting stoves and fuels in their homes,” Tedros said.

Wednesday’s report said access to clean fuels was increasing in every region, but warned “improvements are not even keeping pace with population growth in many parts of the world”, pointing especially to sub-Saharan Africa.

Outdoor air pollution was meanwhile linked to 4.2 million fatalities annually.

In around one million of those cases, a combination of indoor and outdoor pollution was to blame, WHO said.

The report provides air quality data from more than 4,300 cities and towns in 108 countries, constituting the world’s biggest database of ambient, or outdoor, air pollution.

Monitoring key

WHO hailed that more than 1,000 more cities had been added to its database since its last report two years ago, noting that monitoring can prompt action towards addressing the problem.

The data shows that the highest ambient air pollution levels are found in what WHO dubs the Eastern Mediterranean region — which basically covers the Middle East and North Africa — and in South-East Asia.

In these regions air pollutants are often found at levels more than five times higher than what WHO considers safe.

In the city of Gwalior in India, for instance, the levels of both PM10 and PM2.5 measured in 2012 were around 17 times higher than what WHO recommends.

Several Middle Eastern cities count similar levels, including Al Jubail in Saudi Arabia, but WHO experts noted that particulate levels are often pushed higher by sand in cities and towns near deserts.

The report meanwhile stressed an unevenness in the information received, with a dire lack of data from Africa and parts of the Western Pacific region.

Only eight of the 47 countries in Africa have provided air quality information about one or more of their cities.

And while the database lists information on 181 Indian cities, it provides data for only nine Chinese cities.

The team would consist of representatives from the Financial Services Authority (OJK), state-owned electricity firm PLN as the off-taker, the Finance Ministry and the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry.

According to data from the Finance Ministry and the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry, only three of the PPAs have entered the operation phase, while 17 were in the construction phase, four in pre-construction and 46 others had yet to achieve financial closure.

“The objective of [the team] is to find financing solutions for the 46 PPAs. One of the options is to bundle the funding for the 46 PPAs,” the ministry’s diversified new and renewable energy director Harris said recently.

Previously, the private companies holding the PPA contracts had complained that the ministerial decree on renewable energy for electricity was hampering funding of those projects, because an article on the build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) scheme required investors to hand their projects over to PLN when the agreements expire.

“Because of this BOOT scheme, the banks are reluctant to provide financing, as the projects cannot be used as collateral,” Hydropower Plant Developers Association (APPLTA) secretary-general Muhammad Assegaf said last week.

Harris, meanwhile, said the problem had emerged only because banks failed to fully understand investment in the renewable energy sector.

The trains will all be equipped with condition monitoring systems, which can track the health of on-board equipment, thus allowing operators to carry out predictive maintenance to boost reliability.

The additional capacity will support the upcoming North East Line Extension (NELe) and the sixth stage of the Circle Line (CCL6).

The deal, worth about US$250 million, was signed by Alstom and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) on Monday during a ceremony held at the Sengkang Depot.

Of the 17 trains, six will be deployed to the North East Line, increasing the fleet size from 43 to 49. With 11 new trains, the Circle Line fleet will grow from 64 to 75 trains.Circle Line trains each have three cars, while the North East Line trains have six cars each.

The trains are manufactured and assembled in Alstom’s manufacturing facility in Barcelona, Spain. The LTA said the North East Line trains will be progressively shipped here from 2020 and the Circle Line ones, from 2021.

They will undergo testing and commissioning before they are put into service when the extensions open, the authority added.

In addition to condition monitoring systems, the 11 Circle Line trains will have sensors on the current collector shoes to detect any dislodgement of the devices. The trains’ collector shoes draw power from the third-rail.

Two of the new Circle Line trains will each be fitted with an Automatic Track Inspection (ATI) System, which enables monitoring of the running rails, track equipment and sleepers while the trains are in operation, the LTA also said.

“The ATI System supplements existing track inspection activities for timely and more effective identification of rail and trackside components which require maintenance,” it added.

The 1.6km NELe, which opens in 2023, will extend the current 16-station line by one station, Punggol Coast.

The extension will open in tandem with the first phase of developments in the Punggol Digital District, bringing rail connectivity to the area.

Meanwhile, the 4.3km three-station CCL6 will close the loop for the Circle Line, linking up the current stops of HarbourFront and Marina Bay stations. When the CCL6 stations are completed in 2025, the CCL will have a total of 33 stations, including 12 interchange stations connected to other MRT lines.