The Philippines assesses the damage after the Super Typhoon – Embarrassment for a storied US news program after admitting it took the word of a flimsy, inaccurate source – 40 years of rumors swirling around a notorious death may have been settled.

The most powerful storm on record, Super Typhoon Haiyan (known as Yolanda in the Philippines) killed well more than 100 people as it moved across the archipelago.  Right now most of the dead are reported in Tacloban City on Leyte Island, which was swamped in a massive storm surge.  It’s expected that the death toll will rise as recovery efforts proceed.

Toronto’s crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford says he “may seek treatment”, after apologizing for a video showing him ranting and raving almost incoherently, threatening to murder an unidentified person.  That followed his admission that he has smoked crack and likely has a terrible drinking problem.  Calls for his resignation are growing, but he’s saying he’ll stay on the job.

Human traffickers tortured and raped African immigrants, whose boat later sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa.  More than 360 people drowned last month.  But the survivors recognized one of the traffickers in their midst, and beat and apprehended him for Italian authorities.  The abuse happened in a camp in the Libyan Desert, on their migration route from Eastern Africa to Europe.

The American television network CBS is apologizing for its botched report on the terrorist attack on a US diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.  The program “60 Minutes” featured an interview with a security contractor who claimed to have witnessed the report.  But it turned out he had told his employer and US investigators that he wasn’t even there when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others were killed.  It took CBS almost two weeks to renounce the report it initially claimed to be “proud” of.

A British military court found a Royal Marine guilty of murdering an injured Afghan insurgent, in what the prosecution called “an execution”.  The sergeant, known only as “Marine A”, faces a mandatory life term over the shooting of the unknown man while on patrol in Helmand Province, in 2011.  Two other marines were cleared.

Forensic experts say no traces of poison were found during tests of the exhumed remains of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda.  It seems to lay to rest 40 years of suspicions that Neruda was murdered during the bloody chaos of the coup d’etat that saw the death of popularly-elected Socialist President Salvador Allende and the beginning of the US-backed fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.  Neruda was suffering prostate cancer at the time.

A drug cartel murdered the mayor of a small town in western Mexico.  Ygnacio Lopez Mendoza had spoken out against paying extortion to the Knights Templar gang in Michoacan state, and had recently ended an 18-day hunger strike demanding more federal funds to help his town.  His death was initially reported as a car crash, but a local law enforcement association revealed he was abducted and tortured to death.

Venezuelan security forces detained a Miami Herald newspaper reporter as he reported on chronic grocery shortages in the southwestern city of San Cristobal.  The paper says it is concerned about Jim Wyss’ welfare.  He’s a US citizen based in neighboring Colombia. 

A theatrical technician accidentally set off a pyrotechnic display before a stage production in Paris, causing a blast that hurt 15 people, five of them seriously.  It happened at the Palais des Sports venue in the southwest of the city was preparing to stage a production of the 1789 play “The Lovers Of The Bastille”.  Part of the wall and ceiling collapsed.  The victims are also being checked for hearing damage.