trapped

A FORMER Nickelodeon star has been killed in a horror hit-and-run in New York City.

Kianna Underwood, 33, was dragged under a car after it struck her in Brooklyn early on Friday morning.

She was crossing Pitkin Avenue in the Brownsville neighbourhood when a black Ford SUV hit her.

Kianna – who appeared in comedy sketch show All That in 2005 – was pulled under the car for around a block.

The driver fled as she lay motionless in the road, the New York Post reports.

Kianna was pronounced dead at the scene after being found with “severe trauma” at the intersection of Osborn Street and Pitkin Avenue.

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No arrests have been made.

As well as starring in several episodes of Nickelodeon’s All That, Kianna also lent her voice to animated series Little Bill.

The child star also appeared in indie film The 24-Hour Woman in 1999, and provided voiceovers for animated TV movie Santa, Baby in 2001.

Off screen, Kianna spent time on the stage – playing little Inez during the first national tour of Hairspray.

One of Kianna’s relatives, Anthony Underwood, shared the tragic news of her death on Facebook.

He wrote: “Please give me and my family time to process this. Thank you.”

It comes after another child star was killed after he was hit by a car while stepping off a school bus.

Nikodem Marecki, 11, was run over moments after exiting the vehicle near Kraków, Poland.

Emergency services rushed to the scene and an air ambulance helicopter transferred him to hospital on November 26.

Nikodem starred in the multi-award winning Polish war drama White Courage, released last year.

Director Marcin Koszałka called it a “terrible, great loss”, adding: “He was very talented and the world was opening up to him.”

CONCERNS have been raised over the temporary closure of a British Isle airport in a £24million scheme to rebuild its runway.

The charming British Isle of Guernsey has long been loved for trips, with flights between 40 minutes to an hour, but the future of its airport hangs in uncertainty.

Plans were in place to improve Alderney’s only airport – approved back in 2022 – but delays and climbing costs have put the development on pause.

The plans, due to start in 2024, were for the airport to have a £24million renovation to improve services and have more flights to and from the island; there are currently around seven flights to Alderney a day.

The makeover would extend the runway so it could welcome larger planes as well as modernise the 1960s terminal building.

Guernsey officials warned the airport may need to close for an “extended period” to complete the scheme in the shortest time – work could start in 2027.

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Chris Blythe, Alderney resident and pilot and flying instructor, said he was concerned about the possibility of the airport closure leaving islanders “cut off”.

Sharing his worry, Blythe spoke on BBC News and said: “I think it’s going to be pretty brutal for the people on the island to be cut off and there’s been nothing said yet about how we would get to Guernsey or the mainland.”

He added: “From the point of view of the people who will be working on the project, there’s going to be a whole load of workers… who are going to be trapped on the island with us.”

Blythe insists passengers deserved to have a runway which was up to specification and met minimum legal requirements.

The proposed scheme involved the reconstruction of the asphalt runway, to meet minimum aerodrome design standards. Blythe believes this “was always going to be the only option”.

Blythe said: “The main runway in Alderney is not very good, in light aircraft it doesn’t really matter that much but for commercial aircraft it needs to be better than that.”

He added: “I think the previous proposal to extend it and put ATRs in was ludicrous and I think anybody who knew much about aviation probably came to that conclusion.”

A mountain of rubbish collapsed at a landfill in the central Philippines on Thursday, killing a 22-year-old woman and leaving more than 30 people missing, authorities have said.

Rescuers pulled 12 injured sanitation workers from debris at the Binaliw Landfill in Cebu City, who were later hospitalised.

Many of the missing are believed to be workers at the landfill. The mayor of Cebu told news outlet ABS-CBN that it may be difficult to reach survivors because of the potential for further collapse.

The cause of the collapse is still unclear, but Cebu City councillor Joel Garganera said it was likely the result of poor waste management practices.

Some 300 people from various government agencies and civilian groups have been deployed to the privately-owned landfill. Several excavators, ambulances and fire trucks have also been seen on site.

“All response teams remain fully engaged in search and retrieval efforts to locate the remaining missing persons,” Cebu Mayor Nestor Archival said in a Facebook post on Friday.

“This is not like other landslides that you can just excavate. If you pull from the top, the bottom is soft. Let’s say there is a person there, when you get the debris, it might get worse,” he said, ABS-CBN reported.

Cebu City councillor Joel Garganera said the incident may have happened suddenly, but was likely a result of poor waste management practices.

Operators had been cutting into the mountain, mining the soil, and then piling garbage to form another mountain of waste, Garganera told local newspaper The Freeman.

“It’s not a sanitary landfill. It’s already an open dumpsite,” he said.

Families are waiting for updates on their loved ones trapped in the debris.

One Binaliw resident, Belen Antigua, told Rappler that her son had survived the landslide but she was still waiting for her other relatives to be found. Another said that families had been gathered at the landfill to look for their children since Friday morning.

“I could not understand my emotions. They said those trapped are calling for help, so there is a possibility that my brother is still there,” Michelle Lumapas, whose brother works at the landfill, told ABS-CBN.

The Binaliw landfill is about 15 hectares (37 acres).

Landfills are common in major Philippine cities like Cebu, which is the trading centre and transportation gateway of the Visayas, the archipelago nation’s central islands.

A historic theater in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol has opened its doors more than three years after it was pummeled in a Russian airstrike that killed hundreds of civilians sheltering inside.

Moscow-installed authorities marked the rebuilding of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater with a gala concert on the building’s new main stage Sunday night. Images shared by Russian state media outlets showed the building’s marbled pillars and staircases, and dancers wearing traditional Russian headdresses known as kokoshniks performing.

The original theater was destroyed when it was targeted by a Russian airstrike on March 16, 2022, as Moscow’s forces besieged the city in the weeks after their invasion.

An Associated Press investigation later found evidence that the attack killed about 600 people inside and outside the building — almost double an early estimate from the government.

At the time of the strike, hundreds of civilians had sought refuge in the building after weeks of relentless shelling. The word “children” had been written with paint on the street outside the building, large enough to be seen by both pilots and satellites.

Moscow said that Ukrainian forces demolished the theater, a claim that the AP’s investigation refuted.

Russian forces took control of Mariupol’s city center shortly after the strike. The ruins were bulldozed and any remains were taken to the ever-growing mass graves in and around Mariupol.

Mariupol’s Ukrainian city council, which left the city when it was occupied for Ukrainian-controlled territory, called the rebuilding and the opening of the theater “singing and dancing on bones.”

“The ‘restoration’ of the theater is a cynical attempt to conceal the traces of a war crime and part of an aggressive policy of Russification of the city. The repertoire consists largely of works by Russian writers and playwrights,” the council said in a statement on Telegram.

Guests of honor at Sunday’s opening included Denis Pushilin, the Russian-installed head of the partially occupied Donetsk region, and St. Petersburg Gov. Alexander Beglov. Workers from St. Petersburg, which was twinned with Mariupol after Russia took full control of the city in May 2022, aided in the building’s reconstruction.

The Donetsk region, where Mariupol is located, has remained a key battleground throughout the war. Russia illegally annexed it in 2022, though Moscow still doesn’t control all of it. The region’s fate is one of the major sticking points in negotiations to end the war.