A magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck off northeastern Japan's Fukushima region on Thursday, the Japan Meteorological Agency said, but no tsunami warning was issued.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries after the earthquake, whose epicentre had a depth of 40 kilometres (25 miles) and which was also felt in Tokyo.

Japan, one of the world's most tectonically active countries, has strict building standards designed to ensure structures can withstand even the most powerful earthquakes.

The archipelago, home to around 125 million people, experiences around 1,500 jolts every year, the vast majority of which are mild.

The United States Geological Survey put the magnitude of Thursday's quake at 6.1, with a depth of 40.1 kilometres.

It comes a day after at least nine people were killed and more than 1,000 injured by a powerful earthquake in Taiwan.

Wednesday's magnitude-7.4 quake damaged dozens of buildings in Taiwan and prompted tsunami warnings as far as Japan and the Philippines.

Japan's biggest earthquake on record was a massive magnitude-9.0 undersea jolt in March 2011 off Japan's northeast coast, which triggered a tsunami that left around 18,500 people dead or missing.

The 2011 catastrophe also sent three reactors into meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing Japan's worst post-war disaster and the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

The total cost was estimated at 16.9 trillion yen (US$112 billion), not including the hazardous decommissioning of the Fukushima facility, which is expected to take decades. 

At least 34 people, including two babies were killed when a contraband fuel depot exploded into flames in southern Benin near the border with Nigeria on Saturday.

According to Beninese Interior Minister Alassane Seidou, “a serious fire occurred in the town of Seme Podji. Another 20 people were seriously wounded in the incident.”

"I can't really give you the cause of the fire, but there is a large gasoline warehouse here and cars, tricycles and motorcycles come from morning to evening,” he added.

Nigeria is a main oil and gas producer where fuel smuggling is very common along its borders, particularly when the government maintains a subsidy to keep fuel prices low.

The majority of the victims were burnt and they could not be not be identified.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).