Rescuers in the southern Philippines pulled a body from the rubble of a collapsed supermarket on Wednesday, as the death toll from a major earthquake climbed to 46.

The 7.8-magnitude tremor just off the coast of Mindanao on Monday brought down buildings, triggered landslides and set off tsunami warnings across a swathe of the southern island.

Joey Deluvio, 39, was one of two employees at a supermarket in General Santos City that has been the focus of recovery efforts despite the constant threat of aftershocks.

Life-detecting equipment had traced a "weak pulse" earlier in the operation, local rescuer Michelle Chua told AFP on Wednesday, but "when they got to the body... there were no signs of life".

Deluvio's body was found pinned between two beams, Chua added.

The national disaster agency raised the death toll to 45 on Wednesday, while the number of people missing jumped dramatically from four to 17.

However, the figure for fatalities did not include Deluvio, the civil defense office confirmed.

Most of the additional dead were from Davao Occidental province, and most had been killed in landslides or collapsing buildings, civil defense official Rafaelito Alejandro said in a radio interview.

END/AFP/ASA

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).