Deadly cyclone lashes southeastern Africa

Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa feel impact of tropical storm that has killed at least 77 people. At least 77 people in southeastern Africa have been killed and more are still missing as Tropical Cyclone Irina sweeps through the region. The storm struck northern Madagascar more than two weeks ago and has slowly tracked down the west of the country. Torrential rain from the system hit the whole of the island, leading to the deaths of 65 people, weather officials said on Monday. The majority of the deaths occurred in the southeastern district of Ifanadiana. The storm has also affected southern areas of Mozambique and eastern South Africa. Five fishermen were killed in the seas off Mozambique’s port city of Beira on Saturday. Authorities on Monday were still cautioning fishermen not to venture out. Three other people in the southern province of Gaza were killed when a tree fell on their house and the roof collapsed. A further...

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Libyans hold funerals for 163 from mass grave

Thousands of Libyans massed in the eastern city of Benghazi on Monday for the burial of 163 people whose bodies were found in a mass grave, an AFP journalist said. The funeral comes a day after the bodies were transferred to Benghazi from the desert town of Bin Jawad, east of Sirte, where toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi was captured and killed on October 20. Mourners poured into Benghazi's Tahrir Square, cradle of the revolt that spread from east to west and eventually overthrew Kadhafi's regime, where they held prayers in remembrance of the fallen "martyrs." Relatives demanded a quick trial for Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, who stood by his father and sought to squash the popular uprising with brute force. He is now in the custody of a militia made up of former rebel fighters. "The revolutionaries of Zintan must hand over Seif al-Islam immediately" for trial, Mohammed al-Darnawy, who came to bury two of his brothers, told AFP. The...

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Poland mourns victims of train disaster; foreign nationals among those killed

Poland began two days of mourning Monday for 16 people killed in its worst rail disaster in two decades, as investigators probing the cause of Saturday’s crash detained two station masters. A prosecutor said the station officials were responsible for scheduling the doomed trains, which crashed head on as they travelled on the same section of track at Szczekociny, some 200 kilometres from Warsaw. No charges have been brought against the men, the prosecutor said. Fifty people were still in hospital Monday, three of them in a serious condition. Meanwhile, crash investigators have identified a Russian citizen among the victims, the second foreign national killed in the crash.‘Her body was identified today,’ Katarzyna Kuczynska, a spokeswoman for local authorities said Monday. An American woman was also among the victims. A spokesman for the US consulate in the southern Polish city of Krakow told AFP Monday the American woman’s family had...

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Zeebrugge disaster 25 years on: Emotions still raw for family of two victims killed in Britain's worst sea disaster since Titanic

Today two mothers will make a pilgrimage to the port of Dover, as they have done for nearly a quarter of a century. There, under the Norman arches of the church of St Mary the Virgin, they will commemorate...

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