Man killed in bus and tram crash

The bus was badly damaged. Pic: Dave Steiert

A man has died in an accident involving a bus and a tram in Croydon.

The crash happened at about 1000 BST on Sunday in George Street. The driver of the bus was taken to hospital.

Six other people also went to hospital with injuries described by police as “non-critical”. Two shop fronts and a BMW car were also damaged.

Transport for London said: “Following a collision involving a route 468 bus and a tram, a person has been killed. We will carry out a full investigation.”

Their statement went on: “Our deepest sympathies are with the family and friends of the person who died and those who were injured.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said the man who died was believed to be in his late 20s. Police were contacting next of kin.

He appealed for witnesses to the accident to contact police. Some roads in the area were closed while investigations were carried out.

Deadly rockslide hits Cairo homes

At least 20 people have been killed by a rockslide which destroyed homes in Cairo, emergency services say.

Dozens of houses in the shanty town east of central Cairo were hit by huge boulders and rocks, reports said.

Witnesses said a six-storey building in the impoverished Duwayqa district below the Muqattam hills had been completely reduced to rubble.

Some people are believed to be still trapped in the rubble and police have cordoned off the area.

At least 20 people are reported to have been injured and the number of casualties is expected to rise.

Reports said that at least eight boulders – each estimated to weigh about 70 tonnes – had fallen from the towering cliffs overlooking the district at about 0900 local time (0700 GMT).

“It was horror,” said Hassan Ibrahim Hassan, 80, whose house escaped the destruction.

Distraught residents

“The power went out, we heard a loud bang like an earthquake and I thought this house had collapsed. I went out, I saw the whole mountain had collapsed.”

Witnesses described seeing hundreds of distraught people gathered around the site of the destruction, saying they had relatives and friends trapped under the rubble.

Some were scrabbling at the rocks with their bare hands.

The remains of the town have been covered by a thick layer of dust.

Rescue teams were forced to wait for the arrival of cranes and heavy lifting equipment to allow them to move the huge rocks.”I couldn’t find my house this morning,” said Mustafa Abdel-Fatah. “I could only see rocks on top of everything.”

It was not clear what had triggered the rockfall but a our correspondent says there have been previous landslides in the area.

Arrow fired through family’s cat

The 18-inch arrow missed Marmite’s spine by a couple of inches

A family cat is expected to survive after its body was pierced by an 18-inch aluminium arrow.

Two-and-a-half-year-old Marmite managed to make it back to his home in the Scottish Borders village of Newcastleton after being struck.

Police are investigating the incident to try to discover if the cat was the victim of a deliberate attack.

Owner Mark Richardson said Marmite must have used up one of his nine lives after surviving the ordeal.

Police are trying to establish whether the arrow was fired from a bow and arrow or a crossbow.

If it is malicious then it is really sad and hopefully the police will catch whoever is responsible Mark Richardson

The cat was spotted on Tuesday with the arrow through its body but attempts to catch the animal failed.

Marmite eventually turned up the following day at the home of Mark and Lesley Richardson and children Chloe and Ben.

The cat was taken to the Capon Tree veterinary surgery at Longtown where vet Emma McManus removed the arrow through a delicate procedure.

Mr Richardson said: “Marmite is recovering well at the moment but he has been very lucky.

Marmite made his way home with the arrow sticking through him

“You can say he has only got eight lives left after this.

“The arrow has gone in at the front of his right leg, grazed his spine and come out the left leg.”

He said that the cat had been very fortunate not to be more seriously hurt.

“The vet said that if it had been half an inch lower it would have hit his organs and a couple of inches higher would have shattered his spine,” he said.

“We don’t know if someone has been firing in the woods and accidentally hit the cat but they should not be doing that as they could easily hit a child.

“If it is malicious then it is really sad and hopefully the police will catch whoever is responsible.”

Newcastleton’s community police officer Brian Murray said they were keeping an open mind about the incident.

“We would ask for any witnesses or anyone with information to contact us,” he added.

Georgia and Russia agree on truce

Russian troops have pulled back through Abkhazia

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has agreed an outline plan with Russia and Georgia to try to resolve their crisis.

A key element calls for all forces to return to the areas where they were before fighting broke out last week.

EU foreign ministers in Brussels are discussing the plan at an emergency meeting on the crisis.

Some 100,000 people are estimated to have been displaced by the conflict, which has created huge tensions in international relations.

Fighting in the South Ossetia region does now seem to have ended.

On Tuesday, Russia announced its military activity in the area was completed and witnesses saw troops pulling out.

However on Wednesday, journalists and eyewitnesses reported seeing Russian tanks patrolling the streets of Gori, the nearest major Georgian town to the South Ossetian border.

Russia has held all the cards in this conflict and looks set to end up with both a diplomatic and a military victory.

It has shown its power within the region and the weakness of the West, which has been unable and unwilling to come to Georgia’s aid with anything other than words of support, our correspondent adds.

Fiery rhetoric

Despite the diplomacy and apparent withdrawal, rhetoric on both sides remained fiery and analysts were predicting a long road to peace.

On Wednesday, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili accused Russia of violating the ceasefire with troop movements around the country, while asserting that the ceasefire on the Georgian side was always in force.

FIVE-POINT PEACE PLAN No more use of force Stop all military actions for good Free access to humanitarian aid Georgian troops return to their places of permanent deployment Russian troops return to pre-conflict positions

“They went through our towns and they are rampaging and they are also shooting,” he said at a news conference in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

He also said he had been getting reports of large-scale violations of human rights by Russian forces: “What we are seeing is classic Balkan-type and WWII-type ethnic cleansing and purification campaigns,” he said, speaking of a Russian “rampage” through Georgian-controlled villages in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia.

A BBC correspondent in Tbilisi says there have been reports of extensive looting and kidnappings by gunmen around the town of Gori.

Shortly after the Georgian president spoke, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the actions of the Georgian leadership in South Ossetia.

“Georgia – of course, not Georgia, but the Georgian leadership – gave an order which led to an act of genocide, which resulted in war crimes, ethnic cleansing. And this, of course, cannot go unanswered.”

Russian troop reinforcements would be withdrawn from South Ossetia, depending on the extent to which Georgian troops did the same, he added. Mr Lavrov also said that Russian peacekeepers would remain in South Ossetia.

Aid agencies on the ground say they have not come across any evidence of human rights violations.

“It is clear that both sides are exaggerating, and that figures are inflated,” Giorgi Gogia of Human Rights Watch told the BBC News website from Tbilisi.

EU meeting

France – which currently holds the EU presidency – wants Wednesday’s meeting to endorse its peace initiative before it is submitted to the UN Security Council.

The ministers are to consider sending peacekeepers to secure a ceasefire between Russia and Georgia, and protect humanitarian supplies.

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband has said Russian troops in Georgia should withdraw to pre-7 August positions and criticised the country’s “19th-Century way” of doing politics.

Mr Sarkozy, in his current role as EU president, held talks with President Medvedev in Moscow for most of Tuesday before flying to Tbilisi, where his arrival was greeted by emotional displays.

He held news conferences with both Mr Medvedev and Mr Saakashvili – with all three leaders saying they had agreed in principle to a five-point plan.

A sixth point in the plan, about holding international discussions on the future status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, had been deleted with the agreement of Mr Medvedev, Mr Sarkozy and Mr Saakashvili said.

“The territorial integrity and belonging of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to Georgia can never be put under doubt,” the Georgian leader said.

On Wednesday, the Russian army said 74 of its soldiers were killed, 171 were wounded and 19 were missing, the AFP news agency reports.

In Abkhazia, Georgia said its troops had withdrawn from the only area of the breakaway province they still occupied following a Russian offensive there, the Kodori Gorge.

The self-styled president of Abkhazia said it was in control of the disputed upper reaches of the gorge and that its forces had pushed Georgian troops out of the area a day earlier.

National mourning

The US has meanwhile said it is cancelling an annual joint naval exercise with Russia, scheduled for the end of this week in the Sea of Japan.

A US official told news agencies there was no way Washington could “proceed with this joint exercise at this time”.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that Russia was “frankly… doing great damage” to its prospects for integrating into international organisations.

In a reference to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, she said Moscow’s behaviour belonged to “another time”.

“We are not in 1968 and the message has been very clear to Russia that it cannot operate that way,” she told the US channel ABC News.

Making Wednesday a day of national mourning in Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev accused Georgia of mounting a “genocide of the South Ossetian people”.

In his decree on national mourning, Mr Medvedev, who on Tuesday called Georgian troops “thugs” [Russian: otmorozki], did not give figures for civilian casualties in South Ossetia, but said they were “numerous”.

Russia moved in forcefully, sending troops into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway province. Georgian towns away from the two regions were also bombed.

Fighting flared last Thursday night when Georgia sent its army to regain control of South Ossetia – a region nominally part of Georgia, but with de facto independence and where a majority of people hold Russian passports.

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Several dead in Czech train crash

At least 10 people are reported to have died and some 100 have been injured after a train ran into a collapsed bridge in the Czech Republic.

A railway spokesperson said the accident, near the eastern town of Studenka was “a serious disaster”.

Firefighters are at the scene, helping remove the victims from the train, witnesses said.

The high-speed express train was travelling from the Polish city of Krakow to the Czech capital, Prague.

“An international train from Krakow to Prague ran into a collapsed bridge which fell on the rails in the area of the town Studenka,” Radek Joklik, a spokesperson for Czech Railways, told local media.

Czech Railways said the train probably hit part of a motorway bridge under construction which fell on to the track, derailing three passenger carriages and the locomotive.

Initial reports suggest the train was travelling at speeds of 140km/h (87 mph) when it hit the bridge at 1030 local time (0830GMT).

An officer from the Czech fire service told Reuters that many people were injured in the crash.

“There are some dead, but we do not have precise numbers, because our people are rather devoting time to rescue those still alive,” David Pridal said.

Czech Television said approximately 400 people were on board the train at the time of the accident.

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