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As many as 138 people died when an overloaded boat carrying passengers and goods capsized in rough water in Democratic Republic of Congo, police have said.

Congo’s government confirmed the incident, but gave a lower toll of 80 and said it may have been caused by low water levels on the river due to the dry season.

The accident took place mid-week on a stretch of the Congo River in the western Bandundu province, about 80 miles east of Kinshasa, the capital of the vast central African nation.

“The boat was badly overloaded and it didn’t make the rough waters,” Jolly Limengo, provincial inspector of police for Bandundu, told Reuters by telephone on Thursday.

“People here don’t know how to swim. Our provisional toll is 138 dead,” Mr Limengo added.

Naval forces and local Red Cross have gone to assist and collect the bodies, said Lambert Mende, the information minister.

Congo is a vast country of jungles and huge rivers in Central Africa. Decades of conflict and neglect have left the nation’s infrastructure in tatters, with little more than 300 miles of paved road. Many people prefer to take boats even if they do not know how to swim. The boats are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity.

In May, dozens of people died when an overloaded canoe capsized on a river in eastern Congo. And last November, at least 90 people were killed after a logging boat sank on a lake in Congo. The timber-carrying vessel was not supposed to be carrying passengers.

By Telegraph.

Many people in Congo take boats even if they do not know how to swim. The boats are often in poor repair and filled beyond capacity. Photo: ALAMY

Seventy Dutch passengers were among the 103 people killed in the Libya plane crash in which an 8-year-old boy was the sole survivor, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

Officials had previously said 58 Dutch passengers died in the accident Wednesday.

Afriqiyah Airways confirmed on its Web site late Wednesday that the other 92 passengers and 11 crew members were killed when the plane crashed while trying to land at the Tripoli International Airport.

The child, identified as Ruben van Assouw, suffered multiple fractures in his lower limbs and underwent an operation at Al Khadra Hospital in Tripoli, a doctor at the hospital said.

He lost blood but is now much better, said the doctor, who declined to give her name.

The boy has seen a Dutch Embassy representative and is sedated and asleep, she said, adding that he will undergo multiple scans Thursday.

The Dutch Foreign Ministry, which had a representative at the hospital waiting to identify the boy, declined to confirm the child’s name.

The Afriqiyah Airways plane originated in Johannesburg, South Africa. As well as the 70 Dutch citizens killed, six South Africans died along with two Libyans, two Austrians, one German, one French, one Zimbabwean and two Britons.

Other passengers’ nationalities could not immediately be identified. The 11 crew members were all Libyan.

The plane, an Airbus A330-200, was at the end of its nearly nine-hour flight when it crashed at 6 a.m.

“We express our sincere regret and sadness on behalf of the airline. As well, we would like to express our condolences to the relatives and friends of those who had passengers on Flight 8U771 destined for Tripoli late last night, due to arrive around 6 o’clock this morning,” said Nicky Knapp, a representative of the Airports Company South Africa. She was speaking on behalf of Afriqiyah Airways.

Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament, said the child’s survival, “given this tragic event, is truly a miracle.”

At the crash site, workers with surgical masks combed through the smoldering wreckage, which spilled over a large area. A wheel lay atop a pile of bags. Two green airline seats sat upright and intact amid burned parts of the aircraft.

Officials recovered the plane’s flight data recorder, which investigators use to piece together a flight’s last minutes.

The Tripoli-based Afriqiyah (Arabic for “African”) operates flights to four continents. The planes in the fleet carry the logo 9.9.99: the date when the African Union was formed.

The plane that crashed was one of three Airbus 330-200s that the airline owns.

By the CNN

A Dutch boy is the sole survivor of a plane crash in Libya that killed more than 100 people. The plane crashed short of the runway at Tripoli airport en route to London's Gatwick airport.

Rohan Vos, Rovos Railways: “We had a lot of Americans on the train”
Brake failure is being investigated as the possible cause of a luxury train crash in South Africa which killed four people, a safety official says.

The train derailed near the capital, Pretoria, on Wednesday with 55 tourists on board and 30 members of staff.

The victims were all female employees, one of whom was four months pregnant and went into labour at the scene, losing her baby.

According to train owners Rovos Rail, seven people remain in hospital.

Rovos Rail’s Rohan Vos said one person is in a critical condition, the South African Press Association reports.

There were about 40 US tourists, along with French, German and British citizens, on board the Pride of Africa when it derailed.

Mr Vos told Associated Press news agency that the passengers had been relatively safe in wood-panelled carriages - some dating back to the 1920s - but the staff had been in a kitchen area that was less protected.

Emergency worker Chris Botha at the scene said the railway coaches were lying on top of each other.

“It’s absolute carnage,” he told AFP news agency.

Rail Safety Regulator spokesman Carvel Webb said a full report into the causes of the accident would take two weeks.

“It appears from the initial measurement and assessment that were done that there was not adequate braking left on the train during the coupling and uncoupling process,” AFP quotes him telling South Africa’s Radio 702.

Rovos Rail offers “unique train safaris” and some of its coaches have hot showers and air conditioning.

The two-day Cape Town-Pretoria trip can cost from about $1,500 (£974) to nearly $3,000 per passenger, AP reports.

A fresh cholera outbreak has killed 20 people and left 200 others infected in northern Nigeria’s Adamawa State in the past week, a senior health official said Wednesday.

“We have recorded a resurgence of cholera in four local government areas in the northern part of the state in the last week which has claimed 20 lives with about 200 others infected by the disease,” Zainab Baba Kwanci, Adamawa State Health Commissioner told AFP.

“The resurgence is pathetic and we are doing everything that is necessary to contain the situation, including the provision of drugs and vaccines as well as health personnel to the affected areas,” he added.

The latest deaths take to 169 the number of those killed by the disease in four northern states — Adamawa, Jigawa, Taraba and Borno — in the past three months.

Cholera is a water-borne disease and can also be transmitted by food that has been in contact with sewage.

It causes serious diarrhoea and vomiting leading to dehydration. With a short incubation period, it can be fatal if not treated in time. Hard money training

The snows of Kilimanjaro may soon be gone.

The African mountain’s white peak — made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway — is rapidly melting, researchers report.

Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And more than a quarter of the ice present in 2000 was gone by 2007.

If current conditions continue “the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro will not endure,” the researchers said.

The Kilimanjaro glaciers are both shrinking, as the ice at their edges melts, and thinning, the researchers found.

Similar changes are being reported at Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains in Africa and at glaciers in South America and the Himalayas.

“The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause,” Thompson said in a statement. “The increase of Earth’s near surface temperatures, coupled with even greater increases in the mid- to upper-tropical troposphere, as documented in recent decades, would at least partially explain” the observations. Hard money training

Ethiopia said Thursday it needs emergency food aid for 6.2 million people, an appeal that comes 25 years after a devastating famine compounded by communist policies killed 1 million and prompted one of the largest charity campaigns in history.

The crisis stems from a prolonged drought that has hit much of the Horn of Africa, including Kenya and Somalia.

Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of people live off the land. Agriculture drives the economy, accounting for half of all domestic production and most exports.

Mitiku Kassa, Ethiopia’s state minister for agriculture and rural development, appealed to donors Thursday for more than $121 million. In January, he had said that 4.9 million of Ethiopia’s 85 million people needed emergency food aid.

Ethiopia has long struggled with cyclical droughts, which are compounded by the country’s dependence on rain-fed agriculture and archaic farming practices.

In 1984, Ethiopia’s famine drew international attention as news reports showed emaciated children and adults with limbs as thin as sticks. The crisis launched one of the biggest global charity campaigns in history, including the concert Live Aid.

This year’s drought appears to be slightly less severe than the one last year, which was exacerbated by high food prices. A year ago, Mitiku appealed for aid to feed 6.4 million people affected by drought.

But many humanitarian groups have said in recent years that they believe the number of people affected by hunger is higher than government estimates.

Because of Ethiopia’s large size and poor infrastructure, independent observers have difficulty collecting data. The worst-affected areas in the country’s east are the site of a fierce insurgency and are off-limits to journalists. Aid groups say their movements in these areas are limited by military restrictions.

In a report marking 25 years since Ethiopia’s famine, the aid group Oxfam said countries must focus on preparing communities to prevent and deal with drought and other disasters before they strike, rather than relying on importing aid.

According to the U.N., nearly two-thirds of Africa’s agricultural land has been degraded by erosion and misused pesticides. In Ethiopia, where bad farming practices have led to massive erosion, 85 percent of land is damaged. Hard money training