A plane carrying players from a Brazilian football team headed to Colombia for a regional tournament final, has crashed on its way to Medellin's airport, killing at least 76 people.

• Al Jazeera's Alessandro Rampietti, reporting from Bogota, said the flight crashed in a mountainous region.
• "There have been heavy rains day in and day out in the last week or so," he said. "That could have played a big role in the crash, but that is still unconfirmed."
• Medillin's Mayor  Federico Gutierrez said he was on his way to the region where the chartered aircraft was believed to have crashed shortly before midnight local time.
• "It's a tragedy of huge proportions," he told Blu Radio.

It was not clear what caused the British Aerospace 146 short-haul plane to crash, but, as reported by Rampietti, Colombia had been hit by heavy rains and thunderstorms in recent hours.

The team was scheduled to play on Wednesday in the first of a two-game Copa Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional of Medellin.

The northern coastal city of Haifa has been one of the hardest hit as Israel closes its third day of intense battles against hundreds for fire related incidents, with 60,000 people evacuated, acres burned, and thousands of homes left without power.

"We have seen some apocalyptic scenes," he says. "We have seen houses burning down. We have seen trees, we've seen streets with people running out."

The Carmel disaster was the deadliest fire in Israeli history claiming 44 lives. It started on Mount Carmel, located just south of Haifa, burnt 50 square kilometers (12,000 acres) and destroyed 74 buildings.

Chobotaro said that Haifa learned a lot from 2010 and has been working to better its fire services.

• Asked if the Haifa fire department had seen any indications of arson behind the fires, Chobotaro described the speed with which they erupted around the city.
• "Im working at Haifa fire services in our central station today at approximately 9:00 in the morning and we are doing checks on our equipment," he recalls. "Suddenly out of nowhere we see a lot of smoke and big flames. Somebody lit on fire the field that is next to us—huge flames, it was a matter of seconds."
• "The flames almost took our fire station and the fire trucks. Five minutes after this another one at the Halissa neighborhood, another five minutes gone and we had another one south of Haifa and ten minutes again after it started in another place," he continued.
• "It makes no sense."

Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav explained why the fire danger in Haifa is so high.

"For the first time we have had to deal with many points of fire, which becuase of the very strong and extreme wind, has covered a vast area," he added.

As Israeli officials work to discern which fires were arson and which were caused by human negligence or nature, the former Head of Israel's Arson Investigation Unit Shalom Tsaroom explains what type of indicators investigators will be looking for.

"If we found for instance, in a fire, that it was started in a few places at the same time, this is one of the indicators that we are talking about arson."

Ofer Bloch, CEO Israel electric company, declared a state of emergency because of the fires. At the fires' peak 12,000 people in Haifa were without power, which was shut off intentionally to minimize damage. As of Thursday night, power had been restored to most homes, leaving less than 3,000 people without electricity.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told i24news that at the end of the night, the eight fires burning in and around Haifa were largely under control.

LUCKNOW: At least 91 passengers, most of whom were sleeping, were killed when an express train derailed in northern India early Sunday, police said.

• “The death toll has unfortunately increased and it is 96 now,” Daljit Singh Chawdhary, the additional police director-general, told reporters, adding 150 were injured.
• All local hospitals have been placed on alert and more than 30 ambulances have been deployed.
• TV footage showed rescue workers using gas cutters and other equipment to slice through severely mangled coaches strewn with suitcases and other luggage.
• Witnesses spoke of being woken by a huge bang and being thrown around.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was “anguished beyond words” by the loss of life in the latest accident.

In 2012 a government report said almost 15,000 people were killed every year on India’s railways, describing the deaths as an annual “massacre”.

Modi’s government has pledged to invest $137 billion over five years to modernise the crumbling railways, making them safer, faster and more efficient.

We're all doomed. Unless we can figure out how to get the heck off this planet.

• "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years," Hawking said in the speech, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
• "By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race."