Floods kill At least five as storms thrash Italy

ROME: At least five people have died in violent rainstorms sweeping across Italy on Sunday, with the Tuscan city of Livorno taking the brunt of the flooding, fire services said.

Four people from the same family were found dead in a flooded house in the city, where 40 centimetres (one foot, 4 inches) of rainfall in four hours transformed streets into rivers and washed away cars.

The Corriere della Sera daily said the dead were a little girl, her parents and a grandparent.

A fifth body was found in an area devastated by landslides. Three other people were missing, the fire brigade said.

“The situation is very difficult, it’s critical. We fear a disaster,” Livorno mayor Filippo Nogarin said.

Italy’s civil protection service issued a code orange alert for Florence as the storms, which began in northern Italy overnight, swept down the country towards the south.

Underpasses were being closed as a precaution in the capital Rome.

Coldiretti, Italy’s main agricultural organisation, said the bad weather was aggravated by coming hard on the heels of a drought which had left the land drier than usual and unable to soak up the rains.

Rainfall in Tuscany in particular had been down 57 percent this summer, it said.

“The tropicalisation of the climate is causing an increase in extreme weather events, with heat waves, heavy cloud bursts and violent hailstorms which are damaging the national agricultural production,” Coldiretti said.

It put the cost of the damage at over 14 billion euros ($16.8 billion) in the last 10 years. LONDON: London’s Victoria station has been evacuated after a passenger was fatally struck by a train on the northbound Victoria Line service.

A spokesperson for the British Transport Police (BTP) said the person was pronounced dead at the scene, but that the incident was being treated as non-suspicious.

Passengers were ordered by station staff to leave the premises just before 12pm on Sunday and take local buses instead.

Transport for London (TFL) told The Independent there had been a “passenger incident” and the station has been closed to allow emergency services to attend. A reporter from The Independent on the ground witnessed police pull up onto the pavement outside the station and run inside.

There were reportedly nine emergency vehicles — four police vans, a TFL response unit, three fire engines and a fire rescue van — on the scene, as well as a significant police presence. Police were heard saying 50 metres of track had been closed off in order to move a train to recover a body.

One passenger told The Independent they had been on the tube at Vauxhall when the driver announced that there was “a person under the train”. WASHINGTON: Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Sunday that she will not pursue the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“I am done with being a candidate,” Clinton said on CBS’S “Sunday Morning.”

Clinton — who on Tuesday will release “What Happened,” her memoir of the 2016 campaign — does plan to stay involved in national politics, just not as an “active politician” who may launch a campaign.

“But I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country’s future is at stake,” she said in an interview with Jane Pauley.

Clinton also was critical of President Trump’s preparedness for the White House.

“We have a reality show that leads to the election of a president. He ends up in the Oval Office. He says, ‘Boy, it’s so much harder than I thought it would be. This is really tough. I had no idea,’” Clinton said. “Well, yeah, because it’s not a show. It’s real. It’s reality, for sure.” The former Democratic nominee said she has moved on from her 2016 election loss but acknowledged that the sting of defeat has not entirely faded away.

“I am good,” Clinton said. “But that doesn’t mean I am complacent or resolved about what happened. It still is very painful. It hurts a lot.”

Clinton did acknowledge that major flaw of her campaign was the relative lack of anger that she voiced about the state of the economy.

“I understood that there were many Americans who, because of the financial crash, there was anger.”